Psychology: Human, Humanistic Humane
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Abstract
WHATEVER else it may or may not possess, psychology has one quality which obstinately refuses to be assimilated to the requirements of natural science. This quality has expressed itself of late in the resurgence of the humanistic, "understanding," qualitative-affective movement; but there are divergent ideas as to what the quality is. The present article tries to take one more step in bringing it down to earth. Such an inquiry cannot be conclusive, for the movement is one that proceeds by many paths. But contribute it can (and hopes to) by centering on the third of these sources of change, the qualitative-affective one; and by spelling this out in its area of particular importance-the relation of psychology to the humane disciplines. Two quotations, one familiar and the other now recondite, will indicate why this area should be explored, and conduct the reader right to the center of it. The quotations are concerned with a problem which many psychologists of today would regard as non-significant, not relevant to them, or both: the problem of mind and body. Of this, the current standard lexicographers of psychology say in part that it ". . . is essentially metaphysical and of no greater pertinence to the science of psychology than to the science of physics except that it uses many of the same terms" (English & English, 1958, p. 323). Almost exactly a century earlier, however, a lexicographer dealing with a functionally equivalent area (mental philosophy including psychology) found it necessary to say something very different: "God only knows whether the two substances which we call matter and mind have not something which is common to both" (Fleming, 1857, p. 408). True, the earlier writer refers to matter, not body; but this need not make what is to be said irrelevant. The later writers, for their part, regard both body and matter as predominantly metaphysical terms, to be eschewed in present-day psychological usage (English & English, 1958, pp. 70, 307-308). The true relevance and meaning of the earlier lexicographer's definition appear when the following three points are considered: its phrasing, its situation in his dictionary, and what would become of it if it