630 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 



volitional life. The voluntarism, which was founded by Fichte and 

 Schopenhauer and has an important support in the biological theory 

 of the struggle for life, is more and more considered as the main 

 point of view in psychology. 



II 



Both the incommensurability between analysis and synthesis, 

 and the superiority of voluntarism compared with intellectualism 

 ought to diminish the propensity to close once for all the conception 

 of personality, as theology and speculative philosophy have often 

 tried to do. Positivism and empirical philosophy are often accused 

 of abnegating the conception of personality, and in our time the 

 historical view and the theory of liberty are often contrasted with 

 empirical psychology. But even the empirical, experimental, and 

 analytic school of psychology presupposes an energetic and earnest 

 recognition of the reality of personal life. This school is founded 

 on the conviction that the value of mental life is not to be dimin- 

 ished by being bound to certain conditions and subjected to certain 

 laws. It studies then, with confidence, mental life in all ways which 

 are open to science. 



The difference between the psychological schools depends on 

 where the problem is found, and how the burden of proof is dis- 

 tributed. Is the riddle of psychology how unity and continuity in 

 mind are possible, or does the riddle arise when consciousness 

 appears in a sporadic manner, in isolated flashes? That is the main 

 question. But it branches out into many particular questions. The 

 task of the synthetic school is to find the special forms of unity and 

 continuity, which cannot be deduced a priori, and then to explain 

 how it is possible that mental life in certain cases can have a sporadic- 

 character. The task of the other school is to describe the particular 

 forms and degrees of isolation, and then to explain how there can 

 be unity and continuity in mental life. Every school of psychology 

 ought to admit that so long as mental life persists, a perpetual 

 struggle is going on between the synthetic and the sporadic tend- 

 encies. When the character of unity prevails, the problem is, 

 whether this unity is a mechanical aggregate, or whether it has a 

 deeper foundation. 



Pathological psychology seems to me decidedly to prove the 

 truth of the synthetic conception. Without continual mental labor 

 the " psychological tension " (to use the expression of M. Pierre 

 Janet) cannot be sustained, and in mental disease this tension, 

 without which consciousness cannot unite within itself a varied 

 content of different elements, can only be maintained with a great 

 and painful effort; very strong influences are then necessary, if 



