Chaper Four—
4. Man: A Being of Volitional Consciousness
The Principle of Volition
One of the characteristics of the majority of modern psychological theories, aside from the arbitrariness of so many
of their claims, is their frequently ponderous irrelevance. The cause, both of the irrelevance and of the arbitrariness,
is the evident belief of their exponents that one can have a science of human nature while consistently ignoring
man's most significant and distinctive attributes.
Psychology, today, is in desperate need of epistemological rehabilitation. It should be unnecessary, for example, to
point out what is wrong with the attempt to prove that all learning is of a random, trial-and-error kind by placing a
rat into a maze where random, trial-and-error learning is all that is possible, then adducing the rat's behavior as
evidence for the theory. It should be still less requisite to point out what is wrong with accepting the underlying
premise of such experiments: the groundless and flagrantly unempirical notion that the learning process in man is to
be understood through a study of the behavior of rats.
In the writings of modern psychologists—whether or not the writers happen to show a predilection for the study of
rats (or pigeons or earthworms)—man is the entity most conspicuously absent. One can read many textbooks today
and never learn that man has the ability to think; if the fact is acknowledged at all, it is dismissed as unimportant.
One would not learn from these books that man's distinctive form of consciousness is conceptual, nor that