In logic, too, we are led to special assertions.  We are forced to formulate “open definitions,” i.e., we have to insist on the open formulation of tendencies rather than “closed definitions.”  We deal with rich potentialities, never completely predictable.

This background and the demands of work in guiding ourselves and others thus come to lead us also into practical ethics, with a new conception of the relation of actual and experimental determinism and of what “free will” we may want to speak of, with a new emphasis on the meaning of choice, of effort, and of new creation out of new possibilities presented by the ever-newly-created opportunities of ever-new time.  We get a right to the type of voluntaristic conception of man which most of us live by—­with a reasonable harmony between our science and our pragmatic needs and critical common sense.

The extent to which we can be true to the material foundations and yet true to a spiritual goal, ultimately measures our health and natural normality and the value of our morality. Nature shapes her aims according to her means. Would that every man might realize this simple lesson and maxim—­there would be less call for a rank and wanton hankering for relapses into archaic but evidently not wholly outgrown tendencies to the assumption of “omnipotence of thought,” revived again from time to time as “New Thought.”  Psychiatry restores to science and to the practical mind the right to reinclude rationally and constructively what a narrower view of science has, for a time at least, handed over unconditionally to uncritical fancy.  But the only way to make unnecessary astrology and phrenology and playing with mysticism and with Oliver Lodge’s fancies of the revelation of his son Raymond, is to recognize the true needs and yearnings of man and to show nature’s real ways of granting appetites and satisfactions that are wholesome.

Hereby we have indeed a contribution to biologically sound idealism:  a clearer understanding of how to blend fact and ambition, nature and ideal—­an ability to think scientifically and practically and yet idealistically of matters of real life.

To come back to more concrete problems again, a wider grasp of what psychiatry may well furnish us helps toward a new ethical goal in our social conscience.  The nineteenth century brought us the boon and the bane of industrialism.  More and more of the pleasures and satisfactions of creation and production and of the natural rewards of the daily labor drifted away from the sight and control of the worker, who now rarely sees the completed result of his work as the farmer or the artisan used to do.  Few workers have the experience of getting satisfaction from direct pride in the end result; as soon as the product is available, a set of traders carries it to the markets and a set of financiers determines, in fact may already have determined, the reward—­just as the reward of the farmer is often settled for him by astounding speculations long before the crop is at hand.  There is a field for a new conscience heeding the needs of fundamental satisfactions of man so well depicted by Carlton Parker, and psychiatric study furnishes much concrete material for this new conscience in industrial relations—­with a better knowledge of the human needs of all the participants in the great game of economic life.