Yet as soon as they come to their real problems and enter
into the interpretation and meaning of these economic energies, they
naturally slide back into the historical, economic point of view and
discuss the economic relations of men without any reference to their
psychologizing preambles. The application of the psychological,
scientific method to the true economic experience is therefore not
secured at all in this way. The demands and volitions which they
disentangle are not the ones which the psychophysiologist studies,
because they are left in their immediate form of life reality. They
are accordingly inaccessible to the point of view of experimental
psychology, and nothing can be expected from such interpretative
discussions of the economists for the psychotechnics at which the
psychologist is aiming. Even where the political economists deal with
the problems of value in exact language, nothing is gained for the
kind of insight for which the psychologist hopes, and the
psychologists must therefore go on with their own methods, if they
are ever to reach a causal understanding of the means by which a
satisfaction of the economic demands may be effected.
So far the psychologists have not even started to examine these
economic feelings, demands, and satisfactions with the means of
laboratory psychology. Hence no one can say beforehand how it ought to
be done and how to gain access to the important problems, inasmuch as
the right formulation of the problem and the selection of the right
method would here as everywhere be more than half of the solution.
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