ABSTRACT
Personalities react differently even to the study of personality. To the scientifically minded it is the supreme scientific challenge, promising formulae of fantastic and intriguing complexity. The man who objects on principle to studying, measuring, and using predictive laws about personality because it must be 'for ever unpredictable' is on shaky ground. Personality study is only one of several sections into which psychology is sub-divided. Others are perception, comparative psychology, learning, abnormal psychology, physiological psychology, social psychology, and so on. The modest but indubitable increase in the power to understand and predict human behaviour which has occurred in the last half-century of psychological research thus really leaves the philosophical issue untouched. Possibly the reader is beginning to feel that he has now served a sufficient apprenticeship to historical perspectives and talk about methods, and is ready to be rewarded with some factual discoveries.
