With the Enlightenment, of the 18th Century, several "advances" were made in our search for truth. Sir Issac Newton's physics contributed to this separatism with a mechanical "clockwork" view of the universe. From this perspective, it eventually could be seen as a cold, Godless, rather empty and unfeeling aspect of Nature. By the 20th Century, Freudian psychology made great use of Newton's mechanical perspective and Descarte's separatist notions to depict a struggle between personality parts. With the help of defense mechanisms, humans thus could only hope for an uneasy truce with the unruly dark forces of the subconscious.

To make matters more awkward, Hitler's invasion of Austria meant the dispersion of "The Vienna Circle." This group of philosophers took up chairs in leading Western Universities and their perspective, "seeing is believing," pervaded Western science and education. These folk also promoted "reductionism," the idea that we can know about a thing by systematically studying all its parts. The unfortunate side effect of this was a view that any creature (human or otherwise) was nothing but that creature.

We now have the basis for a sort of ontology (understanding our existence) in the 20th Century, nothing but a human, with only its visible aspects worth talking about. Of course we can see (therefore believe) the results of the human mind at work. A human is composed of separate mechanisms (mental and physical) which can be separately studied to provide us with its total picture.

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Having separated itself from the animal world, it need not be concerned with habitat, but it can use its mind to compete for comforts and pleasures. Having separated itself from family, tribe, culture and Nature, it can exploit any and all of these without a moral consequences so long is suitable exchanges are established. As an exploitative and competitive entity, it is natural to have a variety of adversarial relationships with other humans and with Nature. It is also expected that such a separatist existence would cause a sense of isolation and perhaps loneliness. We can also reflect on the great strides in 20th Century, science, technology, and politics to see how this view of humanity in the world could be reinforced, albeit unwittingly. Moreover, such a powerful perspective would have difficulty things another way. Common sense uses more inductive reasoning than we might care to admit.

Nevertheless, not all 20th Century, science and social science supported this prevailing ontology. While not in the mainstream, Quantum physics depicted Nature as much more interconnected and mutually impacted by creatures as small as photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles. Unlike the reductionists, Quantum physics embraces the Newtonian mechanical worldview but adds its perspective to build upon earlier understanding. Thus there is no adversarial stance here. Quantum physics also emphasize that events change by the fact of observing them. In psychology we have found that a teacher's expectations can effect a pupil's performance, etc..

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