[260] necessity. It is of great interest to see how this theory comes into existence. It came into existence actually by the observation of the sick and of those who were subjected to laboratory conditions. In a laboratory you can isolate functions of living bodies, in biology (and of man, in psychology) which now run beside the center of the living being, or the personality. Then they can be subjected to conditioning experiments. Automatically this happens in states of sickness. Psychological compulsions have this character, and in bodily sickness the isolation of functions which are not integrated in the whole of the life process, can be observed, and they of course follow the law of conditioned reflexes. But no living being, insofar as it lives and is NOT subjected to these conditions, follows the stimulus-reflex curve, but has, in spite of all the elements of stimulus and reflexive reactions, an element of spontaneity ^awhich makes the living gestalt ^bable to express itself as a whole. Here you see the relationship of these insights to the gestalt psychology and biology: man is free^c insofar as he reacts AS A WHOLE, as a totality. This is the same in the biological realm where we have "holistic" reactions, as it is also called, and they are spontaneous, while partial reactions can be conditioned by stimulus and response. Now all this had one function, namely that gestalt^d psychology SHOWED that man IS A WHOLE, and that living beings are wholes. It showed, in these psychological experiments, that the whole precedes the part, in our reception of the reality and in the reality itself. You can never produce a whole, a totality, but you can always abstract from a totality in thought and in