ABSTRACT
There is however one peculiar feature of this type of controversy: The ‘reality’ of a unit is more often attacked on the ground that it is part of a larger and essentially indivisible unit than on the ground that it can be subdivided into smaller units. Thus, I think it will be agreed that the following argument is typical of those which question the postulation of man as a unit:
I was just a little surprised to find a trained biologist . . . slipping into the popular description of men as organisms who have been given ‘the means of controlling, and possibly mastering, the environ ment which has produced them’. Does he [Dr. Alex Comfort], then . . . consider man to be an entity on the one hand, and his environment to be a kind of shell, a separate unit, on the other? I should have thought that he, as a dabbler in the humanities, would have realized that man and his environment are inextricably mixed, quite indivisibly compounded, to form the organism.1
