Everyman's psychology / by Sir John Adams.

  • John Adams
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Everyman's psychology / by Sir John Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    out my thinking of it brings out the attitude of the specialists toward the outsiders. In a famous sentence Horace tells us that he despises the vulgar crowd and does his best to ward them off. His attitude is too often imitated by the esoterics toward the exoterics, and in a much more marked way by the joint esoterics and exoterics toward the general public. The readers of this book will naturally wonder where they are placed in this classification. Have they any standing in psy¬ chological circles? Suppose we figure the Temple of Psychology as made up of two courts. In the inner of these the select band of esoterics find their home. The outer court is crowded with people who have a distinct interest in the subject and know some¬ thing about it—but in many cases not much. The word used above, crowded, is deliberately and justifiably used; for the gen¬ eral public is now flocking in. Everybody wants to know what is going on there. We do not find the public lining up to get peeps into dissecting rooms or chemical laboratories. Why then this pressure at the gates of the outer court of psychology? The answer is because what psychology deals with is ourselves, and there is nowhere in the universe a subject in which we are quite so much interested. As we shall see more fully later, psychology may be regarded in a general way as a somewhat systematic study of human nature, and is therefore a very suitable subject for general consideration. In fact, one of Pope’s lines has be¬ come almost indecently threadbare, because it has been so often quoted in defense of just this position. In reading the line, The proper study of mankind is man note the significance of the definite article. It unobtrusively picks out psychology as the primary study for mankind. We might in fact have adopted for our title the phrase Proper Studies, for these words would indicate just the sort of thing we have in view. To be sure, the title would have been a little vague, which is for us the less to be regretted because this title has been already appropriated by Aldous Huxley for a book of essays. It is obvi¬ ous that he relies upon his public to know their Pope, and there¬ fore to guess the nature of the essays.