THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE
AbrahamH. Maslow
Brandeis University
It is increasinglyclear that a phil0s0phical rev0luti0n is
underwayA comprehensivcsystemis swiftlydevelopingike
a fruit tree beginning t0 bear fruit 0n everybranch at the
same time. Every field 0f science and human endeavor is
being affected.
While I willbe c0nsiderings0me facets 0f this rev0luti0n
as it is affecting psych0l0gy,the fundamental finding is
the simultaneousdevelopmentin other fields as well. This
new Zeitgeistof humanistic re0rientati0nis affectings0cial
instituti0ns,w0rk, leisure,educati0n, as well as the areas 0f
science,phil0s0phy,and religi0n.In all these areas similar
work is being d0ne by persons wh0 are ur1kn0wn t0 each
0ther yet are linked by El c0mm0n c0re 0f belief and in-
tenti0n.
It can be termed the Humanistic Rev0luti0n,the turn back
t0 human needs. It is the new center 0f c0ncern and the
growing center 0f human kn0wledge.|t is a centering 0f
kn0wledge,0f epistem0l0gy0f metaphysics,0f science,and
0f all human concernsyvith human needs and with human
experienceWhile this may s0und 0bvi0us,it is in fact a new anew
departure fr0m the prevailingGerman intellectual style 0f departure
Kant and Hegel and Leibnitz. Their pr0cedures0f moving
fr0m the abstract and the a priori t0wardsgenerals0luti0ns
is edifyingand elegantbut n0t c0mplete and 0ften n0t use-
ful. They derivedspecificanswersfor the c0ncrete questions
fr0m the big abstract w0rds which came first, s0 t0 speak.
The dangeris that these abstractw0rdsneed n0t be derived
from c0ncrete experienceand may bec0me what I've been
1 Edited by Dr. James Fadiman from the tape of a lecture given at
the First Unitarian Church, San Francisco (under the auspices of the
Esalen Institute), September 14, l967,Copies of this tape are available
from the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, Calif0rnia,This lecture is the first
public presentation of the emergence of Transpersonal psychology
(fourth force).
l

calling "helium-filled" words. They sail right off the surface
of the earth and have no ties to it.
ln psychology what is called the third force, Humanistic
psychology, is coming back to the prime reality-human
experience itself-and starting from there to derive the
concepts, the necessary abstractions and the definitions of
real human experience and human needs, goals and values.
[9i”im€i”€6¥[iZ)/ This orientation is in marked contrast to the two other
- humélli experience forces in contemporary psychology,the behavioristic and the
Freudian.
The behavioristic (the objectivistic, the positivistic) psy-
chology can be simply described as having modeled itself
upon the successful sciences. These having been physics,
chemistry, astronomy, geology, etc.-generally sciences of
things, of objects. In psychology the rationale has been,
"Look how physicsis successful.The best thing for us to do
is to emulate the best methods of physics, etc. Let us do
our work their way." One result of this unspoken attitude
has been the compilation of a large amount of information
studying the human being as if he were an object, as if he
were a thing. The same procedures, the same methods, the
same concepts, the same definitions, and the same attitudes
have been utilized as might be used in studying the nature
of metal or light. This style of science has been called
mechanomorphic. lts current popularity is due more to the
prestige of the sciences it models itself after than to the
results obtained by it or the kinds of questions it is able to
answer.
The other major force in psychologycan be called the Freud-
ian, which includes a penumbra of modifications or reflec-
tions from the original ideas and methods proposed by
Freud. To oversimplify again, this kind of psychology re-
flects another basic trend in science characterized by the
Darwinian revolution. Psychologists of this persuasion treat
the human being as if he were an animal, which of course
he is, but as if he were merely an animal, 0nly an animal,
so that the animal characteristics which are unique to man
are somehow not considered properly "scientific."
Freud, himself, had training in neurology, comparative
anatomy and so on. The assumption is that that which can
be studied scientifically about the human being is what he
has in common with lower animals. If he does not share an
attribute with lower animals, then it doesn't count, or it's
not to be studied, or it's not scientific. The higher qualities
that are unique to the human being, these higher qualities,
2

these higher aspirations, higher values, are handled by the
Freudian orientation in an apparently irrational fashion. The higherhumgm
tendency is to take such a quality, say altruism or kindness, qualities
and reduce it, to make an animal explanation of it or a
pessimistic explanation. I keep in my files one called "Procto-
pSyCh0l0gy°following the medical specialty of proctology-
the study of the rectum, the anus, and so on. While it is
true that this is an entrance to the human body and it is one
way of approaching the subject, to say the least, there are
other ways.
Humanistic psychology parallels the Freudian model to the
extent of seeing human needs as biological in origin. The
major emphasis in Humanistic psychology rests on the
assumptions regarding "higher needs." They are seen as
biologically based, part of the human essence or the species
character. The tenn I use is "instinctoid," meaning it is not
an instinct, but instinct-like in the sense of being genetic,
to an appreciable extent detennined by genes.
These higher human needs are therefore biological, and I
speak here of love, the need of love, for friendship, for dig-
nity, for self-respect, for individuality, for self-fulfillment,
and so on. There is a considerable amount of evidence to
make this a reasonable hypothesis. This is especially true for
the love needs.
Perhaps human nature has been sold short in that the
higher possibilities of man have not been seen as biological. higher
The need for 'dignity, for example, can be seen as a funda— possibilities
mental human right in the same sense that it is a human ashuman
right to have enough calcium or enough vitamins to be rights
healthy. If these needs are not fulfilled, pathology results.
If, however, these needs are fulfilled, a different picture
emerges. There are people who do feel loved and who are
able to love, who do feel safe and secure and who do feel
respected and who do have self-respect. If you study these
people and ask what motivates them, you find yourselfin
another realm. This realm is what I have to call trans-
humanistic-, meaning that which motivates, gratifies, and
activates the fortunate, developed, self-actualizing person.
These people are motivated by something beyond the basic
needs. The focal point, or the point of departure, into this
transhumanistic realm comes when they answer the follow-
ing kind of questions: "What arc the moments which give
you the greatest kick, the greatest satisfaction? What are the
·This term was coined by Sir Julian Huxley in 1957. Since the
time of this lecture the term has been replaced by "transpersonal."

great moments? What are the moments of reward which
make your work and your life worthwhile?"
The answers to those questions were in terms of ultimate
verities. These are what Robert Hartman (1967) calls "the
intrinsic va/ues intrinsic values"-truth, goodness, beauty, perfection, excel-
lence, simplicity, elegance, and so on. Wllatthis amounts to
is that this third psychology is giving rise to a fourth,
"transhumanistic psychology" dealing with transcendent ex-
periences and with transcendent values.
The fully developed (and very fortunate) human being,
working under the best conditions tends to be motivated by
Valueswhich transcend his Self They are not selfish anymore
in the old sense of that term. Beauty is not within one’s skin
nor is justice or order. One can hardly class these desires as
selfish in the sense that my desire for food might be. My
satisfaction with achieving or allowing justice is not within
my Own skin; it does not lie along my arteries. It is equally
outside and inside: therefore, it has transcended the geo-
graphical limitations of the self. Thus one begins to talk
about transhumanistic psychology.
One point is important to consider here. I am speaking 8.Sa
scientist. What I have just been saying are things which can
be confirmed or disconfirrnedby anybody who is interested.
It can be checked; it can be verified. At another level, how-
ever, I am denying the whole modem history of science
which has from its very beginning claimed the need to be
value-free, value-neutral, value-rejecting. This was a correct
thing to do. The world of objects and the world of things is,
in a sense, value-free,However, human beings are not value-
free; they live by values, they live for values. This can be
viewed as a rejection of the model of mechanomorphic
science. It is also a rejection of the tendency to technologize,
to make something value-free, merely 21 matter of technique.
This tendency is already rampant in education, nursing,
social work and other professions (Maslow, 1966).
To give just one example, in the School of Social Work on
my own campus everyone is working at doing things better,
the good being more efficient, more capable and more expert. How-
society ever, they don’t have a social philosopher on the staff. Every
time I raise the question with my friends in the school about
"What is the good society," they change the subject. Last
semester, I lan a seminar on "Utopian Social Psychology."
Not one social worker came to it. It reminds me again of
the story about the test pilot who radioed, "I'm lost, but
I'm making record time."
4

Another characteristic of this- new development is a resac-
ralizing, a respiritualizing. Value-free science is a desac-
ralizer; it makes things neutral and positivistic. It takes in
what can be taken in, data which are available to the senses.
With transhumanism we have something new. When you
open the door to value and to value experiences and peak or
transcendent experiences,a whole new level of possibilities is
open to investigation. You find that the reports from people
who have had peak-experiences frequently parallel the re-
ports of the great mystics. Religious mystics, for instance,
talk about "Unitive consciousness." They use words which,
for value-free science, have been excluded from the jurisdic-
tion of science. They have been excluded as not scientific,
meaning (without it being said) not really knowledge. These
words describe emotions, wishes, desires, states of being,
alternate forms of knowing, but they are not really facts for
value-free science-therefore their exclusion.
It should be clear that this discussion developed out of a
value-orientation to begin with. The self-actualizing people
I talk about are very healthy people, psychiatrically and
psychologically healthy people. They could be called a
superior segment of the population. Thus I, and others, have
been studying not the whole human species, in an ordinary
statistical sense, not the average of the species, but a select
sample, Le., the most creative or most talented or perhaps
most intelligent that we could find. This is a statistical
approach, but an unusual one, following a biological meta-
phor l've learned to call "growing tip statistics."
The growing tip is where all the action takes place, this is
where all the chromosomes are dividing,where all the growth
processes are most vivid and most active. What I've done as growing tip
a technique is pull out the best specimen rather than sam-
pling the whole of the population. This can be justified
quite apart from the startling things we have learned using
this technique. Consider, for example, that an Olympic gold
medal winner represents the limits of human potential in
that event for every new baby born into the world. When
I was a youngster and trying to run on track teams, it was
humanly impossible to run a hundred yards in less than ten
seconds, as it was humanly impossible to run a mile in less
than four minutes. In each of these events what was
humanly impossible became possible because somebody did
it. Each time somebody did it, the potentials, the horizons,
the ceilings for every newborn baby were lifted. These be-
came potentials for every human being.
Thus we are using techniques for selecting the most fully
S

developed, the m0SZ fully human persons we can find and
suggesting that these people are what the whole human
species can be like if you just let them grow, if the condi-
tions are good and you get out of their way. This is not an
average sample, it is a growing tip sample, the best part of
the top one per cent.
We are dealing with a new image of man. This is most
Hcwimagc important because from that everything else flows. All of
Ofman man's work, all of man's institutions, which includes
science—all the sciences, mathematics and physics are also
human institutions—can be modified. The image of man
is growing. There are more possibilities.
We are dealing with an increased awareness of interpersonal
relations. Out of this has come already a greater conception
of human love. There is a hierarchy of loves. Love at the
highest level I've described is love for the being of the other
person, something considerably more than mutual customer
satisfaction. This Being—love is a higher conception of what
is possible in the human being, not necessarily what exists
in large quantities, but what is the human potential.
This is also true for sex. Sex can be seen at its higher levels,
especially in a love relationship, as a trigger for peak—experi—
ences, for mystical, unitive experiences-in short, as one of
the gates to Heaven. This opens up a realm for science to
explore because if you actually examine the sexual lives of
most people, if you take a sample of the total population,
you'll find that 99 per cent of the population doesn't really
know what the possibilities of sexuality are. They don't know
how high feelings can be.
The concept of friendship is also hierarchical. There are
higher levels of friendship which are possible. As you study
high€Y what friendship can be, what it might be under the best
€077€€[9U077$ circumstances; what friendships often actually are is cast
ofbeing into cruel and cold relief There is a vision of a higher kind
of authentic friendship that can lead one again to research,
to therapeutic work, perhaps to try and bring it more into
being. This is possible also for the family. It is possible for
the teacher—child relationship, for industry, for management
and leadership, etc.
The above examples are among the higher conceptions being
generated out of present—day humanistic and transhumanistic
psychology. The future, as uncertain as ever, appears more
promisingthan it has been for generations.
I ought to separate the image of man from the image of
6

civilization. Civilization and its interests have been seen as
necessarily in mutually exclusive contrast to the interests of
the individual. Whatever is good for the individual is bad for
civilization. That is, if he were S€lfSh,if he let himself gO,
if he were impulsive, if he didn't control himself] the society
would fall. This was part of the Freudian conception. There
is now available a new conception, of a higher possibility, of
the healthy society. There are tools now available to judge
and compare societies. One society can be judged to be
better than another society, or healthier or possessing more judging of
"growth-fostering-potential." We can talk about the value SOCi€Zi€S
of the society, or the function of the society-that is, the
greatest corning to fulfillment of the people in the society.
lll.i§ooint of view is also generating a different notion of
reality and El different notion of objectivity. It is becoming
clearer that there is a higher conception of objectivity than
the one we know.
The notion of objectivity that the scientist now has is what
you might can spectator-objectivity, of not caring, being
neutral about the matter. It doesn't matter to him who wins
or who loses. We have something emerging from the study
of the Beir1g—l0V€relationship which indicates that you can
have Being-love for the problem-not necessarily only for
human beings. It is possible to have Being-love enough for
a human being, for your child, for example so that it be-
comes possible to leave him alone (a great achievement).
It is possible to leave him alone in the Taoistic sense because
you love him so much the way he is that you just delight in
watching him grow. This can be said for apple trees, too, or
for animals, or for whatever. Il turns out that it is possible
to become objective, detached, non intrusive, noninterfering,
able to leave it alone. So that you can let a thing be itself
And it begins to appear to me that from such a spirit may
come the greatest accuracy of perception. Because the
opposite of the leaving-it-alone perception is the selective
perception, "Can I make use of it? Is it good for me? Is
it bad for me? Can I profit from it? Is it threatening to me?
Is it dangerous to me? Can I eat it?" This always means see- non-interfering
ing in a necessarily abstract way. It means not seeing the objectivity
whole of a thing, a phenomenon, a situation. It means see-
ing only, let's say, whether it's edible or not edible, which
means seeing only part of it, i.e., seeing inaccurately.
loving, non-interfering objectivity abstracts less and may,
therefore, get more of the whole truth.
A word about religion. Let this one example serve for many
of the areas I could criticize for technologizing or profes-
7

sionalizing, lf you focus (as,I have) upon the peak-
experience to have almost all the characteristics traditionally
attributed to universal religions experience, not having to
do necessarily with one creed or another, or one place or
another, one can then talk of the religionizing or the sacraliz-
ing of all of life. I can report that these experiences can take
place at any time, at any place, to practically anyone. This
accumulation of data contrasts with the professionalizing or
the specializing that has gone on in formal religion-special-
ization of the day, the building, the person, the words them-
selves-supposed to evoke spontaneous religious feelings.
Characteristically there are holy places, or places when you
walk in the door, then you are supposed to feel that religious
feeling and have that religious feeling until you walk out
the door. Then you drop it and you don't have a religious
feeling until the next time or the next building.
Much the same argument can be present about contempo-
rary education. Humanistic education means educational-
izing the whole of life, rather than having education take
place in one kind of building and not outside it. If the New
York City teachers' strike had lasted long enough, we might
have leamed a great deal about real education. It was begin-
ning with the mothers and neighborhood people and all sorts
of non-experts coming into school. It didn't have a chance
to get well underway before the experts took the controls
back. Now things are well in hand again with education
being sawed up into three-credit slices, like the slices of a
tangerine, which somehow all tum out to be equal, and to
be separate from each other.
The point I'm getting at is that all of life can be education-
alized, can be religionized, can be scientized, can be estheti-
PCYSP€CtiV€‘ cized, can be philosophized, if you think in terms of the
uitimcwevaiues ultimate values rather than of the expertness, rather than
being trapped in the technology or humbled by expertise.
The same thing is true of the therapeutic experience and of
the personal growth-fostering side of therapy. This can fill
all of life as well. All of life, or any part of life, can be
sacralized.
Is this optimistic or starry-eyed? The answer is that it is
neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Our job as empirical
people is to be realistic, to be good reporters, good observers
of what actually is the case. All the possibilities I have been
discussing here are, in fact, possibilities. These are possibili-
ties which have been described in a fraction of one per cent
of the population. It is possible to talk about the healthiest
one per cent, or the most creative one per cent. These are
8

realistic statements; they may be put to the test. Also, it is
possible to consider each of these statements in statistical
terms, to talk about the degree of reliability. "How reliable Scientific
is this? How sure are we that this is so? What does it mean iustiication
about this 'growing tip' statistics that I talk about? Will it
actually happen?" The answer, as far as I can determine, is
that it is not necessary or inevitable that all this shall come
about. The bombs and the buttons that men control are still
waiting. It is possible that they may wipe us all out. Yet, it
is also possible that they will n0t wipe us out. If we get the
scientiiic vision—that is, the empirical vision of something
which is in truth a human being and which, therefore, can
be actualized-if we can realize that these are not pipe
dreams but clear possibilities,then this realization will bring
it all within the realm of human activity. What this all
means to me is that there is scientiiic justiiication for much
of what we hope for in each other and for all mankind.
REFERENCES
HARTMAIR. The structure of value. Carbondale, lll.: S.
Ill. Univer. Press, 1967.
MASLOVKA. H. The psychology of science: a reconnaissance.
New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
9