It may be a mere dream that, as Goethe feigns of Makaria in his
romance(79), there are men and women in sympathy with the vicissitudes of
the starry regions: and hypotheses of lunar influence, or dogmas of
astrological destiny, may count to the present guardians of the sciences
as visionary superstitions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to
be dogmatic; her function hitherto can only be critical; and even for
that, her data are scanty and her principles extremely general. The
influences on the mental mood and faculty, produced by climate and
seasons, by local environment and national type, by individual
peculiarities, by the differences of age and sex, and by the alternation
of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less questionable. It is easy
no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark how indefinable and
incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their radical and
inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character. “The sum
of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but always
leaves a marvellous remainder(80).” Irrational this residue is, in the
sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known
quantities of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific
psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never
lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the
more advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in
indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is remembered,
it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting psychology
for the application to education, and how dependent the solution of that
problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of individual
and national temperament and character.