Organization a term which will be constantly used in relation to every aspect of personality development

This leads us to a preliminary definition of the term "organization," a term which will be constantly used in relation to every aspect of personality development. Organization involves, first of all, the transmission of energy from one region to another; second, the simultaneous passage of energies in various directions in an interdependent fashion as described above; third, the consequent adjustment of one part to another, the constant regularizing effect of tissues upon one another, of which homeostasis or the maintenance of constancy is one aspect. Finally, organization involves not only interstimulation of parts but response of the separate parts of the whole system to outer stimulating forces.

The structure of life is no mere question of the interdependence of all that lies within the body; it is a question of the balance, the interstimulation which goes on between outer and inner forces. As oxygen comes into the lungs and the organism maintains itself by using it at a certain rate, there is no real problem as to when and where the gas becomes part of the living system. If as the oxygen goes down the respiratory passages it is still technically outside the body, what shall we say about the oxygen which is being carried by the red blood cells, or indeed about the oxygen within the individual cells served by the capillaries? The life process is merely focused in the organism; it involves a field extending beyond the body. Organization embraces the entire organism-environment relation, of which the organism is the nodal point but not the complete functioning system.

One more factor, however, remains to be included when the term organization is used. Not only do the tissue systems maintain their homeostatic balance and swing back to a poised normality after an upset; they also undergo systematic progressive change. Organization, then, applies to the temporal dimension as well as to the spatial. Individual growth is organized not merely in the sense that the parts change in an orderly way; since each part is an aspect of a system, the system as a whole changes according to a unified dynamic. Just as lengthening of shadows on a rugged mountainside involves more than the lengthening of individual lines, the growth of any living form involves a progressive alteration of relations in which, despite all change, fundamental unities remain, and in which, despite all fundamental unities, a progressive alteration occurs in the structure of the system. Thus, for example, a study of human aging in terms of decadeby-decade changes in visual acuity is not a study of changes in the eye alone; it is part of a more comprehensive study in which the relation of visual acuity to total functioning efficiency is seen as an aspect of the basic reorganization of human powers throughout the life span.

The entire evolutionary process appears to depend upon the capacity for maintaining basic stability and integrity within the organic system while adding a new feature which establishes a new direction. Thus mutations--sudden appearance of genes within the germ cell, giving rise to radical new body characteristics--initiate new species structurally and functionally different from their progenitors, and over vast periods of time are responsible for progeny: that might never be classified as descendants of their ancestors were not the fossil remains convincing. The process of successful mutation involves the maintenance of life and of most of the essentials of a given form of organization, while at the same time it suddenly adds a completely new characteristic. Whatever may be attributed to the reshufflings of the chromosomes that are responsible for the endless diversities within a species, it is clear that most of the great steps which nature takes by way of initiating new forms of life occur because, upon a base of extreme stability, amazing diversity in new additions is permitted.

Many of the forms which arise through mutation do not survive as well as their parents; indeed, the mutation may be so maladaptive as to be lethal, and with it the bold experiment ends. Often, however, the mutation gives rise to an organism that fits into a niche in the environment which is not already overcrowded with organisms adapted to it. The niches or holes in the environment--capacity to use types of food not already monopolized or to make use of habitats in air, earth, or water not already preempted--permit the newcomer to find, as it were, a place prepared. It is the environment that determines which trend among the countless mutations can be realized in a new species. Both the intrinsic tendencies of living matter and the invitations given by the environing world of nature determine in what direction life will move.