As long as experimental psychology remained essentially
a science of the mental laws, common to all human beings, an
adjustment to the practical demands of daily life could hardly come in
question. With such general laws we could never have mastered the
concrete situations of society, because we should have had to leave
out of view the fact that there are gifted and ungifted, intelligent
and stupid, sensitive and obtuse, quick and slow, energetic and weak
individuals.
But in recent years a complete change can be traced in our science.
Experiments which refer to these individual differences themselves
have been carried on by means of the psychological laboratory, at
first reluctantly and in tentative forms, but within the last ten
years the movement has made rapid progress. To-day we have a
psychology of individual variations from the point of view of the
psychological laboratory.[1] This development of schemes to compare
the differences between the individuals by the methods of experimental
science was after all the most important advance toward the practical
application of psychology. The study of the individual differences
itself is not applied psychology, but it is the presupposition without
which applied psychology would have remained a phantom.
II
THE DEMANDS OF PRACTICAL LIFE
While in this way the progress of psychology itself and the
development of the psychology of individual differences favored the
growth of applied psychology, there arose at the same time an
increasing demand in the midst of practical life.
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