Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software

THE FOUNDATIONS OF PERSONALITY

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]