480 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY 



and mean by it that biology can and must analyse the func- 

 tional relation between the parts of the organism and the whole 

 and the integration of their activity in the preservation and 

 development of the organism, who can deny that functionalism 

 is accepted in contemporary science and has proved extremely 

 successful? It is only such functional analysis which is required 

 for a biologist or psychologist to consider the stable goals of 

 man.^^ 



A psychology adequate to serve as the basis for the social 

 sciences cannot be, however, a study of man based on a narrow 

 methodology. The picture of man given by behavioristic, psy- 

 choanalytic, or purely phenomenological methods is too incom- 

 plete. Nor will a merely eclectic methodology serve the pur- 

 pose. What is required is a psychology which makes use of all 

 known methods of obtaining and analyzing evidence under the 

 control of basic principles so rooted in the broad facts of ex- 

 perience that they can withstand searching philosophical criti- 

 cism. There must be a unified psychology of man in which the 

 dichotomy between the philosophical-humanistic and the sci- 

 entific view of man is overcome.^- 



Since man is not a mere mind nor a Platonic soul but an 

 organism forming a unit in the system of natural bodies, such a 

 unified psychology presupposes a unified physical science of 

 the sort which other contributors to this volume are proposing. 



The Problems to he Studied by a Social Science Founded 



on Natural Science 



What would be the outline of a social science oriented in 

 this manner and founded on a unified psychology.? It would 



^^ See my paper " Research into the intrinsic final causes of physical things," 

 Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, XXVI (1952) , 

 185-194 in which I attempted to show that final causality is just as empirically 

 observable as efficient causality, since they are correlative to each other. Those 

 who reject teleology in the Aristotelian sense must also accept a purely positivistic 

 view of all causality. 



^^ See the views of psychologists who are working in this direction in Magda B. 

 Arnold and John A. Gasson, The Human Person: An Approach to an Integral 

 Theory of Personality (New York: Ronald Press, 1954) . 



