Summary: | "This book outlines the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, examining the first principles of his system. The studies we performed out of an interest in issues of individuality have shown that people may be characterized in ways that cut across traditional categories of perceiving, intelligence, and personality. This finding highlights the difficulty in attempting to consider these categories in isolation from each other. Are we describing a person's perception when we say of him that he spontaneously experiences his body as an entity apart from the surroundings, that he has an immediate impression of himself as a person separate from others? Or are we describing his personality? The identification of individual ways of functioning, expressed in diverse areas of psychological activity, causes us more and more to look across the traditional categories into which man's psychological life has often been divided, make the same claim; and, believing most heartily that Mr. Spencer has not found the truth, I have ventured to say so. Still the appeal is not to sentiment, much less to authority, but to the judicial reason. Let reason judge between us" -- Preface.
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