The first effort at a fresh start tried to explain everything rather one-sidedly out of the meagre knowledge of the body.  Spinoza had said in his remarkable Ethics (III, Prop.  II, Schol.):  “Nobody has thus far determined what the body can do, i.e., nobody has as yet shown by experience and trial what the body can do by the laws of nature alone in so far as nature is considered merely as corporeal and extended, and what it cannot do save when determined by mind.”

This challenge of Spinoza’s had to be met.  With some investigators this seemed very literally all there was to be done about the study of man—­to show how far the body could explain the activity we call “the mind.”  The unfortunate feature was that they thought they had to start with a body not only with mind and soul left out but also with practical disregard of the whole natural setting.  They studied little more than corpses and experimental animals, and many a critic wondered how such a corpse or a frog could ever show any mind, normal or abnormal.  To get things balanced again, the vision of man had to expand to take a sane and practical view of all of human life—­not only of its machinery.

The human organism can never exist without its setting in the world.  All we are and do is of the world and in the world.  The great mistake of an overambitious science has been the desire to study man altogether as a mere sum of parts, if possible of atoms, or now of electrons, and as a machine, detached, by itself, because at least some points in the simpler sciences could be studied to the best advantage with this method of the so-called elementalist.  It was a long time before willingness to see the large groups of facts, in their broad relations as well as in their inner structure, finally gave us the concept and vision of integration which now fits man as a live unit and transformer of energy into the world of fact and makes him frankly a consciously integrated psychobiological individual and member of a social group.

It is natural enough that man should want to travel on the road he knows and likes best.  The philosopher uses his logic and analysis and synthesis.  The introspectionist wants to get at the riddle of the universe by crawling into the innermost depth of his own self-scrutiny, even at the risk—­to use a homely phrase—­of drawing the hole in after him and losing all connection with the objective world.  The physicist follows the reverse course.  He gives us the appreciation of the objective world around and in us.  The chemist follows out the analytic and synthetic possibilities of his atoms and elements, and the biologist the growth and reproduction and multiplication of cells.  Each sees an open world of possibilities and is ready to follow as far as facts will carry and as far as the imagination will soar.  Each branch has created its rules of the game culminating in the concept of objective science, and the last set of facts to bring itself under the rules of objective science, and to be accepted, has been man as a unit and personality.