I should have written you, Sir, upon receiving your latest note, but I preferred to postpone a few days longer making up for my negligence so that I might speak to you at the same time about the book you sent me. Since I could not read it in its entirety, I chose the chapters in which the Author speaks his mind bluntly and which seemed to me to be the most important ones. Reading them satisfied me less than I expected; and I feel that the remnants of my old ideas, grown calloused in my brain, no longer allow such novel ideas to make strong impressions on it. I have never been able to understand just what the evidence is on which legal despotism is supposed to be based; and nothing seemed to me less evident than the chapter devoted to all this evidence.

In Chapters 16 and 18, I reported on progress in the study of cognition, and in Chapter 17 on progress in physiological psychology. In the present chapter, I shall review some events that led to continuity and progress in social, personality, and evolutionary biological psychology. In Chapters 14 and 15, I reported that the study of social psychology and personality in the 1970s had ended in what many regarded as a crisis. In the present chapter, I shall also account for some of the progress in these two areas that contributed to keeping the interest in them alive.

In social psychology, progress was made in the study of attitudes, the oldest – and regarded by many as the central study – of social psychology. In the 1970s, attribution research attracted enormous interest, and some of this research must be reviewed. Around 1970, health psychology emerged as an important new area in which the knowledge and techniques of social psychology proved useful. Other new areas have attracted the interest of psychologists. Of these, in my opinion, attraction and close relationships are of particular interest because they may help integrate a number of problem areas in psychology, as well as integrate psychology with the other social sciences.

In personality psychology, there seems to have been progress, particularly in attempts to describe personality in terms of traits, an undertaking begun by Gordon Allport and Odbert in 1933. Advances have also been made in the study of the self. Made central in psychology by James, Baldwin, and Mead in the late 1800s, this area is again a main concern of psychologists.

Social psychology and personality psychology developed more or less in parallel, and there is considerable overlap between the two. Since the debate in the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship between them does not seem to have been a question of major concern to psychologists. I shall therefore not go into it but merely point out that, if the study of personality is the study of the human being as some sort of psychological totality, it seems problematic to regard a social being as a separate part of this being. There is also considerable overlap between these two areas and developmental psychology.

Intellectual and scientific life in Great Britain differed in important respects from that of Germany, and the psychology emerging in the two countries had little in common. German psychology arose, as we have seen in the preceding three chapters, in close contact with experimental physiology. In contrast, early British psychology grew along with the study of biological evolution and was not based on experiments. Whereas German psychology was organized and carried out at the country's many universities, psychological research in Great Britain was undertaken mainly by private researchers outside the universities. Cooperation between Britain and Germany in the study of psychology was hindered not only by the great differences between their schools of thought but also by intense political rivaly. Efforts to integrate the psychology of the two countries were made by US psychologists, as we shall see in Chapter 11.

The study of evolution led to an entirely new persepctive on human nature, and the formulation of the Darwinian theory of evolution was a milestone in the history of empirical psychology. In addition to starting the comparative biological study of psychology, Charles Darwin can also be credited with laying the foundation of the modern study of emotions and initiating the study of child development. However, while Darwin is undoubtedly the great name in the study of evolution, the idea did not originate with him but was the result of some broad general trends in European science. Familiarity with these trends helps us understand Darwin's thinking as well as the reception of his ideas by contemporary and later biologists.

Familiarity with the study of evolution before Darwin also helps us understand the role played by Herbert Spencer in the early study of empirical psychology. As Mayr emphasized (1982, p. 385), Spencer was not a great biologist. But this must not prevent us from examining his ideas about psychology. As we shall see in the chapter on US psychology, they are of decisive importance for the development of empirical psychology. Before I turn to Darwin, I shall therefore sketch the general historical background of British psychology and say a few words about the early study of evolution. Following that and a discussion of Spencer, we turn to Francis Galton's studies of the role of inheritance in the development of mental abilities, along with his studies of individual differences.

Before speaking about the various forms of Government, let us try to establish the precise meaning of this term, which has not yet been adequately explained.