^^^ The Unity of the Organism 



vironic factors as food in the narrow sense, drink, air, light 

 and temperature. The duty before us is that of testifying to, 

 of viseing, the objectively psychical individual as we did the 

 subjectively psychical individual earlier in this sketch. 

 "What is needed," writes Sellars, "is not vague statements to 

 the effect that individuals cannot be separated or that they 

 are aspects of one another, but definitions and analyses." ^'^ 

 Sellars is here raising his voice against the tendency in 

 present-day social psychology to make the individual a kind 

 of incident in the social order, a by-product of Society. It 

 is a satisfaction that the regular course of my psychological 

 argument has brought me to where I also may contribute 

 something to the definition and analyses essential to check- 

 ing the tendency indicated by Sellars. If it can be shown 

 biologically and psychologically all in one that personality 

 is indubitably objective, both substantively and kinetically, 

 not only the Individual but Society will be the gainer, I am 

 very sure. For my contribution we will examine in outline 

 what may appropriately be called the action-system (adopt- 

 ing and expanding Jennings' term) as it manifests itself in 

 a small homogeneous group of human beings. Our study will 

 be, in other words, one in domestic and neighborhood psy- 

 chology. 



The "material" in this instance must be my own household 

 and the handful of persons constituting the colony of the 

 Scripps Institution for Biological Research. This group 

 is rather specially favorable for such a study in that its 

 geographic severance from other groups, and its strictly 

 rural habitat give it an exceptionally natural, simple, and 

 uniform environment. The analysis might run along any 

 one or all of several axes; but our purpose will be accom- 

 plished by following one only. That one shall be the reac- 

 tion, the behavior, of individual members of the group in 

 response to the stimulus of the world war. Were complete- 

 ness to be aimed at in the analysis, every individual in the 



