You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book makes an enormous impact. Matson's goal of pointing out and illuminating a method toward deeper understanding of man is brilliantly achieved, with an analogical assist from a surprising source, mathematics and physics. Mr. Matson, who with his co-authors, in 1955 received the Woodrow Wilson award for the best book on government and democracy, Prejudice, War, and Democracy, holds his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, and has done much of his research in sociology.
In a masterly detailed and lively survey of psychology, philosophy and the natural and social sciences and how they have acted on each other during the past three hundred years beginning with Newton's discoveries, he has shown how the mechanistic approach has wrought the automaton man and mechanical culture in which we find ourselves today. This is done with numerous vivid quotes from original authors and critiques, conveying a strong effect on the reader of having been there.
The title refers to man's fragmented identity which has evolved from these three hundred years of attempts to separate subjectivity from objectivity, observing from participating, knowing from feeling, meaning from behaving. He exposes the broken image that results from denying our specifically human qualities in the attempt to mimic our instruments in objectiveness. Even in such an inherently subjective situation as analysis, involvement of the analyst as a responsive participant has only recently been legitimized.
Applying the language and concepts of physical sciences to the life sciences in the quest for “measurable certainties” has dehumanized the human. The natural outgrowth of this mechanistic approach is behaviorism, according to Matson, which has now become, not “a dispassionate and positive science of behavior, but a wholly passionate and negative campaign to make men behave.” An even grimmer future is projected should this trend continue, in which the behavioristic experts now in service t