as even
what is not connected with the name of an individual author, but is
found in proverbs or in the folk-epics of the nations, must have
originated in the minds of individual leaders. My aim here is more
modest: I have made my little pilgrimage through literature to find
out in a tentative fashion whether the supply of psychology, outside
of science, is really so rich and valuable as is usually believed.
What I wish to offer, therefore, is only a first collection of
psychological statements, which the prescientific psychologists have
proclaimed, and surely will go on proclaiming, and ought to go on
proclaiming, as they do it so beautifully, where we scientists have
nothing but tiresome formulae.

Let us begin at the beginning. There has never been a nation whose
contemplation was richer in wisdom, whose view of man was subtler and
more suggestive, than those of old India. The sayings of its
philosophers and poets and thinkers have often been gathered in large
volumes of aphorisms. How many of these fine-cut remarks about man
contain real psychology? The largest collection which I could discover
is that of Boehtlinck, who translated seventy-five hundred Indian
sayings into German. Not a few of them refer to things of the outer
world, but by far the largest part of them speaks of man and of man's
feeling and doing. But here in India came my first disappointment, a
disappointment which repeated itself in every corner of the globe.
After carefully going through those thousands of general remarks, I
could not find more than a hundred and nine in which the observation
takes a psychological turn. All those other thousands of reflections
on men are either metaphors and comparisons of distinctly aesthetic
intent, or rules of practical behaviour with social or moral or
religious purpose. Yet even if we turn to this 11/2 per cent. which
has a psychological flavour, we soon discover that among those hundred
and nine, more than a half are simply definitions of the type of this:
"Foolish are they who trust women or good luck, as both like a young
serpent creep hither and thither," or this: "Men who are rich are like
those who are drunk; in walking they are helped by others, they
stagger on smooth roads and talk confusedly." It cannot be said that
any psychological observations of the fool's or of the rich man's mind
are recorded here. If I sift those maxims more carefully, I cannot
find more than two score which, stripped of the