No Justification

There is not even justification for saying psychological factors fall into normal curves—the tests are merely "cooked" in such a way that the results fall into this (assumed) pattern.

Of course even if we were able to define and assess psychological qualities using statistics, there would still be the utterly insurmountable task of interpreting our numbers in a meaningful way. So the effort to quantify consciousness is a dismal failure.

Let us analyse next a few typical quotations from psychological text books.

In one of R. B. Cattell's books ("Introduction to Personality Study") we have the following assertion : "The genius lives in a state of prolonged adolescence"—a sufficiently vague statement to seem intelligent to the psychologists.

Now relying on the everyday meanings of the words in this sentence, we may be prepared to grant its truth—for the moment that is, but of course we expect the author to justify the comparison later, within a rigorous discussion of terms used and experimental details.

Absentmindedly, Cattell omits any discussion of this nature, and instead hastens on to other equally vague and ill-founded statements.

Another is: "Psychologists are fairly well agreed that the subconscious exists"—by all the Gods! What sort of proof is this? Did they take a show of hands, and prove it by statistics? Note, by the way, the term "fairly well" inserted to give the statement an air of impartiality. This is more than pulling the wool over our eyes, it's pulling the whole sheep over!

Or consider the view of Skinner, that inner states are not relevant to the true study of Psychology—behaviour, and "since mental events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them."

Are human beings to be compared to electronic computors?—the psychologist feeding in punched cards stamped with "conflictsituation", "drive involvement", "habit," etc. at one end, and then dashing as fast as he can to the other, where the cards emanate with "hate" or "depression" or "happiness" on them.

In sooth! Can we dismiss our subjectivity, our whole life, by cryptic phrases such as "is irrelevant to"? (I give my word to the reader that Mr Skinner's name will not be mentioned again in this article.)