THE HISTOR.Y OF PSYCHOLOGY 607 



form, not of subjective and objective. It may possibly be considered 

 as in so far an unreflective anticipation of Aristotle's biological 

 point of view, so much, indeed, is possible, but it was not in any 

 sense an anticipation of the subjective point of view from which a 

 science of psychology could isolate its peculiar matter. This accounts, 

 no doubt, for its unfruitfulness in later thought. 



The real isolation of the subjective or " inner " seems to have 

 begun with the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, in their famous 

 doctrine of the relativity of the sense qualities. 1 This intuition led 

 perforce, just as the same type of phenomena the relativeness 

 and deceptiveness of qualities, colors, odors, etc., in things leads 

 the child, to the wider question whether the " inner" is not a sphere 

 to be distinguished from the " outer." Indeed, in Democritus this 

 antithesis is actually and fruitfully made. His other great doctrine, 

 that of the " atoms," was thus made possible, and has remained 

 possible for all time; for by definition the " outer" had to be stripped 

 of those relative and ambiguous predicates which had embarrassed 

 earlier speculation. The atoms could do their work in the body of 

 external reality; and the mind could do its separate work of know- 

 ing that reality. This was a real advance upon the doctrine of " ele- 

 ments " as held by Parmenides and Empedocles. 



The subjective postulate, thus once arrived at in the individual- 

 istic sphere of sensation, was to be carried out in the general sphere 

 of truth by the Sophists; indeed, it was forced upon them by the 

 social and intellectual conditions which made men Sophists in their 

 generation. In the Sophists began the play of certain forces akin to 

 those which we find enormously germinal in the narrower sphere 

 of the individual's personal growth. And in this our present method 

 has further justification. 



The growing consciousness of personal quasi-subjective detach- 

 ment from the world of impersonal things comes to the child 

 through processes analyzed variously into motives of conflict, imi- 

 tation, invention, discussion (and from the psychic point of view, 

 introjection, absorption, realization) a give-and-take or dialect- 

 ical process between the individual and his fellows. In it all the 

 essential fact of subjectivity in the actor's thought of himself and 

 others comes to birth. The actor becomes an agent; the observer, 

 a creature of reflection; the spontaneous thinker, a possible amateur 

 psychologist. 



All this appears, there can be no doubt, in the Sophistic move- 

 ment; and out of it, indeed, the first race-psychologist was born, 

 Socrates. In the views and methods of Socrates are focused the 

 rays which are to burn inward to the core of the human self. This 

 appears true of Socrates in the following precise points. 

 1 Cf. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. i, pp. 320 ff. 



