It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the new paths he opened in the study of human nature and human culture - such as an objective analysis of the relationship between instinctive and culturally programmed impulses in human behavior, the approach to culture as a living system. In our time, when the existence of human culture is under threat as a result of the processes of its own development, such paths are especially relevant. The book is published after the death of its translator. A. Fedorov is the pseudonym of mathematician and publicist Abram Ilyich Fet. He was the first to introduce the Russian reader to the philosophical works of Lorenz.