The poets, to be sure, feel certain that in spite of all these inner contradictions, they know better than the psychologists, and where their knowledge falls short, they at least assure the psychologist that he could not do better. Paul Heyse, in his booklet of epigrammatic stanzas, writes a neat verse which, in clumsy prose, says: “Whoever studies the secrets of the soul may bring to light many a hidden treasure, but which man fits which woman no psychologist will ever discover.” To be sure, as excuse for his low opinion of us psychologists, it may be said that when he wrote it in Munich thirty years ago there was no psychological laboratory in the university of his jolly town and only two or three in the world. But to-day we have more than a hundred big laboratories in all countries, and even Munich now has its share in them, so that Heyse may have improved on his opinion since then. But in any case we psychologists do not take our revenge by thinking badly of the naïve psychology of the poets and of the man on the street. Yet we have seen that their so-called psychology is made up essentially of picturesque metaphors, or of moral advice, of love and malice, and that we have to sift big volumes before we strike a bit of psychological truth; even then, how often it has shown itself haphazard and accidental, vague and distorted! The mathematical statistics of the professional students of the mind and their test experiments in the laboratories are certainly less picturesque, but they have the one advantage that the results are true. Mankind has no right to deceive itself with half-true, naïve psychology of the amateur, when our world is so full of social problems which will be solved only if the aptitudes and the workings of the mind are clearly recognized and traced. The naïve psychology is sometimes stimulating and usually delightful, but if reliable psychology is wanted, it seems after all that only one way is open—to consult the psychologists. THE END THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y. BOOKS BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG