Edward Hoffman's (Editor) Note. It is ironic that Abraham H. Maslow's humanistic approach has been criticized as ignoring the need for empirical validation, because he always invited precisely such criticism from colleagues. In the late 1960s Maslow even worried over the fact that his speculations were being too eagerly accepted as “gospel” rather than as scientific theory. In this unpublished paper written in October, 1966, Maslow sought to make explicit some of humanistic psychology's unproven axioms and assumptions.