This leads us to the one topic to which perhaps more naïve psychology has been devoted than to any other psychological problem, the mental difference between men and women. Volumes could be filled, and I think volumes have been filled, with quotations about this eternal source of happiness and grief. But if we look into those hundreds of thousands of crisp sayings and wise maxims, we find in the material of modern times just what we recognized in the wisdom of India. Almost all is metaphor and comparison, or is practical advice and warning, or is enthusiastic praise, or is maliciousness, but among a hundred hardly one contains psychology. And if we really bring together such psychologizing observations, we should hardly dare to acknowledge that they deserve that right of generality by merit of which they might be welcomed to our psychological system. Bruyere insists: “Women are extreme; they are better or worse than men”; and the same idea is formulated by Kotzebue: “When women are good they stand between men and angels; when they are bad, they stand between men and devils.” Rousseau remarks: “Woman has more esprit, and man more genius; the woman observes, and the man reasons.” Jean Paul expresses the contrast in this way: “No woman can love her child and the four quarters of the globe at the same time, but a man can do it.” Grabbe thinks: “Man looks widely, woman deeply; for man the world is the heart, for woman the heart is the world.” Schiller claims: “Women constantly return to their first word, even if reason has spoken for hours.” Karl Julius Weber, to whom German literature has to credit not a few psychological observations, says: “Women are greater in misfortune than men on account of the chief female virtue, patience, but they are smaller in good fortune than men, on account of the chief female fault, vanity.” Yet as to patience, a German writer of the seventeenth century, Christoph Lehmann, says: “Obedience and patience do not like to grow in the garden of the women.” But I am anxious to close with a more polite German observation. Seume holds: “I cannot decide whether the women have as much reason as the men, but I am perfectly sure that they have not so much unreason.” And yet: “How hard it is for women to keep counsel,” and how many writers since Shakespeare have said this in their own words.

The poets, to be sure, feel certain that in spite of all these inner contradictions, they know better than the psychologists, and where their knowledge falls short, they at least assure the psychologist that he could not do better. Paul Heyse, in his booklet of epigrammatic stanzas, writes a neat verse which, in clumsy prose, says: “Whoever studies the secrets of the soul may bring to light many a hidden treasure, but which man fits which woman no psychologist will ever discover.” To be sure, as excuse for his low opinion of us psychologists, it may be said that when he wrote it in Munich thirty years ago there was no psychological laboratory in the university of his jolly town and only two or three in the world. But to-day we have more than a hundred big laboratories in all countries, and even Munich now has its share in them, so that Heyse may have improved on his opinion since then. But in any case we psychologists do not take our revenge by thinking badly of the naïve psychology of the poets and of the man on the street. Yet we have seen that their so-called psychology is made up essentially of picturesque metaphors, or of moral advice, of love and malice, and that we have to sift big volumes before we strike a bit of psychological truth; even then, how often it has shown itself haphazard and accidental, vague and distorted! The mathematical statistics of the professional students of the mind and their test experiments in the laboratories are certainly less picturesque, but they have the one advantage that the results are true. Mankind has no right to deceive itself with half-true, naïve psychology of the amateur, when our world is so full of social problems which will be solved only if the aptitudes and the workings of the mind are clearly recognized and traced. The naïve psychology is sometimes stimulating and usually delightful, but if reliable psychology is wanted, it seems after all that only one way is open—to consult the psychologists.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

BOOKS BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

Transcriber's Note

Obvious printer's errors have been fixed. See below for the full list. The list of books by Hugo Münsterberg has been moved from the beginning to the end of the project.

Errors fixed