This does not mean, however, that the second activity has replaced the first. Through language, the conceptual sphere has acquired an organisation and structure based on stable, coherent, and logical systems. Our impressions and actions for the most part terminate in, or proceed from, this sphere. But although it rules over them, it has not abolished them. The rituals of primitive peoples usually draw on tremendous emotional resources, which are dissipated as the intellectual image emerges in their stead.
Intellectual reflection dampens emotional agitation.
But emotionality persists. In this way opposing activities come into conflict, though one may initially stem from the other. These affinities and oppositions are consonant with the laws of Marxist dialectics . It is dialectics that has given psychology its stability and its meaning, and which has delivered psychology from the alternatives of elementary materialism or vapid idealism, of crude substantialism or hopeless irrationalism. Through dialectics psychology is able to be at once a natural science and a human science, thus abolishing the division between consciousness and things that spiritualism has sought to impose on the universe.