The problem of human motivation, for example--the ascertainment of both our actual motives and our capacities for motives--is not a matter of simple detail, like color-blindness or the curve of learning in typewriting. Rather, it seems as though we can scarcely touch the edges of motivation without plunging at once into the difficulties that are systemic to the science as a whole. First and foremost is the difficulty involved in the atomistic conception of analysis, a conception taken over from the physical sciences before they had reached their present insight into the all-embracing sweep of dynamic problems. It was taken for granted that to analyse mental life is to look for simple mental elements that correspond to material corpuscles characterized by what Whitehead calls “simple location.” Then it was assumed--simply assumed--that mind is an aggregate of simple elements and that mental dynamic (very little attended to until recently) corresponds to this supposed aggregate of quasi-independent elements. That is, the main tradition of scientific psychology runs to the effect that our whole behavior is actuated by particular relations of a mechanical sort between elements (psychical or psycho-physical) that are as remote from experience as atoms. This amounted, practically, to making a concept of method--a type of analysis--guarantee a particular metaphysics. The incontinence of the thing has been repeatedly pointed out from the early days of the present psychological movement. First, all the logical objections to English associationism applied here. Next, eminent psychologists of the new type--Ladd, Münsterberg and (in a sense) James--warned us that simple sensations or other mental elements are not existing things, but only mental constructs of the psychologists, a kind of technical language, like equations or statistical curves. Finally, the physical prototypes from which the psychological assumption took its start, such as corpuscular indivisible atoms, have now been resolved by physics into systems of a dynamic sort. Whitehead maintains that the whole physical conception of elements and aggregates must now be replaced by that of organism--the parts are not before the whole, and the real wholes or organisms are dynamic, not corpuscular.