490 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



There is still another even more subtle danger which 

 must be guarded against where social factors are empha- 

 sized in the program of psychology. I refer to the 

 danger of assuming, where there are fundamental dis- 

 tinctions from the standpoint of every-day life, that there 

 must also be fundamental psychological distinctions. 

 The mere fact that there are radicals and conservatives, 

 religious and irreligious does not mean that these groups 

 are necessarily important psychological types. It is 

 true that we may describe the radical by means of a 

 psychological terminology, but so may we describe ice- 

 men, and grocerymen, conductors, and policemen, and 

 anybody and everybody in our world. If we did this, we 

 should be merely counting the leaves on the trees. 



In speaking of these things, I do not want to give the 

 impression that I am minimizing the importance of 

 recognizing the social factor in many psychological prob- 

 lems. I wish only to point out the difficulty in this case 

 of keeping free, as scientists, from those standards and 

 prejudices, many of them highly valuable in themselves, 

 which permeate every social situation. 



A fourth point which is likely to impress one is that 

 the study of personality is concerned with facts that 

 are somehow more intimate than those of the rest of 

 psychology. The polarity between the individual and 

 other things and other individuals comes in for a cer- 

 tain amount of stress. When it comes to this aspect of 

 his problem, the student of personality finds that much 

 of value has already been worked out by introspection. 

 It seems to me that the dialectic of personal growth 

 which has become an accepted part of our traditional 

 psycholog}^ ma}" with great profit be written as an im- 

 portant section into our contemporary treatment of per- 

 sonality. 



I have been considering personality study in so far as 

 it is concerned with general principles. There is also 

 a differential psychology of personality which is receiv- 

 ing considerable attention. Ultimately, of course, the 

 general and differential psychology of personality may 

 be but different aspects of the same subject matter, but 

 at present, this is hardly true. Those who have been 



