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This little book contains a series of lectures to the laity during the year 1940–1941 under the auspices of the New York Academy of Medicine.
First, Alan Gregg defines and discusses humanism in its relation to science. He indicates a strong feeling that science, particularly the medical sciences, is in need of humanism. He has this comment to make about psychiatry: 'We hear a great deal nowadays among psychiatrists of the "total situation", "the total personality", "the cultural matrix", "the life situation". These crude groping phrases, these homeless neologisms seem like the outcries of a disoriented specialist in search of a set of values, values not merely for the America of 1940, but criteria for the art of being a human being at any time. The most painful limitation of psychologists is their provincialism in time. Their field has been tilled in their manner not a hundred years, but apparently they will not bother with what was true before they came. More than most scientists, because they set out to study the psyche, they need to correct the absurdities and excesses of their specialism with the perspective of the humanist.'