cal material, which is to be
applied whenever it appears as the right means to secure a certain
effect.

On the other hand the minister also knows, of course, that every word
which he speaks has its psychological effect, but he abstracts from that
entirely, as his belief should appeal directly to the struggling will of
the man. As minister, he is thus not a psychologist. He works with
moral means; the physician, with causal means. The view which the doctor
has to take of the man before him is therefore thoroughly psychological;
whereas that of the religious friend is thoroughly unpsychological, or
better, apsychological. Indeed it is misleading, or at least demands a
special kind of definition, if people say that the minister has to be a
good psychologist. It is just as misleading as the claim, which we hear
so often, that for instance Shakespeare was a great psychologist. No,
the poet deals with human beings from the purposive standpoint of life
and the mere resolving of complex purposes into parts of purposes is not
psychology in the technical sense of the term. The poet makes us
understand the inner life, but he does not describe or explain it; he
makes us feel with other people, but he does not make those feelings
causally understood. The realistic novelists sometimes undertake this
psychological task, but they are then on the borderland of literature,
the analysis of their heroes becomes then a psychological one.
Shakespeare understood human beings better than anyone and therefore the
men and women whom his imagination created are so fully lifelike that
the psychologist may feel justified in using them as material for his
psychological analysis, but Shakespeare himself did not enter into that
psychological dissection; he kept the purposive point of view. In the
same way certainly the minister--the same holds true for the lawyer or
the tradesman or anyone who enters into practical dealings with his
neighbor--may resolve complex attitudes of will into their components,
but each part still remains a will attitude which has to be understood
and to be interpreted and to be appreciated, while the psychologist
would take every one of those parts as a conscious content to be
described and to be explained. But here we abstract from the purposive
relations. Our attention belongs now to the doctor's dealing with man;
for him cause and effect are the only vehicles of connection. Thus he
has to exclude the purposive interpretat