Science, The Scientific Method, and Scientific Knowledge
A Glossary Entry on Roberto Assagioli’s Conception of Science
Editor’s Note: This entry was prepared with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), working from the comprehensive anthology of Assagioli’s articles, Kenneth Sørensen.
Definition
For Roberto Assagioli, the scientific method is not a body of techniques borrowed from physics or chemistry but a discipline of sound reasoning, rooted in Bacon’s Novum Organum and the elimination of error. There is one scientific method, but the techniques by which it is applied to different subject matters are many. So understood, the method extends without distortion to the study of the higher reaches of the human psyche — to intuition, inspiration, the superconscious, and the transpersonal Self — which Assagioli holds to be no less legitimate as objects of scientific inquiry than reflexes, instincts, and the contents of the subconscious. “The superconscious and its facts are as scientific as those of the subconscious. A conditioned reflex is no more scientific than an inspiration.”
This entry gathers Assagioli’s principal statements on the question, drawn from articles, interviews, and lectures spanning six decades, from the 1913 essay on misoneism to the 1974 piece on transpersonal inspiration. The structure follows the order in which Assagioli himself develops the argument: first the conception of science as such; then the critique of the prevailing definition; then the positive case for the scientific study of the higher psyche.
1. The scientific method as sound reasoning
Assagioli’s most concentrated statement on the nature of scientific method appears in the piece dictated to Molly Young Brown in 1973, “The New Dimensions of Psychology: The Third, Fourth and Fifth Forces.” He grounds the method in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum and the analysis of the four idols that distort human reasoning.
“The scientific method essentially consists in sound reasoning.”
— “The New Dimensions of Psychology: The Third, Fourth and Fifth Forces.” Typed at the request of Roberto Assagioli by Molly Young Brown, 1973. First published in the AAP Online Journal, September 2016.
Assagioli pairs Bacon’s four idols — Idola Tribus (of the tribe), Idola Specus (of the cave), Idola Fori (of the marketplace), Idola Theatri (of the theatre) — with Locke’s four sources of error, treating them as complementary diagnoses of the obstacles to clear thought. The method itself is then the discipline of recognising and correcting these obstacles.
“There is only one scientific method, while the techniques are many.”
— Same source.
The distinction is decisive. The method is universal: observe carefully, reason soundly, eliminate error, test hypothesis against fact. The techniques — the microscope, the questionnaire, the introspective protocol, the controlled experiment, the comparative study — vary with the subject matter. To confine “science” to those techniques developed for the study of physical bodies is to mistake a particular set of techniques for the method itself.
2. The three stages of science
In a conversation of 9 March 1958 on parapsychology, Assagioli sets out his model of how a science develops. The framework is taxonomic but also normative: it shows what stage a given inquiry has reached and what remains to be done.
“There are three main stages of science:
The first stage is the collection of facts, either through observation or experimentation.
The second stage involves the investigation of the conditions and manner in which these facts were collected and verified.
The third stage is the interpretation of the facts, examining their meaning and value, and then their inclusion into the body of human knowledge, into scientific and philosophical knowledge.”
— “Science and Parapsychology: A Conversation with Dr. Roberto Assagioli,” 9 March 1958. Doc. #23906, Assagioli Archives, Florence.
A fourth stage — practical application and the development of techniques — follows, but Assagioli urges extreme caution there: premature application by amateurs and enthusiasts has done parapsychology, and psychology more generally, considerable damage.
Applied to psychology in his time, the diagnosis is precise. The first stage has yielded a great mass of reliably established facts; those who still deny them, he says, “are simply far behind … they are now 50 years behind.” The real work lies in the second stage — the investigation of conditions and methods — and in the third — the integration of psychological findings into the broader body of human knowledge.
3. The error of identifying “scientific” with “quantitative”
Assagioli’s most sustained polemic concerns the conflation of scientific method with quantitative measurement. This conflation, he argues, is a historical accident of the natural sciences — a particular technique mistaken for the method itself — and one of the two great errors of positivism.
In the article “Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Life,” he names the two errors directly. The first is the assumption that only quantitative phenomena are scientific. The second is the practice of “explaining away” the higher by reducing it to the lower — the supposition that to understand inspiration as a neural event is to have understood inspiration as such. Both errors must be set aside if psychology is to become a complete science.
In the 1968 conversation with Mariella Crocellà of “La Nazione,” Assagioli illustrates the limits of the quantitative criterion with the familiar example of the half-empty and half-full glass. The same physical fact — the same volume of water in the same vessel — constitutes two distinct psychological facts depending on the observer’s attitude. A psychology that recognises only what can be measured will lose precisely what matters.
He invokes Goethe’s principle in support: “Wirklichkeit was wirkt” — reality is what acts. An intuition that redirects a life, a fear that paralyses an action, an inspiration that produces a work of art — these act, and therefore are real, and therefore are facts in the proper scientific sense.
Themes drawn from “Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Life” (Psicosintesi E Vita Spirituale, translated by Gordon Symons), the Crocellà conversation of 21 February 1968 (Doc. #23493), and “The New Dimensions of Psychology” (1973).
4. The proper definition of a fact
From the Goethean criterion follows a definition of “fact” wide enough to include psychological and spiritual realities. In “Psychology in the Future” (1968), Assagioli develops this point at length, drawing again on Bacon and arguing that the definition of fact must be enlarged to include the psychological facts that genuinely shape human reality. A premonition that turns out to be accurate, a religious experience that transforms a life, an act of moral courage — these are facts. Their reality is not diminished by the absence of a meter or a graduated cylinder.
The most direct application of this principle to the question of the Self appears in a Q&A session preserved in the anthology. A questioner asks whether the transpersonal Self can be proven scientifically. Assagioli’s answer is careful:
“By ordinary science it cannot be proven … But if you take the scientific attitude and method in the way I have put it, then yes … primary experiences which are evidences of themselves … full scientific value, in the broader sense … It should be the ABC of the scientific method … let us take a hypothesis and then let us see if the facts corroborate or not.”
— Transcribed Q&A in the Assagioli anthology.
The structure of the answer is precise. Ordinary science, restricted to its quantitative techniques, cannot prove the Self. But the scientific method properly understood — the discipline of advancing a hypothesis and testing it against the facts of experience — can be applied to inner experience as it is applied to outer. Primary experiences, Assagioli says, are evidences of themselves. The work of science is to take them seriously, frame them as testable hypotheses, and submit them to the discipline of verification.
5. The scientific attitude
Throughout his writings Assagioli distinguishes the scientific method from the scientific attitude, and treats the latter as the necessary inner condition of the former. The attitude is one of “serene, dispassionate, impartial” observation, equally distinct from credulity and from dogmatic skepticism. It must be cultivated; it is not the natural reaction either of the believer or of the debunker.
In “Transpersonal Inspiration” (June 1974, published 1976), he formulates the attitude in still broader terms. To be scientific, in the sense he defends, is to be “independent of every doctrine, system and personal authority.” Independence from doctrine includes independence from the doctrines of materialism and reductionism no less than from the doctrines of religion or of any particular philosophical school.
The principal obstacle to this attitude is misoneism — the reflex hostility to novelty. In his earliest essay on the question, published in Psiche in 1913, Assagioli describes misoneism as a deep-seated psychological tendency rooted in the biological drive to maintain equilibrium and in mental “economy.” When uncounterbalanced by curiosity and theoretical interest, this economy becomes “avarice of thought.” He notes, with characteristic directness, that the progress of modern science has not eliminated misoneism among scientists; the attitude of many of them toward parapsychological phenomena demonstrates this clearly.
“Misoneism is a serious obstacle to the progress of science and civilization, and all those who care about such progress should vigorously fight it whenever the opportunity arises.”
— “A Contribution to the Psychology of Misoneism,” Psiche II, 5–6, 1913. Doc. #23194, 24216, Assagioli Archives.
6. The place of intuition in scientific work
It would be a misunderstanding of Assagioli’s position to suppose that his expanded conception of science marginalises rigour in favour of inspiration. The opposite is the case. He insists that the recognition and use of intuition is itself a feature of the scientific attitude, attested by some of the most rigorous scientists. He puts the point directly:
“There is, furthermore, another aspect of the scientific attitude which some prominent scientists have spontaneously or deliberately utilized. It is the recognition and use in scientific research of certain psychological functions, such as imagination, intuition, and creativity. Many scientists have testified to this, among those having done so in precise terms was the mathematician, Henri Poincaré.”
— “The New Dimensions of Psychology: The Third, Fourth and Fifth Forces.” Typed at the request of Roberto Assagioli by Molly Young Brown, 1973. First published in the AAP Online Journal, September 2016.
Elsewhere in the same piece Assagioli observes that the phases of creative problem-solving — preparation, incubation, illumination, elaboration — “receive ample confirmation in descriptions given by Einstein, the mathematician Poincaré and the chemist Kekulé of the ways in which they reached solutions of their scientific problems.” Intuition and verification are therefore complementary, not opposed: the moment of discovery is non-discursive, while verification, which comes afterwards, is the discipline that distinguishes a scientific intuition from a private conviction. The proper relation between the two — hypothesis followed by test — is what Assagioli calls “the ABC of the scientific method.”
7. The superconscious as a scientific subject
On these foundations Assagioli builds his central methodological claim: the superconscious is no less a proper subject of scientific study than the subconscious. The asymmetry that has prevailed in modern psychology — the willingness to study the lower while dismissing the higher — is a methodological prejudice, not a scientific principle. He sets the point in the context of a historical narrative on how psychology, having rightly freed itself from theology and philosophy, then submitted itself to the methods of chemistry and physics and so produced “that hybrid called ‘physiological psychology’,” in which only what could be measured was admitted as scientific. The diagnosis ends with a now-famous formulation:
“Our starting point for spiritual psychology, in Psychosynthesis, is different, because we argue that higher manifestations are equally important facts of behavior and sensations and that, when they happen, can also be studied scientifically. Intuition can be the origin of an invention that can change our civilization. The intuition of a poet can ignite a generation. Creative imagination has mechanical effects. The superconscious and its facts are as scientific as those of the subconscious. A conditioned reflex is no more scientific than an inspiration. This is the basis of our attitude, the very solid platform on which we can take a position with confidence.”
— “The Position of Psychosynthesis in Contemporary Psychology.” Original Italian title: La Posizione della Psicosintesi nella Psicologia Contemporanea. Assagioli Archive, Florence. Translated from Italian by Gordon Symons.
The most explicit programmatic statement comes in “Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Life,” where Assagioli names the scientific study of the higher manifestations of the human soul as the defining task of psychosynthesis as a science:
“Psychosynthesis as a science aims to investigate with a sound and rigorous scientific method the superior manifestations of the human soul.”
— “Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Life” (Psicosintesi E Vita Spirituale), translated by Gordon Symons.
He then poses the question that puts the asymmetry plainly: “Why should an intuition, a telepathic perception, a premonition be less worthy and acceptable for study than the scientific study of an instinct, an impulse, or a tropism?” The question has no good answer; the asymmetry has no methodological justification. It is sustained only by the prejudices of materialism and the inertia of academic convention.
8. Exemplars of the enlarged scientific spirit
Assagioli does not present his position as an innovation but as a return — a recovery of what science is when it is not unduly narrowed. He cites a roll-call of scientists who, on his view, have approached the higher and supernormal phenomena scientifically rather than apologetically, and who therefore exemplify the method as he defends it.
William James is the figure most frequently invoked. Assagioli describes The Varieties of Religious Experience as:
“… a model of impartial and scientific examination of this subject […] [where James] has vigorously demonstrated the reality and value of the transcendental realm.”
— “The Awakening and Development of Spiritual Consciousness” (Il Risveglio E Lo Sviluppo Della Coscienza Spirituale). Assagioli Archive, Florence. Translated from Italian by Gordon Symons.
C. G. Jung is invoked, in similar terms, for what Assagioli calls his “true scientific spirit”:
“His understanding of the relativity of our knowledge and the recognition of the unavoidable subjective element in every researcher made him shun all systematic formulations and categorical statements. He took up a firm position on the ground of psychological experience and the empirical method, thus demonstrating a true scientific spirit … Jung … assumes an agnostic attitude …; he admits the subjective, ‘psychological’ reality of the experience, but maintains that its essential, transcendental reality cannot be regarded as demonstrated.”
— “C. G. Jung and Psychosynthesis,” 1967. Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, Issue No. 19.
The agnosticism, on Assagioli’s reading, is methodological: a discipline of staying with what can be observed while leaving the larger questions open. Assagioli adopts a similar discipline in psychosynthesis, while extending the field of observation to include inner experience.
Abraham Maslow and Michael Polanyi are credited, in a 1972 interview, with having broadened the working definition of science in a direction compatible with Assagioli’s own:
“Maslow and Michael Polanyi, among others, have enlarged the notion of what is science and the scientific method, and I applaud this.”
— Stuart Miller interview, “The Will.” Intellectual Digest, October 1972.
In the field of parapsychology, Assagioli names a long list of scientists who have, on his view, applied the method properly understood to the study of the supernormal:
“By way of honor I quote first of all W. James, who in his classic book Varieties … subjected the study of the various aspects of spiritual consciousness to a dispassionate, respectful and rigorous process, that is a model of scientific probity and dignity … After him there was a valiant and not so small group of scientists who investigated the dark and arduous regions of the supernormal: the best of them are Crookes and Lodges, Geley and Osty, Driesch, Ribot and under certain respects Jung, and from us, Morselli, Bottazzi, Mackenzie and currently Cazzamalli. Also Rhine.”
— “Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Life” (Psicosintesi E Vita Spirituale). Assagioli Archive, Florence. Translated from Italian by Gordon Symons.
Two further parapsychologists — W. H. C. Tenhaeff (Professor of Parapsychology at the State University of Utrecht) and Hans Bender (founder of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg) — are named in “Psychology and Human Existence” as exemplars of academic parapsychology, holding university chairs in the Netherlands and Germany respectively.
— “Psychology and Human Existence,” translator’s notes [10] and [11]. Available on kennethsorensen.dk.
9. Semantics as refinement of the method
A late but characteristic theme in Assagioli’s writing on this question is the role of semantics in refining the scientific method. In the Crocellà conversation he notes that semantic analysis has come to refine the method by exposing the idols of the marketplace — the errors that arise from imprecise language. This refinement is particularly important in the study of inner experience, where the available vocabulary is shaped by cultures and traditions that may not have been concerned to make the distinctions a scientific investigator must make. Many disagreements about the higher psyche turn out, on inspection, to be disagreements about words. Disciplining the words is a scientific task.
10. The institutional form: the Psychosynthesis Research Foundation
Assagioli’s conception of the scientific method received its most explicit institutional form in the Vision and Mission Statement of the Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, drafted in April 1957 prior to the Foundation’s incorporation later that year. The document spells out a research programme based directly on the principles outlined above:
“The study of the superconscious, the activation of its faculties and energies, and their harmonious integration in, and utilization by, the conscious personality. This includes the study of genius; the discovery and development of special talents; the study and development of the will (a precious human function which has been curiously neglected by psychology, by psychotherapy, and, to some extent, by education); the establishment of a harmonious integration of all human aspects: biological, emotional, mental, and spiritual, under the direction of the Self.”
— “The Psychosynthesis Research Foundation — Its Vision, Mission, and Program,” April 1957. AAP Archive, folder PRF_AAP_Correspondences.
The programme is not a piece of speculative philosophy but a research agenda, framed in the language of scientific investigation and intended to issue in concrete results. That this agenda was conceived in 1957 — more than a decade before the formal emergence of transpersonal psychology as a recognised field — is itself of historical interest. Assagioli was, on his own conception of the term, doing transpersonal science before transpersonal science had a name.
Summary
Assagioli’s conception of the scientific method can be stated in a few propositions. The method is one and universal; the techniques are many. It consists in sound reasoning, in the elimination of error, and in the submission of hypothesis to verification. The reduction of “scientific” to “quantitative” is a historical accident, not a defining feature. Psychological and spiritual facts are facts in the proper sense, because, in Goethe’s formulation, reality is what acts. Inner experience is admissible as primary evidence, provided it is approached with the discipline of impartial observation, hypothesis, and test. The superconscious is as legitimate a subject of scientific study as the subconscious. And psychosynthesis, on this conception, is the systematic application of the scientific method to the higher manifestations of the human soul.
Principal Sources
All quotations are drawn from the comprehensive anthology “Komplet Samling af Roberto Assagiolis artikler,” compiled by Kenneth Sørensen and translated into English by Jan Kuniholm, Gordon Symons, and others. The principal source articles for this entry are:
“A Contribution to the Psychology of Misoneism” (Psiche II, 5–6, 1913); the Crocellà conversation of 21 February 1968 (Doc. #23493); “Science and Parapsychology,” 9 March 1958 (Doc. #23906); “Psychology in the Future” (1968, Doc. #23977); “The New Dimensions of Psychology: The Third, Fourth and Fifth Forces” (dictated 1973, published AAP 2016); “Transpersonal Inspiration” (June 1974, PRF Issue 36, 1976); “On the Scientific Method” (Newsletter of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, February 1970); the Stuart Miller interview, “The Will” (Intellectual Digest, October 1972); “Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Life” (Psicosintesi E Vita Spirituale, translator Gordon Symons); and the Vision and Mission Statement of the Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, April 1957.
