It grows increasingly evident that biology, the tardiest of the sciences, ultimately will rule the roost. At least it is true that the biologist not only is showing the way to the psychologist in the field of human behaviour but promises to supplant him altogether. Psychology is at present a laboratory divided against itself with theory upon theory spinning a futile web of contradiction. In the field of application psycho-analysis is a jumble of confusion and the psychiatrists, striving vainly to make use of psychological theories, are running wildly up blind alleys. Although unaware that the psychological mumbo-jumbo is not scientific, the public is losing faith in the psycho-nostrum vendors whose books on our psychological conflicts and inferiority feelings, continue to pour from the presses to no practical good.

The failure of psychology and its allied arts rests on a very simple error, an error upon which the whole pseudo-scientific structure has been erected. That error springs from the failure of the psychologist to perceive that the human organism is an integrated whole, an entity in which no part may sensibly be considered as separate from the whole. Yet psychologists go right on behaving insensibly by presuming that they can resolve our so-called psychic tensions by tinkering with our so-called subconscious minds. The concept of the subconscious mind, as all psychological concepts which ignore the unity of the human organism, is destined soon to be scrapped and the whole business of psychology shown to be audacious nonsense. The biologists will do the job scientifically.

As a matter of fact there is already available sufficient scientific data to refute the major body of psychological theory and practice. I have reference particularly to the findings of Professor G. E. Coghill, of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, whose laboratory experiments have led him to some extraordinary conclusions concerning man's behaviour. Professor Coghill, aware of the incontrovertible fact that nothing is static, brings the space-time relationship to the problems of human behaviour and finds that nothing practical can be learned about the human organism until the organism is approached as a living, organic whole. He has discovered through painstaking observations over a period of years, that the living organism is, an integrated system which must be approached as such.

Professor Coghill has discovered a mechanism of total integration at work in living organisms. "Parts," he says, "become integrated with each other because they are integral factors of a primarily integrated whole, and they remain integrated, and behaviour is normal, so long as this wholeness is maintained." Now this is exactly the point which the psychologists have missed completely. Instead, they have gone on seeking to tinker with parts, which they have labeled mind, subconscious mind, emotion, libido, etc., as if these parts were separate from the total design, which is the living individual. This ignorance of an organic principle has led the psychological systems to practical failure. They do not work because they are based on a false premise. The psychoanalyst may seek for and even find your so-called hidden conflict in the deeps of your "subconscious mind" as if it were a pocket in your coat but your neuroses will not permanently disappear until your organic wholeness is restored.

Professor Coghill is illuminating in his article on "Space-Time as a Pattern of Psycho-Organismal Mentation," which appeared in the October, 1938, issue of The American Journal of Psychology, when he declares that we should not think of "mind" but of mentation. "Exactly what constitutes mentation in the individual during the early phases of its embryonic development," he writes, "I do not know. Neither do I know what subconscious mentation is in the adult, but science and the medical art deal with it in a practical way. It is called the subconscious mind, and volumes have been written on the relation it holds to the conscious mind. The two types of mind are treated as separate entities which hold some definite and fixed relation to each other, with the result of endless confusion and contradiction. The concept of a psycho-organismal individual, with mentation as an element running parallel with structure and function, dispels the confusion and resolves the contradiction inherent in theory of a subconscious mind underlying the conscious." There is implicit in that paragraph a profound and revolutionary criticism of current psychological theories and practices.

Biology thus discloses the basic fallacy in psychology; and when the work of such men as Professor Coghill finally infiltrates the musty psychological halls, the walls will crumble to shed some scientific light upon the problems of human behaviour. For it is demonstrably true that any deviation from the normal behaviour of the organism is attributable to an imbalance of the total pattern. Restoration of the balance re-establishes normal behaviour.

Although Professor Coghill is an experimental scientist, who has been working under a grant from the Josiah Macy Foundation, it would be interesting to know if he is aware of the work of F. Matthias Alexander in London, who has been applying these principles practically for the past forty years. Mr. Alexander's technique for the restoration of the total integration of the individual approaches the individual as an integrated whole. By re-educating the individual's behaviour as a whole, Alexander has demonstrated a technique which ultimately will replace present psychological as well as many medical practices. Professor Coghill's findings confirm the scientific basis of Alexander's practical work, which for so many years has been confirming these somewhat tardy findings. Thus practice precedes theory; and one wonders what use the Macy Foundation, which exists for the pursuit of knowledge useful for the betterment of the race, will make of the discoveries of the biologist, whose work it has aided.