The concept of mechanism is going out of style today, largely because of a misinterpretation of the Heisenberg principle of indeterminism. There’s a mechanistic interpretation of the universe and scientists often subscribe to it for at least two reasons: in the first place, because it is heuristic. Second, because a mechanistic theory which is thoroughgoing and not oversimplified is compatible with many of the phenomena which transcend mechanism.

Perhaps it might be well if we elaborated on this. We all have some model in the back of our minds of the machinery of human behavior. Let me be bold enough to present my particular model, recognizing that it is naive and oversimplified, because it may form a basis of discussion. In many ways, this model of human behavior has a great deal in common with the Bostonian’s map of the United States. It overemphasizes those areas with which I am familiar and underemphasizes others. This mechanism may be likened to a steam engine which is energized by a fire consisting of the oxidation of glucose, glucose and oxygen going into the brain by way of the cerebral circulation and reacting there. Other substances represent in mass a very small quantity of material; nevertheless, they may be extremely important in the regulation of the flame and in the continued development and repair of the whole machine.

The flame heats a boiler and turns a flywheel. This we may call the Krebs cycle. Energy from this flywheel passes through a clutch mechanism, which can be regulated to increase or decrease the efficiency of transmission of energy from this flywheel to another one. This clutch is the mechanism of phosphorylation, or the creation of high-energy phosphate molecules from the energy released by oxidation.

We may now put into the system a dynamo, generating electrical energy. This energy becomes stored in a battery, which represents the piling up of certain chemical constituents of the cell which are high in energy content, the so-called energy-rich phosphorus compounds. From this storehouse there is a more or less continuous How of electrical energy to the thinking or integrating functions of the brain, which can be naively represented by a series of electronic tubes, hooked together in such a way as to constitute a magnificent electronic computer.

Someone has said that paranoid schizophrenics and scientists have one thing in common in their behavior: their preoccupations change with the development of technology. Several centuries ago the brain was a hydraulic engine, then it became a telegraphic machine, then it became a telephone switchboard, and now it is an electronic computer.

Going into this computing machine are a number of input leads from the ear, which can be designated as a microphone; from the eye a photo cell; from all the senses, but these two will be sufficient.

There is another device which selectively stores the events which take place in the rest of the machine, some tape recorder or other more sophisticated gadget. It is called memory. Within this machine, then, is the entire universe of its experience, past and present.

Finally, the output of that machine, integrated in all its parts, results in behavior, which is largely a function of muscular activity.

This, admittedly naive, representation of the mechanism of behavior nevertheless embraces cerebral metabolism, and also biophysics, neuroanatomy, the social sciences, psychology, cybernetics, and so on.

Even if I had the supreme gift of a great biographer, my message would not be quite the one demanded on an occasion like this, in which laws of personality formation and functioning are, I believe, sought conjointly by the various sciences of man. I believe that when the story is all told the nomothetic effort will give not a small, but a large place in personality study to the researches into history, literature, and the arts, and also a deeper intuitive grasp of what it is that Euripides, Dante, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman had to say about their own experience as they lived through it, or as they put it in eternal form through the mouths of their characters.

The scientific effort to study personality has proved to be extraordinarily difficult. It is a labor fraught with conflict, frustration, the discovery of one’s limitations and mistakes, the endless necessity for backtracking and doing over, and the certainty that one will not only fail one’s contemporaries, but fail oneself in the process. Of course, anyone who talks about personality is going to fail. But Boswell, while he failed, made for himself a glorious place as a father of biography. William James (H. James 1920), as we learn from his letters, could discover the richness of human interchanges in a manner which he knew he could never write into a systematic psychology. During the last few centuries, many men of wisdom, like Im-manuel Kant and William James, have met the effort towards a scientific psychology with utter incredulity. “A nasty little science,” said James. Such men are sure that the world of abstractions, laws, and principles applies only to inert matter, or at best to those aspects of “matter in the living state” which are closest to physics and chemistry; and of all the searching words of scepticism or hostility they have directed to the efforts to make a science of psychology, they have been most profoundly and earnestly hostile to the attempt at a science of personality. Those of us who believe that such a science can be coaxed into existence and given a dignity and even a meaning worthy of a philosopher are out of step with contemporary science in many ways.

The trouble lies partly in the fact that personality is far more complex than most of the phenomena of the life sciences; another lies in the fact that there are profound cultural biases in each period which cause person-ality to be looked upon in a way plainly reeking with all the difficulties of the sociology of knowledge and cultural relativity; and third, plainly and patently, that the conscious and unconscious dynamics of the individual investigator of personality wreak havoc with his most devoted and rnost disciplined scientific efforts. All of the pitfalls which the various kinds of relativity have pointed out, the fact that—as Einstein says—there is no “privileged position,” the fact—as Freud made clear—that one cannot outgrow one’s own deeply ingrained personal outlook when one looks upon either persons in general, or the theory of the person in particular—all this makes the challenge peculiarly severe. There are culturally ingrained and personally colored considerations which determine what can and what cannot be done with the concept of personality, and if we know that our theory is sound, we know that its very soundness inexorably rules out the possibility of our achieving the objectivity which we seek.

No less obvious, however, is the fact that the challenge must be accepted. We live in an era in which we are learning a great deal about the facts that belong to the physical sciences, while we still know tragically little about the facts that have to do with human psychology, and least of all about the facts that have to do with the individuality from which growth, creativity, and leadership must spring. Mallory said that he climbed Everest because it was there. The psychologist must study personality first of all “because it is there.”