; both yield us truth, and both may be carried
from the simplest and most trivial observations of daily life to the
highest elaborations of scholarship. To those who are inclined to give
all value and all credit only to the strictly psychological view, it may
be replied at once that surely our most immediate life experience is
carried on by the non-psychological attitude. If we love our family and
like our friends, and deal with the man of the street, we are certainly
moving in a world of purposive reality. We try to understand each other,
to agree and to disagree, to be in sympathy and antipathy, without
asking how those volitions and feelings and ideas of other people are
built as mental structures, and from what causes they arose; we are
satisfied to understand what they mean. In the same way with ourselves.
We live our lives by hinging them on our aims and purposes and ideas,
and do not ask ourselves what are the causes of our attitudes and of our
thoughts.

This purposive view has in no respect to disappear if we move on from
our personal intercourse to a scholarly study of reality. The historian,
for instance, who tries to understand the will relations of humanity, is
the more the true historian the more he sticks to this purposive view of
man. The truth which he seeks is to interpret the personalities, to
understand them through their attitudes, to make their will living once
more, and to link it by agreement and disagreement, by love and hate,
with the will of friends and enemies, groups and parties, nations and
mankind. It is only a loose popular way of speaking, if this purposive
analysis of a character is often called psychological. In a stricter
sense of the word, it is not psychological. If the historian really were
to take the psychological attitude, he would make of history simply a
social psychology, seeking the laws of the social mind, and treating the
individual, the hero, and the leader, merely as the crossing-point of
psychological law. For such a psychological view the mental life of the
hero would not be more important or more interesting than the mental
life of a scoundrel, and the psychology of the king would not draw his
interest more than the psychology of the beggar. The historian has to
shape all that from an entirely different standpoint: his scientific
interest depends upon the importance of men's attitudes and actions, and
such importance refers to the world of purposes.

In the same way,