This chapter deals with three difficulties that inhibit the author's addressing the assigned question--what new theories, practices, concepts, or research in the natural sciences provide new insight into the affective domain? The first difficulty is that no striking discoveries have been made and that what is known about the relationship of feeling-states and motivation, or of both to performance, is unclear. Second, existing evidence from the sciences has limited application to the kinds of human understanding appropriate to this question. The third is the author's personal view that the problems that particularly occupy teachers today--reluctant learners, violence, and low achievement--can best be understood as part of a much larger complex of changes affecting the society as a whole. The whole society is presently undergoing a loss of psychic structure so extreme that it is turning up as a measurable loss of self-restraint and of intellectual power or motivation in the generations now rising. (Author/IRT)