ABSTRACT
Historically the passage from such a common-sense and practical psychology to science begins in Greek philosophy through the introduction of unifying principles or hypotheses and the attempt at a rational organization of the material. The progress of psychology as a natural science was hampered by the fact that the immortality of the individual human soul became a religious dogma. As literature is becoming increasingly psychological it is difficult for psychology to refrain from being literary rather than scientific. Some indeed are willing to give up the name of psychologists, but like various religious modernists they wish to carry the clerical offices and church property—the chairs of psychology—along with them. According to the classical view, embodied in Catholic and other philosophical treatises, the subject-matter of psychology is the psyche or soul. Until scientific psychologists generally agreed that mental or conscious phenomena constituted the distinctive subject-matter of their study.
