From The End of the Modern World by Romano Guardini

"No man truly aware of his own human nature will admit that he can discover himself in the theories of modern anthropology--be they biological, psychological, sociological, or any other. Only the accidents of man--his attributes, his relations, his forms--make up these theories; they never take man simply as he is. They speak about man, but they never really see man. They approach him, but they never truly find him. They handle him, but they never grip him as he actually is. They take hold of him by statistics; they integrate him into organizations; they put him into use. Forever they play out the same grotesque and fearful comedy, but its incidents strike always upon a phantom. Even when man is subjected to forces which misuse him or mutilate or destroy him, he is not the creature at all which those forces aim to subject."

As seen by the contemporary mind man does not exist. The mind of today attempts continually to lock man into categories where he will not fit. Mechanical, biological, psychological or sociological abstractions are all variations of a basic urge to make man one with "nature," even if it be a "nature of the spirit." But a vital reality escapes this type of mind; namely, man's very act of being which constitutes a man in the primitive, absolute sense, which makes man a man at the very core of his self, which makes him a finite person existing. This is what the existing man is even when he does not want to be, even when he denies his own nature. Called by God into being, man encounters other things and persons in existence, but the new mind does not see that in those relations man is a person possessed of a powerful yet frightful freedom, that he is capable of conserving or of destroying the world, that he is capable of fulfilling or of surrendering and destroying himself in his very substance. The new mind has not seen that the power for destruction does not proceed from outside or above the human person; it has not seen that the power of evil is the truly negative, which can be avoided and which at root is utterly senseless."