The Foundations of Personality
by Abraham Myerson
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

BY
ABRAHAM MYERSON, M.D.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. THE ORGANIC BASIS OF CHARACTER

II. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS OF CHARACTER

III. MEMORY AND HABIT

IV. STIMULATION, INHIBITION, ORGANIZING ENERGY, CHOICE
     AND CONSCIOUSNESS

V. HYSTERIA, SUBCONSCIOUSNESS AND FREUDIANISM

VI. EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL

VII. EXCITEMENT, MONOTONY AND INTEREST

VIII. THE SENTIMENTS OF LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, HATE, PITY
     AND DUTY, COMPENSATION AND ESCAPE

IX. ENERGY RELEASE AND THE EMOTIONS

X. COURAGE, RESIGNATION, SUBLIMATION, PATIENCE, THE
     WISH AND ANHEDONIA

XI. THE EVOLUTION OF CHARACTER WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE
     TO THE GROWTH OF PURPOSE AND PERSONALITY

XII. THE METHODS OF PURPOSE-WORK CHARACTERS

XIII. THE QUALITIES OF THE LEADER AND THE FOLLOWER

XIV. SEX CHARACTERS AND DOMESTICITY

XV. PLAY, RECREATION, HUMOR AND PLEASURE SEEKING

XVI. RELIGIOUS CHARACTERS. DISHARMONY IN CHARACTER

XVII. SOME CHARACTER TYPES

THE FOUNDATIONS OF PERSONALITY

INTRODUCTION

Man's interest in character is founded on an intensely practical
need. In whatsoever relationship we deal with our fellows, we
base our intercourse largely on our understanding of their
characters. The trader asks concerning his customer, "Is he
honest?" and the teacher asks about the pupil, "Is he earnest?"
The friend bases his friendship on his good opinion of his
friend; the foe seeks to know the weak points in the hated one's
make-up; and the maiden yearning for her lover whispers to,
herself, "Is he true?" Upon our success in reading the character
of others, upon our understanding of ourselves hangs a good deal
of our life's success or failure.

Because the feelings are in part mirrored on the face and body,
the experience of mankind has become crystallized in beliefs,
opinions and systems of character reading which are based on
physiognomy, shape of head, lines of hand, gait and even the
method of dress and the handwriting. Some of these all men
believe in, at least in part. For example, every one judges
character to a certain extent by facial expression, manner,
carriage and dress. A few of the methods used have become
organized into specialties, such as the study of the head or
phrenology, and the study of the hand or palmistry. All of these
systems are really "materialistic" in that they postulate so
close a union of mind and body as to make them inseparable.

But there are grave difficulties in the way of character-judging
by these methods. Take, for example, the study of the physiognomy
as a means to character understanding. All the physiognomists, as
well as the average man, look upon the high, wide brow as related
to great intelligence. And so it is--sometimes. But it is also
found in connection with disease of the brain, as in
hydrocephalus, and in old cases of rickets. You may step into
hospitals for the feeble-minded or for the insane and find here
and there a high, noble brow. Conversely you may attend a
scientific convention and find that the finest paper of the
meeting will be read not by some Olympian-browed member, but by a
man with a low, receding forehead, who nevertheless possesses a
high-grade intellect.

So for centuries men have recognized in the large aquiline nose a
sign of power and ability. Napoleon's famous dictum that no man
with this type of proboscis is a fool has been accepted by many,
most of whom, like Napoleon probably, have large aquiline noses.
The number of failures with this facial peculiarity has never
been studied, nor has any one remarked that many a highly
successful man has a snub nose. And in fact the only kind of a
nose that has a real character value is the one presenting no
obstruction to breathing. The assigned value given to a "pretty"
nose has no relation to character, except as its owner is vain
because of it.

One might go on indefinitely discussing the various features of
the face and discovering that only a vague relationship to
character existed. The thick, moist lower lip is the sensual lip,
say the physiognomists, but there are saints with sensual lips
and chaste thoughts. Squinty eyes may indicate a shifty
character, but more often they indicate conjunctivitis or some
defect of the optical apparatus. A square jaw indicates
determination and courage, but a study of the faces of men who
won medals in war for heroism does not reveal a preponderance of
square jaws. In fact, man is a mosaic of characters, and a fine
nature in one direction may be injured by a defect in another;
even if one part of the face really did mean something definite,
no one could figure out its character value because of the
influence of other features--contradictory, inconsistent,
supplementary. Just as the wisest man of his day took bribes as
Lord Chancellor, so the finest face may be invalidated by some
disharmony, and a fatal weakness may disintegrate a splendid
character. Moreover, no one really studies faces disinterestedly,
impartially, without prejudice. We like or dislike too readily,
we are blinded by the race, sex and age of the one studied, and,
most fatal of all, we judge by standards of beauty that are
totally misleading. The sweetest face may hide the most arrant
egoist, for facial beauty has very little to do with the nature
behind the face. In fact, facial make-up is more influenced by
diet, disease and racial tendency than by character.

It would be idle to take up in any detail the claims of
phrenologist and palmist. The former had a very respectable start
in the work of Broca and Gall[1] in that the localization of
function in the various parts of the brain made at least partly
logical the belief that the conformation of the head also
indicated functions of character. But there are two fatal flaws
in the system of phrenological claims. First, even if there were
an exact cerebral localization of powers, which there is not, it
would by no means follow that the shape of the head outlined the
brain. In fact, it does not, for the long-headed are not
long-brained, nor are the short-headed short-brained. Second, the
size and disposal of the sinuses, the state of nutrition in
childhood have far more to do with the "bumps" of the head than
brain or character. The bump of philoprogenitiveness has in my
experience more often been the result of rickets than a sign of
parental love.

[1] It is to be remembered that phrenology had a good standing at
one time, though it has since lapsed into quackdom. This is the
history of many a "short cut" into knowledge. Thus the wisest men
of past centuries believed in astrology. Paracelsus, who gave to
the world the use of Hg in therapeutics, relied in large part for
his diagnosis and cures upon alchemy and astrology.

Without meaning to pun, we may dismiss the claims of palmistry
offhand. Normally the lines of the hand do not change from birth
to death, but character does change. The hand, its shape and its
texture are markedly influenced by illness,[1] toil and care. And
gait, carriage, clothes and the dozen and one details by which we
judge our fellows indicate health, strength, training and
culture, all of which are components of character, or rather are
characters of importance but give no clue to the deeper-lying
traits.

[1] Notably is the shape of the hand changed by chronic heart and
lung disease and by arthritis. But the influence of the
endocrinal secretions is very great.

As a matter of fact, judgment of character will never be attained
through the study of face, form or hand. As language is a means
not only of expressing truth but of disguising it, so these
surface phenomena are as often masks as guides. Any sober-minded
student of life, intent on knowing himself or his fellows, will
seek no royal road to this knowledge, but will endeavor to
understand the fundamental forces of character, will strive to
trace the threads of conduct back to their origins in motive,
intelligence, instinct and emotion.

We have emphasized the practical value of some sort of character
analysis in dealing with others. But to know himself has a hugely
practical value to every man, since upon that knowledge depends
self-correction. For "man is the only animal that deliberately
undertakes while reshaping his outer world to reshape himself
also."[1] Moreover, man is the only seeker of perfection; he is a
deep, intense critic of himself. To reach nobility of character
is not a practical aim, but is held to be an end sufficient in
itself. So man constantly probes into himself--"Are my purposes
good; is my will strong--how can I strengthen my control, how
make righteous my instincts and emotions?" It is true that there
is a worship--and always has been--of efficiency and success as
against character; that man has tended to ask more often, "What
has he done?" or, "What has he got?" rather than, "What is he?"
and that therefore man in his self-analysis has often asked, "How
shall I get?" or, "How shall I do?" In the largest sense these
questions are also questions of character, for even if we discard
as inadequate the psychology which considers behavior alone as
important, conduct is the fruit of character, without which it is
sterile.

[1] Hocking.

This book does not aim at any short cuts by which man may know
himself or his neighbor. It seeks to analyze the fundamentals of
personality, avoiding metaphysics as the plague. It does not
define character or seek to separate it from mind and
personality. Written by a neurologist, a physician in the active
practice of his profession, it cannot fail to bear more of the
imprint of medicine, of neurology, than of psychology and
philosophy. Yet it has also laid under contribution these fields
of human effort. Mainly it will, I hope, bear the marks of
everyday experience, of contact with the world and with men and
women and children as brother, husband, father, son, lover,
hater, citizen, doer and observer. For it is this plurality of
contact that vitalizes, and he who has not drawn his universals
of character out of the particulars of everyday life is a
cloistered theorist, aloof from reality.

CHAPTER I. THE ORGANIC BASIS OF CHARACTER

The history of Man's thought is the real history of mankind. Back
of all the events of history are the curious systems of beliefs
for which men have lived and died. Struggling to understand
himself, Man has built up and discarded superstitions, theologies
and sciences.

Early in this strange and fascinating history he divided himself
into two parts--a body and a mind. Working together with body,
mind somehow was of different stuff and origin than body and had
only a mysterious connection with it. Theology supported this
belief; metaphysics and philosophy debated it with an acumen that
was practically sterile of usefulness. Mind and body "interacted"
in some mysterious way; mind and body were "parallel" and so set
that thought-processes and brain-processes ran side by side
without really having anything to do with one another.[1] With
the development of modern anatomy, physiology and psychology, the
time is ripe for men boldly to say that applying the principle of
causation in a practical manner leaves no doubt that mind and
character are organic, are functions of the organism and do not
exist independently of it. I emphasize "practical" in relation to
causation because it would be idle for us here to enter into the
philosophy of cause and effect. Such discussion is not taken
seriously by the very philosophers who most earnestly enter into
it.

[1] William James in Volume 1 of his "Psychology" gives an
interesting resume of the theories that consider the relationship
of mind (thought and consciousness) to body. He quotes the
"lucky" paragraph from Tyndall, "The passage from the physics of
the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is
unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite
molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not
possess the intellectual organ, or apparently any trace of the
organ which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning
from one to the other." This is the "parallel" theory which
postulates a hideous waste of energy in the universe and which
throws out of count the same kind of reasoning by which Tyndall
worked on light, heat, etc. We cannot understand the beginning
and the end of motion, we cannot understand causation. Probably
when Tyndall's thoughts came slowly and he was fatigued he
said--"Well, a good cup of coffee will make me think faster." In
conceding this practical connection between mind and body, every
"spiritualist" philosopher gives away his case whenever he rests
or eats.

The statement that mind is a function of the organism is not
necessarily "materialistic." The body is a living thing and as
such is as "spiritualistic" as life itself. Enzymes, internal
secretions, nervous activities are the products of cells whose
powers are indeed drawn from the ocean of life.

To prove this statement, which is a cardinal thesis of this book,
I shall adduce facts of scientific and facts of common knowledge.
One might start with the statement that the death of the body
brings about the abolition of mind and character, but this, of
course, proves nothing, since it might well be that the body was
a lever for the expression of mind and character, and with its
disappearance as a functioning agent such expression was no
longer possible.

It is convenient to divide our exposition into two parts, the
first the dependence upon proper brain function and structure,
and the second the dependence upon the proper health of other
organs. For it is not true that mind and character are functions
of the brain alone; they are functions of the entire organism.
The brain is simply the largest and most active of the organs
upon which the mental life depends; but there are minute organs,
as we shall see, upon whose activity the brain absolutely
depends.

Any injury to the brain may destroy or seriously impair the
mentality of the individual. This is too well known to need
detailed exposition. Yet some cases of this type are fundamental
in the exquisite way they prove (if anything can be proven) the
dependence of mind upon bodily structure.

In some cases of fracture of the skull, a piece of bone pressing
upon the brain may profoundly alter memory, mood and character.
Removal of the piece of bone restores the mind to normality. This
is also true of brain tumor of certain types, for example,
frontal endotheliomata, where early removal of the growth
demonstrates first that a "physical" agent changes mind and
character, and second that a "physical" agent, such as the knife
of the surgeon, may act to reestablish mentality.

In cases of hydrocephalus (or water on the brain), where there is
an abnormal secretion of cerebro-spinal fluid acting to increase
the pressure on the brain, the simple expedient of withdrawing
the fluid by lumbar puncture brings about normal mental life. As
the fluid again collects, the mental life becomes cloudy, and the
character alters (irritability, depressed mood, changed purpose,
lowered will); another lumbar puncture and presto!--the
individual is for a time made over more completely than
conversion changes a sinner,--and more easily.

Take the case of the disease known as General Paresis, officially
called Dementia Paralytica. This disease is caused by syphilis
and is one of its late results. The pathological changes are
widespread throughout the brain but may at the onset be confined
mostly to the frontal lobes. The very first change may be--and
usually is--a change in character! The man hitherto kind and
gentle becomes irritable, perhaps even brutal. One whose sex
morals have been of the most conventional kind, a loyal husband,
suddenly becomes a profligate, reckless and debauched, perhaps
even perverted. The man of firm purposes and indefatigable
industry may lose his grip upon the ambitions and strivings of
his lifetime and become an inert slacker, to the amazement of his
associates. Many a fine character, many a splendid mind, has
reached a lofty height and then crumbled before the assaults of
this disease upon the brain. Philosopher, poet, artist,
statesman, captain of industry, handicraftsman, peasant,
courtesan and housewife,--all are lowered to the same level of
dementia and destroyed character by the consequences of the
thickened meninges, the altered blood vessels and the injured
nerve cells.

Now and then one is fortunate enough to treat with success an
early case of General Paresis. And then the reversed miracle
takes place, unfortunately too rarely! The disordered mind, the
altered character, leaps upward to its old place,--after being
dosed by the marvelous drug Salvarsan, created by the German
Jewish scientist, Paul Ehrlich.

Of extraordinary interest are the rare cases of loss of personal
identity seen after brain injury, say in war. A man is knocked
unconscious by a blow and upon restoration of consciousness is
separated from that past in which his ego resides. He does not
know his history or his name, and that continuity of the "self"
so deeply prized and held by all religions to be part of his
immortality is gone. Then after a little while, a few days or
weeks, the disarranged neuronic pathways reestablish themselves
as usual,--and the ego comes back to the man.

One might cite the feeble-mindedness that results from
meningitis, brain tumor, brain abscess, brain wounds, etc., as
further evidence of the dependence of mind upon brain, of its
status as a function of brain. No philosopher seriously doubts
that equilibrium and movement are functions of the brain, and yet
to prove this there is no evidence of any other kind than that
cited to prove the relationship of mind to brain.[1] And what
applies to the intelligence applies as forcibly to character, for
purpose, emotion, mood, instinct and will are altered with these
diseases.

[1] Except that equilibrium does not itself judge of its
relationship to brain, whereas mind is the sole judge of its
relationship and dependence on brain. Since everything in the
world is a mental event, mentality cannot be dependent upon
anything, and everything depends upon mind for its existence, or
at least its recognition. But we get nowhere by such "logic" gone
mad. Apply the same kind of reasoning to brain-mind, body-mind
relationship which anatomists and physiologists apply to other
functions, and one can no longer separate body and mind.

Interesting as is the relationship between mind and character and
the brain, it is at the present overshadowed by the fascinating
relationship between these psychical activities and the bodily
organs. What I am about to cite from medicine and biology is part
of the finest achievements of these sciences and hints at a
future in which a true science of mind and character will appear.

Certain of the glands of the body are described as glands of
internal secretions in that the products of their activity, their
secretions, are poured into the blood stream rather than on the
surface of the body or into the digestive tract. The most
prominent of these glands, all of which are very small and
extraordinarily active, are as follows:

The Pituitary Body (Hypophysis)--a tiny structure which is
situated at the base of the brain but is not a part of that
organ.

The Pineal Body (Epiphysis)--a still smaller structure, located
within the brain substance, having, however, no relationship to
the brain. This gland has only lately acquired a significance.
Descartes thought it the seat of the soul because it is situated
in the middle of the brain.

The Thyroid gland, a somewhat larger body, situated in the front
of the neck, just beneath the larynx. We shall deal with this in
some detail later on.

The Parathyroids, minute organs, four in number, just behind the
thyroid.

The Thymus, a gland placed just within the thorax, which reaches
its maximum size at birth and then gradually recedes until at
twenty it has almost disappeared.

The Adrenal glands, one on each side of the body, above and
adjacent to the kidney. These glands, which are each made up of
two opposing structures, stand in intimate relation to the
sympathetic nervous system and secrete a substance called
adrenalin.

The Sex organs, the ovary in the female and the testicle in the
male, in addition to producing the female egg (ovum) and the male
seed (sperm), respectively, produce substances of unknown
character that have hugely important roles in the establishment
of mind, temperament and sex character.

Without going into the details of the functions of the endocrine
glands, one may say that they are "the managers of the human
body." Every individual, from the time he is born until the time
he dies, is under the influence of these many different kinds of
elements,--some of them having to do with the development of the
bones and teeth, some with the development of the body and
nervous system, some with the development of the mind, etc. (and
character), and later on with reproduction. These glands are not
independent of one another but interact in a marvelous manner so
that under or overaction of any one of them upsets a balance that
exists between them, and thus produces a disorder that is quite
generalized in its effects. The work on this subject is a tribute
to medicine and one pauses in respect and admiration before the
names and labors of Brown, Sequard, Addison, Graves and Basedow,
Horsley, King, Schiff, Schafer, Takamine, Marie, Cushing, Kendal,
Sajous and others of equal insight and patient endeavor.

But let us pass over to the specific instances that bear on our
thesis, to wit, that mind and character are functions of the
organism and have their seat not only in the brain but in the
entire organism.

How do the endocrines prove this? As well as they prove that
physical growth and the growth of the secondary sex characters
are dependent on these glands. Take diseases of the thyroid gland
as the first and shining example.

The thyroid secretes a substance which substantially is an
"iodized globulin,"--and which can be separated from the gland
products. This secretion has the main effect of "activating
metabolism" (Vassale and Generali); in ordinary phrase it acts to
increase the discharge of energy of the cells of the body. In all
living things there is a twofold process constantly going on:
first the building up of energy by means of the foodstuffs, air
and water taken in, and second a discharge of energy in the form
of heat, motion and--in my belief --emotion and thought itself,
though this would be denied by many psychologists. Yet how escape
this conclusion from the following facts?

There is a congenital disease called cretinism which essentially
is due to a lack of thyroid secretion. This disease is
particularly prevalent in Southern France, Spain, Upper Italy and
Switzerland. It is characterized mainly by marked dwarfism and
imbecility, so that the adult untreated cretin remains about as
large as a three or four-year-old child and has the mental level
about that of a child of the same age. But, this comparison as to
intelligence is a gross injustice to the child, for it leaves out
the difference in character between the child and the cretin. The
latter has none of the curiosity, the seeking for experience, the
active interest, the pliant expanding will, the sweet capacity
for affection, friendship and love present in the average child.
The cretin is a travesty on the human being in body, mind and
character.

But feed him thyroid gland. Mind you, the dried substance of the
glands, not of human beings, but of mere sheep. The cretin begins
to grow mentally and physically and loses to a large extent the
grotesqueness of his appearance. He grows taller; his tongue no
longer lolls in his mouth; the hair becomes finer, the hands less
coarse, and the patient exhibits more normal human emotions,
purposes, intelligence. True, he does not reach normality, but
that is because other defects beside the thyroid defect exist and
are not altered by the thyroid feeding.

There is a much more spectacular disease to be cited, --a
relatively infrequent but well-understood condition called
myxoedema, which occurs mainly in women and is also due to a
deficiency in the thyroid secretion. As a result the patient, who
may have been a bright, capable, energetic person, full of the
eager purposes and emotions of life, gradually becomes dull,
stupid, apathetic, without fear, anger, love, joy or sorrow, and
without purpose or striving. In addition the body changes, the
hair becomes coarse and scanty, the skin thick and swollen (hence
the name of the disease) and various changes take place in the
sweat secretion, the heart action, etc.

Then, having made the diagnosis, work the great miracle! Obtain
the dried thyroid glands of the sheep, prepared by the great drug
houses as a by-product of the butcher business, and feed this
poor, transformed creature with these glands! No fairy waving a
magical wand ever worked a greater enchantment, for with the
first dose the patient improves and in a relatively short time is
restored to normal in skin, hair, sweat, etc., and MIND and
character! To every physician who has seen this happen under his
own eyes and by his direction there comes a conviction that mind
and character have their seat in the organic activities of the
body,--and nowhere else.

An interesting confirmation of this is that when the thyroid is
overactive, a condition called hyperthyroidism, the patient
becomes very restless and thin, shows excessive emotionality,
sleeplessness, has a rapid heart action, tremor and many other
signs not necessary to detail here. The thyroid in these cases is
usually swollen. One of the methods used to treat the disease is
to remove some of the gland surgically. In the early days an
operator would occasionally remove too, much gland and then the
symptoms, of myxoedema would occur. This necessitated the
artificial feeding of thyroid the rest of the patient's life!
With the proper dosage of the gland substance the patient remains
normal; with too little she becomes dull and stupid; with too
much she becomes unstable and emotional!

There are plenty of other examples of the influence of the
endocrines on mind, character and personality. I here briefly
mention a few of these.

In the disease called acromegaly, which is due to a change in the
pituitary gland, amongst other things are noted "melancholic
tendencies, loss of memory and mental and physical torpor."

A very profound effect on character and personality, exclusive of
intelligence, is that of the sex glands. One need not accept the
Freudian extravagances regarding the way in which the sex
feelings and impulses enter into our thoughts, emotions, purposes
and acts. No unbiased observer of himself or his fellows but
knows that the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of the sex
feeling, its excitation or its suppression are of great
importance in the destinies of character. Further, man as
herdsman and man as tyrant have carried on huge experiments to
show how necessary to normal character the sex glands are.

As herdsman he has castrated his male Bos and obtained the ox.
And the ox is the symbol of patience, docility, steady labor,
without lust or passion,--and the very opposite of his
non-castrated brother, the bull. The bull is the symbol of
irritability and unteachableness, who will not be easily yoked or
led and who is the incarnation of lust and passion. One is the
male transformed into neuter gender; and the other is rampant
with the fierceness of his sex.

Compare the eunuch and the normal man. If the eunuch state be
imposed in infancy, the shape of the body, its hairiness, the
quality of the voice and the character are altered in
characteristic manner. The eunuch essentially is neither man nor
woman, but a repelling Something intermediate.

Enough has been said to show that mind and character are
dependent upon the health of the brain and the glands of the
body; that somewhere in the interaction of tissues, in the
chemistry of life, arises thought, purpose, emotion, conduct and
deed. But we need not go so far afield as pathology to show this,
for common experience demonstrates it as well.

If character is control of emotions, firmness of purpose,
cheerfulness of outlook and vigor of thought and memory, then the
tired man, worn out by work or a long vigil, is changed in
character. Such a person in the majority of cases is irritable,
showing lack of control and emotion; he slackens in his life's
purposes, loses cheerfulness and outlook and finds it difficult
to concentrate his thoughts or to recall his memories. Though
this change is temporary and disappears with rest, the essential
fact is not altered, namely, fatigue alters character. It is also
true that not all persons show this vulnerability to fatigue in
equal measure. For that matter, neither do they show an equal
liability to infectious diseases, equal reaction to alcohol or
injury. The feeling of vigor which rest gives changes the
expression of personality to a marked degree. It is true that we
are not apt to think of the tired man as changed in character;
yet we must admit on reflection that he has undergone
transformation.

Even a loaded bowel may, as is well known, alter the reaction to
life. Among men who are coarse in their language there is a
salutation more pertinent than elegant that inquires into the
state of the bowels.[1] The famous story of Voltaire and the
Englishman, in which the sage agreed to suicide because life was
not worth living when his digestion was disordered and who broke
his agreement when he purged himself, illustrates how closely
mood is related to the intestinal tract. And mood is the
background of the psychic life, upon which depends the direction
of our thoughts, cheerful or otherwise, the vigor of our will and
purpose. Mood itself arises in part from the influences that
stream into the muscles, joints, heart, lungs, liver, spleen,
kidneys, digestive tract and all the organs and tissues by way of
the afferent nerves (sympathetic and cerebro-spinal). Mood is
thus in part a reflection of the health and proper working of the
organism; it is the most important aspect of the
subconsciousness, and upon it rests the structure of character
and personality.

[1] What is called coarse is frequently crudely true. Thus, in
the streets, in the workshops, and where men untrammeled by
niceties engage in personalities the one who believes the other
to be a "crank" informs him in crude language that he has
intestinal stasis (to put the diagnosis in medical language) and
advises him accordingly to "take a pill."

This does not mean that only the healthy are cheerful, or that
the sick are discouraged. To affirm the dependence of mind upon
body is not to deny that one may build up faith, hope, courage,
through example and precept, or that one may not inherit a
cheerfulness and courage (or the reverse). "There are men," says
James, "who are born under a cloud." But exceptional individuals
aside, the mass of mankind generates its mood either in the
tissues of the body or in the circumstances of life.

Children, because they have not built up standards of thought,
mood and act, demonstrate in a remarkable manner the dependence
of their character upon health.

A child shows the onset of an illness by a complete change in
character. I remember one sociable, amiable lad of two, rich in
the curiosity and expanding friendliness of that time of life,
who became sick with diphtheria. All his basic moods became
altered, and all his wholesome reactions to life disappeared. He
was cross and contrary, he had no interest in people or in
things, he acted very much as do those patients in an insane
hospital who suffer from Dementia Praecox. What is character if
it is not interest and curiosity, friendliness and love,
obedience and trust, cheerfulness and courage? Yet a sick child,
especially if very young, loses all these and takes on the
reverse characters. The little lad spoken of became "himself"
again when the fever and the pain lifted. Yet for a long time
afterward he showed a greater liability to fear than before, and
it was not until six months or more had repaired the more subtle
damage to his organism that he became the hardy little adventurer
in life that he had been before the illness.

There is plenty of chemical proof of this thesis as here set
forth. Men have from time immemorial put things "in their bellies
to steal their brains away." The chemical substance known as
ethyl alcohol has been an artificial basis of good fellowship the
world over, as well as furnishing a very fair share of the
tragedy, the misery and the humor of the world. This is because,
when ingested in any amount, its absorption produces changes in
the flow of thought, in the attitude toward life, in the mood,
the emotions, the purposes, the conduct,--in a word, in
character. One sees the austere man, when drunk, become ribald;
the repressed, close-fisted become open-mouthed and
open-hearted; the kindly, perhaps brutal; the controlled,
uncontrolled. In the change of character it effects is the regret
over its passing and the greatest reason for prohibition.

Alcohol causes several well-defined mental diseases as well as
mere drunkenness. In Delirium Tremens there is an acute delirium,
with confusion, excitement and auditory and visual hallucinations
of all kinds. The latter symptom is so prominent as to give the
reason for the popular name of the "snakes." In alcoholic
hallucinosis the patient has delusions of persecution and hears
voices accusing him of all kinds of wrong-doing. Very
frequently, as all the medical writers note, these voices are
"conscience exteriorized"; that is, the voices say of him just
what he has been saying of himself in the struggle against drink.
Then there is Alcoholic Paranoia, a disease in which the main
change is a delusion of jealousy directed against the mate, who
is accused of infidelity. It is interesting that in the last two
diseases the patient is "clear-headed"; memory and orientation
are good; the patient speaks well and gives no gross signs of his
trouble. As the effects of the alcohol wear away, the patient
recovers,--i.e., his character returns to its normal.

It becomes necessary at this point to take up a reverse side of
our study, namely, what is often called the influence of "mind
over matter." Such cures of disease as seem to follow prayer and
faith are cited; such incidents as the great strength of men
under emotion or the disturbances of the body by ideas are listed
as examples. This is not the place to discuss cures by faith. It
suffices to say this: that in the first place most of such cures
relate to hysteria, a disease we shall discuss later but which is
characterized by symptoms that appear and disappear like magic. I
have seen "cured" (and have "cured") such patients, affected with
paralysis, deafness, dumbness, blindness, etc., with reasoning,
electricity, bitter tonics, fake electrodes, hypnotism, and in
one case by a forcible slap upon a prominent and naked part of
the body. Hysteria has been the basis of many a saint's
reputation and likewise has aided many a physician into
affluence.

Nor is the effect of coincidence taken into account in estimating
cures, whether by faith or by drugs. Many a physician has owed
his start to the fact that he was called in on some obscure case
just when the patient was on the turn towards recovery. He then
receives the credit that belonged to Nature. Medical men
understand this,--that many diseases are "self-limited" and pass
through a cycle influenced but little by treatment. But faith
curists do not so understand, and neither does the mass of
people, so that neither one nor the other separates "post hoc"
from "propter hoc." If the truth were told, most of the miracle
and faith cures that are not of hysterical origin are due to
coincidence. Faith curists report in detail their successes, but
we have no statistics whatever of their failures.

If thought is a product of the brain activated by the rest of the
organism, it would be perfectly natural to expect that thought
would influence the organism. That thought is intimately
associated with impulses to action is well known. This action
largely takes place in the speech muscles but also it irradiates
into the rest of the organism. Especially is this true if the
thought is associated with some emotion. Emotion, as we shall
discuss it later, is at least in large part a bodily reaction, a
disturbance in heart, lungs, abdominal organs, blood vessels,
sympathetic nervous system, endocrines, etc. The effect of
thought and emotion upon the body, whether to heighten its
activity or to lower its activity, is, from my point of view,
merely the effect of one function of the organism upon others. We
are not surprised if digestion affects thinking and mood, and we
need not be surprised if thought and mood disturb or improve
digestion. And we may substitute for digestion any other organic
function.

As a working basis, substantiated by the kind of proof we use in
our daily lives in laboratories and machine shops, we may state
that mind, character and personality are organic in their origin
and are functions of the entire organism. What a man thinks, does
and feels (or perhaps we should reverse this order) is the result
of environmental forces playing upon a marvelously intricate
organism in which every part reacts on every other part, in which
nervous energy influences digestion and digestion influences
nervous energy, in which enzymes, hormones, and endocrines engage
in an extraordinary game of checks and balance, which in the
normal course of events make for the individual's welfare. What a
man thinks, does, and feels influences the fate of his organism
from one end of life to the other.

We have not adduced in favor of the organic nature of mind,
character and personality the facts of heredity. This is a most
important set of facts, for if the egg and the sperm carry
mentality and personality, they may be presumed to carry them in
some organic form, as organic potentialities, just as they carry
size,[1] color, sex, etc. That abnormal mind is inherited is
shown in family insanity in the second, third and fourth
generation cases of mental disease. Certain types of
feeble-mindedness surely are transmitted from generation to
generation, as witness the case of the famous (or infamous) Jukes
family. In this group vagabondage, crime, immorality and other
character abnormalities appeared linked with the
feeble-mindedness. But there is plenty of evidence to show that
normal character qualities are inherited as well as the
abnormal.[2] Galton, the father of eugenics, collected facts from
the history of successful families to prove this. It is true that
he failed to take into account the facts of SOCIAL heredity, in
that a gifted man establishes a place for himself and a tradition
for his family that is of great help to his son. Nevertheless,
musical ability runs in families and races, as does athletic
ability, high temper, passion, etc. In short, at least the
potentialities, the capacities for character, are transmitted
together with other qualities as part of the capital of heredity.

[1] I have collected and published from the records and wards of
the State Hospital at Taunton, Mass., many such cases. The whole
subject is to be reviewed in a following book on the transmission
of mental disease, but no one seriously doubts that there is a
transference of "insane" character from generation to generation.
In fact, I believe that a little too much stress hag been laid on
this aspect of mental disease and not enough on the fact that
sickness may injure a family stock and cause the descendants to
be insane. Any one who has seen a single case of congenital
General Paresis, where a child has a mental disease due to the
syphilis of a parent, and can doubt that character and mind are
organic, simply is blinded by theological or metaphysical
prejudice.

[2] See his book "Genius."

This means that in studying character and personality, we must
start with an analysis of the physical make-up of the individual.
We are not yet at the point in science where we can easily get at
the activities of the endocrinal glands in normal mentality. We
are able to recognize certain fundamental types, but more we
cannot do; nor are we able to measure nervous energy except in
relatively crude ways, but these crude ways have great value
under certain conditions.

When there has been a change in personality, the question of
bodily disease is always paramount. The first questions to be
asked under such circumstances are, "Is this person sick?" "Is
the brain involved?" "Are endocrinal glands involved?" "Is there
disease of some organ of the body, acting to lower the feeling of
well-being, acting to slacken the purposes and the will or to
obscure the intelligence?"

There are other important questions of this type to answer, some
of which may be deferred for the time. Meanwhile, the next
equally fundamental thesis is on the effect of the environment
upon mind, character and personality.

CHAPTER II. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS OF CHARACTER

From the time any one of us is born into the world he is subject
to the influences of forces that reach backwards to the earliest
days of the race. The "dead hand" rules,--yes, and the dead
thought, belief and custom continue to shape the lives and
character of the living. The invention and development of speech
and writing have brought into every man's career the mental life
and character of all his own ancestors and the ancestors of every
other man.

A child is not born merely to a father and a mother. He is born
to a group, fiercely and definitely prejudiced in custom, belief
and ideal, with ways of doing, feeling and thinking which it
seeks to impose on each of its new members. Family, tribe, race
and nation all demand of each accession that he accept their
ideals, habits and beliefs on peril of disapproval and even of
punishment. And man is so constituted that the approval and
disapproval of his group mean more to him even than his life.

The social setting into which each one is born is his social
heredity. "The heredity with which civilization is most
supremely concerned," says Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, "is not that
which is inborn in the individual. It is the SOCIAL inheritance
which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress."[1] It
is this social inheritance which shapes our characters,
rough-hewn by nature. It is by the light of each person's social
inheritance that we must also judge his character.

[1] The Eugenists fiercely contest this statement, and rightly,
for it is extreme. Society is threatened at its roots by the
present high birth rate of the low grade and the low birth rate
of the high grade. Environment, culture, can do much, but they
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Neither can heredity
make a silk purse out of silk; without culture and the
environmental influences, without social heredity, the silk
remains crude and with no special value. The aims of a rational
society, which we are born a thousand years too soon to see would
be twofold: to control marriage and birth so that the number of
the unfit would be kept as low as possible, and then to bring
fostering influences to bear on the fit.

"Education," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "is only second to
nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places!" And education is merely social
inheritance organized by parents and teachers for the sake of
molding the scholar into usefulness and conformity to the group
into which he is born. There may be in each individual an innate
capacity for this ability or that, for expressing and controlling
this or that emotion, for developing this or that purpose. Which
ability will be developed, which emotion or purpose will be
expressed, is a matter of the age in which a man is born, the
country in which he lives, the family which claims him as its
own. In a warrior age the fighting spirit chooses war as its
vocation and develops a warlike character; in a peaceful time
that same fighting spirit may seek to bring about such reforms as
will do away with war.[1] When the world said that a man might
and really ought now and then to beat his wife and rule her by
force, the really conformable man did so, while his descendant,
living in a time and country where woman is the domestic "boss,"
submits, humorously and otherwise, to a good-natured henpecking.
And in the times where a woman had no vocation but that of
housewife, the wife of larger ability merely became a
discontented, futile woman; whereas in an age which opens up
politics to her, the same type of person expands into a vigorous,
dominating political leader. Though the force of the water remain
the same, the nature of the land determines whether the water
shall collect as a river, carrying the produce of the land to the
sea, or as a stagnant lake in which idlers fish. Time, social
circumstances, education and a thousand and one factors determine
whether one shall be a "Village Hampden," quarreling in a petty
way with a petty autocrat over some petty thing, or a national
Hampden, whose defiance of a tyrannical king stirs a nation into
revolt.

[1] Indeed, a reformer is to-day called a crusader, though the
knight of the twelfth century armed cap-a-pie for a joust with
the Saracen would hardly recognize as his spiritual descendant a
sedentary person preaching against rum. Yet to the student of
character there is nothing anomalous in the transformation.

How conceptions of right and wrong, of proper and improper
conduct, ideals and thoughts arise, it is not my function to
treat in detail. That intelligence primarily uses the method of
trial and error to learn is as true of groups as of individuals;
and established methods of doing things--customs--are often
enough temporary conclusions, though they last a thousand years.
The feeling that such group customs are right and that to depart
from them is wrong, is perhaps based on a specific instinct, the
moral instinct; but much more likely, in my opinion, is it
obedience to leadership, fear of social disapproval and
punishment, conscience, imitation, suggestibility and sympathy,
all of which are parts of that social cement substance, the
social instinct. No child ever learns "what is right and wrong"
except through teaching, but no child would ever conform, except
through gross fear, unless he found himself urged by deep-seated
instincts to be in conformity, in harmony and in sympathy with
his group,--to be one with that group. Perhaps it is true, as
Bergson suggests, as Galton[1] hints and as Samuel Butler boldly
states, that there are no real individuals in life but we are
merely different aspects of reality or, to phrase it
materialistically, corpuscles in the blood stream of an organism
too vast and complicated to be encompassed by our imagination.
Just as a white blood cell obeys laws of which it can have no
conception, fulfills purposes whose meaning transcends its own
welfare, so we, with all our self-consciousness and all the
paraphernalia of individuality, are perhaps parts of a life we
cannot understand.

[1] For example, read what the hard-headed Galton says
("Hereditary Genius," p. 376):

"There is decidedly a solidarity as well as a separateness in all
human and probably in all lives whatsoever, and this
consideration goes far, I think, to establish an opinion that the
constitution of the living universe is a pure theism and that its
form of activity is what may he described as cooperative. It
points to the conclusion that all life is single in its essence,
but various, ever-varying and interactive in its manifestations,
and that men and all other living animals are active workers and
sharers in a vastly more extended system of cosmic action than
any of ourselves, much less of them, can possibly comprehend. It
also suggests that they may contribute, more or less
unconsciously, to the manifestation of a far higher life than our
own, somewhat as . . . the individual cells of one of the more
complex animals contribute to the manifestations of its higher
order of personality." Perhaps such a unity is the basis of
instinct, of knowledge without teaching, of desire and wish that
has not the individual welfare as its basis. No man can reject
such phenomena as telepathy or thought transference merely
because he cannot understand them on a basis of strict human
individuality. To reject because one cannot understand is the
arrogance of the "clerico-academic" type of William James.

No one can read the stories of travelers or the writings of
anthropologists without concluding that codes of belief and
action arise out of the efforts of groups to understand and to
influence nature and that out of this practical effort AND
seeking of a harmonious reality arises morality. "Man seeks the
truth, a world that does not contradict itself, that does not
deceive, that does not change; a real world,--a world in which
there is no suffering. Contradiction, deception and variability
are the causes of suffering. He does not doubt there is such a
thing as, a world as it might be, and he would fain find a road
to it."[1] But alas, intelligence and knowledge both are
imperfect, and one group seeking a truth that will bring them
good crops, fine families, victory over enemies, riches, power
and fellowship, as well as a harmonious universe, finds it in
idol worship and polygamy; another group seeking the same truth
finds it in Christianity and monogamy. And the members of some
groups are born to ideals, customs and habits that make it right
for a member to sing obscene songs and to be obscene at certain
periods, to kill and destroy the enemy, to sacrifice the
unbeliever, to worship a clay image, to have as many wives as
possible, and that make it WRONG to do otherwise. Indeed, he who
wishes a child to believe absolutely in a code of morals would
better postpone teaching him the customs and beliefs of other
people until habit has made him adamant to new ideas.

[1] Nietzsche.

It is with pleasure that I turn the attention of the reader to
the work of Frazier in the growth of human belief, custom and
institutions that he has incorporated into the stupendous series
of books called "The Golden Bough." The things that influence us
most in our lives are heritages, not much changed, from the
beliefs of primitive societies. Believing that the forces of the
world were animate, like himself, and that they might be moved,
persuaded, cajoled and frightened into favorable action,
undeveloped man based most of his customs on efforts to obtain
some desired result from the gods. Out of these customs grew the
majority of our institutions; out of these queer beliefs and
superstitions, out of witchcraft, sympathetic magic, the "Old
Man" idea, the primitive reaction to sleep, epilepsy and death
grew medicine, science, religion, festivals, the kingship, the
idea of soul and most of the other governing and directing ideas
of our lives. It is true that the noble beliefs and sciences also
grew from these rude seeds, but with them and permeating our
social structure are crops of atrophied ideas, hampering customs,
cramping ideals. Further, in every race in every country, in
every family, there are somewhat different assortments of these
directing traditional forces; and it is these social inheritances
which are more responsible for difference in people than a native
difference in stock.

Consider the difference that being born and brought up in Turkey
and being born, let us say, in New York City, would make in two
children of exactly the same disposition, mental caliber and
physical structure. One would grow up a Turk and the other a New
Yorker, and the mere fact that they had the same original
capacity for thought, feeling and action would not alter the
result that in character the two men would stand almost at
opposite poles. One need not judge between them and say that one
was superior to the other, for while I feel that the New Yorker
might stand OUR inspection better, I am certain that the Turk
would be more pleasing to Turkish ideas. The point is that they
would be different and that the differences would result solely
from the environmental forces of natural conditions and social
inheritance.

Study the immigrant to the United States and his descendant,
American born and bred. Compare Irishman and Irish-American,
Russian Jew and his American-born descendant; compare Englishman
and the Anglo-Saxon New England descendant. Here is a race, the
Jew, which in the Ghetto and under circumstances that built up a
tremendously powerful set of traditions and customs developed a
very distinctive type of human being. Poor in physique, with
little physical pugnacity, but worshiping, learning and reaching
out for wealth and power in an unusually successful manner, the
crucible of an adverse and hostile environment rendered him
totally different in manners from his Gentile neighbors. With a
high birth rate and an intensely close and pure family life, the
Ghetto Jew lived and died shut off by the restrictions placed
upon him and his own social heredity from the life of the country
of his birth. Then came immigration to the United States through
one cause or another,--and note the results.

With the old social heredity still at work, another set of
customs, traditions and beliefs comes into open competition with
it in the bosom of the American Jew. Nowhere is the struggle
between the old and the new generations so intense as in the home
of the Orthodox Jew. His descendant is clean-shaven and no longer
observes (or observes only perfunctorily or with many a gross
inconsistency) the dietary and household laws. He is a free
spender and luxurious in his habits as compared with his
economical, ascetic forefathers. He marries late and the birth
rate drops with most astonishing rapidity, so that in one
generation the children of parents who had eight or ten children
have families of one or two or three children. He becomes a
follower of sports, and with his love for scholarship still
strong, as witness his production of scholars and scientists, the
remarkable rise of the Jewish prize fighter stands out as a
divergence from tradition that mocks at theories of inborn racial
characters. And a third generation differs in customs, manners,
ideals, purposes and physique but little from the social class of
Americans in which the individual members move. The names become
Anglicized; gone are the Abrahams and Isaacs and Jacobs, the
Rachels and Leahs and Rebeccas, and in their place are Vernon,
Mortimer, Winthrop, Alice, Helen and Elizabeth. And this change
in name symbolizes the revolution in essential characters.

Has the racial stock changed in one generation or two? No. A new
social heredity has overcome--or at least in part supplanted--an
older social heredity and released and developed characters
hitherto held in check. In every human being--and this is a theme
we shall enlarge upon later--there are potential lines of
development far outnumbering those that can be manifested, and
each environment and tradition calls forth some and suppresses
others. Every man is a garden planted with all kinds of seeds;
tradition and teaching are the gardeners that allow only certain
ones to come to bloom. In each age, each country and each family
there is a different gardener at work, repressing certain trends
in the individual, favoring and bringing to an exaggerated growth
other trends.

That each family, or type of family, acts in this way is
recognized in the value given to the home life. The home, because
of its sequestration, allows for the growth of individual types
better than would a community house where the same traditions and
ideals governed the life of each child. In the home the parents
seek to cultivate the specific type of character they favor. The
home is par excellence the place where prejudice and social
attitude are fostered. Though the mother and father seek to give
broadmindedness and wide culture to the child, their efforts must
largely be governed by their own attitudes and reactions,--in
short, by their own character and the resultant examples and
teaching. It is true that the native character of the child may
make him resistant to the teachings of the parents or may even
develop counter-prejudices, to react violently against the
gardening. This is the case when the child is of an opposing
temperament or when in the course of time he falls under the
influence of ideals and traditions that are opposed to those of
his home. Unless the home combines interest and freedom, together
with teaching, certain children become violent rebels, and,
seeking freedom and interest outside of the home, find themselves
in a conflict, both with their home teaching and the home
teachers, that shakes the unity and the happiness of parent and
child. Like all civil wars this war between new and old
generations reaches great bitterness.

In studying the cases of several hundred delinquent girls, as a
consultant to the Parole Department of Massachusetts, it was
found that the family life of the girls could be classified in
two ways. The majority of the girls that reached the Reformatory
came from bad homes,--homes in which drunkenness, prostitution,
feeble-mindedness, and insanity were common traits of the
parents. Or else the girls were orphans brought up by a
stepmother or some careless foster mother. In any case, through
either example, cruelty or neglect, they drifted into the
streets.

And the streets! Only the poor child (or the child brought up
over strictly) can know the lure of the streets. THERE is
excitement, THERE is freedom from prohibitions and inhibitions.
So the boy or girl finds a world without discipline, is without
the restraints imposed on the sex instincts and comes under the
influence of derelicts, sex-adventurers, thieves, vagabonds and
the aimless of all sorts. Into this university of the vices most
of the girls I am speaking of drifted, largely because the home
influence either was of the street type or had no advantages to
offer in competition with the street.

But the child on the streets is no more a solitary individual
than the savage is, or for that matter the civilized man. He
quickly forms part of a group, a roving group, called "The Gang."
In the large cities gangs are usually composed of boys of one age
or nearly so; in the small towns the gangs will consist of the
boys of a neighborhood. In fact, regardless of whether they are
street children or home children, boys form gangs spontaneously.
The gang is the first voluntary organization of society, for the
home, in so far as the child is concerned, is an involuntary
organization. The gang has its leader or leaders, usually the
strongest or the best fighter. At any rate, the best fighter is
the nominal leader, though a shrewder lad may assume the real
power. The gang has rules, it plays according to regulations, its
quarrels are settled according to a code, property has a definite
status and distribution.[1] The members of the gang are always
quarreling with each other, but here, as in the larger
aggregations of older human beings, "politics ends at the
border," and the gang is a unit against foreign aggression.
Indeed, gangs of a neighborhood may league against a group of
other gangs, as did the quarreling cities of Greece against
Persia.

[1] In the gang of which I was a member there was a ritual in the
formation of partnership, an association within the association.
Two boys, fond of each other and desiring to become partners,
would link little fingers, while a third boy acting as a sort of
priest--an elder of the gang--would raise his hand and strike the
link, shouting, "Partners, partners, never break!" This ritual
was a symbol of the unity of the pair, so that they fought for
each other, shared all personal goods (such as candy, pocket
money, etc.,) and were to be loyal and sympathetic throughout
life. Alas, dear partner of my boyhood, most gallant of fighters
and most generous of souls, where are you, and where is our
friendship, now?

For the student of mankind the gang is one of the most
fascinating phenomena. Here the power of tradition, without the
aid of records, is seen. Throughout America, in a mysterious way,
all the boys start spinning tops at a certain season and then
suddenly cease and begin, to play marbles. Without any
standardization of a central type they have the same rules for
their games, call them by the same names and use in their songs
the same rhymes and airs. Every generation of children has the
same jokes and trick games: "Eight and eight are sixteen, stick
your nose in kerosene"--"A dead cat, I one it, you two it, I
three it, you four it, I five it, you six it, I seven it, you
eight it!" The fact is, of course, that there are no generations
as distinct entities; there are always individuals of one age,
and there is a mutual teaching and learning going on at all
times, which is the basis of transmission of tradition. Children
are usually more conservative and greater sticklers for form and
propriety than even men are; only now and then a freer mind
arises whose courage and pertinacity change things.

Therefore, in the understanding of character the influence of the
environment becomes of as fundamental importance as the
consideration of the organic make-up of the individual. The
environment in the form of tradition, social ideal, social
status, economic situation, race, religion, family, education is
thus on the one hand the directing, guiding, eliciting factor in
character and on the other is the repressing, inhibiting,
limiting factor.

Putting the whole thing in another way: the organism is the
Microcosmos, or little world, in which the potentialities of
character are elaborated in the germ plasm we inherit from our
ancestors, in the healthy interaction of brain with the rest of
the body, especially the internal glands. The outside world is
the Macrocosmos, or large world, and includes the physical
conditions of existence (climate, altitude, plentiness of food,
access to the sea) as well as the social conditions of existence
(state of culture of times and race and family). The social
conditions of existence are of especial interest in that they
reach back ages before the individual was born so that the lives,
thoughts, ideals of the dead may dominate the character of the
living.

This macrocosmos both brings to light and stifles the character
peculiarities of the microcosmos and the character of no man, as
we see or know it, ever expresses in any complete manner his
innate possibilities.

The question arises: What is the basis of the influence of the
social heredity, of the forces, in the character of the person
born in a social group? Certain aspects of this we must deal with
later, in order to keep to a unified presentation of the subject.
Other aspects are pertinently to be discussed now.

The link that binds man to man is called the social instinct,
though perhaps it would be better to call it the group of social
instincts. The link is one of feeling, primarily, though it has
associated with it, in an indissoluble way, purpose and action.
The existence of the social instinct is undisputed; its
explanation is varied and ranges from the mystical to the
evolutionary. For the mystical (which crops out in Bergson,
Butler and even in Galton), the unity of life is its basis, and
there is a sort of recognition of parts formerly united but now
separate individuals. This does not explain hate, racial and
individual. The evolutionary aspect has received its best
handling in recent years in Trotter's "The Herd," where the
social instincts are traced in their relation to human history.
One writer after another has placed as basic in social instinct,
sympathy, imitation, suggestibility and the recognition of
"likeness." These are merely names for a spreading of emotion
from one member of a group to another, for a something that makes
members of the group teachable and makes them wish to teach; that
is back of the wish to conform and help and has two sets of
guiding forces, reward and its derivative praise; punishment and
its derivative blame. Perhaps the term "derivative" is not
correct, and perhaps praise and blame are primary and reward and
punishment secondary.

So eminent a philosopher as the elder Mill declared the
distribution of praise and blame is the greatest problem of
society." This view of the place of praise and blame in the
organization of character and in directing the efforts and
activity of men is hardly exaggerated. From birth to death the
pleasure of reward and praise and the pain of punishment and
blame are immensely powerful human motives. It is true that now
and then individuals seek punishment and blame, but this is
always to win the favor of others or of the most important
observer of men's actions,--God, The child is trained through the
effect of reward and punishment, praise and blame; and these are
used to set up, on the one hand, habits of conduct, and on the
other an inner mentor and guide called Conscience. It may be true
that conscience is innate in its potentialities, but whether that
is so or not, it is the teaching and training of the times or of
some group that gives to conscience its peculiar trend in any
individual case. And before a child has any inward mentor it
depends for its knowledge of right and wrong upon the efforts of
its parents, their use of praise-reward and blame-punishment; it
reacts to these measures in accordance with the strength and
vigor of its social instincts and in accordance with its fear of
punishment and desire for reward. The feelings of duty and the
prickings of conscience serve to consolidate a structure already
formed.

Here we must discuss a matter of fundamental importance in
character analysis. Men are not born equal in any respect. This
inequality extends to every power, possibility and peculiarity
and has its widest range in the mental and character life. A tall
man is perhaps a foot taller than a very short man; a giant is
perhaps twice as tall as a dwarf. A very fleet runner can "do" a
hundred yards in ten seconds, and there are few except the
crippled or aged who cannot run the distance in twenty seconds.
Only in the fables has the hero the strength of a dozen men. But
where dexterity or knowledge enters things become different, and
one man can do what the most of men cannot even prepare to do.
Where abstract thought or talent or genius is involved the
greatest human variability is seen. There we have Pascals who are
mathematicians at five and discoverers at sixteen; there we have
Mozarts, composers at three; there we have our inspired boy
preachers already consecrated to their great ideal of work; and
we have also our Jesse Pomeroys, fiendish murderers before
adolescence. I believe with Carlyle that it is the heroes, the
geniuses of the race, to whom we owe its achievements; and the
hero and the genius are the men and women of "greatest
variability" in powers. The first weapon, the starting of fire,
the song that became "a folk song" were created by the
prehistoric geniuses and became the social heritage of the group
or race. And "common man" did little to develop religions or even
superstitions; he merely accepted the belief of a leader.

This digression is to emphasize that children and the men and
women they grow to be are widely variable in their native social
feeling, in their response to praise, blame, reward and
punishmept. One child eagerly responds to all, is moved by
praise, loves reward, fears punishment and hates blame. Another
child responds mainly to reward, is but little moved by praise,
fears punishment and laughs at blame. Still another only fears
punishment, while there is a type of deeply antisocial nature
which goes his own way, seeking his own egoistic purposes,
uninfluenced by the opinion of others, accepting reward cynically
and fighting against punishment. More than that, each child shows
peculiarities in the types of praise, reward, blame and
punishment that move him. Some children need corporal
punishment[1] and others who are made rebels by it are melted
into conformity by ostracism.

[1] It is a wishy-washy ideal of teaching that regards pain as
equivalent to cruelty. On the contrary, it may be real cruelty to
spare pain,--cruelty to the future of the child. Pain is a great
teacher, whether inflicted by the knife one has been told not to
play with, or by the parent when the injunction not to play with
the knife has been disregarded.

The distribution of praise and blame constitutes the distribution
of public opinion. Wherever public opinion is free to exercise
its power it is a weapon of extraordinary potency before which
almost nothing can stand. One might define a free nation as one
where public opinion has no limits,[1] where no one is prevented
from the expression of belief about the action of others, and no
one is exempted from the pressure of opinion. Conversely an
autocracy is one where there is but little room for the public
use of praise and but little power to blame, especially in regard
to the rulers. But in all societies, whether free or otherwise,
people are constantly praising, constantly blaming one another,
whether over the teacups or the wine glasses, in the sewing
circle or the smoking rooms, in the midst of families, in the
press, in the great halls of the states and nations. These are
"the mallets" by which society beats or attempts to beat
individuals into the accepted shape.

[1] In fact, Oliver Wendell Holmes has defined as the great
object of human society the free growth and expression of human
thought. How far we are from that ideal!

Men and women and children all strive to be praised, if not by
their own group, by some other group or by some generation. It
is, therefore, a high achievement to introduce a new ideal of
character and personality to the group. Men--whose opinion as to
desirability and praiseworthiness has been the prepotent
opinion--love best of all beauty in woman. Therefore, the ideal
of beauty as an achievement is a leading factor in the character
formation of most girls and young women. The first question girls
ask about one another is, "Is she pretty?" and in their criticism
of one another the personal appearance is the first and most,
important subject discussed. A personal beauty ideal has little
value to the character; in fact, it tends to exaggerate vanity
and triviality and selfishness; it leads away from the higher
aspects of reality. If you ask the majority of women which would
they rather be, very beautiful or very intelligent, most will say
without question (in their frank moments) that they would rather
be very beautiful. Those who are attempting to introduce the
ideal of intelligence as a goal to women need of course to
balance it with other ideals, but if successful they will
revolutionize the attitude of women toward life and change the
trend of their character.

Such ideals as beauty and wealth, however, do not acquire their
imperativeness unless at the same time they gratify some
deep-seated group of desires or instincts. Wealth gives too many
things to catalogue here, but fundamentally it gives power, and
so beauty which may lead to wealth is always a source of power,
although this power carries with it danger to the owner. Mankind
has been praising unselfishness for thousands of years, and all
men hate to be called selfish, but selfishness still rules in the
lives of most of the people of the world. Chastity and continence
receive the praise of the religious of the world, as well as of
the ascetic-minded of all types, yet the majority of men, in
theory accepting this ideal, reject it in practice. Selfishness
leads to self-gratification and pleasure; chastity imposes a
burden on desire, and praise and blame are in this instance not
powerful enough to control mankind's acts, though powerful enough
to influence them. Wherever social pressure and education
influence men and women to conduct which is contrary to the
gratification of fundamental desires, it causes an uneasiness, an
unhappiness and discomfort upon which Graham Wallas[1] has laid
great stress as the balked desire. The history of man is made up
of the struggle of normal instincts, emotions and purposes
against the mistaken inhibitions and prohibitions, against
mistaken praise and blame, reward and punishment. Moral and
ethical ideals develop institutions, and these often press too
heavily upon the life and activities of those who accept them as
authoritative.

[1] See his book "The Great Society" for a fine discussion of
this important matter.

We have spoken as if praise and blame invariably had the same
results. On the contrary, though in general they tend to bring
about uniformity and conformity, people vary remarkably from one
another in their reaction and the same person is not uniform in
his reactions. The reaction to praise is on the whole an
increased happiness and vigor, but of course it may, when
undeserved, demoralize the character and lead to a foolish vanity
and to inefficiency. To those whose conscience is highly
developed, undeserved praise is painful in that it leads to a
feeling that one is deceiving others. Speaking broadly, this is a
rare reaction. Most people accept praise as their due, just as
they attribute success to their merits.[1] The reaction to blame
may be anger, if the blame is felt to be undeserved, and there
are people of irritable ego who respond in this way to all blame
or even the hint of adverse criticism. The reaction may be
humiliation and lowered self-valuation, greatly deenergizing the
character and lowering efficiency. There, again, though this
reaction occurs in some degree to all, others are so constituted
that all criticism or blame is extremely painful and needs to be
tempered with praise and encouragement. Where blame is felt to be
deserved, and where the character is one of striving after
betterment, where the ego is neither irritable nor tender, blame
is an aid to growth and efficiency. Many a man flares up under
blame who "cools" down when he sees the justice of the criticism,
and changes accordingly.

[1] A very striking example of this was noticeable during the
Great War. American business men in general, producers,
distributors, wholesalers, retailers and speculators all got
"rich,"--some in extraordinary measure. Did many of them
attribute this to the fact that there was a "sellers' market"
caused by the conditions over which the individual business man
had no control? On the contrary, the overwhelming majority quite
complacently attributed the success (which later proved
ephemeral) to their own ability.

Therefore, in estimating the character of any individual, one
must ask into the nature of his environment, the traits and
teachings of the group from which he comes and among whom he has
lived. To understand any one this inquiry must be detailed and
reach back into his early life. Yet not too much stress must be
laid upon certain influences in regard to certain qualities. For
example, the average child is not influenced greatly by
immorality until near puberty, but dishonesty and bad manners
strike at him from early childhood. The large group, the small
group, family life, gang life influence character, but not
necessarily in a direct way. They may act to develop counter-
prejudices, for there is no one so bitter against alcoholism as
the man whose father was a drunkard and who himself revolts
against it. And there is no one so radical as he whose youth was
cramped by too much conservatism.

One might easily classify people according to their reaction to
reward, praise, punishment and blame. This would lead us too far
afield. But at least it is safe to say that in using these
factors in directing conduct and character the individual must be
studied in a detailed way. The average child, the average man and
woman is found only in statistics. Everywhere, to deal
successfully, one must deal with the individual.

There is a praise-reacting type to whom praise acts as a tonic of
incomparable worth, especially when he who administers the praise
is respected. And there are employers, teachers and parents who
ignore this fact entirely, who use praise too little or not at
all and who rely on adverse criticism. The hunger for
appreciation is a deep, intense need, and many of the problems of
life would melt before the proper use of praise.

"Fine words butter no parsnips" means that reward of other kinds
is needed to give substance to praise. Praise only without reward
losses its value. "I get lots of 'Thank you's' and 'You are a
good fellow'," complained a porter to me once, "but I cannot
bring up my family on them." In their hearts, no matter what they
say, the majority of people place highly him who is just in
compensation and reward and they want substantial goods. Many a
young scientist of my acquaintance has found that election to
learned societies and praise and respect palled on him as
compared to a living salary. Money can be exchanged for
vacations, education, books, good times and the opportunity of
helping others, but praise has no cash exchange value.

Blame and punishment are intensely individual matters. Where they
are used to correct and to better the character, where they are
the tools of the friends and teacher and not the weapons of the
enemy, great care must be used. Character building is an aim, not
a technique, and the end has justified the means. Society has
just about come to the conclusion that merely punishing the
criminal does not reform him, and merely to punish the child has
but part of the effect desired. In character training punishment
and blame must bring PAIN, but that pain must be felt to be
deserved (at least in the older child and adult) and not arouse
lasting anger or humiliation. It must teach the error of the ways
and prepare the recipient for instruction as to the right away.
Often enough the pain of punishment and blame widens the breach
between the teacher and pupil merely because the former has
inflicted pain without recompense.

One might put it thus: The pleasure of praise and reward must
energize, the pain of blame and punishment. must teach, else
teacher and society have misused these social tools.

"Very well," I hear some readers say, "is conscience to be
dismissed so shortly? Have not men dared to do right in the face
of a world that blamed and punished; have they not stood without
praise or reward or the fellowship of others for the actions
their conscience dictated?"

Yes, indeed. What, then, is conscience? For the common thought of
the world it is an inward mentor placed by God within the bosom
of man to guide him, to goad him, even, into choosing right and
avoiding wrong. Where the conception of conscience is not quite
so literal and direct it is held to be an immanent something of
innate origin. Whatever it may be, it surely does not guide us
very accurately or well, for there are opposing consciences on
every side of every question, and opponents find themselves
equally spurred by conscience to action and are equally convinced
of righteousness. In the long run it would be difficult to decide
which did more harm in the world, a conscientious persecutor or
bigot, an Alvarez or James the First, or a dissolute,
conscienceless sensualist like Charles the Second. Certainly
consciences differ as widely as digestions.

Conscience, so it seems to me, arises in early childhood with the
appearance of fixed purposes. It is entirely guided at first by
teaching and by praise and blame, for the infant gives no
evidence of conscience. But the infant (or young child) soon
wants to please, wants the favor and smiles of its parents. Why
does it wish to please? Is there a something irreducible in the
desire? I do not know and cannot pretend to answer.

This, however, may be definitely stated. Conscience arises or
grows in the struggle between opposing desires and purposes in
the course of which one purpose becomes recognized as the proper
guide to conduct. Let us take a simple case from the moral
struggles of the child.

A three-year-old, wandering into the kitchen, with mother in the
back yard hanging out the clothes, makes the startling discovery
that there is a pan of tarts, apple tarts, on the kitchen table,
easily within reach, especially if Master Three-Year-Old pulls up
a chair. Tarts! The child becomes excited, his mouth waters, and
those tarts become the symbol and substance of pleasure,--and
within his reach. But in the back of his mind, urging him to stop
and consider, is the memory of mother's injunction, "You must
always ask for tarts or candy or any goodies before you take
them." And there is the pain of punishment and scolding and the
vision of father, looking stern and not playing with one. These
are distant, faint memories, weak forces,--but they influence
conduct so that the little one takes a tart and eats it hurriedly
before mother returns and then runs into the dining room or
bedroom. Thus, instead of merely obeying an impulse to take the
tart, as an uninstructed child would, he has now become a little
thief and has had his first real moral struggle.

But it is a grim law that sensual pleasures do not last beyond
the period of gratification. If this were not so there could be
no morality in the world, and conscience would never reach any
importance. Whether we gratify sex appetite or gastric hunger,
the pleasure goes at once. True, there may be a short afterglow
of good feeling, but rarely is it strongly affective, and very
often it is replaced by a positive repulsion for the appetite. On
the other hand, to be out of conformity with your group is a
permanent pain, and the fear of being found out is an anxiety
often too great to be endured. And so our child, with the tart
gone, wishes he had not taken it, perhaps not clearly or
verbally; he is regretful, let us say. Out of this regret, out of
this fear of being found out, out of the pain of nonconformity,
arises the conscience feeling which says, "Thou shalt not" or
"Thou shalt," according to social teaching.

It may be objected that "Conscience often arrays itself against
society, against social teaching, against perhaps all men." It is
not my place to trace the growth in mind of the idea of the
Absolute Good, or absolute right and wrong, with which a man must
align himself. I believe it is the strength of the ego feeling
which gives to some the vigor and unyieldingness of their
conscience. "I am right," says such a person, "and the rest of
the world is wrong. God is with me, my conscience and future
times will agree," thus appealing to the distant tribunal as
James pointed out. All the insane hospitals have their sufferers
for conscience's sake, paranoid personalities whose egos have
expanded to infallibility and whose consciences are
correspondingly developed.

Conscience thus represents the power of the permanent purposes
and ideals of the individuals, and it wars on the less permanent
desires and impulses, because there is in memory the uneasiness
and anxiety that resulted from indulgence and the pain of the
feeling of inferiority that results when one is hiding a secret
weakness or undergoing reproof or punishment. This group of
permanent purposes, ideals and aspirations corresponds closely to
the censor of the Freudian concept and here is an example where a
new name successfully disguises an age-old thought.

In other words, conscience is social in its origin, developing
differently in different people according to their teaching,
intelligence, will, ego-feeling, instincts, etc. From the
standpoint of character analysis there are many types of people
in regard to conscience development.

In respect to the reactions to praise and blame the following
types are conspicuous:

1. A "weak" group in whom these act as apparently the sole
motives.

2. A group energized by love of praise.

3. A group energized mainly by fear of blame.

4. A type that scorns anything but material reward.

5. Another, that "takes advantage" of reward; likes praise but is
merely made conceited by it, hates blame but is merely made angry
by it, fears punishment and finds its main goad to good conduct
in this fear.

6. Then there are those in whom all these motives operate in
greater or lesser degree,--the so-called normal person. In
reality he has his special inclinations and dreads.

7. The majority of people are influenced mainly by the group with
which they have cast their positions, the blame of others being
relatively unimportant or arousing anger. For there is this great
difference between our reactions to praise and blame: that while
the praise of almost any one and for almost any quality is
welcome, the blame of only a few is taken "well," and for the
rest there is anger, contempt or defiance. The influence of blame
varies with the respect, love and especially acknowledged
superiority of the blamer. The "boss" has a right to blame and so
has father or mother while we are children, but we resent
bitterly the blame of a fellow employee; "he has no right to
blame," and we rebel against the blame of our parents when we
grow up. In fact, the war of the old and new generations starts
with the criticism of the elder folk and the resentment of the
younger folk.

It will be seen that reaction to praise and blame, etc., will
depend upon the irritability of ego feeling, the love of
superiority and the dislike for inferiority. This basic situation
we must defer discussing, but what is of importance is that the
primitive disciplinary weapons we have discussed never lose their
cardinal value and remain throughout life and in all societies
the prime modes of thought and conduct.

In similar fashion the conscience types might be depicted. From
the over-conscientious who rigidly hold themselves to an ideal,
who watch every departure from perfection with agony and
self-reproach, and who may either reach the highest level or
"break down" and become inefficient to the almost conscienceless
group, doing only what seems more profitable, are many
intermediate types merging one with the other.

There are people whose conscience is localized, as the
self-sacrificing father who is a pirate in business, or as the
policeman who holds rigidly to conscience in courage and loyalty
to his fellows, but who finds no internal reproach when he takes
a bribe or perjures himself about a criminal. What we call a code
is really a localized conscience, and there are many men whose
consciences do not permit seduction of the virgin but who are
quite easy in mind about an intrigue with a married woman. So,
too, you may be as wily as you please in business but find
cheating at cards base and unthinkable. Conscience in the
abstract may be a divine entity, but in the realities of everyday
life it is a medley of motives, purposes and teachings, varying
from the grotesque and mischief-working to the sublime and
splendid.

CHAPTER III. MEMORY AND HABIT

There are two qualities of nervous tissues (possibly of all
living tissue) that are basic in all nervous and mental
processes. They are dependent upon the modificability of nerve
cells and fibers by stimuli, e. g., a light flashing through the
pupil and passing along the optical tracts to the occipital
cortex produces changes which constitute the basis of visual
memory. Experience modifies nervous tissue in definite manner,
and SOMETHING remembers. Who remembers? Who is conscious? Believe
what you please about that, call it ego, soul, call it
consciousness dipped out of a cosmic consciousness; and I have no
quarrel with you.

Memory has its mechanics, in the association of ideas, which
preoccupied the early English psychologists and philosophers; it
is the basis of thought and also of action, and it is a prime
mystery. We know its pathology, we think that memories for speech
have loci in the brain, the so-called motor memories in Broca's
area.[1] We know that a hemorrhage in these areas or in the
fibers passing from them, or a tumor pressing on them may destroy
or temporarily abolish these memories, so that a man may KNOW
what he wishes to say, understand speech and be unable to say it,
though he may write it (motor aphasia). In sensory aphasia the
defect is a loss of the capacity to understand spoken speech,
though the patient may be able to say what he himself wishes. (It
is fair to say that the definite location of these capacities in
definite areas has been challenged by Marie, Moutier and others,
but this denial does not deny the organic brain location of
speech memories; it merely affirms that they are scattered rather
than concentrated in one area.)

[1] Foot of the left or right third frontal convolutions,
auditory speech in the supramarginal, etc.

In its widest phases memory alters with the state of the brain.
In childhood impressibility is high, but until the age or four or
five the duration of impression is low, and likewise the power of
voluntary recall. In youth (eighteen-twenty) all these capacities
are perhaps at their highest. As time goes on impressibility
seems first of all to be lost, so that it becomes harder and
harder to learn new things, to remember new faces, new names.

The typical difficulty of middle age is to remember names,
because these have no real relationship or logical value and must
be arbitrarily remembered. The typical senile defect is the
dropping out of the recent memories, though the past may be
preserved in its entirety. With any disease of the brain,
temporary or permanent, amnesia or memory loss may and usually is
present (e. g., general paresis, tumor, cerebral
arteriosclerosis, etc.). As the result of Carbon monoxide
poisoning, as after accidental or attempted suicidal gas
inhalation, the memory, especially for the most recent events, is
impaired and the patient cannot remember the events as they
occur; he passes from moment to moment unconnected to the recent
past, though his remote past is clear. Since memory is the basis
of certainty, of the feeling of reality, these unfortunates are
afflicted with an uncertainty, a sense of unreality, that is
almost agonizing. As the effects of the poison wear off, which
even in favorable cases takes months, the impressibility returns
but never reaches normality again.

Unquestionably there is an inherent congenital difference in
memory capacity. There are people who are prodigies of memory as
there are those who are prodigies of physical strength,--and
without training. The IMPRESSIBILITY for memories can in no way
be increased except through the stimulation of interest and a
certain heightening of attention through emotion. For the man or
woman concerned with memory the first point of importance is to
find some value in the fact or thing to be learned. Before a
subject is broached to students the teacher should make clear its
practical and theoretic value to the students. Too often that is
the last thing done and it is only when the course is finished
that its practical meaning is stressed or even indicated. In
fact, throughout, teaching the value of the subject should
constantly be emphasized, if possible, by illustrations from
life. There are only a few who love knowledge for its own sake,
but there are many who become eager for learning when it is made
practical.

The number of associations given to a fact determines to a large
extent its permanence in memory and the power of recalling it. In
my own teaching I always instruct my students in the technique of
memorizing, as follows:

1. Listen attentively, making only as many notes as necessary to
recall the leading facts. The auditory memories are thus given
the first place.

2. Go home and read up the subject in your textbooks, again
making notes. Thus is added the visual associations.

3. Write out in brief form the substance of the lecture, deriving
your knowledge from both the lecture and the book. You thus add
another set of associations to your memories of the subject.

4. Teach the subject to or discuss it with a fellow student. By
this you vitalize the memories you have, you link them firmly
together, you lend to them the ardor of usefulness and of
victory. You are forced to realize where the gaps, the lacunae of
your knowledge come, and are made to fill them in.

Thus the best way to remember a fact is to find a use for it and
to link it to your interests and your purposes. Unrelated it has
no value; related it becomes in fact a part of you. After that
the mechanics of memory necessitate the making of as many
pathways to that fact as possible, and this means deliberately to
associate the fact by sound, by speech and by action. The
advertised schemes of memory training are simply association
schemes, old as the hills, and having value indeed, but too much
is claimed for them. A splendid memory is born, not made; but any
memory, except where disease has entered, can be improved by
training.

It is because lectures on the whole do not supply enough
associations or arouse enough interest that the lecture is the
poorest method of teaching or learning. Man's mind sticks easily
to things, but with difficulty to words about things. To maintain
attention for an hour or so, while sitting, is a task, and there
develops a tendency either to a hypnoidal state in which the mind
follows uncritically, or to a restless uneasiness with wandering
mind and fatigue of body. A demonstration, on the other hand, a
laboratory experiment with short, personal instruction, a bodily
contact with the problem calls into play interest, enthusiasm,
curiosity, motor images, the use of the hands, and is THE method
of teaching.

There are at present excellent psychological methods of testing
out the memory capacity. Every one engaged in any responsible
work, or troubled about his memory, should be so tested. While
there are other qualities of mind of great importance, memory is
basic, and no one can really understand himself who is in doubt
about his memory. In such diseases as neurasthenia one of the
commonest complaints is the "loss of memory," which greatly
troubles the patient. As a matter of fact, what is impaired is
interest and attention, and when the patient realizes this he is
usually quite relieved. The man who has a poor memory may become
very successful if he develops systems of recording, filing,
indexing, but his possibilities of knowledge are greatly reduced
by his defect.[1]

[1] It is the growth of the subject matter of knowledge that
makes necessary the elaborate systems of indexing, etc., now so
important. It is as much as man can do to follow the places where
the men work, let alone what they are doing. This growth of
knowledge is getting to be an extra-human phenomenon. Of this
Graham Wallas has written entertainingly.

A second fundamental ability of living tissue, and of particular
importance in character, is habit formation. Habit resides in the
fact that once living tissue has been traversed by a stimulus and
has responded by an act, three things result:

1. The pathway for that stimulus becomes more permeable; becomes,
as it were, grooved or like a track laid across the living
structure of the nervous system.

2. The responding element is more easily stirred into activity,
responds with more vigor and with less effort.

3. Consciousness, at first invoked, recedes more and more, until
the habit-action of whatever type tends to become automatic.
There is in this last peculiarity a tendency for the habit to
establish itself as independent of the personality, and if an
injurious or undesired habit, to set up the worst of the
conflicts of life,--a conflict between one's intention and an
automaton in the shape of a powerfully entrenched habit.

Habits are economical of thought and energy, generally speaking;
that is their main recommendation. A dozen examples present
themselves at once as illustrative: piano playing, with its
intense concentration on each note, with consciousness attending
to the action of each muscle, and then practice, habit formation,
and the ease and power of execution with the mind free to wander
off in the moods suggested by the music, or to busy itself with
improvisations, flourishes and the artistic touches. Before true
artistry can come, technique must be relegated to habit. So with
typewriting, driving an automobile, etc.

More fundamental than these, which are largely skill habits, are
the organic habits. One of the triumphs of pediatrics depends
upon the realization that the baby's welfare hangs on regular
habits of feeding, that he is not to be fed except at stated
intervals; as a result processes of digestion are set going in a
regular, harmonious manner. In other words, these processes may
be said to "get to know" what is expected of them and act
accordingly. The mother's time is economized and the strain of
nursing is lessened. In adults, regular hours of eating make it
possible for the juices of digestion to be secreted as the food
is ingested; in other words, an habitual adjustment takes place.

If there were one single health habit that I would have
inculcated above all others, it would be the habit of regularly
evacuating the bowels. While constipation is not the worst ill in
the world, it causes much trouble, annoyance and a considerable
degree of ill health, and, in my opinion, a considerable degree
of unhappiness. A physician may be pardoned for frank advice: all
the matters concerning the bowels, such as coarse foods, plenty
of water and exercise, are secondary compared to the habit of
going to the stool at the same time each day, whether there be
desire or not. A child should be trained in this matter as
definitely as he is trained to brush his teeth. In fact, I think
that the former habit is more important than the latter. The mood
of man is remarkably related to the condition of his
gastro-intestinal tract and the involuntary muscle of that tract
is indirectly under the control of the will through habit
formation.

Sleep[1] the mysterious, the death in life which we all seek each
night, is likewise regulated by habit. Arising from the need of
relief from consciousness and bodily exertion, the mechanism of
sleep is still not well understood. Is there a toxic influence at
work? is the body poisoned by itself, as it were, as has been
postulated; is there a toxin of fatigue, or is there a
"vaso-motor" reaction, a shift of the blood supply causing a
cerebral anaemia and thus creating the "sleepy" feeling? The
capacity to sleep is a factor of great importance and we shall
deal with it later under a separate heading as part of the
mechanism of success and failure. At present we shall simply
point out that each person builds up a set of habits regarding
sleep,--as to hour, kind of place, warmth, companionship,
ventilation and even the side of the body he shall lie on, and
that a change in these preliminary matters is often attended by
insomnia. Moreover, a change from the habitual in the general
conduct of life--a new city or town, a strange bed, a disturbance
in the moods and emotions--may upset the sleep capacity. Those in
whom excitement persists, or whose emotions are persistent,
become easily burdened with the dreaded insomnia. Sleep is
dependent on an exclusion of excitement and exciting influences.
If, however, exciting influences become habitual they lose their
power over the organism and then the individual can sleep on a
battle field, in a boiler factory, or almost anywhere.
Conversely, many a New Yorker is lulled to sleep by the roar of
the great city who, finds that the quiet of the country keeps him
awake.

[1] As good a book as any on the subject of sleep is Boris
Sidis's little monograph.

Sleeplessness often enough is a habit. Something happens to a man
that deeply stirs him, as an insult, or a falling out with a
friend, or the loss of money,--something which disturbs what we
call his poise or peace of mind. He becomes sleepless because,
when he goes to bed and the shock-absorbing objects of daily
interest are removed, his thoughts revert back to his difficulty;
he becomes again humiliated or grieved or thrown into an
emotional turmoil that prevents sleep. After the first night of
insomnia a new factor enters,--the fear of sleeplessness and the
conviction that one will not sleep. After a time the insult has
lost its sting, or the difficulty has been adjusted, there is no
more emotional distress, but there is the established
sleeplessness, based on habitual emotional reaction to sleep. I
know one lady whose fear reached the stage where she could not
even bear the thought of night and darkness. It is in these cases
that a powerful drug used two or three nights in succession
breaks up the sleepless habit and reestablishes the power to
sleep.

People differ in their capacity to form habits and in their love
of habits. The normal habits, thoroughness, neatness and method
come easily to some and are never really acquired by others.
People of an impetuous, explosive or reckless character, keenly
alive to every shade of difference in things, find it hard to be
methodical, to carry on routine. The impatient person has similar
difficulties. Whereas others take readily to the same methods of
doing things day by day; and these are usually non-explosive,
well inhibited, patient persons, to whom the way a thing is done
is as important as the goal itself.

Here comes a very entertaining problem, the question of the value
of habits. Good habits save time and energy, tend to eliminate
useless labor and make for peace and quiet. But there is a large
body of persons who come to value habits for themselves and,
indeed, this is true to a certain extent of all of us. Once an
accustomed way of doing things is established it becomes not only
a path of least resistance, but a sort of fixed point of view,
and, if one may mix metaphors a trifle, a sort of trunk for the
ego to twine itself around. There is uneasiness in the thought of
breaking up habits, an uneasiness that grows the more as we
become older and is deepened into agony if the habit is tinged
with our status in life, if it has become a sort of measure of
our respectability. Thus a good housekeeper falls into the habits
of doing things which were originally a mark of her ability,
which she holds as sacred and values above her health and energy.
There are people who fiercely resent a new way of doing things;
they have woven their most minor habits into their ego feeling
and thus make a personal issue of innovations. These are the
upholders of the established; they hate change as such; they are
efficient but not progressive. In its pathological form this type
becomes the "health fiends" who never vary in their diet or in
their clothing, who arise at a certain time, take their "plunge"
regardless, take their exercise and their breakfasts alike as a
health measure without real enjoyment, etc., who grow weary if
they stay up half an hour or so beyond their ordinary bedtime;
they are the individuals who fall into health cults, become
vegetarians, raw food exponents, etc.

Opposed to the group that falls into habits very readily is the
group that finds it difficult to acquire habitual ways of working
and living. All of us seek change and variety, as well as
stability. Some cannot easily form habits because they are
quickly bored by the habitual. These restless folk are the
failures or the great successes, according to their intelligence
and good fortune. There is a low-grade intelligence type, without
purpose and energy, and there is a high-grade intelligence type,
seeking the ideal, restless under imperfection and restraint,
disdaining the commonplace and the habits that go with it. Is
their disdain of habit-forming and customs the result of their
unconventional ways, or do their unconventional ways result
because they cannot easily form habits? It is very probable that
the true wanderer and Bohemian finds it difficult, at least in
youth, to form habits, and that the pseudo-Bohemian is merely an
imitation.

Habit is so intimately a part of all traits and abilities that we
would be anticipating several chapters of this book did we go
into all the habit types. Social conditions, desire, fatigue,
monotony, purpose, intelligence, inhibition, all enter into habit
and habit formation. Youth experiments with habit; old age clings
to it. Efficiency is the result of good habits but originality is
the reward of some who discard habits. A nation forms habits
which seem to be part of its nature, until emigration to another
land shows the falsity of this belief. So with individuals: a man
feels he must eat or drink so much, gratify his sex appetite so
often, sleep so many hours, exercise this or that amount, seek
his entertainment in this or that fashion,--until something
happens to make the habit impossible and he finds that what he
thought a deeply rooted mode of living was a superficial routine.
Though good habits may lead to success they may also bar the way
to the pleasures of experience; that is their danger. A man who
finds that he must do this or that in such a way had better
beware; he is getting old, no matter what his age.[1] For we grow
older as we lose mobility,--in joints, muscles, skin and our ways
of doing, feeling and thinking! It is a transitory stage of the
final immobility of Death.

[1] Says the talkative Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: "There is
one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical
ones; I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who shrinks into
himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much
beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were governed
by clock work."

We have not considered the pathological habits, such as
alcoholism, excessive smoking and eating, perverse sex habits.
The latter, the perverse sex habits, will be studied when
discussing the sex feelings and purposes in their entirety.
Alcoholism is not yet a dead issue in this country though those
who are sincere in wishing their fellows well hope it soon will
be. It stands, however, as a sort of paradigm of bad habit-
forming and presents a problem in treatment that is typical of
such habits.

Not all persons have a liability to the alcoholic habit. For most
people lack of real desire or pleasure prevented alcoholism. The
majority of those who drank little or not at all were not in the
least tempted by the drug. "Will power" rarely had anything to do
with their abstinence and the complacency with which they held
themselves up as an example to the drunken had all the flavor of
Phariseeism. To some the taste is not pleasing, to others the
immediate effects are so terrifying as automatically to shut off
excess. Many people become dizzy or nauseated almost at once and
even lose the power of locomotion or speech.

In many countries and during many centuries most of those who
became alcoholic were such largely through the social setting
given to alcohol. Because of the psychological effects of this
drug in removing restraint, inhibition and formality, in its
various forms it became the symbol of good-fellowship; and
because it has an apparent stimulation and heat-producing effect
there grew up the notion that it aided hard labor and helped
resist hardship. As the symbol of good-fellowship it grew into a
tradition of the most binding kind, so that no good time, no
coming together was complete without it, and its power is
celebrated in picturesque songs and picturesque sayings the world
over. Hospitality, tolerance, good humor, kindliness and the
pleasant breaking down of the barriers between man and man, and
also between man and woman, all these lured generation after
generation into the alcoholic habit.

There are relatively normal types of the heavy drinker,--the
socially minded and the hard manual worker. But there is a large
group of those who find in alcohol a relief from the burden of
their moods, who find in its real effect, the release from
inhibitions, a reason for drinking beyond the reach of reason. Do
you feel that the endless monotony of your existence can no
longer be borne,--drink deep and you color your life to suit
yourself. Do disappointment and despair gnaw at your love of life
so that nothing seems worth while,--some bottled "essence of
sunshine" will give new, fresh value to existence. Are you a
victim of strange, uncaused fluctuations of mood so that
periodically you descend to a bottomless pit of melancholy,
--well, then, why suffer, when over the bar a man will furnish
you a release from agony? And so men of certain types of
temperament, or with unhappy experiences, form the alcoholic
habit because it gives them surcease from pain; it deals out to
them, temporarily, a new world with happier mood, lessened
tension and greater success.

Seeking relief[1] from distressing thoughts or moods is perhaps
one of the main causes of the narcotic habit. The feeling of
inferiority, one of the most painful of mental conditions, is
responsible for the use not only of alcohol but also of other
drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, morphine, etc. One of the most
typical cases of this I have known is of a young man of
twenty-five, a tall fellow with a very unattractive face who had
this feeling of inferiority almost to the point of agony,
especially in the presence of young women, but also in any
situation where he would be noticed. He was fast becoming a
hermit when he discovered that a few drinks completely removed
this feeling. From that time on he became a steady drinker, with
now and then a short period when he would try to stop drinking,
only to resume when he found himself obsessed again by the
dreaded inferiority complex.

[1] This is the main theme of De Quincey's "Confessions of an
Opium Eater."

Similarly a shameful position, such as that of the prostitute or
the chronic criminal, is "relieved" by alcohol and drugs, so that
the majority of these types of unfortunates are either drunkards
or "dopes." Too often have reformers reversed the relationship,
believing that alcohol caused prostitution and crime. Of course
that relationship exists, but more often, in my experience, the
alcohol is used to keep up the "ego" feeling, without which few
can bear life.

Curiously enough, one of the sex perversions, masturbation, has
in a few cases a similar genesis. I have known patients who, when
under the influence of depression, or humiliated in some way or
other, found a compensating pleasure in the act. Here we come to
a cardinal truth in the understanding of ourselves and our
fellows and one we shall pursue in detail later,--that face to
face with mental pain, men seek relief or pleasure or both by
alcohol, drugs, sensual pleasures of all kinds, and that the
secret explanation of all such habits is that they offer
compensation for some pain and are turned to at such times. What
one man seeks in work, another man seeks in religion, another
finds in self-flagellation, and still others seek in alcohol,
morphine, sexual excesses, etc.

With the increasing excitement and tension of our times there is
a constant search for relief, and here is the origin of much of
the smoking. Most men find in the deliberate puff, in the slow
inhalation and in the prolonged exhalation with the formation of
the white cloud of smoke, a shifting of consciousness from the
major businesses of their mind, from a constant tension to a
minor business not requiring concentration and thereby breaking
up in a pleasurable, rhythmic fashion the sense of effort. When
one is alone the fatigue and even the pain of one's thinking is
relieved by shifting the attention to the smoking. Keeping one's
attention at a high and constant pitch is apt to produce a
restless fatigue and this is often offset to the smoker by his
habit. Excessive smoking may cause "nervousness" but as a matter
of fact it is more often a means by which the excessively nervous
try to relieve themselves. Of course it is not good therapeutics
under such conditions, but I believe that in moderation smoking
does no harm and is an innocent pleasure.

Some of the pathological motor habits, such as the tics, often
have a curious background. The most common tics are snuffing,
blinking, shaking of the head, facial contortions of one kind or
another. These arise usually under exciting conditions or in the
excitable, sometimes in the acutely self-conscious. Frequently
they represent a motor outlet for this excitement; they are the
motor analogues of crying, shouting, laughing, etc. (Indeed, a
common habit is the one so frequently heard,--a little laugh when
there is no feeling of merriment and no occasion for it.) Motor
activity discharges tension and is pleasurable and these tics
furnish a momentary pleasure; they relieve a feeling that some of
the victims compare to an itch and the habit thus is based on a
seeking of relief, even though that relief is obtained in a way
that distresses the more settled purposes of the individual.

In the establishment of good habits, those desirable from the
point of view of the important issues of life, training is of
course essential. But in the training of children, certain things
must be kept in mind: the usefulness, the practical value must be
presented to the child's mind in a way he can understand, or else
various ways of energizing him to help in the formation of the
habit must be used--praise and blame, reward and punishment.
Further, these habits are not to be held holy; cleanliness and
method are desirable acquisitions but not so desirable as a
feeling of freedom to play and experiment with life and things.
If the child is constantly worried lest he get too dirty, or
fears to play in his room because he may disorder it, he is
forming the good habits of cleanliness and method but also the
worse one of worry.

In the breaking of a bad habit, its root in desire and difficulty
must be discovered. Often enough a man does not face the source
of his trouble, preferring not to. I am not at all sure that it
is best in all cases for a man to know his own weakness; in fact,
I feel convinced to the contrary in some cases. But in the
majority of difficulties, self-revelation is salutary and makes
an intelligent coping with the situation possible. Here is the
value of the good friend, the respected pastor, the wise doctor.
The human being will always need a confessor and a confidante,
and he who is struggling with a habit is in utmost need of such
help.

Shall the struggler with a bad habit break it with its thralldom?
Shall he say to his chains, "From this time, nevermore!" To some
men it is given to win the victory this way, to rise to the
heights of a stubborn resolution and to be free. But not to many
is this possible. To others there is a long history of repeated
effort and repeated failures and then--one day there comes a
feeling of power, perhaps through a great love, a great cause, a
sermon heard, a chance sentence, or a bitter experience, and
then, like a religious conversion, the tracks of the old habit
are obliterated, never to be used again.

I have in mind two men, both heavy drinkers but differing in
everything else. One was a philosopher who saw the world in that
dreadful, clear white light of which Jack London[1] spoke, that
light which leaves no cozy, pleasant obscurities, in which Truth,
the naked, is horrible to look at, when life seems too unreal,
when purposes seem most futile. At such times he would get drunk
and be happy for the time being, and afterwards find himself
bitterly repentant, though even that was a pleasure compared to
the hollow world in which his sober self dwelt. Then one day,
when all his friends had given him up as hopeless, as destined
for disaster, he read a book. "The Varieties of Religious
Experience," by William James, came to him as a clear light comes
to a man lost in the darkness; he saw himself as a "sick soul,"
obsessed with the idea that he saw life relentlessly and clearly.
There came to him the conviction that he had been arrogant, a
conceited ass, bent on ruin, "a sickly soul," he said. Out of
that realization grew resolutions that needed no vowing or
pledging, for as simply as a man turns from one road to another
he turned from his habit into healthy-minded work.

[1] Jack London's "John Barleycorn."

The other was an essentially healthy-minded man but he loved
joviality, freedom and good fellowship. Without ever knowing how
he came to it, he found himself a confirmed drinker, holding an
inferior place, passed by men of lesser caliber. He struggled
fitfully but always slipped when the next "good fellow" slapped
him on the back and invited him to have a drink. One day he
stepped out of a barroom with a group of his cronies, and though
he walked straight there was a reckless, happy feeling in him
that pushed him on to his folly. A young lady standing on a
street corner waiting for a car caught his eye. Signaling to his
companions, he walked up to her, put his arms around her and
kissed her. The girl stood as if petrified, then she pushed him
off and looked him up and down deliberately with cold scorn in
her eyes. Then she took off her glove and slapped him across the
face with it, as if disdaining to use her hand. With that she
walked away.

The man was a gentleman, and he stood there stricken. The laugh
of his companions aroused him. He saw them as if they were
himself, with a horror and disgust that made him suddenly run
away from them.

"From that moment I never again had the slightest desire for
drink. The slap sobered me for good."

While these conversions occur now and then there are certain
practical points in the breaking of a habit that need attention
in each case.

In the first place it is best in the majority of instances to
avoid the particular stimuli and associations that set off the
habit. The stimulus is a kind of trigger; pull it and the habit
can hardly be checked. Whatever the situation is that acts as the
temptation, avoid it. Not for nothing do men pray, "Lead us not
into temptation." The will needs no such exercise and rarely
stands up well against such strain. This may mean a removal for
the time being from the source of temptation, a flying away to
gain strength.

Further, a substitution of habit, of purpose, is necessary. Some
line of activities must be selected to fill in the vacuum. A
hobby is needed, a devotion to some larger purpose, whether it be
in work or social activity. "Nature abhors a vacuum"; boredom
must be avoided, for that is a pain, awakening desire. The
gymnasium, golf, sports of all kinds are substitute pleasures of
great value.

Third, harness a friend, a superior or a respected equal to the
yoke with you. Pull double harness; let him lend his strength to
yours. Throw away pride; confess and receive new energy from his
sympathy and wisdom. If you are lucky enough to have such a
friend, or some wise counselor, thank God for him. For here is
where the true friend finds his highest value.

In the analysis of any character the question of the kind of
habits formed demands attention. Since almost all traits become
matters of habit, such an inquiry would sooner or later lead to a
catalogue of qualities. What is here pertinent is this,--that one
might inquire into the kind of habits that are easily formed by
the individual and the kind that are not. Habits fall into groups
such as these:

1. Relating to care of the body: cleanliness, diet, exercise,
bowel function, sleep. Here we learn about personal tidiness or
the reverse, foppery, dandyism, gluttony, asceticism, etc.

2. Relating to method, efficiency, neatness in work: some people
find it almost impossible to become methodical or neat; others
become obsessed by these qualities to the exclusion of mobility.

3. Relating to the pursuit of pleasure: type of pleasure sought,
time given to it, hobbies.

4. Relating to special habits: alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex
perversions.

5. Relating to study and advancement: love of books, attendance
at lectures.

Especially in the study of children is some such scheme
essential, for then one gets a definite idea of their defects and
takes definite efforts to make habitual the desired practice, or
else one sees the special trend, and, if it is good, fosters it.
This, of course, is the long and short of character development.

CHAPTER IV. STIMULATION, INHIBITION, ORGANIZING ENERGY, CHOICE
AND CONSCIOUSNESS

There are three fundamental factors in the relation of any
organism to the environment and in the relation of the various
parts of an organism to each other which we must now consider. To
consider a living thing of any kind as something separate from
the stimuli the world streams in on it, or to consider it as a
real unit, is a mistake that falsifies most of the thinking of
the world.

On us, as living things, the universe pours in stimuli of a few
kinds. Or rather there are few kinds of stimuli we are
specialized to receive and react to; there may be innumerable
other kinds to which we cannot react because they do not reach
us. The world for us is a collection of things that we see, hear,
smell, taste and feel, but there may be vast reaches of things
for which we have no avenues of approach,--completely
unimaginable things because our images are built upon our senses.

To some of the stimuli the world pours in on us we must react
properly or die. Certain "mechanisms" with which we are equipped
must respond to these stimuli or the forces of the world destroy
us. A lion on the horizon must awaken flight, or concealment, or
the modified fight reaction of using weapons; extreme cold or
heat must start up impulses and reflexes leading away from their
disintegrating effects. Food must, when smelled or seen, lead us
to conduct whereby we supply ourselves or we die from hunger.
Dangers and needs awaken reactions, both through instinctive
responses and through intelligence. The main activities of life
are to be classed as "averting" and "acquiring," for if life
showers us with the things we would or need to have, it also
pelts us with the things we fear, hate or despise. It would be
interesting to know which activities are the most numerous;
presumably the lucky or successful man is busy acquiring while
the unlucky or unsuccessful finds himself busiest averting. The
averting activities are directed largely against the
disagreeable, disgusting, dangerous and the undesired; the
acquiring activities are directed toward the pleasant, the
necessary, the desired. The problems of life are to know what is
really good or bad for us and how to acquire the one and avert
the other. While there are certain things that "naturally"[1] are
deemed good or bad, there are more that are so regarded through
training and education. Morality and Taste are alike concerned
with bringing about attitudes that will determine the "right"
response to the stimuli of the world.

[1] I place in quotations NATURALLY because it is difficult to
know what is "natural" and what is cultural. In the widest sense
everything is natural; in the narrowest very few things are
natural. Cooked food, clothing, houses, marriages, education,
etc., are not found in a state of nature, any more than clocks
and plays by Ibsen are. Our judgment as to what is good and bad
is mainly instinctive leaning directed or smothered by education.

The stimuli that thus pour in upon the individual, and to which
he must react, must find an organism ready to respond in some way
or other. A sleeping man naturally does not adjust himself to
danger, nor does a paralyzed man fly. The most attractive female
in the world causes no response in the very young male child and
perhaps stirs only reminiscences in the aged. Food, which causes
the saliva to flow in the mouth of the hungry, may disgust the
full. Throughout life there are factors in the internal life of
the organism instantly changing one's reaction to things of
physical, mental and moral significance. He talks loudest of
restraint and control who has no desire; and in satiation even
the sinner sees the beauty of asceticism. There must be a
coincidence of stimulus, readiness and opportunity for the full,
successful response to take place.[1]

[1] A slang epigram puts it better: The time, the place, and the
girl.

The simplest response to any stimulus from the outer world is the
reflex act. Theoretically a reflex act is dependent upon the
interaction of a sensory surface, a sensory nerve cell, a motor
nerve cell and a muscle, i. e., a receptive apparatus and a motor
apparatus in such close union that the will and intelligence play
no part. Thus if one puts his finger on a hot stove he withdraws
it immediately, and such responses are present even in the
decapitated frog and human for a short time. So if light streams
in on the wide-open pupil of the eye, it contracts, grows
smaller, without any effort of the will, and in fact entirely
without the consciousness of the individual. Swallowing is a
series of reflexes in a row, so that food in the back part of the
mouth sets a reflex going that carries it beyond the epiglottis;
another reflex carries it to the esophagus and then one reflex
after the other transports the food the rest of the way. Except
for the first effort of swallowing, the rest is entirely
involuntary and even unconscious. Those readers who are
interested would do well to read the work of Pavlow on the
conditioned reflex, in which the great Russian physiologist
builds up all action on a basis of a modification of the
primitive reflex which he calls the "conditioned reflex."[1]

[1] Pavlow is one of the scientists who regard all mental life as
built up out of reflexes. The immediate reflex is only one
variety; thought, emotion, etc., are merely reflexes placed end
to end. Pavlow divides action into two trends, one due to an
unconditioned reflex, of innate structure, and the other a
modified or conditioned reflex which arises because some stimulus
has become associated with the reflex act. Thus saliva dripping
from a dog's mouth at the smell of food is an unconditioned
reflex; if a bell is heard at the same time the food is smelled
then in the course of time the saliva flows at the sound of the
bell alone,--a conditioned reflex. A very complex system has been
built up of this kind of facts, which I have criticized
elsewhere.

The simple reflex, immediate response to a stimulus, has only a
limited field in human life or adult life. Sherrington points out
in his notable book, "The Integrative Action of the Nervous
System," that there is a play of the entire organism on each
responding element, and there is also a competition throughout
each pathway to action. Let us examine this a little closer.

A man is hungry, let us say; i. e., there arise from his
gastro-intestinal tract and from the tissues stimuli which arouse
motor mechanisms to action and the man seeks food. The need of
the body arouses desire in the form of an organic sensation and
this arouses mechanisms whose function is to satisfy that desire.
Let us assume that he finds something that looks good and he is
about to seize it when an odor, called disagreeable, assails his
nostrils from the food, which stops him. Then there arises a
competition for action between the desire for food and the visual
stimulus, associated memories, etc., on the one hand, and the
odor, the awakened fear, memories, disgust, etc., on the other
hand. This struggle for action, for use of the mechanisms of
action, is the struggling of choosing, one of the fundamental
phenomena of life. In order for a choice to become manifest, what
is known as inhibition must come into play; an impulse to action
must be checked in order that an opposing action can be
effective. The movement of rejection uses muscles that oppose the
movement of acquirement; e. g., one uses the triceps and the
other the biceps, muscles situated in opposite sides of the upper
arm and having antagonistic action. In order for triceps to act,
biceps must be inhibited from action, and in that inhibition is a
fundamental function of the organism. In every function of the
body there are opposing groups of forces; for every dilator there
is a contractor, for every accelerator of action there is
inhibition. Nature drives by two reins, and one is a checkrein.

This function of inhibition, then, delays, retards or prevents an
action and is in one sense a higher function than the response to
stimulation. Its main seat is the cerebrum, the "highest" nervous
tissue, whereas reflex and instinctive actions usually are in the
vegetative nervous system, the spinal cord, the bulbar regions
and the mid-brain, all of which are lower centers. Choice, which
is intimately associated with inhibition, is par excellence a
cerebral function and in general is associated with intense
consciousness. The act of choosing brings to the circumstances
the whole past history of the individual; it marshals his
resources of judgment, intelligence, will, purposes and desires.
In choice lies the fate of the personality, for it is basically
related to habit formation. Further, in the dynamics of life a
right, proper choice, an appropriate choice, opens wide the door
of opportunity, whereas an unfortunate choice may commit one to
the mercies of wrecking forces. Education should aim to teach
proper choosing and then proper action.

The capacity for perceiving and responding to stimuli, for
inhibiting or delaying action and for choosing, are of cardinal
importance in our study. But there is another phase of life and
character without which everything else lacks unity and is
unintelligible. From the beginning of life to the end there is
choice. Who and what chooses? From infancy one sees the war of
purposes and desires and the gradual rise of one purpose or set
of purposes into dominance,--in short, the growth of unity, the
growth of personality. The common man calls this unity his soul,
the philosopher speaks of the ego and implies some such thing as
this organizing energy of character.

But a naturalistic view of character must reject such a
metaphysical entity, for one sees the organizing energy increase
and diminish with the rest of character through health, age,
environment, etc. Further, there is at work in all living things
a similar something that organizes the action of the humblest bit
of protoplasm. This organizing energy of character will be, for
us, that something inherent in all life which tends to
individualize each living thing. It is as if all life were
originally of one piece and then, spreading itself throughout the
world, it tended to differentiate and develop (according to the
Spencerian formula) into genera, species, groups and individuals.
This organizing energy works up the experiences of the individual
so that new formulae for action develop, so that what is
experienced becomes the basis of future reaction.

It must be remembered that the world we live in has its great
habits. Night follows day in a cycle that never fails, the
seasons are repeated each year, and there is a periodicity in the
lives of plants and animals that is manifested in growth,
nutrition, mating and resting. Things happen again and again,
though in slightly altered form, and our desires, satisfied now,
soon repeat their urge. The great organic needs and sensations
repeat themselves and with the periodic world of outer experience
must be dealt with according to a more or less settled policy. It
is the organizing energy that works out the policy, that learns,
inhibits, chooses and acts,--and it is the essential
character-developing principle. For like our bodily organs which
are whipped into line by the nervous system, our impulses,
instincts, and reflexes[1] have their own policy of action and
therefore need, for the good of the entire organism, discipline
and coordination. It may sound as if the body were made up of
warring entities and states and that there gradually arose a
centralized good, and though the analogy may lead to error, it
offers a convenient method of thinking.

[1] Roux, the great French biologist, has shown that each tissue
and each cell competes with the other tissues and the other
cells. The organism, though it reaches a practical working unity
as viewed by consciousness, is nevertheless no entity; it is a
collection, an aggregate of living cells which are organized on a
cooperation basis just as men are, but maintain individuality and
competition nevertheless.

Moreover, the organizing energy seems often to be at work when
consciousness itself is at rest, as in sleep. Often enough a man
debates and debates on lines of conduct and wakes up with his
problem solved. Or he works hard to learn and goes to bed
discouraged, because the matter is a jumble, and wakes up in the
morning with an orderly and useful arrangement of the facts. A
writer seeks to find the proper opening,--and gives up in a
frenzy of despair. He is perhaps walking or driving when suddenly
he lifts his head as one does who is listening to a longed-for
voice, and in himself he finds the phrases that he longs for.
Something within has set itself, so it seems, the task of
bringing the right associations into consciousness. What we call
quickness of mind, energy of mind, is largely this function.

It is this which adapts us to different situations, different
groups, by calling into play organized modes of talking or
acting. We pass from a group of ladies in whose presence we have
been friendly but decorous, perhaps unconventionally formal, to a
group of business intimates, men of long acquaintance. Without
even being conscious of it we lounge around, feet on the table,
carelessly dropping cigarette ash to the floor, using language
chosen for force rather than elegance; we discuss sports, women,
business and a whole group of different emotions, habits and
purposes come to the surface, though we were not at all conscious
of having repressed them while in the presence of the ladies. A
faux pas is where the organizer has "slipped" on his job; lack of
tact implies in part a rigid organizing energy, neither plastic
nor versatile enough.

We are now ready to face certain developments of these three main
factors, viz., the response to stimuli; choice and inhibition,
and the organizing energy. Largely we might classify people
according to the type of vigor of their reactions to stimuli, the
quality and vigor of choice and of inhibition, and the quality
and vigor of the organizing energy. We note that there are people
who have, as it were, exquisitely sensitive feelers for the
stimuli of one kind or another and who react vigorously, perhaps
excessively; that there are others of a duller, less reactive
nature, largely because they are stimuli-proof. Others are
under-inhibited, follow desire or outer stimulus without heed,
without a brake; others are over-inhibited, too cautious, too
full of doubt, unable to choose the reaction that seems
appropriate. The organizing energy of some is low; they never
seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living;
they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with
disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy
is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the
metaphor) they weld life's happenings, their memories, their
emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I,
harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end
and striving bravely towards it. Or there is over-unification and
fanaticism, with narrow aim and little sympathy for other aims.
Sketched in this very broad way we see masses of people, rather
than individuals, and we are not finely adjusted to our subject.

Psychologists rarely concern themselves to any extent with these
matters; they deal mainly with their outgrowths,--emotions,
instinct, intelligence and will. We are at once beset with
difficulties which are resolved mainly by ignoring them. In such
a book as this we are not concerned with the fundamental nature
of these divisions of the mental life, we must omit such
questions as the relation of instinct to racial habit, or the
evolution of instinct from habit, if that is really its origin.
Again I must repeat that we shall deal with these as organic, as
arising in the sensitized individual as a result of environmental
forces, as manifestations of a life which is as yet--and perhaps
always will be--mysterious to us. We shall best consider these
manifestations of mental activity as an interplay of the
reactions of stimulation, inhibition, choice, organizing energy,
and not as separate and totally different matters. We shall see
that probably emotion is one aspect of reaction to the world,
while instinct is merely another aspect; that intelligence is a
cerebral shift of instinct, and that will is no unity but the
energy of instincts and purposes.

Before we go farther we must squarely face a problem of human
thought. Man, since he started reflecting about himself, has been
puzzled about his consciousness. How can a person be aware of
himself, and what identifies and links together each phase of
consciousness? There is an enormous range of thought on this
subject: from those who identified consciousness as the only
reality and considered what the average person holds as
realities--things and people--as only phases of consciousness, to
those who, like Huxley, regard consciousness as an
"epi-pbenomenon," a sort of overture to brain activity and having
nothing whatever to do with action, nothing to do with choice and
plan, so that, as Lloyd Morgan points out, "An unconscious
Shakespeare writes plays acted by an unconscious troupe of actors
to an unconscious audience." The first extreme view, that of
Berkeley and the idealists, nullifies all other realities save
that of the individual thinker and reduces one to the absurdities
of Solipsism where a man writes books to convince persons
conjured up by himself and having no existence outside of
himself; the other view nullifies that which seems to each of us
the very essence of himself.

I shall take a very simple view of consciousness,[1] simply
because I shall deliberately dodge the great difficulties.
Consciousness is the result of the activities of a group of more
or less permanently excited areas of the brain--areas having to
do with positions of the head, eyes and shoulders; areas having
to do with vision, hearing and smell; areas having to do with
speech,--these constituting extremely mobile, extremely active
parts of the organism. From these consciousness may irradiate to
the activities of almost every part of the organism, in different
degrees. We are often extremely conscious of the activities of
the hands, in less degree of the legs; we may become wrapped up
almost completely in a sensation emanating from the sex organs,
and under fear or excitement the heart may pound so that we feel
and are conscious of it as ordinarily we can never be. The state
of consciousness called interest may shift our feeling of self to
any part of our body (as in pain, when a part usually out of
consciousness swings into it, or when the hand of a lover grips
our own so that the great reality of our life at the moment seems
to be the consciousness of the hand) or it may fasten us to an
outside object until our world narrows to that object, nothing
else having any conscious value. This latter phenomenon is very
striking in children; they become fascinated by something they
hear or see and project themselves, as it were, into that object;
they become the "soapiness of soap, or the wetness of water" (to
use Chesterton's phrase), and when they listen to a story they
hold nothing in reserve. Consciousness may busy itself with its
past phases, with the preceding thought, emotion, sensation
--how, I do not know--or it may occupy itself mainly with the
world of things which are hereby declared to have a reality in
our theory. In the first instances we have introspection and
subjectiveness, and in the second we have extroversion and
objectivity.

[1] For discussion of consciousness read Berkeley, Locke, Hume,
Spencer, Lotze, Moyan, James, Wundt, Munsterberg and every other
philosopher and psychologist. I have not attempted to discuss the
matter from the philosopher's point of view for the very obvious
reason that I am no philosopher.

Since consciousness is most intense when the new or unfamiliar is
seen, heard, felt or attempted, we may assume it has a chief
function in acquainting the individual with the new and
unfamiliar and in the establishment of habitual reactions, We are
extraordinarily conscious of a queer, unexplainable thing on the
horizon, we bring into the limelight (or IT brings into the
limelight) all our possible reactions,--fear, flight, anger,
fight, circumvention, curiosity and the movements of
investigation; we are thrown into the maelstrom of choice. Choice
and consciousness, doubt and consciousness, are directly related;
it is only when conduct becomes established as habit, with
choosing relegated to the background, that consciousness, in so
far as the act is concerned, becomes diminished.

A moderate constant sensation tends to disappear from
consciousness, as when we keep our hand in warm water. It then
takes a certain increase of the stimulus to keep the sensation
from lapsing out of consciousness. This lapsing out of
consciousness of the steady stimulus, in its ramifications, is
responsible for a good deal of the activity of man, since
sensation is a goal of effort.[1] Under emotion we become aware
of two sets of things,--the reaction of our body in its sum
total of pleasure or the reverse, and second the object that sets
up this reaction. Consciousness fastens itself on the body and on
the world, and the bodily reaction becomes a guide for future
action. Extreme bodily reactions are painful and may result in
the abolishing of consciousness.

[1] The physiologists speak of this phenomenon under the heading
of the Weber-Fechner law, after the two physiologists who gave it
prominence. James pokes a good deal of fun at the "law," which is
expressed mathematically. Perhaps the mathematics should have
been eliminated as too "scientific" for our present attainment,
but it does remain true that it is not the ACTUAL stimulus
increase that is important in sensation or perception, but the
RELATIVE stimulus increase. This is behind all of "getting used
to things"; it removes the pain from humiliation and also the
novelty from joy. It is the reason behind all of the searching
for novelty and excitement.

We assume that consciousness is organic, though we concede that
it may be true that it is borrowed from a great pool of
consciousness[1] out of which we all come. Consciousness IS
organic because a blow on the head may abolish it as may drugs
and disease, or a shifting of the blood supply as in emotion or
fatigue in the form of sleep, etc. Where does it go to and how
does it come back? The savage answered that question by building
up the idea of a soul, a thing that might migrate, had an
independent existence, took journeys in the form of dreams and
lived and flourished after death. Most of these ideas still
persist, perhaps as much through the fear of annihilation as
anything else, but as to whether or not they are true this book
does not concern itself. We have no proof of these matters, but
we can prove that we can play on consciousness as we play on a
piano, through the body and brain. A blow injures groups of nerve
cells and consciousness disappears; when they recover, it
returns. Where does any function go when structure is injured? We
have practically the same kind of proof for the position of
consciousness as a function of the brain and body that we have
for gastric juice as a secretion of gastric cells.

[1] Even if it were true that consciousness is the only reality,
nobody really believes it in that nobody acts as if it were true.
Conversely, everybody acts as if trees, rocks, and people were
realities; as if fatigue, sickness, age, etc., affected
consciousness. That is why, in this book, we are discarding as
irrelevant the "ultimate" truth concerning consciousness. My
humble belief is that the ultimate truth in this matter will
never concern us because we shall never know it.

However widely we spread the function of consciousness and its
domain, we still leave a large field of activities untouched. And
so we come to the conception of the subconsciousness. There are
two prevailing sets of opinions concerning the subconscious.

The first is quite matter-of-fact. It states that the movements
and activities of a large part of the body are outside of the
realm of consciousness, such as the activities of the great
viscera--heart, lungs, intestines, liver, blood vessels, sex
glands--and are largely operated by the vegetative nervous
system.[1] There are influences pouring into the brain from these
organs, together with influences from muscles, joints, tendons,
and these influences, though not consciously itemized, are the
subconsciously received stimuli which give us feelings of vigor,
energy, courage, hopefulness, or the reverse, according to the
state of the organism. In health the ordinary result of these
stimuli is good, though people may have health in that no
definite disease is present, and yet there is some deficiency in
the energy-arousing viscera which brings a lowered coenesthesia,
a lessened vigor and lowered mood. In youth the state of the
organs brings a state of well feeling; in old age there is a
constant feeling of a low balance of energy and mood, and the
person is always on the verge of unpleasant feeling. In the great
change periods of life--at puberty and the climacteric (or the
menopause)--the sudden change in the activity of the sex organs
may produce great alterations[2] in the coenaesthesia and
therefore in the energy and mood of the individual.

[1] This is not the place to describe the vegetative nervous
system. (It was formerly called the sympathetic nervous system,
but this term is now limited to one part of this system, and the
term autonomic to another part, although some writers still use
the term sympathetic for the whole, and others [the English] the
term autonomic for the whole.) This system is the nervous
mechanism of organic life, regulating heart, lungs, blood
vessels, intestines, sex organs, acting together with endocrines,
etc. A huge amount of work has been done of late years on this
system and we know definitely that it stimulates, inhibits and
regulates these organs, and also that it records their
activities. We are commencing to believe that this system is
fully as important, in mental life, as the brain. See Langley,
Schaeffer, Higier, etc.

[2] This is especially true of the menopause in women, and often
enough of each menstrual period. That there is a climacteric in
men is not so clear, but something corresponding to it occurs, at
least in the case of some men.

In addition, these activities, which are so all-important,
determine the basic conduct by arousing the basic appetites and
desires of the individual. It is the change in the
gastro-intestinal tract and in the tissues of the body that
starts up the hunger feeling and the impulses which prompt men to
seek food; in other words, this type of coenaesthesia has set
going all the physical and mental activities relating to food; it
is the basic impulse behind agriculture and stock raising, as
well as energizing work activities of all kinds. It is the
tension in the seminal vessels of the male that wakes up his
passion, if it is not the sole source of that passion. Sex desire
in the adult male has many elements in it, not pertinent at
present, but the coenaesthetic influence of the physical
structures is its starting point. In men as well as women there
is a cycle of desire, with height due to physical tension and
abyss following the discharge or disappearance of tension, that
profoundly influences life and conduct. Here the sympathetic
nervous system and the internal secretion of the genital glands
awaken into sexual activity brain, spinal cord and muscles, so
that the individual seeks a mate, plunges into marriage and
directs his conduct, conscious of taste and desire, but largely
unconscious of the physical condition that is impelling him on.
In this sense the subconscious activities dominate in life,
because the functions of nutrition and reproduction are largely
unconscious in their origin, but there is no organized, plotting
subconsciousness at work.

Once a thing is experienced, it is stored in memory. What is the
basis and position of a memory when we are not conscious of it,
when our conscious minds are busy with other matters? What
happens when a desire is repressed, inhibited into inaction; when
consciousness revolts against part of its own content? Is a
"forgotten" memory ever really lost, or a desire that is
squelched and thrust out of "mind" really made inactive? Do our
inhibitions really inhibit, or do we build up another self or set
of selves that rise to the surface under strange forms, under the
guise of disease manifestations?

Sigmund Freud and his followers have made definite answers to the
foregoing, answers that are incorporated in a doctrine called
Freudianism. Freud is an Austrian Jew, a physician, and one that
soon specialized in nervous and mental diseases. Early in his
career he did some excellent work in the study of the paralysis
of childhood (infantile hemiplegia), but his attention and that
of an older colleague, Breuer, were soon drawn (as has occurred
to almost every neurologist) to the manifestations of that
extraordinary disease, hysteria. Hysteria has played so important
a role in human history, and Freud's ideas are permeating so
deeply into modern thought that I deem it advisable to devote a
chapter to them.

CHAPTER V. HYSTERIA, SUBCONSCIOUSNESS AND FREUDIANISM

Hysteria was known to the ancients and in fact is as old as the
written history of mankind. Considered essentially a disease of
women, it was given its present name which is derived from
"hysteron," the Greek name for the womb. We know to-day that men
also are victims of this malady, though it arises under somewhat
different circumstances than is the case with the other sex. Men
and women, living in the same world and side by side, are placed
in greatly different positions in that world, are governed by
different traditions and are placed under the influences of
differing ambitions, expectations, hopes and fears. Hysteria
arises largely out of the emotional and volitional reactions of
life, and these reactions differ in the sexes.

It was a group of French neurologists, headed by Charcot--and
including very illustrious men, such as Janet and Marie, who paid
the first scientific attention to the disease. Under their
analyses hysteria was defined as a mental disease in which
certain symptoms appeared prominently.

1. Charcot especially paid attention to what are known as the
attacks. The hysteric patient (usually a woman, and so we shall
speak of the patient as "she") under emotional stress and strain,
following a quarrel or a disagreement or perhaps some
disagreeable, humiliating situation, shows alarming symptoms.
Perhaps she falls (never in a way to injure herself) to the floor
and apparently loses consciousness, closes her eyes, rolls her
head from side to side, moans, clenches her fists, lifts her body
from the floor so that it rests on head and heels (opisthotonic
hysteria), shrieks now and then and altogether presents a
terrifying spectacle. Or else she twitches all over, weeps,
moans, laughs and shouts, and rushes around the room, beating her
head on the walls; or she may lie or stand in a very dramatic
pose, perhaps indicating passion or fear or anger. The attacks
are characterized by a few main peculiarities, which are that the
patient usually has had an emotional upset or is in some
disagreeable situation, that she does not hurt herself by her
falls, that consciousness is never completely abolished and
fluctuates so that now she seems almost "awake" and then she
seems almost in a complete stupor, and that the expression of
emotion in the attack is often very prominent. These symptoms are
readily differentiated from what is seen in epilepsy.[1]

[1] The French writers of the school of Babinski deny that the
above symptom and even the majority of the following have a real
existence in hysteria. The English, American and German
neurologists and the rest of the French school describe hysteria
substantially as I am here describing it.

2. The hysteric paralyses which are featured in all the
literatures of the world are curious manifestations and often
very stubborn. Following an accident (especially in industry and
in war) and after some emotional difficulty there is a paralysis
of some part of the body. The arm or some particular part of the
arm cannot be moved by the will, is paralyzed; or else the
difficulty involves one or both legs. Sometimes speech is gone,
or the power of moving the head; occasionally the difficulty is
with one side of the face, etc. Usually the paralysis comes on
suddenly, but often it comes on gradually. Modern neurology soon
discovered that these paralyses were quite unlike those seen when
there is "real" injury to the brain, spinal cord or the
peripheral nerves. They corresponded to the layman's idea of a
part. Thus a paralysis of the arm ends at the shoulder, a
paralysis of the feet at the ankle, and in ways not necessary to
detail here differ from what occurs when the organic structure of
the nervous system is involved. For example, the reflexes in
hysteria are unaltered, and stiffness when it occurs is not the
stiffness of organic disease. If a neurologist were to have a
hysteric paralysis a very interesting problem in diagnosis would
be presented.

Further, the paralysis yields in spectacular fashion to various
procedures or else disappears spontaneously in remarkable fashion
overnight. Paralyses of this type have disappeared under
hypnosis, violent electric shocks, "magical" liniments, threats,
prayers, the healer's, the fakir's, the doctor's personal
influence; under circumstances of danger (a fire, a row, etc.);
by pilgrimages to Lourdes, St. Anne de Beaupre, the Temple of
Diana, the relic of a saint; by the influence of sudden joy,
fear, anger; by the work of the psychoanalyst and by that of the
osteopath! Every great religious leader and every savage medicine
man beating a tom-tom has had to, prove his pretensions to
greatness by healing the sick--so intensely practical is man--and
he has proved his divinity by curing the hysterics, so that they
threw away their crutches, or jumped blithely out of bed, or used
their arms, perhaps for the first time in years. Hysteria has
caused more talk of the influence of mind over body than all
other manifestations of mental peculiarity put together. Wherever
there is anything to be gained by hysteric paralyses, these
appear in much greater frequency than under ordinary
circumstances. Thus the possibility of recovering damages seems
to play a role in bringing about a paralysis that defies
treatment until the litigation is settled; similarly the
possibility of being removed from the fighting line played a
large part in the causation of war hysteric paralysis.

3. A group of sensory phenomena is conspicuous in hysteria,
sometimes combined with the paralyses and attacks but often
existing alone. A part of the body will become curiously
insensitive to stimulation. Thus one may thrust a pin into any
part without evoking any pain and APPARENTLY without being felt;
one may rub the cornea of the eye, that exquisitely sensitive
part, without arousing a reaction; one may push a throat stick
against the uvula as it hangs from the palate without arousing
the normal and very lively reflex of "gagging." These insensitive
areas, known as stigmata, played a very important role in the
epidemic of witchcraft hunting of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when the witch was so diagnosed if she felt no pain
when a needle was thrust into her. Mankind has often enough
worshiped the insane and mentally aberrant and has as often been
diabolically cruel to them.

What has been stated of the paralyses is true of the insensitive
areas; they correspond to an idea of a part and not to an
anatomical unit. Thus a loss of sensation will reach up to the
wrist (glove type) all around, front and back, or to the elbow or
the shoulder, etc. No organically caused anaesthetic area ever
does this, and so the neurologist is able, usually, to separate
the two conditions. And the anaesthesias yield as do the hysteric
paralyses to a variety of agents, from prayer and persuasion to a
bitter tonic or a blow. I confess to a weird feeling in the
presence of a hysteric whose arm can be thrust through and
through with a needle without apparently suffering any pain, and
it seems to me that this may be the explanation of the fortitude
of those martyrs who have astonished and sometimes converted
their persecutors by their sublime resistance to torture.

There has been described as part of hysteria the hysteric
temperament. The characteristics of this temperament are the
emotional instability, the strong desire for sympathy, the effort
to obtain one's desire through weakness, through the appeal to
the sympathy of others, an irritable egoism never satisfied and
without firm purpose. It is true that the majority of peace-time
hysterics show this peculiar temperament, but it is also true
that the war-time hysterics often enough were of "normal"
character, without prior evidence of weakness.

As I before mentioned, Freud became greatly interested in this
group of patients and especially in the female patients, since in
ordinary neurological practice the male hysteric is not common.
Out of his experience and effort he built up a system of beliefs
and treatment, the evolution of which is interesting, but which
is not here important.

At the present time the Freudian doctrine hangs on the following
beliefs:

1. That from the beginning to the end of life everything in the
mental activities of man has a cause and a meaning, and that
these causes and meanings may be traced back to infancy. No slip
of the tongue is accidental; it has purpose and this purpose can
be traced by psychoanalysis. So with hysteric phenomena: the
paralyses, the sensory changes, all the queer and startling
things represent something of importance and of value to the
subconscious.

2. There is in man a subconscious mentality, having wills,
purposes, strivings, desires, passions. These trends are the raw,
native, uninhibited desires of man; they are our lusts, our crude
unsocialized desires, arising out of a metaphysical,
undifferentiated yearning called libido. In the Freudian
"psychology" the libido is mainly sex desire and takes the form
of homosexual feelings, incest feelings (desire for the father or
for the mother--the oedipus complex), desire for the sister or
brother.[1] (The human being, according to Freud, goes through
three stages in his sex life: first, a sex attachment to himself
marked by thumb sucking, masturbation, etc., second, an
attachment to the same sex--homosexuality--and, finally, the
attachment or desire for the opposite sex.) In the practical
application of the Freudian psychology to the patients the sex
conflicts (of which we shall speak shortly) are all important;
the subconsciousness is largely taken up with sex and with
efforts to obtain gratification for these sex desires.

[1] The Freudians would protest against this. Libido is the life
energy,--but all the Freudian analyses of actual cases published
make libido sex, and usually "perverse." (I put the perverse in
quotations because I fear to be called prudish by Freudians.)

3. But, the theory continues, the conscious personality is the
socialized personality, having aims and ends not consistent with
desire for mother, homosexual cravings, lust for a married man or
woman. So there ensues a battle between desire and inhibition.
The inhibiting agent is a something called the censor, who pushes
back into the subconsciousness the socially tabooed, the socially
abhorrent desires; represses emotions and instincts that are
socially out of order. But there is no real victory for the
consciousness, for the complex (the name given to a desire or
wish with its attendant ideas, emotions and motor manifestations)
is still active, subconsciously changing the life of the person,
causing him to make slips in his speech, expressing itself in his
dreams and his work, and if sufficiently powerful, giving rise to
nervous or mental disease of one type or another. Nothing is ever
forgotten, according to Freud, and the reason our childhood is
not voluntarily remembered is because it is full of forbidden
desires and curiosities and the developing censor thrusts it all
into the subconsciousness, where it continues to make trouble all
the rest of the individual's life. In fact, a cardinal part of
Freudianism (which he and his followers are lately modifying) is
that it is the results of the "psychic traumata" (psychical
injuries) of infancy and childhood that cause the hysteria of the
adult; and these psychical traumata are largely (about ninety-
nine per cent.) sexual.

4. Freudianism has borrowed the time-honored dictum that every
sensation has a natural result in action and has elaborated it
into the statement that every affective state, every desire and
craving of whatever sort, needs a motor discharge, an avenue of
outlet. If the desire or emotion is inhibited, its excitement is
transferred with it into the subconscious and that excitement may
attach itself to other excitements and break into consciousness
as a mental disturbance of one type or another. If you can get at
the complex by psychoanalysis, by dragging it to the light, by
making it conscious, you discharge the excitement and health is
restored. This originally was very important in the Freudian work
and was called by the crude term of catharsis.

5. How can one get at these subterranean cravings and strivings,
at the fact that originally one desired one's mother and was
jealous of one's father, or vice versa? Here Freud developed an
elaborate technique based on the following:

Though the censor sits on the lid of the subconsciousness, that
wily self has ways and means of expression. In dreams, in humor,
in the slip of the tongue, in forgetfulness, in myths of the
race, in the symptoms of the hysteric patient, in the creations
of writers and artists, the subconsciousness seeks to symbolize
in innocent (or acceptable) form its crude wishes. By taking a
dream, for example, and analyzing it by what is known as the free
association method, one discovers the real meaning of the terms
used, the meaning behind the symbol; and behind the apparent
dream-content one sees revealed the wishes and disorganizing
desires of the subconscious or the real person. For throughout
Freud's work, though not so definitely expressed, there is the
idea that the subconscious is by far the most important part of
the personality, and that the social purposes, the moral
injunctions and feelings are not the real purposes and real
desires of the real personality.

In analyzing dreams, the symbols become quite standardized. The
horses, dogs, beards, queer situations of the dream (falling,
walking without clothes, picking up money, etc.), the demons,
ghosts, flying, relate definitely to sex situations, sex organs,
sex desires. (The Freudians are apt to deny this theoretically,
but practically every dream of the thousands they publish is a
sex dream of crude content.) Naturally a "pure" girl is quite
shocked when told that because she dreamed she was riding a gray
horse in a green meadow that she really has bad (and still is
troubled by) incestuous desires for her father, but that is the
way to cure her of her neurasthenia or fatigue or obsession of
one kind or other.

I have not attempted a detailed account of the technique of free
association, nor the Freudian account of humor, etc. There are
plenty of books on the market written by Freud himself and his
followers. Frankly I advise the average person not to read them.
I am opposed to the Freudian account of life and character,
though recognizing that he has caused the psychologist to examine
life with more realism, to strip away pretense, to be familiar
with the crude and to examine conduct with the microscope.

I do not believe there is an ORGANIZED subconsciousness, having a
PERSONALITY. Most of the work which proves this has been done on
hysterics. Hysterics are usually proficient liars, are very
suggestible and quite apt to give the examiner what he looks for,
because they seek his friendly interest and eager study. Wherever
I have checked up the "subconscious" facts as revealed by the
patient as a result of his psychoanalysis or through hypnosis, I
have found but little truth. On the other hand, the Freudians
practically never check up the statements of their patients; if a
woman tells all sorts of tales of her husband's attitude toward
her, or of the attitude of her parents, it is taken for granted
that she tells the truth. My belief is that had the statements of
Freud's patients been carefully investigated he would probably
never have evolved his theories.

The Freudians have made no consecutive study of normal childhood,
though they lay great stress on this period of life and in fact
trace the symptoms of their patients back to "infantile trauma."
Most of Freud's ideas on sex development can be traced to, the
one four-and-a-half-years-old child he analyzed, who was as
representative of normal childhood as the little chess champion
of nine years now astounding the world is representative of the
chess ability of the average child. Moreover, the basis of the
technique is the free association, an association released from
inhibitions of all kinds. There isn't any such thing, as
Professor Woodworth has pointed out. All associations are
conditioned by the physical condition of the patient, by his
mood, by the nature of the environment he finds himself in, by
the personality of the examiner and his powers of suggesting, his
purposes and (very important) by the patient's purposes, which he
cannot bid "Disappear!" As for the results of treatment, every
neurologist meets patients again and again who have been
"psychoanalyzed" without results. Moreover, psychoneurotic
patients get well without treatment, as do all other classes of
the sick, and the Christian Scientist, the osteopath and the
chiropractic also have records of "cures."

This is not the place to discuss in further detail the Freudian
ideas (the wish, the symbol, the jargon of transference, etc).
The leading follower of Freud, Jung, has already broken away from
the parent church, and there is an amusing cry of heresy raised.
Soon the eminent Austrian will have the pleasure of seeing a
half-dozen schools that have split off from his own,--followers
of Bleuler, Jung, Adler and others.

There IS a subconsciousness in that much of the nervous activity
of the organism has but little or no relation to consciousness.
There are mechanisms laid down by heredity and by the racial
structure that accomplish great functions without any but the
most indirect effect on consciousness and without any control by
the conscious personality. We are spurred on to sex life, to
marriage, to the care of our children by instinct; but the
instinct is not a personality any more than the automatic
heartbeat is. We repress a forbidden desire; if we are successful
and really overcome the desire by setting up new desires or in
some other way, the inhibited desire is not locked up in a
subterranean limbo. There is nothing pathological about
inhibition, for inhibition is as normal a part of character as
desire, and the social instinct which bids us inhibit is as
fundamental as the sex instinct. Most conflicts are on a
conscious plane, but most people will not admit to any one else
their deeply abhorrent desires. To all of us, or nearly all, come
desires and temptations that we would not acknowledge for the
world. If a wise examiner succeeds in getting us to admit them,
it is very agreeable to find a scapegoat in the form of the
subconsciousness. I have often said this to students: if all our
thoughts and conscious desires could be exposed, the most of us
would almost die of shame. True, we do not clearly understand
ourselves and our conflicts and explanation is often necessary,
but that is not equivalent to the subconsciousness; it merely
means that introspection is not sagacious.

Nor is it true, in my belief, that dreams are important psychical
events, nor that the subconsciousness evades a censor in
elaborating them. To what end would that be done? What would be
the use of it? Suppose that Freud and his school had never been;
then dreams would always be useless, for they would have no
interpreter. Men have dreamed in the countless ages before Freud
was born,--in vain. Think how the poor, misguided
subconsciousness has labored for nothing,--and how grateful it
should be to Freud! Dreams are results and have the same kind of
function that a stomach-ache has.

Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are
remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are
experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put
to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and
old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that
experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the
brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with
surprising ease.

The conflicts of life are generally conscious conflicts, in my
experience. Desires and lusts that one does not know of do no
harm; it is the conflict which we cannot settle, the choice we
cannot make, the doubt we cannot resolve, that injures. It is not
those who find it easy to inhibit a desire or any impulse that
are troubled, though they may and do grow narrow. It is those
whose unlawful or discordant desires are not easily inhibited who
find themselves the theater of a constant struggle that breaks
them down. The uneasiness of a desire that arises from the
activity of the sex organs is not a manifestation of a
subconscious personality, unless we include in our personality
our livers, spleen and internal organs of all kinds. Such an
uneasiness may not be clearly understood by the individual merely
because the uneasiness is diffuse and not localized. But there is
no personality, Do will, wish or desire in that uneasiness; it
may and does cause to arise in the conscious personality wills
and wishes and desires against which there is rebellion and
because of which there is conflict.

Upon the issue of the conflicts within the personality hangs the
fate of the individual. Race-old lines of conduct are inhibited
by custom, tradition, teaching, conformity and the social
instinct and its allies. Here is a subject worthy of extended
consideration.

Freud has done the thought of our times a great service in
emphasizing conflict. From the earliest restriction laid by men
on his own conduct, wrestling with desire and temptation has been
the greatest of man's struggles. Internal warfare between
opposing purposes and desires may proceed to a disruption of the
personality, to failure and unhappiness, or else to a solidified
personality, efficient, single-minded and successful. Freud's
work has directed our attention to the thousand and one aberrant
desires that we will hardly acknowledge to ourselves, and he has
forced the professional worker in abnormal and normal mental life
to disregard his own prejudices, to strip away the camouflage
that we put over our motives and our struggles. Together with
Jung and Bleuler, he has helped our science of character a great
deal through no other method than by arousing it to action
against him. In order to fight him, our thought has been forced
to arm itself with the weapons that he has used.

CHAPTER VI. EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL

In a preceding chapter we discussed man as an organism reacting
against an outside world and spurred on by internal activities
and needs. We discussed stimulation, reflexes, inhibition, choice
and the organizing activity, memory and habit, consciousness and
subconsciousness, all of which are primary activities of the
organism. But these are mere theories of function, for the
activities we are interested in reside in more definite
reactions, of which the foregoing are parts.

We see a dreaded object on the horizon or foresee a
calamity,--and we fear. That state of the organism (note I do not
say that STATE OF MIND) resulting from the vision is an emotion.
We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an
instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we
think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we
shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run,
hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if
cornered. "What shall I do--what shall I do? finds no conscious
answer if the emotion is overwhelming or the instinctive flight a
pell-mell affair; but ordinarily memories of other experiences or
of teaching come into the mind and some effort is made to meet
the situation in an "intelligent" manner.

Here, then, is a response in which three cardinal reactions have
occurred and are blended,--the emotion, the instinctive action,
and the intelligent action; or to make abstractions, emotion,
instinct and intelligence. (Personally, I think half the trouble
with our thought is that, we abstract from our experiences a
common group of associations and believe that the abstraction has
some existence outside our thoughts.) Thus there arise in us, as
a result of things experienced, curious feelings and we speak of
the feelings as emotions; we make a race-old response to a
situation,--an instinctive reaction; our memories, past
experiences and present purposes are stirred into activity, and
we plan and scheme, and this is an intelligent reaction, but
there is in reality no metaphysical entity Emotion, Instinct,
Intelligence. I believe that here the philosophers whose mental
activities are essentially in the direction of forming abstract
ideas have misled us.

What I wish to point out is this: that to any situation all three
reactions may take place and modify one another. We are
insulted--some one slaps our face--the fierce emotion of anger
arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the
motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing,
perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our
fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs
but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the
aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. But no,--the
situation has aroused certain memories and certain inhibitions:
the one who struck us has been our friend and we can see that he
is acting under a mistaken impression, or else we perceive that
he is right, that we have done him a wrong for which his blow is
a sort of just reaction. We are checked by these cerebral
activities, we choose some other reaction than fight; perhaps we
prevent him from further assault, or we turn and walk away, or we
start to explain, to mollify and console, or to remonstrate and
reprove. In other words, "intelligence" steps in to inhibit, to
bring to the surface the possibilities, to choose, and thus
overrides the emotional instinctive reaction. It may not succeed
in the overriding; we may hesitate, inhibit, etc., for only a
second or so, before hot anger overcomes us, and the instinctive
response of fight and retaliation takes place.

These examples might be multiplied a thousandfold. Every day of
our lives situations come up in which there is a blending or an
antagonism between emotional, instinctive and intelligent
responses. In fact, very few acts of the organized human being
are anything else. For every emotion awakens memories of past
emotions and the consequences; every instinct is hampered by
other instincts or by the inhibitions aroused by obstacles; and
intelligence continually struggles against emotion and blind
instinct. Teaching, experience, knowledge, all modify emotional
and instinctive responses so that sometimes they are hardly
recognizable as such. On the other hand, though intelligence
normally occupies the seat of power, it is easily ousted and in
reality only steers and directs the vehicle of life, choosing not
the goal but the road by which the goal can safely be reached.

In general terms we shall define emotions, instincts and
intelligence as follows:

1. For emotions we shall accept a modified James-Lange theory,
supplementing it by the developments of science since their day.
When a thing is seen or heard (or smelled or tasted or thought),
it arouses an emotion; that emotion consists of at least three
parts. First, the arousal of memories and experiences that give
it a value to the individual, make it a desired object or a
dreaded, distasteful object. Second, at the same time, or shortly
preceding or succeeding this, a great variety of changes takes
place in the organism, changes that we shall call the
vaso-visceral-motor changes. This means merely that there is a
series of reactions set up in the sympathetic nervous system, in
the blood vessels and bodily structures they control and in the
glands of internal secretion,--changes which include the blush or
the pallor, the rapid heartbeat, the quickened or labored
breathing, the changes in the digestive tract which include the
vomiting of disgust and the diarrhoea of fear; the changes that
passion brings in the male and the female and many other
alterations to be discussed again. Third, there is then the
feeling of these coenaesthetic changes,--a feeling of
pleasantness, unpleasantness mingled with the basic feeling of
excitement, and from then on that situation is linked in memory
with the feeling that we usually call the emotion but which is
only a part of it. Nevertheless, it becomes the part longed for
or thereafter avoided; it is the value of the emotion to us, as
conscious personalities, although it may be a false, disastrous,
dangerous value. Excitement is the generalized mood change that
results in consciousness in consequence of the
vaso-visceral-motor changes of emotion; it is therefore based on
bodily changes as is the feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, that
also occurs. William James said that we laugh and are therefore
happy; we weep and are therefore sad; the bodily changes are
primary and the feeling secondary. We do not accept this dictum
entirely, but we say that the organism reacts in a complicated
way and that the feeling--sadness, disgust, anger, joy--springs
from the memories and past experiences aroused by a situation as
well as from the widespread bodily excitement also so aroused.
For the neurologist both the cerebral and the sympathetic-
endocrinal components of emotion are important.

For the moment we turn to instinct and instinctive reactions.

2. Man has always wondered that things can be known without
teaching. So slow and painful is the process of mastering a
technique, whether of handicraftsmanship or of art, so imbued are
we with the need of education for the acquirement of knowledge,
that we are taken aback by the realization that all around us are
creatures carrying on the most elaborate technique, going through
the most complicated procedures and apparently possessed of the
surest knowledge without the possibility of teaching. The flight
of birds, the obstetric and nursing procedures of all animals,
and especially the complicated and systematized labors of bees,
ants and other insects, have aroused the wonder, admiration and
awe of scientists. A chick pecks its way out of its egg and
shakes itself,--then immediately starts on the trail of food and
usually needs no instruction as to diet. The female insect lays
its eggs, the male insect fertilizes them, the progeny go through
the states of evolution leading to adult life without teaching
and without the possibility of previous experience. Since the
parent never sees the progeny, and the progeny assume various
shapes and have very varied capacities at these times, there can
be no possible teaching of what is remarkably skillful and
marvelously adapted conduct.[1]

[1] The nature of instinct has been a subject of discussion for
centuries, but it is only within the last fifty years or
thereabouts that instinctive actions have really been studied. I
refer the reader to the works of Darwin, Romanes, Lloyd Morgan,
the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse, and McDougall for details as to
the controversies and the facts obtained.

Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable
reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in
putrid meat in order that the larvae may have appropriate food,
although she never sees the larvae or cannot know through
experience their needs. "The smell of putrid meat attracts the
gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings
which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell,
and the contact combined stimulate the functions of
oviposition."[1] But as all the critics have pointed out, the
theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there
are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the
same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in
that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so
inevitably.

[1] Hobhouse.

In fact, it is this internal condition in the living creature
that is the most important single link in instinct. In the
non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the
male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with
procreative cells; these change his coenaesthesia; that starts
desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search,
courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is
gravid. All instinctive acts have back of them either a tension
or a deficit of some kind or other, brought about by the
awakening of function of some glandular structure, so that the
organism becomes ready to respond to some appropriate outside
stimulus and inaccessible to others. During the mating season,
with certain animals, the stimulus of food has no effect until
there is effected the purposes of the sexual hunger. Changes in
the body due to the activity of sex glands or gastric juices or
any other organic product have two effects. They increase the
stimulation that comes from the thing sought and decrease the
stimulation that comes from other things. In physiological
language, the threshold for the first is lowered and for the
other it is raised.

But this does not explain HOW the changes in glands MAKE the
animal seek this or that, except by saying that the animal has
hereditary structures all primed to explode in the right way. We
may fall back on Bergson's mystical idea that all life is a
unity, and that instinct, which makes one living thing know what
to do with another--to kill it in a scientific way for the good
of the posterity of the killer--is merely the knowledge,
unconscious, that life has of life. That pleasant explanation
projects us back to a darker problem than ever: how life knows
life and why one part of life so obviously seeks to circumvent
the purpose of another part of life.

For us it is best to say that instinct arises out of the racial
and individual needs; that physically there occur changes in the
glands and tissues; that these set up desires which arouse into
action simple or elaborate mechanisms which finally satisfy the
need of the organs and tissues.[1]

[1] Kempf in his book on the vegetative nervous system goes into
great detail the way the visceral needs force the animal or human
to satisfy them. Life is a sort of war between the vegetative and
the central nervous system. There is just enough truth in this
point of view to make it very entertaining.

Even in the low forms of life instincts are not perfect at the
start, or perfect in details, and almost every member of a
species will show individuality in dealing with an obstacle to an
instinctive action. In other words, though there is instinct and
this furnishes the basis for action in the lowest forms of life,
there is also the capacity for learning by experience,--and this
is Intelligence. "The basis of instinct is heredity and we can
impute an action to pure instinct only if it is hereditary. The
other class of actions are those devised by the individual animal
for himself on the basis of his own experience and these are
called generally intelligent. Of intelligence operating within
the sphere of instinct there is ample evidence. There are
modifications of instinctive action directly traceable to
experience which cannot be explained by the interaction of purely
hereditary tendencies and there are cases in which the whole
structure of the instinct is profoundly modified by the
experience of the individual." Hobhouse, whom I quote, goes on to
give many examples of instinctive action modified by experience
and intelligence in the insect and lower animal world.

What I wish especially to point out is that man has many
instinctive bases for conduct, but instincts as such are not
often seen in pure form in man. They are constantly modified by
other instincts and through them runs the influence of
intelligence. The function of intelligence is to control
instincts, to choose ways and means for the fulfillment of
instincts that are blocked, etc. Moreover, the effects of
teachings, ethics, social organization and tradition, operating
through the social instincts, are to repress, inhibit and whip
into conformity every mode of instinctive conduct. The main
instincts are those relating to nutrition and reproduction, the
care of the young, to averting danger or destroying it, to play
and organized activity, to acquiring, perhaps to teaching and
learning and to the social relations generally. But manners creep
in to regulate our methods of eating and the things we shall eat;
and we may not eat at all unless we agree to get the things to
eat a certain way. We may not cohabit except under tremendous
restriction, and marriage with its aims and purposes is sexual in
origin but modified largely and almost beyond recognition by
social consideration, taste, esthetic matters, taboos and
economic conditions. We may not treat our enemy as instinct bids
us do,--for only in war may one kill and here one kills without
any personal purpose or anger, almost without instinct. We may be
compelled through social exigencies to treat our enemy politely,
eat with him, sleep with him and help him out of difficulties and
thus completely thwart one instinctive set of reactions. Play
becomes regulated by rules and customs, becomes motivated by the
desire for superiority, or the desire for gain, and may even
leave the physical field entirely and become purely mental. And
so on. It does no special practical good to discuss instincts as
if they operated in man as such. They become purposes. Therefore
we shall defer the consideration of instincts and purposes in
detail until later chapters of this book.

Since instincts are too rigid to meet the needs of the social and
traditional life of man, they become intellectualized and
socialized into purposes and ambitions, sometimes almost beyond
recognition. Nevertheless, the driving force of instinct is
behind every purpose, every ambition, even though the individual
himself has not the slightest idea of the force that is at work.
This does not mean that instinct acts as a sort of cellar-
plotter, roving around in a subconsciousness, or at least no such
semi-diabolical personality need be postulated, any more than it
need be postulated for the automatic mechanism that regulates
heartbeat or digestion. The organic tensions and depressions that
constitute instinct are not conscious or subconscious; they
affect our conscious personalities so that we desire something,
we fit that desire in with the rest of our desires, we seek the
means of gratifying that desire first in accordance with means
that Nature has given us and second in accordance with social
teaching and our intelligence. If the desire brings us sharply in
contact with obstacles imposed either by circumstances or more
precious desire, we inhibit that desire,--and thus the instinct.
Because organic tensions and depressions are periodic and are
dependent upon the activities of glands and tissues not within
our control, the desires may never be completely squelched and
may arise as often as some outer stimulus brings them into
activity, to plague and disorder the life of the conscious
personality.

3. With this preliminary consideration of instinct, we pass on to
certain of the phases of intelligence. How to define intelligence
is a difficulty best met by ignoring definition. But this much is
true: that the prime function of intelligence is to store up the
past and present experiences so that they can be used in the
future, and that it adds to the rigid mechanism of instinct a
plastic force which by inhibiting and exciting activity according
to need steers the organism through intricate channels.

Instinct, guided by a plan, conveniently called Nature's plan, is
not itself a planner. The discharge of one mechanism discharges
another and so on through a series until an end is reached,--an
end apparently not foreseen by the organism but acting for the
good of the race to which the organism belongs. Intelligence,
often enough not conscious of the plans of Nature,[1] indeed,
decidedly ignorant of these plans, works for some good
established by itself out of stimuli set up by the instincts. It
plans, looks backward and forward, reaches the height of
reflecting on itself, gets to recognize the existence of instinct
and sets itself the task of controlling instinct. Often enough it
fails, instinct breaks through, takes possession of the means of
achievement, accomplishes its purpose--but the failure of
intelligence to control and the misguided control it attempts and
assumes are merely part of the general imperfections of the
organism. A perfect intelligence would be clearly able to
understand its instincts, to give each of them satisfaction by a
perfect compromise, would pick the methods for accomplishment
without error, and storing up the past experiences without loss,
would meet the future according to a plan.

[1] We are at this stage in a very dark place in human thought.
We say that instincts seek the good of the race, or have some
racial purpose, as the sexual instinct has procreation as its
end. But the lover wooing his sweetheart has no procreation plan
in his mind; he is urged on by a desire to win this particular
girl, a desire which is in part sexual, in part admiration of her
beauty, grace, and charm; again it is the pride of possession and
achievement; and further is the result of the social and romantic
ideals taught in books, theaters, etc. He may not have the
slightest desire for a child; as individual he plans one
thing,--but we who watch him see in his approach the racial urge
for procreation and even disregard his purposes as unimportant.
Who and what is the Race, where does it reside, how can it have
purposes? Call it Nature, and we are no better off. We must fall
back on an ancient personalization of forces, and our minds rest
easier when we think of a Planner operating in all of us and
perhaps smiling as He witnesses our strivings.

As we study the nervous systems of animals, we find that with the
apparent growth of intelligence there is a development of that
part of the brain called the cerebrum. In so far as certain other
parts of the brain are concerned--medulla, pons, mid-brain, basal
ganglia cerebellum--we who are human are not essentially superior
to the dog, the cow, the elephant or the monkey. But when the
neopallium, or the cerebrum, is considered, the enormous
superiority of man (and the superiority of the higher over the
lower animals) becomes striking. Anatomically the cerebrum is a
complex elaboration of cells and fibers that have these main
purposes: First, to record in perfect and detailed fashion the
EXPERIENCES of the organism, so that here are memory centers for
visual and auditory experiences, for skin, joint and bone
experiences of all kinds, speech memories, action memories, and
undoubtedly for the recording in some way not understood of the
pleasure-pain feelings. Second, it has a hold, a grip on the
motor mechanism of the body, on the muscles that produce action,
so that the intelligence can nicely adapt movement to the
circumstances, to purpose, and can inhibit the movements that
arise reflexly. Thus in certain diseases, where the part of the
brain involved in movement is injured, voluntary movement
disappears but reflex action is increased. Third, the neopallium,
or cerebrum, is characterized by what are known as association
tracts, i.e., connections of intricate kinds which link together
areas of the brain having different functions and thus allow for
combinations of activity of all kinds. The brain thus acts to
increase the memories of the past, and, as we all know, man is
probably the only animal to whom the past is a controlling force,
sometimes even an overpowering force. It acts to control the
conduct of the individual, to delay or to inhibit it, and it acts
to increase in an astonishing manner the number of reactions
possible. One stimulus arousing cerebral excitement may set going
mechanisms of the brain through associated tracts that will
produce conduct of one kind or another for years to come.

We spoke in a previous chapter of choice as an integral function
of the organism. While choice, when two competing stimuli awake
competing mechanisms, may be non-cerebral in its nature, largely
speaking it is a function of the cerebrum, of the intelligence.
To choose is a constant work of the intelligence, just as to
doubt is an unavailing effort to find a choice. Choice blocked is
doubt, one of the unhappiest of mental states. I shall not
pretend to solve the mystery of WHO chooses,--WHAT chooses;
perhaps there is a constant immortal ego; perhaps there is built
up a series of permanently excited areas which give rise to ego
feeling and predominate in choice; perhaps competing mechanisms,
as they struggle (in Sherrington's sense) for motor pathways,
give origin to the feeling of choice. At any rate, because we
choose is the reason that the concept of will has arisen in the
minds of both philosopher and the man in the street, and much of
our feeling of worth, individuality and power--mental factors of
huge importance in character--arises from the power to choose.
Choice is influenced by--or it is a net result of--the praise and
blame of others, conscience, memory, knowledge of the past, plans
for the future. It is the fulcrum point of conduct!

That animals have intelligence in the sense in which I have used
the term is without doubt. No one who reads the work of Morgan,
the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse and other recent investigators of
the instincts can doubt it. Whether animals think in anything
like the form our thought takes is another matter. We are so
largely verbal in thought that speech and the capacity to speak
seem intimately related to thought. For the mechanics of thought,
for the laws of the association of ideas, the reader is referred
to the psychologists. That minds differ according to whether they
habitually follow one type of associations or another is an old
story. The most annoying individual in the world is the one whose
associations are unguided by a controlling purpose, who rambles
along misdirected by sound associations or by accidental
resemblances in structure of words, or by remote meanings,--who
starts off to tell you that she (the garrulous old lady) went to
the store to get some eggs, that she has a friend in the country
whose boy is in the army (aren't the Germans dreadful, she's glad
she's born in this country), city life is very hard, it isn't so
healthy as the country, thank God her health is good, etc.,
etc.," and she never arrives at the grocery store to buy the
eggs. The organizing of the associations through a goal idea is
part of that organizing energy of the mind and character
previously spoken of. The mind tends automatically to follow the
stimuli that reach it, but the organizing energy has as one of
its functions the preventing of this, and controlled thinking
follows associations that are, as it were, laid down by the goal.
In fatigue, in illness, in certain of the mental diseases, the
failure of the organizing energy brings about failure "to
concentrate" and the tyranny of casual associations annoys and
angers. The stock complaint of the neurasthenic that everything
distracts his attention is a reversion back to the unorganized
conditions of childhood, with this essential difference: that the
neurasthenic rebels against his difficulty in thinking, whereas
the child has no rebellion against that which is his normal
state. Minds differ primarily and hugely in their power of
organizing experience, in so studying and recording the past that
it becomes a guide for the, future. Basic in this is the power of
resisting the irrelevant association, of checking those automatic
mental activities that tend to be stirred up by each sound, each
sight, smell, taste and touch. The man whose task has no appeal
for him has to fight to keep his mind on it, and there are other
people, the so-called absent-minded, who are so over-
concentrated, so wedded to a goal in thought, that lesser matters
are neither remembered nor noticed. In its excess
overconcentration is a handicap, since it robs one of that
alertness for new impressions, new sources of thought so
necessary for growth. The fine mind is that which can pursue
successfully a goal in thought but which picks en route to that
goal, out of the irrelevant associations, something that enriches
its conclusions.

Not often enough is mechanical skill, hand-mindedness, considered
as one of the prime phases of intelligence. Intelligence, en
route to the conquest of the world, made use of that marvelous
instrument, the human hand, which in its opposable thumb and
little finger sharply separates man from the rest of creation.
Studying causes and effects, experimenting to produce effect, the
hand became the principal instrument in investigation, and the
prime verifier of belief. "Seeing is believing" is not nearly so
accurate as "Handling is believing," for there is in touch, and
especially in touch of the hands and in the arm movements, a
Reality component of the first magnitude. But not only in
touching and investigating, but in pushing and pulling and
striking, IN CAUSING CHANGE, does the hand become the symbol and
source of power and efficiency. Undoubtedly this phase of the
hands' activities remained predominant for untold centuries,
during which man made but slow progress in his career toward the
leadership of the world. Then came the phase of tool-making and
using and with that a rush of events that built the cities,
bridged the waters, opened up the Little and the Big as sources
of knowledge and energy for man and gave him the power which he
has used,--but poorly. It is the skill of human hands upon which
the mind of man depends; though we fly through the air and speed
under water, some one has made the tools that made the machine we
use. Therefore, the mechanical skill of man, the capacity to
shape resisting material to purpose, the power of the detailed
applications of the principles of movement and force are high,
special functions of the intelligence. That people differ
enormously in this skill, that it is not necessarily associated
with other phases of intelligence are commonplaces. The dealer in
abstract ideas of great value to the race may be unable to drive
a nail straight, while the man who can build the most intricate
mechanism out of crude iron, wood and metal may be unable to
express any but the commonplaces of existence. Intelligence,
acting through skill, has evolved machinery and the industrial
evolution; acting to discover constant principles operating in
experience, it has established science. Seeking to explain and
control the world of unknown forces, it has evolved theory and
practice. A very essential division of people is on the one hand
those whose effort is to explain things, and who are called
theorists, and those who seek to control things, the practical
persons. There is a constant duel between these two types of
personalities, and since the practical usually control the power
of the world, the theorists and explainers have had rather a hard
time of it, though they are slowly coming into their own.

Another difference between minds is this: that intelligence deals
with the relations between things (this being a prime function of
speech), and intelligence only becomes intellect when it is able
to see the world from the standpoint of abstract ideas, such as
truth, beauty, love, honor, goodness, evil, justice, race,
individual, etc. The wider one can generalize correctly, the
higher the intellect. The practical man rarely seeks wide
generalizations because the truth of these and their value can
only be demonstrated through the course of long periods of time,
during which no good to the individual himself is seen. Besides
which, the practical man knows that the wide generalization may
be an error. Practical aims are usually immediate aims, whereas
the aims of intellect are essentially remote and may project
beyond the life of the thinker himself.

We speak of people as original or as the reverse, with the
understanding that originality is the basis of the world's
progress. To be original in thought is to add new relationships
to those already accepted, or to substitute new ones for the old.
The original person is not easily credulous; he applies to
traditional teaching and procedure the acid test of results. Thus
the astronomers who rejected the theological idea that the earth
was the center of the universe observed that eclipses could not
be explained on such a basis, and Harvey, as he dissected
bullocks' hearts and tied tourniquets around his arms, could not
believe that Galen's teaching on circulation fitted what he saw
of the veins and valves of his arm. The original observer refuses
to slide over stubborn facts; authority has less influence with
him than has an apple dropping downward. In another way the
original thinker is constantly taking apart his experiences and
readjusting the pieces into new combinations of beauty,
usefulness and truth. This he does as artist, inventor and
scientist. Most originality lies in the rejection of old ideas
and methods as not consonant with results and experience; in the
taking apart and the isolation of the components of experience
(analysis) and in their reassemblage into new combinations
(synthesis). The organizing activity of the original mind is
high, and curiosity and interest are usually well maintained.
Unless there is with these traits the quality called good
judgment (i.e., good choice), the original is merely one of those
"pests" who launch half-baked reforms and projects upon a weary
world.

We have spoken of intelligence as controlling and directing
instinct and desire, as inhibiting emotion, as exhibiting itself
in handicraftsmanship, as the builder up of abstractions and the
principles of power and knowledge; we have omitted its
relationship to speech. Without speech and its derivatives, man
would still be a naked savage and not so well off in his struggle
for existence as most of the larger animals. It is possible that
we can think without words, but surely very little thinking is
possible under such circumstances. One might conduct a business
without definite records, but it would be a very small one.
Speech is a means not only of designating things but of the
manifest relations between things. It "short-cuts" thought so
that we may store up a thousand experiences in one word. But its
stupendous value and effects lie in this, that in words not only
do we store up ourselves (could we be self-conscious without
words?) and things, but we are able to interchange ourselves and
our things with any one else in the world who understands our
speech and writings. And we may truly converse with the dead and
be profoundly changed by them. If the germ plasm is the organ of
biological heredity, speech and its derivatives are the organs of
social heredity!

The power of expressing thought in words, of compressing
experiences into spoken and written symbols, of being eloquent or
convincing either by tongue or pen, is thus a high function of
intelligence. The able speaker and writer has always been
powerful, and he has always found a high social value in
promulgating the ideas of those too busy or unfitted for this
task, and he has been the chief agent in the unification of
groups.

The danger that lies in words as the symbols of thought lies in
the fact pointed out by Francis Bacon[1] (and in our day by Wundt
and Jung) that words have been coined by the mass of people and
have come to mean very definitely the relations between things as
conceived by the ignorant majority, so that when the philosopher
or scientist seeks to use them, he finds himself hampered by the
false beliefs inherent in the word and by the lack of precision
in the current use of words. Moreover, words are also a means of
stirring up emotions, hate, love, passion, and become weapons in
a struggle for power and therefore obscure intelligence.

[1] This is Bacon's "Idols of the Market Place."

Words, themselves, arise in our social relations, for the
solitary human would never speak, and the thought we think of as
peculiarly our own is intensely social. Indeed, as Cooley pointed
out, our thought is usually in a dialogue form with an auditor
who listens and whose applause we desire and whose arguments we
meet. In children, who think aloud, this trend is obvious, for
they say, "you, I, no, yes, I mustn't, you mustn't," and terms of
dialogue and social intercourse appear constantly. Thought and
words offer us the basis of definite internal conflict: one part
of us says to the other, "You must not do that," and the other
answers, "What shall I do?" Desire may run along smoothly without
distinct, internal verbal thought until it runs into inhibition
which becomes at once distinctly verbal in its, "No! You musn't!"
But desire obstructed also becomes verbal and we hear within us,
"I will!"

We live secure in the belief that our thoughts are our own and
cannot be "read" by others. Yet in our intercourse we seek to
read the thoughts of others--the real thoughts--recognizing that
just as we do not express ourselves either accurately or
honestly, so may the other be limited or disingenuous. Whenever
there occurs a feeling of inferiority, the face is averted so the
thoughts may not be read, and it is very common for people
mentally diseased to believe that their thoughts are being read
and published. Indeed, the connection between thoughts and the
personality may be severed and the patient mistakes as an outside
voice his own thoughts.

A large part of ancient and modern belief and superstition hinges
on the feeling of power in thought and therefore in words.
Thought CAUSES things as any other power does. Think something
hard, use the appropriate word, and presto,--what you desire is
done. "Faith moves mountains," and the kindred beliefs of the
magic in words have plunged the world into abysses of
superstition. Thought is powerful, words are powerful, if
combined with the appropriate action, and in their indirect
effects. All our triumphs are thought and word products; so, too,
are our defeats.

It is not profitable for us at this stage to study the types of
intelligence in greater detail. In the larger aspects of
intelligence we must regard it as intimately blended with
emotions, mood, instincts, and in its control of them is a
measurement of character. We may ask what is the range of memory,
what is the capacity for choosing, how good is the planning
ability, how active is the organizing ability, what is the type
of associations that predominate and how active is the stream of
thought? What is the skill of the individual? How well does he
use words and to what end does he use them? Intelligence deals
with the variables of life, leaving to instinct the basic
reactions, but it is in these variables that intelligence meets
situations that of themselves would end disastrously for the
individual.

Not a line, so far, on Will. What of the will, basic force in
character and center of a controversy that will never end? Has
man a free will? does his choice of action and thought come from
a power within himself? Is there a uniting will, operating in our
actions, a something of an integral indivisible kind, which is
non-material yet which controls matter?

Taking the free-will idea at its face value leads us nowhere in
our study of character. If character in its totality is organic,
so is will, and it therefore resides in the tissues of our
organism and is subject to its laws. In some mental diseases the
central disturbance is in the will, as Kraepelin postulates in
the disease known as Dementia Praecox. The power of choice and
the power of acting according to choice disappear gradually,
leaving the individual inert and apathetic. The will may alter
its directions in disease (or rather be altered) so that BECAUSE
of a tumor mass in the brain, or a clot of blood, or the
extirpation of his testicles, he chooses and acts on different
principles than ever before in his life. Or you get a man drunk,
introduce into his organism the soluble narcotic alcohol, and you
change his will in the sense that he chooses to be foolish or
immoral or brutal, and acts accordingly. When from Philip drunk
we appeal to Philip sober, we acknowledge that the two Philips
are different and will different things. And the will of the
child is not the will of the adult, nor is that the will of the
old man. If will is organic it cannot be free, but is conditioned
by health, glandular activity, tissue chemistry, age, social
setting, education, intelligence.

Moreover, behind each choice and each act are motives set up by
the whole past of the individual, set up by heredity and
training, by the will of our ancestors and our contemporaries.
Logically and psychologically, we cannot agree that a free agent
has any conditions; and if it has any conditions, it cannot in
any phase be free. To set up an argument for free will one has to
appeal to the consciousness or have a deep religious motive. But
even the ecclesiastical psychologists and even so strong a
believer in free will as Munsterberg take the stand that we may
have two points of view, one--as religiously minded--that there
is a free will, and the other--as scientists--that will is
determined in its operations by causes that reach back in an
endless chain. The power to choose and the power to act may be
heightened by advice and admonitions. In this sense we may
properly tell a man to use his will, and we may seek to introduce
into him motives that will fortify his resolution, remove or
increase his inhibitions, make clearer his choice. But that will
is an entity, existing by itself and pulling at levers of conduct
without itself being organic, need not be entertained by any
serious-minded student of his kind.

Is there a unit, will? A will power? I can see no good evidence
for this belief except the generalizing trend of human thought
and the fallacy that raises abstractions into realities. Napoleon
had a strong will in regard to his battles and a weak one
regarding women. Pitt was a determined statesman but could not
resist the lure of drink. Socrates found no difficulty in dying
for his beliefs, but asked not to be tempted by a beautiful
youth. Francis Bacon took all knowledge to be his province, and
his will was equal to the task, but he found the desire for
riches too great for him. In reality, man is a mosaic of wills;
and the will of each instinct, each desire, each purpose, is the
intensity of that instinct, desire or purpose. In each of us
there is a clash of wills, as the trends in our character oppose
one another. The united self harmonizes its purposes and wills
into as nearly one as possible; the disunited self is standing
unsteadily astride two or more horses. We all know that it is
easy for us to accomplish certain things and difficult to make up
our minds to do others. Like and dislike, facility or difficulty
are part of each purpose and enter into each will as parts.

Such a view does not commit one to fatalism, at least in conduct.
Desiring to accomplish something or desiring to avoid doing
something, both of which are usually considered as part of
willing, we must seek to find motives and influences that will
help us. We must realize that each choice, each act, changes the
world for us and every one else and seek to harmonize our choice
and acts with the purposes we regard as our best. If we seek to
influence others, then this view of the will is the only hopeful
one, for if will is a free entity how can it possibly be
influenced by another agent? The very essence of freedom is to be
noninfluenced. Seeking to galvanize the will of another, there is
need to search for the influences that will increase the energy
of his better purposes, to "appeal to his better self," meaning
that the spurs to his good conduct are applied with greater
force, but that first the nature of the particular things that
spur him on must be discovered. Praise? Blame? Reward?
Punishment? Education? Authority? Logic? Religion? Emotional
appeal? Substitution of new motives and associations?

The will is therefore no unit, but a sum total of things
operating within the sphere of purpose. Purpose we have defined
as arising from instinct and desire and intellectualized and
socialized by intelligence, education, training, tradition, etc.
Will is therefore best studied under the head of purpose and is
an outgrowth of instinct. Each instinct, in its energy, its
fierceness, its permanence, has its will. He who cannot desire
deeply, in whom some powerful instinct does not surge, cannot
will deeply.

If we look at character from the standpoint of emotion, instinct,
purpose and intelligence, we find that emotion is an internal
discharge of energy, which being FELT by the individual becomes
an aim or aversion of his life; that instinctive action is the
passing over of a stimulus directly into hereditary conduct along
race-old motor pathways for purposes that often enough the
individual does not recognize and may even rebel against; that
instinct is without reflection, but that purpose, which is an
outgrowth of instinct guided and controlled by intelligence, is
reflective and self-conscious. Purpose seeks the good of the
individual as understood by him and is often against the welfare
of the race, whereas instinct seeks the good of the race, often
against the welfare of the individual. Intelligence is the path
of the stimulus or need cerebrally directed, lengthened out,
inhibited, elaborated and checked. Often enough faulty, it is the
chief instrument by which man has become the leading figure on
the world stage.

CHAPTER VII. EXCITEMENT, MONOTONY AND INTEREST

No matter what happens in the outside world, be it something we
see, hear or feel, in any sense-field there is an internal
reverberation in our bodies,--excitement. Excitement is the
undifferentiated result of stimuli, whether these come from
without or from within. For a change in the glands of the body
heaps up changes within us, which when felt, become excitement.
Thus at the mating period of animals, at the puberty of man,
there is a quite evident excitement demonstrated in the conduct
of the animal and the adolescent. He who remembers his own
adolescence, or who watches the boy or girl of that age, sees the
excitement in the readiness to laugh, cry, fight or love that is
so striking.

Undoubtedly the mother-stuff of all emotion is the feeling of
excitement. Before any emotion reaches its characteristic
expression there is the preparatory tension of excitement. Joy,
sorrow, anger, fear, wonder, surprise, etc., have in them as a
basis the same consciousness of an internal activity, of a world
within us beginning to seethe. Heart, lungs, blood stream, the
great viscera and the internal glands, cerebrum and sympathetic
nervous system, all participate in this activity, and the outward
visage of excitement is always the wide-open eye, the slightly
parted lips, the flaring nostrils and the slightly tensed muscles
of the whole body. Shouts, cries, the waving of arms and legs,
taking the specific direction of some emotion, make of excitement
a fierce discharger of energy, a fact of great importance in the
understanding of social and pathological phenomena. On the other
hand, excitement may be so intensely internal that it shifts the
blood supply too vigorously from the head and the result is a
swoon. This is more especially true of the excitement that
accompanies sorrow and fear than joy or anger, but even in these
emotions it occurs.

There are some very important phases of excitement that have not
been given sufficient weight in most of the discussions.

1. In the very young, excitement is diffuse and spreads
throughout the organism. An infant starts with a jump at a sudden
sound and shivers at a bright light. A young child is
unrestrained and general in his expression of excitement, no
matter what emotional direction that excitement takes. Bring
about any tension of expectation in a child--have him wait for
your head to appear around the corner as you play peek-a-boo, or
delay opening the box of candy, or pretend you are one thing or
another--and the excitement of the child is manifested in what is
known as eagerness. Attention in children is accompanied by
excitement and is wearying as a natural result, since excitement,
means a physical discharge of energy. A child laughs all over and
weeps with his entire body; his anger involves every muscle of
his body and his fear is an explosion. The young organism cannot
inhibit excitement.

As life goes on, the capacity for localizing or limiting
excitement increases. We become better organized, and the
disrupting force of a stimulus becomes less. Attention becomes
less painful, less tense, i.e., there is less general muscular
and emotional reaction. Expectation is less a physical
matter--perhaps because we have been so often disappointed--and
is more cerebral and the emotions are more reflective and
introspective in their expression and less a physical outburst.
Indeed, the process often enough goes too far, and we long for
the excitement of anticipation and realization. We do not start
at a noise, and though a great crowd will "stir our blood"
(excitement popularly phrased and accurately), we still limit
that excitement so that though we cheer or shout there is a core
of us that is quiet.

This is the case in health. In sickness, especially in that
condition known as neurasthenia, where the main symptoms cluster
around an abnormal liability to fatigue, and also in many other
conditions, there is an increase in the diffusion of excitement
so that one starts all over at a noise, instead of merely turning
to see what it is, so that expectation and attention become
painful and fatiguing. Crowds, though usually pleasurable, become
too exciting, and there is a sort of confusion resulting because
attention and comprehension are interfered with. The neurasthenic
finds himself a prey to stimuli, his reaction is too great and he
fatigues too readily. He finds sleep difficult because the little
noises and discomforts make difficult the relaxation that is so
important. The neurasthenic's voluntary attention is lowered
because of the excitement he feels when his involuntary attention
is aroused.

In the condition called anhedonia, which we shall hear of from
time to time, there is a blocking or dropping out of the sense of
desire and satisfaction even if through habit one eats, drinks,
has sexual relationship, keeps up his work and carries out his
plans. This lack of desire for the joys of life is attended by a
restlessness, a seeking of excitement for a time, until there
arises a curious over-reaction to excitement. The anhedonic
patient finds that noises are very troublesome, that he becomes
unpleasantly excited over music, that company is distressing
because he becomes confused and excited, and crowds, busy scenes
and streets are intolerable. Many a hermit, I fancy, who found
the sensual and ambitious pleasure of life intolerable, who
sought to fly from crowds to the deserts, was anhedonic but he
called it renunciation. (Whether one really ever renounces when
desire is still strong is a nice question. I confess to some
scepticism on this point.)

2. Seeking excitement is one of the great pleasure-trends of
life. In moderation, tension, expectation and the diffuse bodily
reactions are agreeable; there is a feeling of vigor, the
attention is drawn from the self and there is a feeling of being
alive that is pleasurable. The tension must not be too long
sustained, nor the bodily reaction too intense; relaxation and
lowered attention must relieve the excitement from time to time;
but with these kept in mind, it is true that Man is a seeker of
excitement.

This is a factor neglected in the study of great social
phenomena. The growth of cities is not only a result of the
economic forces of the time; it is made permanent by the fact
that the cities are exciting. The multiplicity and variety of the
stimuli of a city--social, sexual, its stir and bustle--make it
difficult for those once habituated ever to tolerate the quiet of
the country. Excitement follows the great law of stimulation; the
same internal effect, the same feeling, requires a greater and
greater stimulus, as well as new stimuli. So, the cities grow
larger, increase their modes of excitement, and the dweller in
the city, unless fortified by a steady purpose, becomes a seeker
of excitement.

Not only is excitement pleasurable when reached through the
intrinsically agreeable but it can be obtained from small doses
of the intrinsically disagreeable. This is the explanation of the
pleasure obtained from the gruesome, from the risk of life or
limb, or from watching others risk life or limb. Aside from the
sense of power obtained by traveling fast, it is the risk, THE
SLIGHT FEAR, producing excitement, that makes the speed maniac a
menace to the highways. And I think that part of the pleasure
obtained from bitter foods is that the disagreeable element is
just sufficient to excite the gastro-intestinal tract. The
fascination of the horrible lies in the excitement produced, an
excitement that turns to horror and disgust if the disagreeable
is presented too closely. Thus we can read with pleasurable
excitement of things that in their reality would shock us into
profoundest pain. The more jaded one is, the more used to
excitement, the more he seeks what are, ordinarily, disagreeable
methods of excitement. Thus pain in slight degree is exciting,
and in the sexual sphere pain is often sought as a means of
heightening the pleasure, especially by women and by the roue. I
suspect also that the haircloth shirt and the sackcloth and ashes
of the anhedonic hermit were painful methods of seeking
excitement.

Sometimes pain is used in small amounts to relieve excitement.
Thus the man who bites his finger nails to the quick gets a
degree of satisfaction from the habit. Indeed, all manner of
habitual and absurd movements, from scratching to pacing up and
down, are efforts to relieve the tension of excitement. One of my
patients under any excitement likes to put his hands in very hot
water, and the pain, by its localization, takes away from the
diffuse and unpleasant excitement. The diffuse uncontrolled
excitement of itching is often relieved by painful biting and
scratching. Here is an effort to localize a feeling and thus
avoid diffuse discomfort, a sort of homeopathic treatment.

3. As a corollary to the need of excitement and its pleasure is
the reaction to monotony. Monotony is one of the most dreaded
factors in the life of man. The internal resources of most of us
are but small; we can furnish excitement and interest from our
own store for but a short time, and there then ensues an intense
yearning for something or somebody that will take up our
attention and give a direction to our thought and action. Under
monotony the thought turns inward, there is daydreaming and
introspection,[1] which are pleasurable only at certain times for
most of us and which grow less pleasurable as we grow older.
Watch the faces of people thinking as they travel alone in
cars,--and rarely does one see a happy face. The lines of the
face droop and sighs are frequent. Monotony and melancholy are
not far apart; monotony and a restless seeking for excitement are
almost synonymous. Of course, what constitutes monotony will
differ in the viewpoint of each person, for some are so
constituted and habituated (for habit is a great factor) that it
takes but few stimuli to arouse a well-sustained interest, and
others need or think they need many things, a constantly changing
set of circumstances for pleasure.

[1] Stanley Hall, in his book "Adolescence," lays great stress on
monotony and its effects. See also Graham Wallas' "The Great
Society."

Restlessness, eager searching for change, intense dissatisfaction
are the natural fruit of monotony. Here is an important item in
the problems of our times. Side by side with growth of the cities
and their excitement is the growing monotony of most labor. The
factory, with its specialized production, reduces the worker to a
cog in the machinery. In some factories, in the name of
efficiency, the windows are whitewashed so that the outside world
is shut out and talking is prohibited; the worker passes his day
performing his unvaried task from morning to night. Under such
circumstances there arises either a burning sense of wrong, of
injustice, of slavery and a thwarting of the individual dignity,
or else a yearning for the end of the day, for dancing, drinking,
gambling, for anything that offers excitement. Or perhaps both
reactions are combined. Our industrial world is poorly organized
economically, as witness the poor distribution of wealth and the
periodic crises, but it is abominably organized from the
standpoint of the happiness of the worker. Of this, more in
another place.

Monotony brings fatigue, because there is a shutting out of the
excitement that acts as an antidote to fatigue-feeling. A man
who works without fatigue six days a week is tired all day Sunday
and longs for Monday. The modern housewife,[1] with her four
walls and the unending, uninteresting tasks, is worn out, and her
fatigue reaction is the greater the more her previous life has
been exciting and varied. Fatigue often enough is present not
because of the work done but because the STIMULUS TO WORK HAS
DISAPPEARED. Monotony is an enemy of character. Variety, in its
normal aspect, is not only the spice of life; it is a great need.
Stabilization of purpose and work are necessary, but a
standardization that stamps out the excitement of variety is a
deadly blow to human happiness.

[1] See my book "The Nervous Housewife!"

Under monotony certain types of personalities develop an intense
inner life, which may be pathological, or it may be exceedingly
fruitful of productive thought.

Some build up a delusional thought and feeling. For delusion
merely means uncorrected thought and belief, and we can only
correct by contact and collision. The whole outer world may
vanish or become hostile and true mental disease develop. Perhaps
it is more nearly correct to say that minds predisposed to mental
disease find in monotony a circumstance favoring disease.

On the other hand, a vigorous mind shut out from outer stimuli[1]
finds in this circumstance the time to develop leisurely, finds a
freedom from distraction that leads to clear views of life and a
proper expression. A periodic retirement from the busy, too-busy
world is necessary for the thinker that he may digest his
material, that he may strip away unessential beliefs, that he may
find what it is he really needs, strives for and ought to have.

[1] Perhaps this is why real genius does not flourish in our
crowded, over-busy days, despite the great amount of talent.

4. Here we come to another corollary of the need for excitement,
the need of relaxation. At any rate, satisfaction and pleasure
need periods of hunger in order to be felt. In the story of
Buddha he is represented as being shielded from all sorrow and
pain, living a life filled with pleasure and excitement, yet he
sought out pain. So excitement, if too long continued--or rather
if a situation that produces excitement of a pleasurable kind be
too long endured--will result in boredom. "Things get to be the
same," whether it be the excitement of love, the city, sports or
what not. This is a basic law of all pleasures. In order that
life may have zest, that excitement may be easily and pleasurably
evoked and by normal means, we need relaxation, periods free from
excitement, or we must pass on to a costly chase for excitement
that brings breakdown of the character.

5. If the seeking of excitement, as such, is one of the prime
pleasures of life, organized excitement in the form of interest
is the directing and guiding principle of activity. At the outset
of life interest is in the main involuntary and is aroused by the
sights, sounds and happenings of the outer world. As time goes
on, as the organism develops, as memories of past experiences
become active, as peculiarities of personality develop, and as
instincts reach activity, interest commences to take definite
direction, to become canalized, so to speak. In fact, the
development of interest is from the diffuse involuntary form of
early childhood to a specialization, a condensation into definite
voluntary channels. This development goes on unevenly, and is a
very variable feature in the lives of all of us. Great ability
expresses itself in a sustained interest; a narrow character is
one with overdeformed, too narrow interest; failure is often the
retention of the childish character of diffuse, involuntary
interest. And the capacity to sustain interest depends not only
on the special strength of the various abilities of the
individual, but remarkably on his energy and health. Sustained
"voluntary" interest is far more fatiguing than involuntary
interest, and where fatigue is already present it becomes
difficult and perhaps impossible. Thus after much work, whether
physical or mental, during and after illness--especially in
influenza, in neurasthenic states generally, or where there is an
inner conflict--interest in its adult form is at a low ebb.

There are two main directions which interest may take, because
there are two worlds in which we live. There is the inner world
of our feelings, our thoughts, our desires and our
struggles,[1]--and there is the outer world, with its people, its
things, its hostilities, its friendships, its problems and facts,
its attractions and repulsions. Man divides his interest between
the two worlds, for in both of them are the values of existence.
The chief source of voluntary interest lies in desire and value,
and though these are frequently in coalescence, so that the thing
we desire is the thing we value, more often they are not in
coalescence and then we have the divided self that James so
eloquently describes. So there are types of men to whom the outer
world, whether it is in its "other people," or its things, or its
facts, or its attractions and repulsions, is the chief source of
interest and these are the objective types, exteriorized folks,
whose values lie in the goods they can accumulate, or the people
they can help, or the external power they exercise, or the
knowledge they possess of the phenomena of the world, or the
things they can do with their hands. These are on the whole
healthy-minded, finding in their pursuits and interest a real
value, rarely stopping from their work to ask, "Why do I work? To
what end? Are things real?" Contrasted with them are those whose
gaze is turned inward, who move through life carrying on the
activities of the average existence but absorbed in their
thoughts, their emotions, their desires, their
conflicts,--perhaps on their sensations and coenaesthetic
streams. Though there is no sharp line of division between the
two types, and all of us are blends in varying degrees, these
latter are the subjective introspective folk, interiorized,
living in the microcosmos, and much more apt than the objective
minded to be "sick souls" obsessed with "whys and wherefores."
They are endlessly putting to themselves unanswerable questions,
are apt to be the mentally unbalanced, or, but now and then, they
furnish the race with one whose answers to the meaning of life
and the direction of efforts guide the steps of millions.

[1] Herbert Spencer's description of these two worlds is the best
in literature. "Principles of Psychology."

There is a good and a bad side to the two types of interest. The
objective minded conquer the world in dealing with what they call
reality. They bridge the water and dig up the earth; they invent,
they plow, they sell and buy, they produce and distribute wealth,
and they deal with the education that teaches how to do all these
things. They find in the outer world an unalterable sense of
reality, and they tend rather naively to accept themselves, their
interests and efforts as normal. In their highest forms they are
the scientist, reducing to law this tangle of outer realities, or
the artist, who though he is a hybrid with deep subjective and
objective interest, nevertheless remodels the outer world to his
concept of beauty. These objective-minded folk, the bulk of the
brawn and in lesser degree of the brain of the world, are apt to
be "materialists," to value mainly quantity and to be
self-complacent. Of course, since no man is purely objective,
there come to them as to all moments of brooding over the eggs of
their inner life, when they wonder whether they have reached out
for the right things and whether the goods they seek or have are
worth while. Such introspective interest comes on them when they
are alone and the outer world does not reach in, or when they
have witnessed death and misfortune, or when sickness and fatigue
have reduced them to a feeling of weakness. For it is true that
the objective minded are more often robust, hearty, with more
natural lust, passion and desire than your introspectionists,
more virile and less sensitive to fine impressions.

The introspectionists, culling, chewing the cud of their
experiences and sensations, find in their own reactions the
realities. In fact, interested in consciousness, they are
sometimes bold enough to deny the realities of anything else.
Where the others build bridges, they build up the ideas of
eternal good and bad, of beauty, of the transitory and the
permanent, of now and eternity. They deal with abstract ideas,
and they luxuriate in emotions. They build up beliefs where
thought is the only reality and is omnipotent. They are the
founders of religious, cults, fads and fancies. They inculcate
the permanent ideals, because they are the only ones who interest
themselves in something beside the show of the universe.

But too often they are the sick folk. Without the hardihood and
the energy to conquer the outer world, they fall back on a world
requiring less energy to study, less energy to conquer. Sometimes
they develop a sense of unreality which vitiates all their
efforts to succeed; or they become hypochondriacs, feeling every
flutter of the heart and every vague ache and pain. The Hamlet
doubting type is an introspectionist and oscillates in his mind
from yea to nay on every question. Such as this type develop
ideas of compensation and power and become cranks and fake
prophets. Or else, and this we shall see again, they become
imbued with a sense of inferiority, feel futile as against the
red-blooded and shrink from others through pain.

Everywhere one sees these phases of interest in antagonism and
cooperation. The "healthy-minded" acknowledge the leadership of a
past introspectionist but despise the contemporary one as futile
and light-headed. The introverted (to use a Freudian term) call
the others Philistines, and mock them for their lack of spiritual
insight, yet in everything they do they depend for aid and
sustenance upon them. Introspection gives no exact measurements
of value, but it gives value and without it, there can be no
wisdom. But always it needs the correction of the outer world to
keep it healthy.

While we have dealt here with the extremes of extrospection and
introspection, it is safe to say that in the vast majority of
people there is a definite and unassailable interest in both of
these directions. Interest in others is not altruism and interest
in the self is not self-interest or egoism. But, on the whole,
they who are not interested in others never become
philanthropists; they who are not interested in things never
become savants; and they who do not dig deep into themselves are
not philosophers. There are, therefore, certain practical aspects
to the study of interest which are essential parts of the
knowledge of character.

1. Is the interest of the one studied controlled by some purpose
or purposes, or is it diffuse, involuntary, not well directed?

2. Is it narrow, so that it excludes the greater part of the
world, or is it easily evoked by a multiplicity of things? In the
breadth of interest is contained the breadth of character, but
not necessarily its intensity or efficiency. There are people of
narrow but intense successful interest, and others of broad,
intense successful interest, but one meets, too frequently,
people quickly interested in anything, but not for long or in a
practical fashion. There is a certain high type of failure that
has this difficulty.

3. Is its main trend outward, and if so, is there some special
feature or features of the world that excite interest?

4. Is its main trend inward, and is he interested in emotions,
thoughts, sensations,--In his mind or his body, in ideas or in
feelings? For it is obvious that the man interested in his ideas
is quite a different person than he who is keenly aware of his
emotions, and that the hypochondriac belongs in a class by
himself.

5. If there are special interests, how do these harmonize with
ability and with well-defined plan and purpose. It is not
sufficient to be keenly interested, though that is necessary. One
of the greatest disharmonies of life is when a man is interested
when he is not proficient, though usually proficiency develops
interest because it gives superiority and achievement.

Interest is heightened by the success of others, for we are
naturally competitive creatures, or by admiration for those
successful in any line of activity. The desire to emulate or
excel or to get power is a mighty factor in the maintenance of
interest. "See how nicely Georgie does it," is a formula for both
children and adults, and if omitted, interest would not be easily
aroused or maintained. In other words, the competitive feeling
and desire in its largest sense are necessary for the
concentrated excitement of interest. So any scheme of social
organization that proposes to do away with competition and desire
for superiority labors under the psychological handicap of
removing the basis of much of the interest in work and study and
must find some substitute for the lacking incentives before it
can seriously ask for the adherence of those with a realistic
view of human nature. One might, it is true, establish traditions
of work, bring about a livelier social conscience as to service,
but these are not sufficient to arouse real interest in the vast
majority of the race. Here and there one finds a man in whom
interest is aroused by the unsolved problem, by the reward of
fame and the pleasure of achievement, but such persons are rare.
The average man (and woman), in my experience, loses interest in
anything that does not directly benefit him or in which his
personal competitive feeling is not aroused. Interest becomes
vague and ill-defined the farther the matter concerned is from
the direct personal good of the individual, and proportionately
it becomes difficult to sustain it.

That is why in our day "dollars and cents" appeals to interest
are made; away with abstracts, away with sentiment; the publicity
man working for a good cause now uses the methods of the man
selling shoes or automobiles: he attempts to show that one's
interest and cooperation are demanded and necessary because one's
direct personal welfare is involved. Whether or not ethically
justifiable, it is a recognition of the fact that interest is
aroused and sustained, for the majority, by some direct personal
involvement.

Thus in education, a fact to be learned, or a subject to be
studied, should be first sketched or placed in some use value to
the student. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is appealing only to
the rare scholar, he who palpitates with interest over the
relationship of things to one another, he who seeks to discover
values. Now and then one finds such a person, one thrown into
sustained excitement by learning, but the great majority of
students, whether in medicine, law or mathematics, are
"practical," meaning that their interests are relatively narrow
and the good they seek an immediate one to be reaped by
themselves. Recognizing this fact in the abstract, the most of
teaching is conducted on the plane of the real scholar, and the
average student is left to find values for himself. From first to
last in teaching I would emphasize usevalue; true, I would seek
to broaden the conception of usevalue, so that a student would
see that usefulness is a social value, but no matter how abstract
and remote the subject, its relationship to usefulness would be
preliminary and continuously emphasized in order to sustain
interest.

Interest, like any other form of excitement, needs new stimuli
and periods of relaxation. People under the driving force of
necessity continue at their work for longer periods of time and
more constantly than is psychologically possible for the
maintaining of interest. So it disappears, and then fatigue sets
in at once,--a fatigue that is increased by the effort to work
and the regret and rebellion at the change. The memory seems to
suffer and a fear is aroused that "I am losing my memory"; the
threat to success brings anguish and often the health becomes
definitely impaired. Overconcentrated, too long maintenance of
interest brings apathy,--an apathy that cannot be dispelled
except by change and rest. Here there is wide individual
variation from those who need frequent change and relaxation
periods to those who can maintain interest in a task almost
indefinitely.

A hobby, or a secondary object of interest, is therefore a real
necessity to the man or woman battling for a purpose, whose
interest must be sustained. It acts to relax, to shift the
excitement and to allow something of the feeling of novelty as
one reapproaches the task.

As a matter of fact, excitement and interest are not easily
separated from their derivatives and elaborations. Desire,
purpose, ambition, imply a force; interest implies a direction
for that force. Interest may be as casual as curiosity aroused by
the novel and strange, or as deep-seated and specialized as a
talent. The born teacher is he who knows how to arouse and
maintain and direct interest; the born achiever is the man whose
interest, quickly aroused, is easily maintained and directs
effort. To find the activity that is natively interesting and yet
suited to one's ability is the aim in vocational guidance.

There are some curious pathological aspects to interest
--"conflict" aspects of the subject. A man finds himself
palpitatingly interested in what is horrible to him, as a bird is
fascinated by a snake. Sex abnormalities have a marvelous
interest to everybody, although many will not admit it. Stories
of crime and bloodshed are read by everybody with great
avidity,--and people will go miles to the site of grim tragedy.
Court rooms are packed whenever a horrible murder is aired or a
nauseating divorce scandal is tried. A chaste woman will read, on
the sly and with inner rebellion, as many pornographic tales as
she can get hold of, and the "carefully" brought up, i. e., those
whose interest has been carefully directed, suddenly become
interested in the forbidden; they seek to peek through windows
when they should be looking straight ahead.

As a matter of fact, interest is as much inhibited as conduct.
"You mustn't ask about that" is the commonest answer a child
gets. "That's a naughty question to ask" runs it a close second.
Can one inhibit interest, which is the excitement caused by the
unknown? The answer is that we can, because a large part of
education is to do this very thing. "Can we inhibit any interest
without injuring all interests?" is a question often put. My
answer would be that it is socially necessary that interest in
certain directions be inhibited, whether it hurts the individual
or not. But the interest in a forbidden direction can be shifted
to a permitted direction, and this should be done. In my opinion,
sex interest can be so handled and a blunt thwarting of this
interest should be avoided. Some explanation leading the child to
larger, less personal aspects of sex should be given.

The interest of the child is often thwarted through sheer
laziness. "Don't bother me" is the reply of a parent shirking a
sacred duty. Interest is the beginning of knowledge, and where it
is discouraged knowledge is discouraged. Any inquiry can be met
on the child's plane of intelligence and comprehension, and the
parent must arrange for the gratification of this fundamental
desire. How? By a question hour each day, perhaps a children's
hour, a home university period where the vital interest of the
child will be satisfied.

To return to the morbid interests: do they arise from secret
morbid desires? The Freudian answer to that would be yes. And so
would many another answer. It is the answer in many cases,
especially where the desire is not so much morbid as forbidden.
The virgin, the continent who are intensely interested in sex are
not morbid, even though they have been forbidden to think of a
natural craving and appetite. But when the interest is for the
horrible it is often the case that the excitement aroused by the
subject is pleasurable, because it is a mild excitement and does
not quite reach disgust. Confronted with the real perversity, the
disgust aroused would quite effectually conquer interest.

And here is a fundamental law of interest: it must lead to a
profitable, pleasurable result or else it tends to disappear. If
this is too bold a statement, let me qualify it by stating that a
profitable, pleasurable result must be foreseen or foreseeable.
Either in some affective state, or in some tangible good,
interest seeks fulfillment. Disappointment is the foe of
interest, and too prolonged a "vestibule of satisfaction" (to use
Hocking's phrase) destroys or impairs interest.

CHAPTER VIII. THE SENTIMENTS OF LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, HATE, PITY AND
DUTY. COMPENSATION AND ESCAPE

I shall ignore the complexities that arise when we seek to
organize our reactions into various groups by making a simple
classification of feeling, for the purposes of this book. There
is a primary result of any stimulation, whether from within
ourselves or without, which we have called excitement. This
excitement may have a pleasurable or an unpleasurable quality,
and we cannot understand just what is back of pleasure and pain
in this sense. Such an explanation, that pleasure is a sign of
good for the organism and pain a sign of bad, is an error in that
often an experience that produces pleasure is a detriment and an
injury. If pleasure were an infallible sign of good, no books on
character, morals or hygiene would need to be written.

This primary excitement, when associated with outer events or
things, becomes differentiated into many forms. Curiosity (or
interest) is the focusing of that excitement on particular
objects or ends, in order that the essential value or meaning of
that object or individual become known. Curiosity and interest
develop into the seeking of experience and the general
intellectual pursuits. We have already discussed this phase of
excitement.

An object of interest may then evoke further feeling. It may be
one's baby, or one's father or a kinsman or a female of the same
species. A type of feeling FAVORABLE to the object is aroused,
called "tender feeling," which is associated with deep-lying
instincts and has endless modifications and variations. Perhaps
its great example is the tender feeling of the mother for the
baby, a feeling so strong that it leads to conduct of self-
sacrifice; conduct that makes nothing of privation, suffering,
even death, if these will help the object of the tender feeling,
the child. Tender feeling of this type, which we call love, is a
theme one cannot discuss dryly, for it sweeps one into reveries;
it suggests softly glowing eyes, not far from tears, tenderly
curved lips, just barely smiling, and the soft humming of the
mother to the babe in her arms. It is the soft feeling which is
the unifying feeling, and when it reaches a group they become
gentle in tone and manners and feel as one. The dream of the
reformer has always been the extension of this tender feeling
from the baby, from the child and the helpless, to all men, thus
abolishing strife, conquering hate, unifying man. This type of
love is also paternal, though it is doubtful whether as such it
ever reaches the intensity it does in the mother. By a sort of
association it spreads to all children, to all little things, to
all helpless things, except where there exists a counter feeling
already well established.

Though typical in the mother, child relationship, tender feeling
or love, exists in many other relationships. The human family,
with its close association, its inculcated unity of interests, in
its highest form is based on the tender feeling. The noble ideal
of the brotherhood of man comes from an extension of the feeling
found in brothers. The brotherly feeling is emphasized, though
the sisterly feeling is fully as strong, merely because the male
member of genus homo has been the articulate member, he has
written and talked as if he, and not his sister, were the
important human personage. So fraternal feeling is tender
feeling, existing between members of the same family, or the love
that we conceive ought to be present. Is such love instinctive,
as is the maternal love? If it is, that instinct is very much
weaker, and hostile feeling, indifference, rivalry, may easily
replace it. We rarely conceive of a mortal world where so intense
a love as that of the mother will be the common feeling; all we
dare hope for is a world in which there will be a fine fraternal
feeling.

Fraternal feeling is born of association together, any task
undertaken en masse, any living together under one roof. Even
when men sit down to eat at the same table, it tends to appear.
So college life, the barracks, secret orders, awaken it, but
here, as always, while it links together the associated, it shuts
out as non-fraternal those not associated.

What we call friendly feeling is a less vehement, more
intellectualized form of tender feeling. It demands a certain
equality and a certain similarity in tastes, though some
friendships are noted for the dissimilarity of the friends.
Friendship lives on reciprocal benefits, tangible or intangible,
though sentimentalists may take exception to this. Primary in it
is the good opinion of the friends and interest in one another;
we cannot be friends with those who think we are foolish or mean
or bad. We ALLOW a friend to say that we have acted wrongly
because we think he has our interest at heart, because he has
shown that he has this interest at heart, though his saying so
sometimes strains the friendship for a while. Friendship ideally
expects no material benefits, but it lives on the spiritual
benefit of sympathy and expressed interest and the flattery of a
taste in common. It is a unification of individuals that has been
glorified as the perfect relationship, since it has no
classifiable instinct behind it and is in a sense democracy at
its noblest. Friendship is easiest formed in youth, because men
are least selfish, least specialized at that time. As time goes
on, alas, our own interests and purposes narrow down in order
that we may succeed; there is less time and energy for
friendship.

Sex love is only in part made up of tender feeling. Passion,
admiration of beauty, desire of possession, the love of conquest,
take away from the "other" feeling that is the basis of
tenderness or true love. We desire so much for ourselves in sex
love that we have not so much capacity for tender feeling as we
usually think we have. The protests of eternal devotion and
unending self-sacrifice are sincere enough but they have this
proviso in the background: "You must give yourself to me." If the
lovers can also be friends, if they have a real harmony of
tastes, desires and ambitions, if they can recede their ego
feeling, know how to compromise, then this added to sex feeling
makes the most genuinely satisfying of all human relations, or at
least the most reciprocal. But the two human beings who fall in
love are rarely enough alike, and their relationship is rarely
one of equality; traditional duties and rights are not equal;
they will seek different things, and their relationship is too
close and intimate to be an easy one to maintain. Sex love and
marriage are different matters, for though they may be the same,
too often they are not. Rarely does sex love maintain itself
without marriage and marriage colors over sex love with parental
feelings, financial interests, home and its emotions, etc. In sex
gratification[1] there is the danger of all sensuous pleasure:
that a periodic appetite gratified often leaves behind it an
ennui, a distaste,--sometimes reaching dislike--of the entire act
and associations.

[1] Stanley Hall says that after sex gratification there is
"taedium vitae," weariness of life. In unsanctioned sex
gratification this is extreme and takes on either bitter
self-reproach or else a hate of the partner. But this is due to
the inner conflict rather than the sex act.

Is all tender feeling, all love, sexual in its essential nature?
The Freudians say yes to this, or what amounts to yes. All mother
love arises from the sex sphere, and it cannot be denied that in
the passionate desire to fondle, to kiss and even to bite there
is something very like the excitement of sex. But there is
something very different in the wish for self-sacrifice, the pity
for the helpless state, the love of the littleness. Women, when
they love men, often add maternal feeling to it, but mainly they
love their strength, size and vigor; and there tenderness and
passion differ. Certainly there seems little of the sexual in the
love of a father for his baby,[1] though the Freudians do not
hesitate in their use of the term homosexual. Apparently all
children have incestuous desire for their parents, if we are to
trust Freud. Without entering into detailed reasoning, I disavow
any truly sexual element in tender feeling. It is part of the
reception we give to objects having a favorable relation to
ourselves. Indeed, we give it to our houses, our dogs, our
cattle; our pipes are hallowed by friendly association, and so
with our books, our clothes and our homes. We extend it in deep,
full measure to the very rocks and rills of our native land or to
some place where we spent happy or tender days. Tender feeling,
love, is inclusive of much of the sex emotion, and the
characteristic mistake of the Freudians of identifying somewhat
similar things has here been made.

[1] It's a very difficult world to live in, if we are to trust
the Freudians. If your boy child loves his mother, that's
heterosexual; if he loves his father, that's homosexual; and the
love of a girl child for her parents simply reverses the above
formula. If your wife says of the baby boy, "How I love him! He
looks just like my father," be careful; that's a daughter-father
complex of a dangerous kind and means the most unhallowed things,
and may cause her to have a nervous breakdown some day!

Love, then, is this tender feeling made purposive and
intelligent. It is a sentiment, in Shand's phrase, and seeks the
good of its object. It may be narrow, it may be broad, it may be
intense or feeble, but in its organized sense it plans, fights
and cherishes. It has organized with it the primary
emotions,--fear if the object is in danger, or anger is evoked
according to the circumstances; joy if the object of love is
enhanced or prospers; sorrow if it is lost or injured under
circumstances that make the lover helpless. Love is not only the
tenderest feeling, but it is also the most heroic and desperate
fighter in behalf of the loved one. Here we are face to face with
the contradictions that we always meet when we personify a
quality or make an abstraction. Love may do the most hateful
things; love may stunt, the character of the lover and the
beloved. In other words, love, tender feeling, must be conjoined
with intelligence, good judgment, determination and fairness
before it is useful. It would be a nice question to determine
just how much harm misguided love has done.

What is pity? Though objects of love always elicit pity, when
helpless or injured, objects of pity are not necessarily objects
of love. In fact, we may pity through contempt. Objective pity is
a type of tender feeling in which there is little or no
self-feeling. We do not extend the ego to the piteous object. We
desire to help, even though the object of pity is an enemy or
disgusting. One of the commonest struggles of life is that
between self-interest and pity,--and the selfish resent any
situation that arouses their pity, because they dislike to give.
Pity tends to disappear from the life of the soldier and is,
indeed, a trait he does not need; in the lives of the strong and
successful, pity is apt to be a hindering quality. In a world in
which competition is keen, the cooperative gentle qualities
hinder success. The weak seek the pity of others; they need it;
and the pity-seeker is a very distinct type. The strong and proud
hate to be pitied, and when wounded they hide, shun their friends
and keep the semblance of strength with a brave face. Pity
directed toward oneself as the object is self-pity,--a quality
found in children and in a certain amiable, weak, egoistic type,
whose eyes are always full of tears as they talk of themselves.
Of course, at times, we are all prone to this vice of character,
but there are some chronically afflicted.

Certain so-called sentimentalists are those who die, tribute
their pity in an erratic fashion. These are the vegetarians who
are sad because it is wrong to kill for food; yet they wear
without compunction the leather of cattle who have neither
committed suicide nor died of old age. And the
anti-vivisectionists view without any stir of pity the children
of the slums and the sick of all kinds. Pity raises man to the
divine but, like all the gentle qualities, it needs guidance by
reason and common sense before it is of any value.

Just as there are objects and individuals recognized or believed
to be as somehow favorable and who evoke tender feeling, so there
are objects and individuals regarded as unfavorable, perhaps
dangerous, who arouse aversion and hatred. The feeling thus
produced is the other great sentiment of life, which on the whole
organizes character and conduct on a great plane. Hatred, a
decidedly primitive reaction, still is powerful in the world and
is back of dissension of all kinds, from lawsuits to war. When
one hates he is attached to the hated object in a fashion just
the reverse of the attachment of love; joy, anger, fear and
sorrow arise under exactly the opposite circumstances, and the
aim and end of hate is to block, thwart and destroy the hated
one. The earlier history of man lays emphasis on the activities
of hate,--war, feats of arms, individual feuds. Hate, unlike
love, needs no moral code or teaching to bring it into activity;
it springs into being and constantly needs repression. Unlikeness
alone often brings it to life; to be too different from others is
recognized as a legitimate reason for hatred. The most important
cause is conflict of interest and wounding of self-feeling and
pride. Revengeful feeling, fostered by tradition and
"patriotism," caused many wars and in its lesser spheres of
operation is back of murders, assaults, insults and the lesser
categories of injuries of all kinds.

The prime emotion of hatred is anger; in its less intense aspect
of aversion it is disgust. The aim and end of anger is
destruction of the offending object; the aim and end of aversion
is removal, ejection. Hate may be and often is a noble sentiment,
though the trend of modern thought, as it minimizes personal
responsibility, is to eliminate hate against persons and
intellectualize hate so that it is reserved for the battle
against ideas. Whether you can really summon all your effort
against any one, against his plans, opinions and actions, unless
you have built up the steady sentiment of hatred for him, is a
nice psychological question. Hate is most intense in little
people, in persons absolutely convinced that their interests,
opinions and plans are sacred, sure of their superiority and
righteousness. Once let insight into yourself, your weakness and
your real motives creep into your mind and your hate against
opponents and obstructors must lessen. Those who realize most the
fallibility of men and women, to whom Pilate's question "What is
truth?" has added to it a more sceptical question, "What is
right," find it hard to hate. Therefore, such persons, the
broad-minded and the most deeply wise, are not the best fighters
for a cause, since their efforts are lessened by sympathy for the
opponent. Here is the marvel of Abraham Lincoln; rich with
insight, he could hate slavery and secession and yet not hate the
southern people. In that division of himself lies his greatness
and his suffering.

The disappearance of personal hate from the world can only come
when men realize the essential unity of mankind. For part of the
psychological origin of hate lies in unlikeness. Great unlikeness
in color and facial line seems to act as a challenge to the
feeling of superiority. Wherever a "different" group challenges
another's superiority, or enters into active competition for the
goods of life, there hate enters in its most virulent form. The
disappearance of the "unlike" feeling is very slow and is
hindered by the existence of small "particular" groups. Little
nationalities,[1] small sects, even exclusive clubs and circles
are means of generating difference and thus hate.

[1] The more nationalities, each with its claim to a great
destiny, the more wars! There is the essential danger and folly
of tribal patriotism.

We shall not enter into the origin of hate through the danger to
purpose, through rivalry among those not separated by unlikeness.
Hate seems to be a chronic anger, or at least that emotion kept
at a more or less constant level by perception of danger and the
threat at personal dignity and worth. Obstructed love or passion
and the feeling of "wrong," i. e., injury done that was not
merited, that the personal conscience does not justify, furnish
the most virulent types of hatred. "Love thine enemies" is still
an impossible injunction for most men.

We cannot hope to trace the feeling of revenge in its effects on
human conduct. Though at present religion and law both prohibit
revengeful acts, the desire "to get even" flames high in almost
every human breast under all kinds of injury or insult. This form
of hate may express itself crudely in the vendetta of the
Sicilian, the feud of the Tennessee mountaineer, or the assault
and battery of an aggrieved husband; it is behind the present-day
conflict in Ireland, and it threatened Europe for forty years
after the Franco-Prussian War, --and no man knows how profoundly
it will influence future world affairs because of the Great War.
Often it disguises itself as justice, the principle of the thing,
in those who will not admit revenge as a motive; and the eclipsed
and beaten take revenge in slander, innuendo and double-edged
praise. To some revenge is a devil to be fought out of their
hearts; to others it is a god that guides every act. We may
define nobility of character as the withdrawal from revenge as a
motive and the substitution for it of justice.

Some hatred expresses itself openly and fearlessly and as such
gains some respect, even from its own object. Other hatred plots
and schemes, the intelligence lends itself to the plans
completely and the whole personality suffers in consequence. Some
hatred, weak and without self-confidence, or seeking the effect
of surprise, is hypocritical, dissimulates, affects friendly
feeling, rubs its hands over insults and awaits the opportune
moment. This type is associated in all minds with a feeling of
disgust, for at bottom we rather admire the "good" hater.

We have spoken of these three specialized and directed outgrowths
of excitement, interest, love and hatred as if they were
primarily directed to the outside world, though in a previous
chapter we discussed the introspective interest. What shall we
call the love and hatred a man has for himself? Is the
self-regarding sentiment any different than the sentiment of love
for others? Is that hate and disgust we feel for ourselves, or
for some action or thought, different from the hate and disgust
we have for others?

Judged by Shand's dicta that anger and fear are aroused if the
object of love is threatened, joy is aroused as it prospers, and
sorrow if it is deeply injured or lost, self-love remarkably
resembles other-love. The pride we take in our own achievements
is unalloyed by jealousy, and there is always a trace of jealousy
in the pride we take in the achievements of others, but there is
no difference in the pride itself. There is no essential
difference in the "good" we seek for ourselves and in the good we
seek for others, for what we seek will depend on our idea of
"good." Thus the ambitious mother seeks for her daughter a rich
husband and the idealist seeks for his son a career of devotion
to the ideal. And the sensualist devoted to the good of his belly
and his pocket loves his child and shows it by feeding and
enriching him.

There seems to be lacking, however, the glow of tender feeling in
self-love. The projection of the self-interest to others has a
passion, a melting in it that self-love never seems to possess,
though it may be constant and ever-operating. Self-regard,
self-admiration or conceit may be very high and deeply felt, but
though more common than real admiration for others, it seldom
reaches the awe and reverence that the projected emotion reaches.

In mental disease, of the type known as Maniac Depressive
insanity, there is a curious oscillation of self-love and
self-admiration. This disease is cyclic, in that two opposing
groups of symptoms tend to appear and displace each other. In the
manic, or excited state, there is greatly heightened activity
with correspondingly heightened feeling of power. Self-love and
admiration reach absurd levels: one is the most beautiful, the
richest and wisest of persons, infallible, irresistible, aye,
perhaps God or Christ. Sometimes the feeling of grandeur, the
euphoria, is less fantastic and the patient imagines himself a
great inventor, a statesman of power and wisdom, a writer of
renown, etc. Suddenly, or perhaps gradually, the change comes;
self-feeling drops into an abyss. "I am the most miserable of
persons, the vilest sinner, hated and rightly by God and man,
cause of suffering and misery. I am no good, no use, a horrible
odor issues from me, I am loathsome to look at, etc., etc."
Desperate suicidal attempts are made, and all the desires that
tend to preserve the individual disappear, including appetite for
food and drink, the power to sleep. It is the most startling of
transitions; one can hardly realize that the dejected, silent
person, sitting in a corner, hiding his face and hardly
breathing, is the same individual who lately tore around the
wards, happy, dancing, singing and boasting of his greatness of
power. Indeed, is he the same individual? No wonder the ancients
regarded such insanity as a possession by an evil spirit. We of a
later day who deal with this disease on the whole are inclined to
the belief that some internal factor of a physical kind is
responsible, some neuronic shift, or some strange, visceral
endocrinal disorder.

While self-hate in this pathological aspect is relatively
uncommon, in every person there are self-critical,
self-condemning activities which sometimes for short periods of
time reach self-hatred and disgust. McDougall makes a good deal
of the self-abasing instinct which makes us lower ourselves
gladly and willingly. This seems to me to be an aspect of the
emotion of admiration and wonder, for we do not wish ordinarily
to kneel at the feet of the insignificant, debased; or it is an
aspect of fear and the effort to obtain conciliation and pity.
But the establishment of ideals for ourselves to which we are not
faithful brings with it a disgust and loathing for self that is
extremely painful and leads to a desire for penance of any kind
In order that we may punish ourselves and feel that we have made
amends. The capacity for self-hate and self-disgust depends
largely upon the development of these ideals and principles of
conscience, of expectation of the self. Frequently there is an
overrigidity, a ceaseless self-examination that now and then
produces miracles of character and achievement but more often
brings the breakdown of health. This is the seeker of perfection
in himself, who will not compromise with his instincts and his
human flesh. There seekers of perfection are among the noblest of
the race, admired in the abstract but condemned by their friends
as "too good," "impractical," as possessors of the "New England
conscience." One of the effects of a Puritanical bringing-up is
a belief that pleasure is unworthy, especially in the sex field
and even in marriage. Now and then one meets a patient caught
between perfectly proper desire and an obsession that such
pleasure is debasing; and a feeling of self-disgust and
self-hatred results that is the more tragic since it is useless.

There are those in whom self-love and self-esteem is at a lower
pressure than with the average man, just as there are those in
whom it is at a much higher pressure. Such people, when fatigued
or when subject to the hostile or even non-friendly opinion of
others, become so-called self-conscious, i. e., are afflicted
with fear and a feeling of inferiority. This may deepen into
self-contempt and self-hatred. Part of what is called confidence
in oneself is self-esteem, and under fatigue, illness, after
punishment of a physical or mental nature, it is apt to
disappear. Very distressing is this in those who have been
accustomed to courage and self-confidence, perhaps whose
occupation makes these qualities necessary. Soldiers, after
gassing or cerebral concussion, men completely without
introspection, fearless and gay with assurance, become
apprehensive, self-analytical and without the least faith in
themselves, so that they approach their work in fear. So with men
who work in high places or where there is risk, such as
steeplejacks, bridge builders, iron workers, engineers; let an
accident happen to them, or let there occur an exhausting disease
with its aftermath of neurasthenia, and the self-esteem and
self-confidence disappear so that in many cases they have to give
up their job.

Because self-disgust and hatred are so painful, compensatory
"mechanisms" have been set up. There is in many people a tendency
to project outward the blame for those acts or thoughts which
they dislike. In the pathological field we get those delusions of
influence that are so common. Thus a patient will attribute his
obscene thoughts and words to a hypnotic effect of some person or
group of persons and saves his own face by the delusion. In
lesser pathological measure, men have fiercely preached against
the snares and wiles of women, refusing to recognize that the
turmoil of unwelcome desire into which they were thrown was
internal in the greater part of its origin and that the woman
often knew little or not at all of the effect she helped produce.
One of the outstanding features in the history of the race has
been this transfer of blame from the desire of men to the agent
which aroused them. Of course, women have played on the desires
of men, but even where this was true the blame for VULNERABILITY
has seldom been fully accepted. Whenever any one has been "weak"
or "foolish" or "sinful," his mind at once seeks avenues of
escape from the blame, from the painful feeling of inferiority
and self-reproach. The avenue of escape selected may be to blame
others as tempting or not warning and not teaching, may become
entirely delusional, or it may take the religious form of
confession, expiation and repentance. There are some so hardy in
their self-esteem that they never suffer, never seek any escape
from self-reproach, largely because they never feel it; and
others, though they seek escape, are continually dragged by
conscience to self-imposed torture. Most of us seek explanations
for our unwelcome conduct on a plane most favorable to our
self-esteem, and there arises an elaborate system of
self-disguise, expiation, repentance and confession that is in a
large part the real inner life of most of us. To explain failure
especially are the avenues of escape utilized. Wounded in his
self-esteem, rare is the one who frankly acknowledges
inferiority. "Pull," "favoritism," "luck," explain the success of
others as do the reverse circumstances explain our failures to
ourselves. Sickness explains it, and so the defeated search in
themselves for the explanation which will in part compensate
them. Escape from inferiority follows many avenues, --by actual
development of superiority, by denying real superiority to
others, or by explaining the inferiority on some acceptable
basis.

Here (as elsewhere in character) there is evident an organic and
a social basis for feeling. We have not emphasized sufficiently a
peculiarity of all human feeling, all emotions, all sentiments.
They have their value to the individual in organizing his
conduct, his standard of value. They are of enormous importance
socially. A great law of feeling of whatever kind, of whatever
elaboration, is this; it tends to spread from individual to
individual and excites whole groups to the same feeling; tender
feeling is contagious, and so is hate. We are somehow so made
that we reverberate at a friendly smile in one way and to the
snarl and stern look of hate in another way. Ordinarily love
awakens love and hate awakens hate, though it may bring fear or
contempt. It is true that we may feel so superior or cherish some
secret hate that will make another's love odious to us, and also
we may admire and worship one who hates us. These are exceptional
cases and are examples of exceptional sentimental stability. It
is of course understood that by love is not meant sex passion.
Here the curious effect of coldness is sometimes to fan the flame
of passion. Desire obstructed often gains in violence, and the
desire to conquer and to possess the proud, that we all feel,
adds to the fire of lust.

Self-esteem, self-confidence, hateful to others if in excess or
if obtrusive, is an essential of the leader. His feeling is
extraordinarily contagious, and the morale of the group is in his
keeping. He must not show fear, or self-distrust or self-lowering
in any way. He must be deliberate, but forceful, vigorous,
masterful. If he has doubts, he must keep them to himself or
exhibit them only to one who loves him, who is not a mere
follower. It is a law of life that the herd follows the
unwounded, confident, egoistic leader and tears to pieces or
deserts the one who is wearying.

The basic sentiments of interest, love and hate, projected
outward or inward, organize personality. Men's characters and
their destinies rest in the things they find interesting, the
persons they love and hate, their self-confidence and
self-esteem, their self-contempt and hatred. And it is true that
often we hate and love the same person or circumstance; we are
divided, secretly, in our tenderest feelings, in our fiercest
hate, more often, alas, in the former. For occasionally
admiration and respect will mitigate hate and render impotent our
aim, but more commonly we are jealous of or envy son, brother,
sister, husband, wife, father, mother and friend. We love our
work but hate its tyranny, and even the ideal that we cherish,
when we examine it too closely, seems overconventionalized, not
enough our own, and it stifles and martyrs too many unpleasant
desires. We rebel against our own affections, against the love
that chains us perhaps to weakness and forces us, weary, to the
wheel.

How deeply the feeling of "right" enters into the sentiments and
their labors needs only a little reflection to understand. Here
we come to the effect of the sentiment of duty, for as such it
may be discussed. The establishment of conscience as our inner
guide to conduct, and even to thought and emotions, has been
studied briefly. On a basis of innate capacity, conscience arises
from the teaching and traditions of the group (or groups). The
individual who has a susceptibility or a readiness to believe and
a desire to be in conformity accepts or evolves for himself
principles of conduct, based on obligation, expectation of reward
and fear of punishment, these entering in various proportions,
according to the type of person. In children, or the very young
child, expectation of reward and fear of punishment are more
important than obligation, and this remains true of many people
throughout life. Gradually right, what we call duty, becomes
established as a guiding principle; but it must struggle with
impulse and the desire for immediate pleasure throughout life. In
fact, one of the dangers of the development of the feeling of
duty lies in the view often held by those guided by principle and
duty that pleasure is in itself somehow wrong and needs
justification. Whereas, in my opinion, pleasure is right and
needs no justification and is wrong only when it offends the
fundamental moralities and purposes of Society.

The feeling of "right" depends to a certain extent on the kind of
teaching in early childhood, but more on the nature of the
individual. It is based on his social feeling, his desire to be
in harmony with a group or a God that essentially stands above
any group. For the idea of God introduces an element having more
authority than the group whom He leads. Here also is a factor of
importance: choice is difficult for the great majority. Placed in
a situation where more than one response is possible, an unhappy
state of bewilderment results unless there are formulae for
action. The leader is the chooser for the group; religion is an
established system of choices even in its "Thou shalt not"
injunctions, and to be at one with God implies that one is
following an infallible leader, and doubt and uncertainty
disappear. Trotter[1] points out clearly the role the feeling of
certitude plays in developing codes. As life becomes more
complex, as more choices appear, the need of an established
method of choosing becomes greater. The careful, cautious,
conscientious types develop a system of principles for choice of
action; they discard the uncertainty of pleasure as a guide for
the certainty of a code laid down and fixed. Duty is the north
star of conduct!

[1] "The Herd and its Instincts in Peace and War."

In passing, an interesting development of our times is worth
noticing. The tendency is to discard established codes, to weaken
dogma and to throw more responsibility on the individual
conscience. That is the meaning of the Protestant reformation,
and it is the meaning of the growth of Unitarianism within the
Protestant church; it is also the meaning of the reform movement
in Judaism. The Catholic church has felt it in the breaking away
of state after state from its authority, which virtually means
that the states have thrown their citizens back on their own
consciences and the state laws. In fact, reliance on law is in
part an effort to escape the necessity of choosing. The pressure
of external authority has its burden, but in giving up its
certainty man also gives up tranquillity. Much of modern
neurasthenia is characterized by a feeling of uncertainty,
unreality, doubt: what is right, what is real? True, as religion
in the dogmatic sense relinquishes its power, ethics grow in
value and men seek some other formula which will compensate for
the dogma. It is no accident that as the old religions lose their
complete control new ones appear, with all-embracing formula,
like Christian Science, New Thought, etc. Though these start with
elastic general principles, sooner or later the directions for
conduct become minute and then fixed. The tragedy of a great
founder of religion like Buddha or Christ is that though he gives
out a great pure principle, his followers must have, demand and
evolve a dogmatic religion with fixed ceremonials. Man, on the
whole, does not want to choose; he wants to have the feeling that
he ought to do this or that according to a code laid down by
authority. This will make a real democracy always impossible.

However the sentiment of duty arises, it becomes the central
feeling in all inner conflicts, and it wrestles with inclination
and the pleasant choice. Duty is the great inhibitor, but also it
says "Thou shalt!" Ideally, duty involves self-sacrifice, and
practically man dislikes self-sacrifice save where love is very
strong. Duty chains a man to his task where he is inclined for a
holiday. Duty may demand a man's life, and that sacrifice seems
easier for men to make than the giving up of power and pelf. (In
the late war it was no great trouble to pass laws conscripting
life; it was impossible to pass laws conscripting wealth. It was
easier for a man to allow his son to go to war than to give up
his wealth en masse.)

The power of the feeling of duty and right over men is very
variable. There are a few to whom the feeling of "ought" is all
powerful; they cannot struggle against it, even though they wish
to. All of their goings, comings and doings are governed thereby,
and even though they find the rest of the world dropping from
them, they resist the herd. For the mass of men duty governs a
few relationships--to family and country--and even here
self-interest is camouflaged by the term "duty" in the phrase "a
man owes a duty to himself." This is the end of real duty. The
average man or woman makes a duty of nonessentials, of
ceremonials, but is greatly moved by the cry of duty if it comes
from authority or from those he respects. He fiercely resents it
if told he is not doing his duty, but is quick to tell others
they are not doing theirs.

There is also a group in whom the sense of duty is almost
completely lacking, or rather fails to govern action. Ordinarily
these are spoken of as lacking moral fiber, but in reality the
organizing energy of character and the inhibition of the impulse
to seek pleasure and present desire is feeble. Sometimes there is
lack of affection toward others, little of the real glow of
tender feeling, either towards children[1] or parents or any one.
Though these are often emotional, they are not, in the good
meaning of the term, sentimental.

[1] It is again to be emphasized that the most vital instincts
may be lacking. Even the maternal feeling may be absent, not only
in the human mother but in the animal mother. So we need not be
surprised if there are those with no sense of right or duty.

Is the sentiment of duty waning? The alarmists say it is and
point to the increase of divorce, falling off in church
attendance, and the unrest among the laboring classes as evidence
that there is a decadence. Pleasure is sought, excitement is the
goal, and sober, solid duty is "forgotten." They point out a
resemblance to the decadent days of Rome, in the rise of luxury
and luxurious tastes, and indicate that duty and the love of
luxury cannot coexist. Woman has forgotten her duty to bear
children and to maintain the home and man has forgotten his duty
to God.

Superficially these critics are right. There is a demand for a
more satisfying life, involving less self sacrifice on the part
of those who have in the past made the bulk of the sacrifices.
Woman, demanding equality, refuses to be regarded as merely a
child bearer and is become a seeker of luxury. The working man,
looking at the world he has built, now able to read, write and
vote, asks why the duty is all on his side. In other words, a
demand for justice, which is merely reciprocal, universal duty,
has weakened something of the sense of duty. In fact, that is the
first effect of the feeling of injustice, of unjust inequality.
Dealing with the emancipated, the old conception of duty as
loyalty under all conditions has not worked, and we need new
ideals of duty on the part of governments and governing groups
before we can get the proper ideals of duty in the governed.

Some of those ideals are commencing to be heard. International
duty for governments is talked of and some are bold to say that
national feeling prevents a real feeling of duty to the world, to
man. These claim that duty must have its origin in the extension
of tender feeling, in fraternity, to all men. In a lesser way
business is commencing to substitute for its former motto,
"Handelschaft ist keine Bruderschaft" (business is no
brotherhood), the ideal of service, as the duty of business.
Everywhere we are commencing to hear of "social duty," of
obligation to the lesser and unfortunate, of the responsibility
of the leaders to the led, of the well to the sick, of the
law-abiding to the criminal. Strange notion, this last, but one
at bottom sound and practical.

In the end, the true sense of duty is in a sense of individual
responsibility. Our age feels this as no other age has felt it.
Other ages have placed responsibility on the Church, on God and
on the State. Difficult and onerous as is the burden, we are
commencing to place duty on the individual, and in that respect
we are not in the least a decadent generation.

CHAPTER IX. ENERGY RELEASE AND THE EMOTIONS

One of the problems in all work is to place things in their right
order, in the order of origin and importance. This difficulty is
almost insoluble when one studies the character of man. As we see
him in operation, the synthesis is so complete that we can hardly
discern the component parts. Inheritance, social pressure,
excitement, interest, love, hate, self-interest, duty and
obligation, --these are not unitary in the least and there is
constantly a false dissection to be made, an artefact, in order
that clearness in presentation may be obtained.

We see men as discharging energy in work and play, in the
activities that help or hurt themselves and the race. They obtain
that energy from the world without, from the sunshine, the air,
the plants and the animals; it is built up in their bodies, it is
discharged either because some inner tension builds up a desire
or because some outer stimulus, environmental or social, directs
it. Though we have no way of measuring one man's energy against
another, we say, perhaps erroneously, "He is very energetic," or
"He is not"; "He is tireless," or "He breaks down easily." As
students of character, we must take this question of the energies
of men into account as integral in our study.

Granting that the human being takes in energy as food and drink
and builds it up into dischargeable tissues, we are not further
concerned with the details of its physiology. How does the
feeling of energy arise, what increases the energy discharge and
what blocks, inhibits or lowers it? For from day to day, from
hour to hour, we are conscious either of a desire to be active, a
feeling of capacity or the reverse. We depend on that feeling of
capacity to guide us, and though it is organic, it has its
mysterious disappearances and marvelous reenforcements.

It arises, so we assume, from the visceral-neuronic activities,
subconsciously, in the sense we have used that word. It therefore
fluctuates with health, with fatigue, with the years. We marvel
at the energy of childhood and youth, and the deepest sadness we
have is the depletion of energy-feeling in old age. We love
energy in ourselves and we yield admiration, willing or
unwilling, to its display in others. The Hero, the leader, is
always energetic. In our times, in America, we demand "pep,"
action and energy-display as an essential in our play and in our
work, and we worship quite too frankly where all men have always
worshiped.

What besides the organic activity, besides health and well-being,
excites the feeling of energy and what depresses it?

1. This feeling is excited by the society of others, by the
herd-feeling, and depressed by long-continued solitude or
loneliness. The stimuli that come from other people's faces,
voices, contacts--their emotions, feelings and manifestations of
energy--are those we are best adapted to react to, those most
valuable in stirring us up. Scenery, the grandeur of the outer
world, finally depress the most of us, and we can bear these
things best in company. Who has not, on a long railroad journey,
watched with weariness and flickering interest valley and hill
and meadow swing by and then sat up with energy and definite
attention as a human being passed along on some rural road?
Lacking these stimuli there is monotony and monotony always has
with it as one of its painful features a subjective sense of
lowered energy, of fatigue. This is the problem of the housewife
and the solitary worker everywhere,--there is failure of the
sense of energy due to a failure to receive new stimuli in their
most potent form, our fellows.

2. The disappearance or injury of desire and purpose. Let there
be a sudden blocking of a purpose or an aim, so that it seems
impossible of fulfillment, and energy-feeling drops; movement,
thought, even feeling seem painful. The will flags, and the whole
world becomes unreal. This is part of the anhedonia we spoke of.

In reality, we have the disappearance of hope as basic in this
adynamia. Hope and courage are in part organic, in part are due
to the belief that a desired goal can be reached. Whether that
goal is health, when one is sick, or riches, or fame, or love and
possession, if it is a well-centralized goal toward which our
main energies are bent, and then seems suddenly impossible to
reach, there is a corresponding paralysis of energy.

Here is where a great difference is seen between individuals and
between one time of life and another. There are some to whom hope
is a shining beacon light never absent; whatever happens, hope
remains, like the beautiful fable of Pandora's box. There are
others to whom any obstruction, any discouraging feature, blots
out hope, and who constantly need the energy of others; their
persuasions and exhortations, for a renewal of energy. Here, as
elsewhere in life, some are givers and others takers of energy.
In the presence of the hopeless it is hard to maintain one's own
feeling of energy and that is why the average man shuns them. He
guards as priceless his own enthusiasm.

Curiously enough, when energy tends to disappear in the face of
disaster to one's plans, a tonic is often enough the reflection,
"it might have been worse" or "there are others worse off."[1]
Though one rebels against the encouraging effect of the last
statement, it does console, it does renew hope. For hope and
energy and desire are competitive, as is every other measure of
value. So long as one is not the worst off, then there is
something left, there is a hopeful element in the situation.
Similarly a certain rough treatment helps, as when Job is told
practically, "After all, who is Man that he should ask for the
fulfillment of his hopes?" A sense of littleness with the rest of
the race acts to bring resignation, and after that has been
established, hope can reappear. For resignation is rarely a
prolonged state of mind; it is a doorway through which we reenter
into the vista-chambers of Hope.

[1] A humorous use of this fact is in the popular "Cheer up, the
worst is yet to come!" This acts as a rough tonic.

And one clearly sees the benefit of a belief, a faith in God.
"Gott in sein Mizpah ist gerecht," cries the orthodox Jew when
his hope is shattered,--"God's decree is just." This is Hope
Eternal; "my purposes are blocked, but were they God's purposes?
No. He would not then block them. I must seek God's purposes."
Faith is really a transcendent Hope, renewing the feeling of
energy.

3. The belief that one has the good opinion of others is a
powerful stimulus to energy and feeling. We have already
considered the effect of praise and blame. Some are so
constituted that they need the approval of others at all times;
they are at the mercy of any one who gives them a cold look or a
harsh word. Others cling to the need of their own self-approval;
they are aristocrats, firm and secure in their self-estimate. Let
their self-esteem crumble, and these proud and haughty ones are
humble, weak, inefficient. We fiercely resent criticism because
in it is a threat to our source of energy, our very feeling of
being alive.

One has shrewdly to examine his fellow men from this angle: "Does
he work up his own steam; are his boilers of energy heated by his
own enthusiasm and his own self-approval? Or does he borrow; can
he work only if others add their fire to his; does his light go
out if his neighbors turn away or are too busy to help him?" One
type of man may be as admirable as another in his gifts, but the
types need different treatment.

Self-valuation is to a large extent our opinion of the valuation
of others of ourselves.[1] We believe people like us, think we
are fine and able, or beautiful, and we react with energy to
difficulties. We may be wrong; they may call us a conceited ass
and laugh at us behind our backs, but so long as we do not find
it out, it doesn't matter. There is, however, no blow quite so
severe as the sudden realization that we have mistaken the
opinion of others, we have been "fooled." To be fooled is to be
lowered in one's own self-esteem, and we like sincerity and hate
insincerity largely because our self-esteem stands on some solid
basis in the one case and on none whatever in the other. Most of
us would rather have people say bad things of us to our face than
run the risk of the ridicule and the foolish feeling that comes
with insincerity. There are some who are always suspicions that
people are insincere in praise or friendly words; they hate being
fooled, they know of no criterion of sincerity and such people
are in an adynamic state most of the time. The difference between
the trusting and the suspicious is that one responds with energy
and belief to the manifestations of friendliness in everybody,
and the other has no such inner response to guide his energy and
his actions. Trust in others is a releaser of energy; distrust
paralyzes it.

[1] To paraphrase Doctor Holmes the biggest factor in John's
self-valuation is HIS idea of Jane's idea of John.

4. Doubt and inability to choose may be contrasted with certitude
and clear choice in their effect on energy release. Of course,
one of the signs of lowered energy is doubt, as a sign of high
energy is certainty. Nevertheless, a situation of critical
importance, in which choice is difficult or digagreeable,
inhibits energy feeling[1] and discharge perhaps as much as any
other mental factor. Especially is this true when the inhibition
concerns a moral situation--"Ought I to do this or that"--and
where the fear of being wrong or doing wrong operates so that the
individual does nothing and develops an obsession of doubt. This
"to be or not to be" attitude is typical of many intelligent
people, yes, even intellectual people. They we so many angles to
a situation, they project so far into the future in their
thoughts, that a weary discouragement comes. To such as these,
the counsel of "action right or wrong but action anyway!" is
good, but the difficulty is to make them overcome their doubts.
Their cerebral oscillation makes them weary but they cannot seem
to stop it; their pendulum of choice never stops at action.

[1] See William James' "Varieties of Religious Experiences," for
beautiful examples. The Russian writers are often narrators of
this struggle.

If one wishes to destroy the energy of any one, the best way to
do it is to sow the seeds of doubt. "Your ideal is a fine one, my
friend, but--isn't it a little sophomoric?" "A nice piece of
work, but--who wants it?" On the other hand, to one obsessed by
doubt it may happen that a whole-hearted endorsement, a
resolution of the doubt, brings with it first relief and then a
swing of energy into the channels of action.

5. Competition is a great factor in energy release. Every one has
seen a horse ambling along, apparently without sufficient energy
to go more than four miles an hour. Suddenly he cocks up his ears
as the sounds of the hoof beats of a rapidly traveling horse are
heard. He shakes his head and to the amazement or amusement of
his driver sets off in rivalry at a two-minute clip. Intensely
cooperative and gregarious as man is, he is as intensely
competitive, spurred on by his observations of the other fellow.
Introduce a definite system of rivalry into a school or an
office, and you release energies never manifested before. There
are some to whom this is the main releaser of energy; struggle,
competition and victory over another is their stimulus. They can
play no game unless there is competition, and the solitary
pleasures and satisfactions, like reading, exploring, a row on
the river or a walk in the woods, cannot arouse them. Others
dislike rivalry or competition; they are too sympathetic to wish
victory over another and also they dread to lose. They prefer
team play and cooperation. The world will always seem different
to these two types. This may be said now that for most of us, who
are somewhat of a blend in this matter, rivalry is pleasant and
stimulating when there is a show of success, but we prefer
cooperation when we foresee failure.

This brings up the interesting phase of precedent in energy
release. Early success, unless it brings too high a
self-valuation, which is its great danger, is remarkably valuable
in releasing energy, and failure establishes a precedent that may
bring doubt, fear and the attendant inhibition of energy. Of
course, failure may bring with it caution and a recasting of
plans and thus constitute the most valuable of experiences. But
if it is too great, or if there is lacking a certain fortitude,
it may act as a paralyzer of energy thenceforth. In the prize
ring this is often noted; the spirit of a man goes with a defeat
and he never again has self-confidence; thereafter his energy is
constantly inhibited.

Emotions have long been studied in their effects on energy. In
fact, every animal that bristles and snarls as it faces a foe is,
unconsciously, attempting to paralyze with fear its opponent, to
render it helpless through the inhibition of action. So with the
lurking tiger; it waits in silence for the prey and seeks the
fascination of surprise as a f