Conditions and consequences of human variability / by Raymond Dodge.

  • Dodge, Raymond, 1871-1942.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Conditions and consequences of human variability / by Raymond Dodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/184 (page 6)
    standpoint of a scientist who seeks reaction invariants on a supposed analogy to the physical sciences, psy¬ chology must seem quite hopeless. It may be, however, that the supposed analogy with physics and chemistry is a misleading residuum of a discredited scientific attitude. It begins to seem that the theoretically most significant facts even in the physical sciences are facts of change and development rather than of invariants. However that may be, psychologists have never found mental analogues of hypothetically stable physical atoms and molecules, but only changing processes. Individual variations delayed the development of a science of human nature for a long time. It was a fruit¬ ful methodological advance when psychology rescued individual differences from the scrap heap of scientific anomalies and began to study them. At the present time surfaces of frequency and the relative positions of individuals in continuous series express our knowl¬ edge of human nature vastly better than the hypotheti¬ cal “average man” of a few years ago. This has revo¬ lutionized the scientific account of personalities; and much of the recent service of psychology in the fields of education, mental hygiene, and personnel has been due to the shift in scientific emphasis from the effort to describe human nature to the effort to deal sys¬ tematically with human natures. Treating each indi¬ vidual as a special combination of capacities, accom¬ plishments, and tendencies has been far more produc¬ tive than treating individuals as though they were all alike or as though they belonged to mutually exclusive types. Unfortunately, however, residua of this dis¬ credited hypothesis are still evident in politics, in criminology, in psychopathology, and even in psy¬ chology. There is some basis for the belief that an analogous