We burn with the desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation, whereon to build a tower reaching to the infinite, but our whole groundwork cracks and the earth opens to abysses.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées

Personality theories have much to lose by pretending to greater coverage or rigour than they in fact possess. In following this timehonoured primrose path to damnation, they easily leave the field of science altogether.

H. J. Eysenck: The Biological Bases of Personality

In this life everyone is a failure.

Anonymous

APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO SUO

After some two decades of dealing with the trivialities currently fashionable in the social and behavioral sciences, of applying text x to population y, we have become keenly interested in the holistic context of human behavior. This is in line with the scientistic crises that many academics who deal with the sciences of man seem to undergo. They feel that their explanations deal with a non sequitur, a narrow segment of human behavior, and that their disconnected theories are not concerned with issues of real importance. We therefore encounter more and more scientists who, having devoted themselves for a quarter of a century to, say, the visual perception of the Siamese fighting fish, now turn to the psychology of . . .