The literature of our day shows experimental scientists to be divided between two schools of thought, now generally called Mechanist and Vitalist. The literature of any day these last 2000 years would tell the same tale, but for occasional changes of name. Where an issue dividing scientists is seen to be an experimental issue, it presents no challenge to the philosopher. His interest is limited to the question, How shall we find out? and where all are agreed as to the way of settling a difference of opinion, he can wait with patience to learn the result. But the very history of this world-old and world-wide conflict between schools of experimental science shows that it never has been, is not now, could never become one whose issue turned on the outcome of this or that experiment; nor in all the 2000 years the conflict has lasted, has science been able to come upon any other type of evidence by which the issue might be settled. As one of a class of similar issues, ancient, pervasive, persistent, the manner of whose decision lies still beyond the grasp of experimental science, this Mechanist-Vitalist controversy gives the philosopher much to think about.

Since James defined emotion as consciousness of bodily reactions and Cannon and others detailed the nature of these reactions, there has been an increasing tendency among behaviorists to equate emotions with visceral reactions (1) and to neglect some of the genetic and adaptive aspects of emotion which had been discussed by Darwin (3).

Bruno Petermann in his The Gestalt Theory and the Problem of Configuration (tr. Meyer Fortes, Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1932, Pp. 344) and S. H. MacColl in her A Comparative Study of the Systems of Lewin and Koffka with special reference to Memory Phenomena (Duke University Press: Durham, 1939, Pp. 160) have shown that the gestalt concept is fundamentally valid but that as a tool of psychological explanation it has been developed with unrecognized inconsistencies and without a successful correlation with physiological facts. And John J. Ryan in his “Volition” (Readings in Psychology, ed. Skinner, C. E., Farrar: New York, 1935, Pp. 853, p. 646) has shown that psychology must provide a place for ethical responsibility. The purpose of the present paper is to show that the gestalt concept when conceived in accord with the fundamentals of experimental psychology and of theoretical mathematics and physics: (1) avoids unrecognized inconsistencies; (2) opens the gates to an increasingly refined mensurational correlation between physiological facts and psychological experience; and (3) provides a place within a comprehensive psychology for freedom and purpose, integrated with conditioning, which result in understanding and cooperation in the achievement of ideal purposes.

There is no period in the history of philosophy so difficult to understand as that period beginning upon Kant's death and extending up into the present. Attributing this difficulty to the proximity and contingence of the period to our own is not a satisfactory excuse, though we would be willing to admit we lack some of the clarity that “time passed” gives. If we give up the challenge of making a meaningful interpretation of this history because we lack perspective, we are surrendering a period whose lessons might prove immeasurably valuable to us. What is more important than such negative motivation for making a meaningful study of the philosophy of the last 100 years is the positive demand that we begin to develop techniques for understanding the present and immediate past, in order that we can more effectively face and contribute to the present and future.

There are styles in thinking just as there are in dress. Their justification is often as slight, and once a style in thought has been established, it is followed with the same unconscious readiness. The possibility of styles lies, of course, in a lack of fixed criterions. In dress, the choice to a large extent is a matter of taste, and because taste varies from individual to individual and from time to time, styles also change. Although the foundations of science are far more stable than those of taste, they yet have some touch of uncertainty. We live in a relative world, not an absolute one, and thus there is always room for the point of view to shift. We like to feel that we ourselves and the world in general are growing wiser, and thus that while there were errors in the thinking of the past, they are now being rapidly eliminated. The discovery that some philosopher of several thousand years ago held almost our identical views is always disconcerting.

It seems that Whitehead's original problem, as evidenced in his earlier works, was epistemological and metaphysical dualism. His method of extensive abstraction is an attempt to bring the factual world and the abstract world of thought together. So far as his books on nature are concerned, then, Whitehead denied the ultimate reality of a static world and accepted the reality of dynamic relations analogous to the relations found in a biological organism.

W. H. Sheldon has recently remarked that philosophical naturalism of the type propounded by John Dewey and his followers boils down to materialism in a new guise. Of course, any effort to relate human experience to the physical world within which it arises is open to the general charge of “materialism.” But naturalism can be called “materialistic” in a more specific sense if it tends to pass cavalierly over those aspects of experience upon which older philosophers have based a sharp contrast between experience and nature. This, I take it, is the primary complaint against recent naturalism, and it has its roots, I believe, in the influence of modern psychological theory upon philosophical thought.

Scientists are people. They are not “people, but…”. They have not escaped and cannot escape the “democentric” predicament. They are members of a society, no matter how hard they strain to be individualistic or exclusively clannish. If they succeed in being members of a small clan or a club they can be credited possibly with having more or less shrunk only the apparent size of their society, without escaping in any significant manner the social field implied in being “people”. If they attempt a greater shrinkage than that, they court complete frustration. To verify that, try, if you will, to imagine a thoroughly solitary scientist on a desert isle. Is he not alone and at last an illustration of the ungrammatical and even logically fictitious singular of the word “people”? No, he is definitely and hopelessly not alone, unless he first forgets even as habit everything he has learned from people. And, if he does that, he is no longer a scientist or even the rudiments of one. Indeed he must be reduced at least to the status of an animal, and an extremely unsocial one at that, because by the terms of our imaginary experiment, he must not join any other society, even if it were of but “animal-people”, e.g. a wolf-pack or an ant-hill culture, where he might learn something from others. Such strictness in argument is introduced only to drive home the fact that what constitutes “people” is derived from the dimmest animal past, where language is still unspoken and is constituted of simple actions taken together, literally concepts. The “con” in “concept” tends to be forgotten. We underscore it.

At the outset it will be useful, I think, to distinguish the following components in the definitional situation:

1. The “definitional relation” that holds, in a given case, between either (1) a definiendum and definiens (a dyadic symmetrical relation between symbols) or (2) a definiendum, definiens, and referent (a triadic relation between (a) the symbol being defined, (b) the defining symbol, which is usually complex and includes descriptive terms, and (c) any member of the class of non-symbolic referents by means of references to which the descriptive terms in (b) are given their semantical meaning—the relation between (b) and (c) being non-symmetrical, even though the relata are, in some contests, functionally equivalent. The former syntactical relation connects one symbol (the definiendum) with another symbol (the definiens); the latter semantical relation also does this, but includes the additional factor of a descriptive reference, via the definiens, to a class of non-symbolic referents.