Experimental Psychology

[Modern psychology] appears as the sickly offspring of average common sense when it is taken as what it professes to be—a science of the inner life. The entire achievements of the so-called science in this respect is outweighed by a single page of Goethe’s or of Jean Paul’s psychology; and it is impossible to evade the bitter truth which Novalis already has summed up, when he says that so-called psychology is one of those idols which have usurped the place in the sanctuary where true images of the gods should stand.

Psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul.