Aristotelicrn Concepts
　　Fortuitousness o f the Individual Case. The concept forma-tion of psychology is dominated，just as was that of Aristotelianphysics，by the question of regularity in the sense of frequency.This is obvious in its immediate attitude toward particular phe-nomena as well as in its attitude toward lawfulness. If， for exam-ple，one show a film of a concrete incident in the behavior of a cer-tain child，the first question of the psychologist usually is: "Do all children do that，or is it at least common ?" And if one must an-swer this question in the negative the behavior involved loses for that psychologist all or almost all claim to scientific interest. To pay attention to such an "exceptional case" seems to him a scien-tifically unimportant bit of folly.
　　The real attitude of the investigator toward particular events and the problem of individuality is perhaps more clearly expressed in this actual behavior than in many theories. The individual event seems to him fortuitous， unimportant， scientifically indifferent. It may，however，be some extraordinary event，some tremendous ex-perience，something that has critically determined the destiny of the person involved，or the appearance of an historically significant personality. In such a case it is customary to emphasize the "mys-tical" character of all individuality and originality，comprehensible only to "intuition，" or at least not to science.
　　Both of these attitudes toward the particular event lead to the same conclusion: that that which does not occur repeatedly lies outside the realm of the comprehensible. La'w fuLness as Frequency. The esteem in which frequency is held in present-day psychology is due to the fact that it is still considered a question whether， and if so how far， the psychical world is lawful，just as in Aristotelian physics this esteem was due to a similar uncertainty about lawfulness in the physical world. It is not necessary here to describe at length the vicissitudes of the thesis of the lawfulness of the psychic in philosophical discussion. It is sufficient to recall that even at present there arc many tend-encies to limit the operation of law to certain "lower" spheres of psychical events. For us it is more important to note that the field which is considered lawful， not in principle，but in the actual re-search of psychology-even of experimental psychology-has only been extended very gradually. If psychology has only very gradu-ally and hesitantly pushed beyond the bounds of sensory psychol-ogy into the fields of will and affect，it is certainly due not only to technical difficulties，but mainly to the fact that in this field actual repetition，a recurrence of the same event，is not to be expected. And this repetition remains，as it did for Aristotle，to a large ex-tent the basis for the assumption of the lawfulness or intelligibili-ty of an event.
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