Personality is unique

This matter of discontinuity--the distinctiveness of the individual --leads to a final broad philosophical problem that has to be faced, and the sooner the better. As G. W. Allport has eloquently shown, personality is unique. Much of the best work of today is centered in this sound and important principle. So, too, it is clear from biology that every individual is unique; not only every tree, but every leaf. Microscopy and mathematics have demonstrated that every snowflake is unique. Every geological formation, every village street, is unique. The uniqueness seems to the present writer to lie not in the constituents but in the modes of interrelation, the organization of the constituents. It is from this general fact of uniqueness of the particular that science, with its disentangling, measuring, conceptualizing method, has proceeded; from such a method has arisen a science of crystals, a science of botany. Why not a general science of the psychology of personality, that is, a science dealing not only with particulars but with laws of organization, the general principles governing the interrelations of the constituent parts? Such a science would be concerned with organization, with architectonics, exactly as crystallography or botany are; it would be interested not only in the individuality of each human being, but in all the reasons for each individual variation in parts or structures, just as the botanist is interested not only in Mendel's laws or in osmotic pressure, but in the way in which they reflect themselves in endlessly diverse fashion when one complete plant is compared with another. There are laws of an extremely general sort that govern all plants; as we move away from such generalization, we find other, more particular laws governing only certain species; and at the end of such a continuum there are very specific principles that govern only one class of event--say the respiratory process of an aspen leaf at sea-level atmospheric pressure. Such laws are presumably uniformities in nature, but uniformities which sometimes have significance for all life processes in all living things, at other times for some processes in some living things, at still other times for a single event in a single living thing.

There may have been just once in cosmic history a whale like Moby Dick. The response of that leviathan would necessarily be an expression of all the physicochemical laws in their specific application to that special case. So, too, there has been in cosmic history just one Confucius, one Jeanne d'Arc, and one you. But your uniqueness does not exempt you from any of the forms and norms of the generalizing method of science. As end results we are indeed unique; but as evolutionary products, and processes, we all express the same cosmic principles. At least, this is the frame of reference within which the present treatment proceeds.