practical attack upon the problems in the form in which we find them in
our common-sense life.

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