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This book offers a serious effort at definition of the basic concepts underlying a holistic science of personality. The author has obviously been swayed in his thinking by a number of modern representatives of the holistic doctrine, including Smuts, Adolf Meyer, William Stern, A. Meyer (the biologist of Hamburg), von Uexküll and Bertalanffy, as well as by theGestaltschool. He defines the organism as a dynamic whole whose direction is toward an increase in autonomy in a setting in which the organism is under autonomous and heteronomous influences. The effort to increase autonomy appears to be a goal, not in the strict teleologic but in the directional sense. Under this general definition of biologic total processes the psychologic functions of symbolization, perception, imagination, thinking, emotion, conation, etc., are defined. The biosphere is defined as the realm in which life takes place and is characterized by a system of tensions
Gilliland et al. (Wed,) studied this question.