J.—PSYCHOLOGY. 229 
pretation of the course of their lives. If, under the influence of any meta- 
physical dogma or any supposed rule of method, you overlook it from the 
start, you cannot introduce it into your otherwise completed picture of 
human nature, as an element to be added to and put alongside others 
already described. 
It is too all-pervasive for such treatment. As well might the landscape 
artist, after painting a picture without atmosphere, attempt to add it by 
drawing a smear of paint across the whole. This is the difficulty found 
by students who have been brought up on the parallel-column psychology, 
as I know from instances of such students who have found difficulty 
with my frankly purposive ‘Outline of Psychology’; nor are such 
students helped to a truer view of human nature by those books on 
psychology which, after describing man after one or other of the three 
fashions we have noted, throw in perfunctorily as an afterthought a 
chapter on ‘The Will.’ If striving has been ignored throughout the com- 
position, ‘The Will’ cannot be added to the picture as a finishing touch. 
_ Having learnt to look upon man as a bundle of mechanical reflexes, a 
superior penny-in-the-slot machine, whose workings are mysteriously 
- accompanied by various ‘elements of consciousness,’ they can find no 
_ place in their completed picture for yet another element called ‘ a purpose’ ; 
_ it refuses to fit in among the other blocks ; there is no room for it, and, as 
_ they think, no need for it; and it seems to them quite an ambiguous, not 
: to say shady and suspicious, character; at best it appears to them as a 
disturbing intruder. 
But let the budding psychologist ponder some phase of human life 
that is dominated by some strong but thwarted desire. Let him consider 
the strange yet familiar case of Romeo seeking the Juliet who is forbidden 
to him. How this desire to see, to hear, to touch the loved one dominates 
his life, waking and sleeping! How it fevers his blood ; wears him to a 
shadow ; keeps him running to and fro, scheming, trying, hoping, despond- 
- ing, exulting, despairing, and always desiring! ‘The desire governs all 
his thinking and acting; the most rooted habits and mental associations 
are as nothing in the course of this torrent of purposive activity, all directed 
to Nature’s most imperative goal. 
Can we accept any account, any description or explanation of human 
life, which leaves out of the picture this all-important aspect that we call 
impulse, desire, striving towards a goal ? 
When we turn to the fields of applied psychology, the same truth 
stares usin theface. In every field we find that the most urgent practical 
problems are concerned with the striving aspect of human nature. The 
most fundamental task of the educator is to awaken an interest in and a 
desire for knowledge and self-development. The psychiatrist must study 
and redirect if possible the conflicting desires of his patient, his subcon- 
scious as well as his conscious motives and impulses. 
The personnel manager is chiefly concerned with incentives, rewards, 
jealousies, rivalries, discontents, loyalties, ambitions, and aspirations. 
The lawyer, the judge, and the jurymen are primarily concerned to deter- 
mine motives, intentions, and responsibility. The politician, the economist, 
and the moralist are, or should be, primarily concerned with relative values 
and the means to make real or actual the highest values of mankind, by 
harmonising and co-ordinating the conflicting motives of our social life. 
