This book presents the substance of six lectures delivered before a lay audience at the Lowell Institute, Boston, In February, 1933. The lectures attempted to give a more vivid and precise meaning to the word personality, and to stimulate the interest of those present in the driving forces of the individual life, but made no pretence to discuss exhaustively and systematically man and his destiny. The presentation was made as concrete as possible; specific examples of the individual in action were preferred to a discussion of general principles, biographies were borrowed from freely. Thus this book is somewhat a thing of shreds and patches. The patching may require apology; the shreds, however, are taken from the most valuable fabric that man deals with, the living fabric of the human personality. I should be glad to think that the shreds may have stimulated some to a fuller study of the total fabric, through which alone the structure of the world as a system of values and of strivings is revealed. The book makes no claim to originality; for the collection of the shreds I am indebted to many colleagues, but especially to the devoted colleague whom I have the honor to call my wife. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)