this holds the key to understanding man behaviorally, motivationally, and characterologically.
Man's defining attribute, which distinguishes him from all other living species, is his ability to reason. This means:
to extend the range of his awareness beyond the perceptual concretes immediately confronting him, to abstract, to
integrate, to grasp principles—to apprehend reality on the conceptual level of consciousness (Chapter Three).
An animal's range is only as wide as its percepts. The rudimentary forms of inference of which it may be capable
are entirely bound by and dependent on the physical cues within its immediate sensory field (in the context, of
course, of past experience). It cannot conceptualize, it cannot initiate a process of question-asking, it cannot project
a chain of inference that is independent of immediate sensory stimuli. But man can chart, on the back of an
envelope, the motion of planets through the outer reaches of space.
Like every other species that possesses awareness, man survives by the guidance of his distinctive form of
consciousness, i.e., by the guidance of his conceptual faculty.
This is the first fact about man's nature that must be understood, this is the starting point of any scientific study of
man—the basic principle without which no aspect of the distinctively human can be understood. Whether one is
seeking to understand the nature of emotion, or the psychology of family relationships, or the causes of mental
illness, or the meaning of love, or the significance of productive work, or the process of artistic creativeness, or
sexual behavior—one must begin by identifying the fact upon which any subsequent analysis of man necessarily
rests: that man is a rational being, a being whose distinctive form of consciousness is conceptual.
Thus, psychology, as it pertains to man, is properly conceived and defined as the science that studies the attributes
and characteristics which man possesses by virtue of his rational faculty.
Consciousness
Consciousness is an attribute of living organisms—an attribute of life at a certain level of development and
organization.