The Foundations of Personality Index

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 obs

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Online Executive Education Resources

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Business Management, Economics Studies, Government Leadership, Politics, Social Issues and More...

CEO Library Online Executive Education Resources

CEO Library and Education Resources on Business Management, Economics Studies, Government Leadership, Politics, Social Issues and More...

CEO Library
Online Executive Education Resources

CEO Library and Education Resources on
Business Management, Economics Studies, Government Leadership, Politics, Social Issues and More...