- 
J.—PSYCHOLOGY. 239 
Where the exigencies of the case dernand a speedy assessment, I 
recommend the practical psychologist to aim chiefly at the so-called 
general factors. If I were permitted to measure no more than a pair 
of mental qualities, I should iook first to the degree of a man’s native 
intelligence—his ‘ general ability,’ with which more special capacities 
are known to be correlated; and next to the degree of his native in- 
stability—his ‘ general emotionality,’ with which his special instincts 
are apt to be in accord. Were I granted the grace of two or three 
additional estimates, they would still be of a general type—general 
physical health, general moral character, and general cultural 
attainments. 
It may be that I am too optimistic, and that my views are premature. 
But it is my personal conviction that the main outlines of our human 
nature are now approximately known, and that the whole territory of 
individual psychology has, by one worker or another, been completely 
covered in the large. We have viewed the whole continent from above 
by rapid aerial flights towards different quarters. It remains to link up 
and to co-ordinate the numerous reconnoitring pioneers ; then to descend, 
and, by the laborious method of exploring feature after feature, to 
correct up our maps in definite detail. Once its broad principles have 
been determined, it is from the close and microscopic detection of 
minutie, of tiny items and small but telling indications, that every 
science is eventually built up. This must be the aim with individual 
psychology in the near future. We must discover what mental traits 
are relatively independent, and which are the general among the rela- 
tively specific; we must construct precise working definitions for each, 
and hammer out by experiment upon experiment, research upon 
research, tests and rating-scales for everything that can be quantitatively 
expressed, inventing new tests for traits not hitherto tested, and refining 
the procedure of the old. Here rather than in any grand discovery 
must further progress lie. 
Finally, let me leave the would-be analyst of character with a 
repetition of a warning already uttered in another place. Individual 
psychology is not a code of rules and principles to be mastered out of 
hand in the lecture-room or laboratory. It is not an affair of text- 
book terminology or of a teachable technique. It is the product of 
worldly experience acting on an inborn interest—an enthusiasm for 
_ persons as persons, in the old nihil alienwm spirit. To take an unknown 
mind as it is, and delicately one by one to learn its chords and stops, 
to ‘pluck the heart out of its mystery, and sound it from its lowest 
note to the top of its compass,’ is an art and not a science. The scientist 
may standardise the methods. To apply those methods, and appraise 
the results, demands the tact, the temperament, the sympathetic insight 
of the genuine lover of strange souls. 
1923 8 
