machine has a structure, and there are many structural forms in a living gestalt. Therefore we do better to accept this foreign word---as the English language was always able to accept many words from Latin, Greek and other languages, and owes its richness to this. So I suggest that at least in these lectures, as in so many others and in books I have seen, the word “gestalt”^a be accepted.

What does this discovery of “gestalt”^b mean, and what is it? It came out of experimental psychology^c. My friend and colleague Max Wertheimer, ^dwho is mostly connected with the first steps in gestalt psychology---he was professor in Berlin and then in Frankfurt, and finally in the New School in New York---his experiments showed him that no psychological experience (e.g., the picture you have when you come into a room) has the character of a composition out of atomistic sense-impressions, but that these sense-impressions are from the very beginning ordered in a structure, in a structural whole---this room---and if you want to go to the special elements of it, you do it by abstraction.^e This simply means: gestalt^f precedes abstraction. Or better: gestalt precedes its particles which are won by a later process of abstraction. Reality does not have the character---neither in psychology, and later on this was applied to biology (here again I would like to name a great name, Kurt Goldstein^g, formerly of Frankfurt, partly here in Tufts University, and now in New York)---and he did a very interesting thing, of which I want to speak because it has bearing on the relationship of doctrine-of-man^h and religious problems in a very profound way. After the First World War, he and a team of collaborators