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Of all living creatures man alone is truly historical, and this is because he has a mind by which he can create new conditions of life which absorb and transform the previous ones. Of all civilizations, Western civilization is the most historical in character. In spite of this, one of the main aims of modern psychology has been to model itself on the pattern of the natural sciences; its main ambition has been to formulate concepts, descriptive and explicative, which can be applied generally. Thus time and even space are considered as abstractions; they do not affect either the nature, or the norms of psychological phenomena. Various attempts have been made to build up ‘mathematical’ models of behaviour. Even Freud, who was more aware than any other modern psychologist of the basically irrational character of the human mind, was obsessed with the idea of an almost mechanical determinism in the field of psychological phenomena. It was this idea that fostered in him the belief in the universal validity of the basic concepts of his system. The knowledge of the statistical nature of the norms governing psychological phenomena did not temper this ambition of modern psychology. As in other scientific disciplines, probability has easily been turned into a new form of determinism.
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