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Human Traits and their Social Significance

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Title: Human Traits and their Social Significance

Author: Irwin Edman


        
Release date: August 13, 2007 [eBook #22306]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Robert J. Hall


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMAN TRAITS AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE ***




Produced by Robert J. Hall




HUMAN TRAITS

AND THEIR

SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE


BY

IRWIN EDMAN, Ph.D.

INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY


BOSTON  NEW YORK  CHICAGO

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE




FOREWORD

This book was written, originally and primarily, for use in
a course entitled "Introduction to Contemporary Civilization,"
required of all Freshmen in Columbia College. It is
an attempt to give a bird's-eye view of the processes of human
nature, from man's simple inborn impulses and needs to the
most complete fulfillment of these in the deliberate activities
of religion, art, science, and morals. It is hoped that the
book may give to the student and general reader a knowledge
of the fundamentals of human nature and a sense of the possibilities
and limits these give to human enterprise.

Part I consists of an analysis of the types of behavior, a
survey of individual traits and their significance in social
life, a brief consideration of the nature and development of
the self, individual differences, language and communication,
racial and cultural continuity. Those fruits of psychological
inquiry have been stressed which bear most strikingly on the
relations of men in our present-day social and economic
organization. In consequence, there has been a deliberate
exclusion of purely technical or controversial material, however
interesting. The psychological analysis is in general based
upon the results of the objective inquiries into human behavior
which have been so fruitfully conducted in the last twenty-five
years by Thorndike and Woodworth. To the work of
the first-mentioned, the author is particularly indebted.

Part II is a brief analysis, chiefly psychological in character,
of the four great activities of the human mind and imagination--religion,
art, science, and morals. These are discussed as
normal though complex activities developed, through the
process of reflection, in the fulfillment of man's inborn
impulses and needs. Thus descriptively to treat these spiritual
enterprises implies on the part of the author a naturalistic
viewpoint whose main outlines have been fixed for this generation
by James, Santayana, and Dewey. To the last-named
the writer wishes to express the very special obligation
that a pupil owes to a great teacher.

The book as a whole, so far as can be judged from the experience
the author and others have had in using it during
the past year as a text at Columbia, should fit well into any
general course in social psychology. It has been increasingly
realized that the student's understanding of contemporary
problems of government and industry is immensely clarified
by a knowledge of the human factors which they involve.
This volume supplies a brief account of the essential facts of
human behavior with especial emphasis on their social
consequences. Part I may be independently used, as it has been
with success, in a general course in social psychology. Part II,
the "Career of Reason," presents material which many
instructors find it highly desirable to use in introductory
philosophy courses, but for which no elementary texts are
available. The usual textbooks deal with the more metaphysical
problems to the exclusion of religion, art, morals, and science,
humanly the most interesting and significant of philosophical
problems. Where, as in many colleges, the introductory
philosophy course is preceded by a course in psychology, the
arrangement of the volume should prove particularly well
suited.

The illustrative material has been drawn, possibly to an
unusual extent, from literature. The latter seems to give the
student in the vivid reality of specific situations facts which
the psychologist is condemned, from the necessities of scientific
method, to discuss in the abstract.

The book follows more or less closely that part of the syllabus
for the course in Contemporary Civilization, which is
called "The World of Human Nature," which section of the
outline was chiefly the joint product of collaboration by
Professor John J. Coss and the author. To the former the author
wishes to express his large indebtedness. Also to Miss Edith
G. Taber, for her careful and valuable editing of the manuscript
in preparation for the printer, he desires to convey his
deep appreciation.

I. E.

_Columbia University, June_ 1920.




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

HUMAN TRAITS AND CIVILIZATION


PART I--SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER I

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

The human animal--The number and variety of man's instincts--Learning
in animals and men--The prolonged
period of infancy--Consciousness of self and reaction to
ideas--Human beings alone possess language--Man the
only maker and user of tools.

CHAPTER II

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE--INSTINCT,
HABIT, AND EMOTION

Instinctive behavior--The necessity for the control of
instinct--Habitual behavior--The mechanism of habit--The
acquisition of new modes of response--Trial and error
and deliberate learning--Some conditions of habit-formation--Drill
_versus_ attentive repetition in learning--Learning
affected by age, fatigue, and health--Habit as a time-saver--Habit
as a stabilizer of action--Disserviceable habits
in the individual--Social inertia--The importance of the
learning habit--The specificity of habits--The conscious
transference of habits--Emotion.

CHAPTER III

REFLECTION

Instinct and habit _versus_ reflection--The origin and nature of
reflection--Illustration of the reflective process--Reflection
as the modifier of instinct--Reflective behavior modifies
habit--The limits of reflection as a modifier of instinct and
habit--How instincts and habits impair the processes of
reflection--The value of reflection for life--The social
importance of reflective behavior--Reflection removed from
immediate application: science--The practical aspect of
science--The creation of beautiful objects and the expression
of ideas and feelings in beautiful form.

CHAPTER IV

THE BASIC HUMAN ACTIVITIES

Food, shelter, and sex--Physical activity--Mental
activity--Quiescence: fatigue--Nervous and mental fatigue.

CHAPTER V

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

Man as a social being--Gregariousness--Gregariousness
important for social solidarity--Gregariousness may hinder the
solidarity of large groups--Gregariousness in belief--Gregariousness
in habits of action--The effect of gregariousness
on innovation--Sympathy (a specialization of gregariousness)--Praise
and blame--Praise and blame modify habit--Desire
for praise may lead to the profession rather than
the practice of virtue--The social effectiveness of praise and
blame--Social estimates and standards of conduct--Importance
of relating praise and blame to socially important
conduct--Education as the agency of social control--Social
activity and the social motive.

CHAPTER VI

CRUCIAL TRAITS IN SOCIAL LIFE

The interpenetration of human traits--The fighting instinct--Pugnacity
a menace when uncontrolled--Pugnacity as a
beneficent social force--The "submissive instinct"--Men
display qualities of leadership--Man pities and protects weak
and suffering things--Fear--Love and hate--Love--Hate.

CHAPTER VII

THE DEMAND FOR PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALITY

Privacy and solitude--Satisfaction in personal possession: the
acquisitive instinct--Individuality in opinion and belief--The
social importance of individuality in opinion.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "SELF"

Origin and development of a sense of personal selfhood--The
social self--Character and will--The enhancement of the
self--Egoism _versus_ altruism--Self-satisfaction and
dissatisfaction--The contrast between the self and others--Types
of self--Self-display or boldness--Self-sufficient modesty--The
positive and flexible self--Dogmatism and self-assertion--Enthusiasm--The
negative self--Eccentrics--The
active and the contemplative--Emotions aroused in the
maintenance of the self--The individuality of groups.

CHAPTER IX

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

The meaning of individual differences--Causes of individual
differences--The influence of sex--The influence of race--The
influence of immediate ancestry or family--The influence
of the environment--Individual differences--Democracy
and education.

CHAPTER X

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

Language as a social habit--Language and mental life--The
instability of language--Changes in meaning--Uniformities
in language--Standardization of language--Counter-tendencies
toward differentiation--Language as emotional and
logical--Language and logic.

CHAPTER XI

RACIAL AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY

Restriction of population--Cultural continuity--Uncritical
veneration of the past--Romantic idealization of the past--Change
synonymous with evil--"Order" _versus_ change--Personal
or class opposition to change--Uncritical disparagement--Critical
examination of the past--Limitations of the
past--Education as the transmitter of the past.


PART II--THE CAREER OF REASON

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER XII

RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

The religious experience--"The reality of the unseen"--Experiences
which frequently find religious expression--Need and
impotence--Fear and awe--Regret, remorse: repentance
and penance--Joy and enthusiasm: festivals and thanksgivings--Theology--The
description of the divine--The divine
as the human ideal--The religious experience, theology and
science--Mechanistic science and theology--Religion and
science--The church as a social institution--The social
consequences of institutionalized religion--Intolerance and
inquisition--Quietism and consolation: other-worldliness.

CHAPTER XIII

ART AND THE ÆSTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Art _versus_ nature--The emergence of the fine arts--The æsthetic
experience--Appreciation _versus_ action--Sense
satisfaction--Form--Expression--Art as vicarious experience--Art
and æsthetic experience in the social order--Art as an
industry--Art and morals.

CHAPTER XIV

SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD

What science is--Science as explanation--Science and a
world view--The æsthetic value of science--The danger of
"pure science"--Practical or applied science--Analysis of
scientific procedure--Science and common sense--Curiosity
and scientific inquiry--Thinking begins with a problem--The
quality of thinking: suggestion--Classification--Experimental
variation of conditions--Generalizations, their
elaboration and testing--The quantitative basis of scientific
procedure--Statistics and probability--Science as an instrument
of human progress.

CHAPTER XV

MORALS AND MORAL VALUATION

The pre-conditions of morality: instinct, impulse, and desire--The
conflict of interests between men and groups--The levels
of moral action: custom; the establishment of "folkways"--Morality
as conformity to the established--The values of
customary morality--The defects of customary morality--Custom
and progress--Origin and nature of reflective morality--Reflective
reconstruction of moral standards--The
values of reflective morality--Reflection transforms customs
into principles--Reflective action genuinely moral--Reflection
sets up ideal standards--The defects of reflective morality--The
inadequacy of theory in moral life--The danger of
intellectualism in morals--Types of moral theory--Absolutism--Relativistic
or teleological morality--Utilitarianism--Moral
knowledge--Intuitionalism--Empiricism--Ethics
and life--Morality and human nature--Morals, law, and
education.

INDEX




INTRODUCTION

HUMAN TRAITS AND CIVILIZATION. Throughout the long
enterprise of civilization in which mankind have more or less
consciously changed the world they found into one more in
conformity with their desires, two factors have remained
constant: (1) the physical order of the universe, which we
commonly call Nature, and (2) the native biological equipment
of man, commonly known as human nature. Both of
these, we are almost unanimously assured by modern science,
have remained essentially the same from the dawn of history
to the present. They are the raw material out of which is
built up the vast complex of government, industry, science,
art--all that we call civilization. In a very genuine sense,
there is nothing new under the sun. Matter and men remain
the same.

But while this fundamental material is constant, it may be
given various forms; and both Nature itself and the nature of
man may, with increasing knowledge, be increasingly controlled
in man's own interests. The railroad, the wireless,
and the aeroplane are striking and familiar testimonies to the
efficacy of man's informed mastery of the world into which
he is born. In the field of physical science, man has, in the
short period of three centuries since Francis Bacon sounded
the trumpet call to the study of Nature and Newton discovered
the laws of motion, magnificently attained and appreciated
the power to know exactly what the facts of Nature
are, what consequences follow from them, and how they may
be applied to enlarge the boundaries of the "empire of man."

In his control of human nature, which is in its outlines as
fixed and constant as the laws that govern the movements of
the stars, man has been much less conscious and deliberate,
and more frequently moved by passion and ignorance than
by reason and knowledge. Nevertheless, custom and law,
the court, the school, and the market have similarly been man's
ways of utilizing the original equipment of impulse and desire
which Nature has given him. It is hard to believe, but as
certain as it is incredible, that the modern professional and
businessman, moving freely amid the diverse contacts and
complexities pictured in any casual newspaper, in a world of factories
and parliaments and aeroplanes, is by nature no different from
the superstitious savage hunting precarious food, living in
caves, and finding every stranger an enemy. The difference
between the civilization of an American city and that of the
barbarian tribes of Western Europe thousands of years ago
is an accurate index of the extent to which man has succeeded
in redirecting and controlling that fundamental human
nature which has in its essential structure remained the same
through history.

Man's ways of association and coöperation, for the most
part, have not been deliberately developed, since men lived
and had to live together long before a science of human relations
could have been dreamed of. Only to-day are we beginning
to have an inkling of the fundamental facts of human
nature. But it has become increasingly plain that progress
depends not merely on increasing our knowledge and application
of the laws which govern man's physical environment.
Machinery, factories, and automatic reapers are, after all,
only instruments for man's welfare. If man is ever to attain
the happiness and rationality of which philosophers and
reformers have continually been dreaming, there must also
be an understanding of the laws which govern man himself,
laws quite as constant as those of physics and chemistry.

Education and political organization, the college and the
legislature, however remote they may seem from the random
impulses to cry and clutch at random objects with which a
baby comes into the world, must start from just such materials
as these. The same impulse which prompts a five-year-old
to put blocks into a symmetrical arrangement is the stuff
out of which architects or great executives are made.
Patriotism and public spirit find their roots back in the same
unlearned impulses which make a baby smile back when
smiled at, and makes it, when a little older, cry if left too
long alone or in a strange place. All the native biological
impulses, which are almost literally our birthright, may, when
understood, be modified through education, public opinion,
and law, and directed in the interests of human ideals.

It is the aim of this book to indicate some of these more
outstanding human traits, and the factors which must be
taken into account if they are to be controlled in the interests
of human welfare. It is too often forgotten that the problems
which are to be dealt with in the world of politics, of
business, of law, and education, are much complicated
by the fact that human beings are so constituted that given
certain situations, they will do certain things in certain inevitable
ways. These problems are much clarified by knowing what
these fundamental ways of men are.




HUMAN TRAITS AND THEIR
SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE


PART I


CHAPTER I

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

THE HUMAN ANIMAL. Any attempt to understand what the
nature of man is, apart from its training and education during
the life of the individual, must start with the realization that
man is a human animal. As a human being he is strikingly
set off by his upright posture and his large and flexible hand.
But chiefly he is distinguished by his plastic brain, upon
which depends his capacity to perform the complex mental
activities--from administering a railroad to solving problems
in calculus--which constitute man's outstanding and
exclusive characteristic.[1]

[Footnote 1: The thinking process is discussed in detail in
chapters III and XIV.]

But in his structure and functions man bears, as is now well
known, a marked resemblance to the lower animals. His
respiratory and digestive organs, for example, may be duplicated
as far down in the animal scale as birds and chickens.[2]
Man's whole physical apparatus and mode of life, save in
complexity and refinement of operations, are the same as
those of any of the higher mammals. But more important for
the student of human behavior, man's mental life--that is,
his way of responding to and dealing with his environment--is
in large part identical with that of the lower animals,
especially of the most highly developed vertebrates, such as the
monkey. They have, up to a certain point, precisely the
same equipment for adjusting themselves to the conditions of
life. Apart from education, both man and animal are endowed
with a set of more or less fixed tendencies to respond in
specific ways to specific stimuli. These inborn or congenital
tendencies are generally known as reflexes or instincts.[1]
These are unlearned ways, exhibited by both human and
animal organisms, of responding promptly and precisely, and
in a comparatively changeless manner to a given stimulus
from the environment. These tendencies to act, while they
may be, and most frequently are of advantage to the organism,
are not conscious or acquired. They are irresistible
impulses to do just such-and-such particular things in
such-and-such particular ways when confronted with just
such-and-such particular situations. In the well-known words of
James:

[Footnote 2: With certain modifications accounted for in their historical
"descent" with modification from a common ancestor. See Scott:
_Theory of Evolution_.]

[Footnote 1: The difference between the two is largely one of complexity.
By a reflex is meant a very simple and comparatively rigid response; by
an instinct a series of reflexes such that when the first is set off, the
remainder are set off in a regularly determinate succession.]

The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog,
avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water, etc., not
because he has any notion either of life or death, or of self-preservation.
He has probably attained to no one of these conceptions in
such a way as to react definitely upon it. He acts in each case
separately, and simply because he cannot help it; being so framed that
when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his
field of vision he _must_ pursue; that when that particular barking and
obstreperous thing called a dog appears there he _must_ retire, if at a
distance, and scratch if close by; that he _must_ withdraw his feet from
water, and his face from flame.[2]

[Footnote 2: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 384.]

Similarly, the baby's reaching for random objects, and
sucking them when seized, its turning its head aside, when it
has had enough food, its crying when alone and hungry, are
not, for the most part, deliberate methods invented by the
infant to maintain its own welfare, but are almost as automatic
as the number of sounds omitted by the cuckoo clock at
midnight.

Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather
than on hard floors? Why do they sit round the stove on a cold day?
... Why does the maiden interest the youth so that everything
about her seems more important and significant than anything else
in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human
ways, and that every creature _likes_ its own ways, and takes to the
following of them as a matter of course.... Not one man in a billion,
when taking his dinner, thinks of utility. He eats because
the food tastes good, and makes him want more. If you ask him
_why_ he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of
revering you as a philosopher, he will probably laugh at you for a
fool.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 386.]

These inborn tendencies to act vary in complexity from the
withdrawing of a hand from a hot stove or the jerking of the
knee when touched in a particular spot to startlingly involved
trains of action to be found in the behavior of certain of the
lower animals. Bergson cites the case of a species of wasp
which with a skill, unconscious though it be, resembling that
of the expert surgeon, paralyzes a caterpillar without killing
it, and carries it home for food for its young.[2] There are
again many cases of "insects which invariably lay their eggs
in the only places where the grubs, when hatched, will find the
food they need and can eat, or where the larvæ will be able to
attach themselves as parasites to some host in a way that is
necessary to their survival."[3] In many instances these complicated
trains of action are performed by the animal in a
situation absolutely strange to it, without its ever having seen
the act performed before, having been born frequently after
its parents had died, and itself destined to die long before its
grubs will have hatched.

[Footnote 2: Bergson: _Creative Evolution_, p. 172.]

[Footnote 3: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 24. (Except
where otherwise noted, all references are to the fourth edition.)]

THE NUMBER AND VARIETY OF MAN'S INSTINCTS. Various attempts
have been made, notably by such men as James,
McDougall, and Thorndike, to enumerate and classify the
tendencies with which man is at birth endowed, or which,
like the sex instinct, make their appearance at a certain stage
in biological growth, regardless of the particular training to
which the individual has been subjected. Earlier classifications
were inclined to speak of instincts as very general and as
half consciously purposeful in character. Thus it is still
popularly customary to speak of the "instinct of self-preservation,"
the "instinct of hunger," and the "parental instinct."
The tendency of present-day psychology is to note just what
responses take place in given specific situations. As a result
of such observation, particularly by such biologists as Watson
and Jennings,[1] instincts have come to be regarded not as
general and purposive but as specific and automatic. Thus it
is no instinct of self-preservation that drives the child to
blink its eyes at a blinding flash of light; it is solely and simply
the very direct and immediate tendency to blink its eyes in
just that way whenever such a phenomenon occurs. It is no
deliberate intent to inhale the oxygen necessary to the sustenance
of life that causes us to breathe. No more is it a conscious
plan to provide the organism with nourishment that
prompts us to eat our breakfast in the morning; it is simply
the immediate and irresistible enticement of food after a
night's fast. Not a deliberate motive of maternity prompts
the mother to caress and care for her baby, but an inevitable
and almost invincible tendency to "cuddle it when it cries,
smile when it smiles, fondle it and coo to it in turn."

[Footnote 1: Watson: _Behavior_. H. S. Jennings: _Behavior of
the Lower Organisms_.]

In the last few years, as a result of the observation of
animals under laboratory conditions, there has been increasing
evidence of a large number of specific tendencies to act in
specific ways, in response to specific given stimuli. As no
stimuli are ever quite alike, and no animal organism is ever in
exactly the same physico-chemical condition at two different
times, there are slight but negligible differences in response.
Allowing for these, animals may be said to be equipped with a
wide variety of tendencies to do precisely the same things
under recurrent identical circumstances. The aim of the
experimental psychologist is to discover just what actions
occur when an animal is placed in any given circumstances,
precisely as the chemist notes what reaction occurs when two
chemicals are combined.

While experiments with the human infant are more difficult
and rare (and while it is among infants alone among humans
that original tendencies can be observed free from the
modifications to which they are so soon subjected by training and
environment) careful observers find in the human animal also
a great number of these specific ways of acting. Just which of
the large number of observed universal modes of behavior are
original and unlearned, is a matter still in controversy among
psychologists. There is practically complete agreement
among them, however, with respect to such comparatively
simple acts as grasping, reaching, putting things in the mouth,
creeping, standing and walking, and the making of sounds
more or less articulate. Most psychologists recognize even
such highly complicated tendencies as man's restlessness in
the absence of other people, his tendency to attract their
attention when present, to be at once pitying and pugnacious,
greedy and sympathetic, to take and to follow a lead.

In general, it may be said that man possesses not fewer
instincts than animals, but more. His superiority consists in
the fact that he has at once more tendencies to respond, and
that in him these tendencies are more flexible and more
susceptible of modification than those of animals. A chicken has
at the start the advantage over the human; it can at first do
more things and do them better. But it is the human baby
who, though it cannot find food for itself at the start, can
eventually be taught to distinguish between the nutritive
values of food, secure food from remote sources, and make
palatable food from materials which when raw are inedible.

An inventory and classification of man's original tendencies
is made more difficult precisely because these are so easily
modifiable and are, even in earliest childhood, seldom seen in
their original and simple form.

At any given time a human being is being acted upon by a
wide variety of competing and contemporaneous stimuli. In
walking down a street with a friend, for example, one may be
attracted by the array of bright colors, of flowers, jewelry and
clothing in the shop windows, blink one's eyes in the glare of
the sun, feel a satisfaction in the presence of other people and
a loneliness for a particular friend, dodge before a passing
automobile, be envious of its occupant, and smile benevolently
at a passing child. It would be difficult in so complex
and so characteristically familiar a situation to pick out
completely and precisely the original human tendencies at work,
and trace out all the modifications to which they have been
subjected in the course of individual experience. For even
single responses in the adult are not the same in quality or
scope as they were to start with. Even the simplest stimuli
of taste and of sound are different to the adult from what
they are to the child. What for the adult is a printed page
full of significance is for the baby a blur, or at most chaotic
black marks on white paper.

But while it is difficult to disentangle out of even a simple,
everyday occurrence the original unlearned human impulses
at work, experimentation on both humans and animals seems
clearly to establish that "in the same organism the same
situation will always produce the same response." It also seems
clear that in man these native unlearned responses to given
stimuli are unusually numerous and unusually controllable.
Upon the possibility of the ready modification of these original
elements in man's behavior his whole education and social
life depend.

LEARNING IN ANIMALS AND MEN. Men and animals are alike
not only in that they have in common a large number of tendencies
to respond in definite ways to definite stimuli, but that
these responses may be modified, some strengthened through
use, and others weakened or altogether discarded through
disuse. In both also the survival and strengthening of some
native tendencies, the weakening and even the complete
elimination of others, depends primarily upon the satisfaction
which flows from their practice.

It must be remembered that any situation, while it calls
forth on the part of the organism a characteristic response,
may also call out others, especially if the first response made
fails to secure satisfaction, or if it places the animal in a
positively annoying situation. There are certain situations--being
fed when hungry, resting when weary, etc.--which are
immediate and original satisfiers; there are others such as bitter
tastes, being looked at with scorn by others, etc., which
are natural annoyers. The first type the animal will try various
means of attaining; the second, various means of avoiding.
Through "trial and error," through going through every response
it can make to a given situation, the animal or human
hits upon some response which will secure for it satisfaction or
rid it of a positive annoyance. Once this successful response
is hit upon, it tends to be retained and becomes habitual in
that situation, while other random responses are eliminated.

As will be pointed out in the following, man has developed
in the process of reflection a much more effective and subtle
mode of attaining desirable results, but a large part of human
acquisition of skill, whether at the typewriter, the piano, the
tennis court, or in dealing with other people, is still a matter
of making every random response that the situation provokes
until the appropriate and effective one is hit upon, and making
this latter response more immediately upon repeated experiences
in the same situation. Once this effective response becomes
habitual it is just as automatic in character as if it had
been made immediately the first time, and it is almost impossible
without knowledge of the animal's or the human's
earlier modes of response to detect the difference between an
acquired response and one that is inborn.

This process of trial and error is perhaps best illustrated in
the behavior of the lower animals where careful experiments
have been conducted for the purpose of tracing the process of
learning. In the classic cases reported by Thorndike and
Watson, when chickens, rats, and cats were placed in situations
where the first response failed to bring satisfaction,
their behavior was in each case marked by the following features.
At the first trial the animals in every case performed a
wide variety of acts useless to secure the satisfaction they
were instinctively seeking, whether it was food in a box, or
freedom from confinement in a cage. Upon repeated trials
the act appropriate to securing satisfaction was performed with
increasing elimination of useless acts, and consequent decrease
of the time required to perform the act requisite to secure
food, or freedom, or both, as the case might be. One of Thorndike's
famous cat experiments is best told in his own report:

If we take a box twenty by fifteen by twelve inches, replace its
cover and front side by bars an inch apart, and make in this front
side a door arranged so as to fall open when a wooden button inside
is turned from a vertical to a horizontal position, we shall have means
to observe such [learning by trial and error]. A kitten, three to
six months old, if put in this box when hungry, a bit of fish being
left outside, reacts as follows: It tries to squeeze through between
the bars, claws at the bars, and at loose things in and out of the box,
stretches its paws out between the bars, and bites at its confining
walls. Some one of all these promiscuous clawings, squeezings, and
bitings turns round the wooden button, and the kitten gains freedom
and food. By repeating the experience again and again the animal
gradually comes to omit all the useless clawings, and the like, and to
manifest only the particular impulse (_e.g._, to claw hard at the top of
the button with the paw or to push against one side of it with the
nose) which has resulted successfully. It turns the button around
without delay whenever put in the box. It has formed an association
between the situation _confined in a box with a certain appearance_
and the response of _clawing at a certain part of that box in a certain
definite way_. Popularly speaking, it has learned to open a door by
pressing a button. To the uninitiated observer the behavior of the
six kittens that thus freed themselves from such a box would seem
wonderful and quite unlike their ordinary accomplishments of finding
their way to their food or beds.... A certain situation arouses,
by virtue of accident or more often instinctive equipment, certain
responses. One of these happens to be an act appropriate to secure
freedom. It is stamped in in connection with that situation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course. p. 129.]

Perhaps the most significant factor to be noted in this, and
in similar cases, is that the successful response to a baffling
situation is acquired, and that this acquisition remains a more
or less permanent possession of the human or animal organism.
Particularly important for the problem and practice of
education is the mechanism by which these learned modes of
behavior are acquired. For, to attain skill, knowledge, intellect,
character, is to attain certain determinate habits of
action, certain recurrent and stable ways of responding to a
situation. The reason why the cat in the box ceased to perform
the hundred and one random acts of clawing and biting,
and after a number of trials got down to the immediately
necessary business of turning the button was because it had
learned that one thing only, out of the multitude of things it
could do, would enable it to get out of the box and get its
food. To say that it learned this is not to say that it consciously
realized it; it means simply that when placed in such
a situation again after having been placed in it a sufficient
number of times, it will be set off to the turning of the button
which gets it food, instead of biting bars and clawing at
random--actions which merely serve further to frustrate its
hunger. The animal has not consciously learned, but its nervous
system has been mechanically directed.

A large part of the education of humans as well as of animals
consists precisely in the modification of our original
responses to situations by a trial-and-error discovery of ways
of attaining satisfactory and avoiding annoying situations.
Both animals and humans, when they have several times performed
a certain act that brings satisfaction, tend, on the recurrence
of a similar situation, to repeat that action immediately
and to eliminate with successive repetitions almost all
the other responses which are possible, but which are ineffective
in the attainment of some specific satisfaction. The
whole training imposed by civilization on the individual is
based ultimately on this fundamental fact that human beings
can be taught to modify their behavior, to change their original
response to a situation in the light of the consequences
that follow it. This means that while man's nature remains
on the whole constant, its operations may be indefinitely
varied by the results which follow the operation of any given
instinct. The child has its original tendency to reach toward
bright objects checked by the experience of putting its hand
in the flame. Later his tendency to take all the food within
reach may be checked by the looks of scorn which follow that
manifestation of man's original greed, or the punishment and
privation which are correlated with it. Through experience
with punishment and reward, humans may be taught to do
precisely the opposite of what would have been their original
impulse in any given situation, just as the monkey reported
by one experimenter may be taught to go to the top of his
cage whenever a banana has been placed at the bottom.

THE PROLONGED PERIOD OF INFANCY. Probably the most
significant and unique fact of human behavior is the period of
"prolonged infancy" which is characteristic of human beings
alone. Fiske and Butler in particular have stressed the
importance of this human trait. In the lower animals the period
of infancy--that is, the period during which the young are
dependent upon their parents for food, care, and training--is
very short, extending even in the highest form of ape to not
more than three months. This would appear, at first blush,
to be a great advantage possessed by the lower animals.
They come into the world equipped with a variety of tendencies
to act which, within a week, or, as in the case of chickens,
almost immediately after birth, are perfectly adapted to
secure for them food, shelter, and protection. They are
mechanisms from the beginning perfectly adjusted to their
environment.

The human infant, while it is born with a greater number of
instinctive activities than other animals, is able to make little
use of them just as they stand. For years after birth it is
helplessly dependent on others to supply its most elementary
needs. It must be fed, carried, and sheltered; it cannot by
itself even reach for an object, and it cannot for nearly two
years after birth specifically communicate its wants to other
people. But this comparatively long helplessness of the human
infant is perhaps the chief source of human progress.

The human baby, because it can do so little at the start,
because it has so many tendencies to act and has them all so
plastic, undeveloped, and modifiable, has to a unique degree
the capacity to learn. This means that it can profit by the
experience of others and adjust itself to a great variety and
complexity of situations. The chicken or the bird can do a
limited number of things perfectly, but it is as if it had a
number of special keys opening special locks. The power of
modifying these instinctive adjustments, the capacity of
learning, is like being put in possession of a pass-key. As
Professor Dewey puts it, "An original specialized power of
adjustment secures immediate efficiency, but, like a railway
ticket, it is good for one route only. A being who, in order to
use his eyes, ears, hands, and legs, has to experiment in making
varied combinations of their reactions, achieves a control
that is flexible and varied."[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey; _Democracy and Education_, p. 53.]

The more complex the environment is in which the individual
must live, the longer is the period of infancy needed in
which the necessary habits and capacities may be acquired.
In the human being the period of infancy extends in a literal
sense through the first five years of the individual's life. But
in civilized societies it extends factually much longer. By the
end of the first five years the child's physical infancy is over.
It can take care of itself so far as actually feeding itself, moving
about, and communicating with others is concerned. But
so complex are the habits to which it must become accustomed
in our civilization that it is dependent for a much
longer period. The whole duration of the child's education is
a prolongation of the period of infancy. In most civilized
countries, until at least the age of twelve, the child is literally
dependent on its parents. And with every advance in civilization
has come a lengthening in the period of education, or
learning.

Intellectually, the period of infancy might be said not
really to be over before the age of twenty-five, by which time
habits of mind have become fairly well fixed. The brain and
the nervous system remain fairly plastic up to that time, and
if inquiry and learning have themselves become habitual,
plasticity may last even longer. In the cases of the greatest
intellects, of a Darwin, or a Newton, one might almost say
the period of infancy lasts to old age. To be still learning at
sixty is to be still a child in the best sense of the word. It is
still to be open rather than rigid, still to be profiting by
experience.

The great social advantages of the prolonged period of
infancy lie in the fact that there is a unique opportunity both
for the acquisition by individuals and for the imposition on
the part of society of a large number of habits of great social
value. The human being, born into a world where there are
many things to be learned both of natural law and human relations,
is, as it were, fortunately born ignorant. He has instincts
which are pliable enough to be modified into habits,
and in consequence socially useful habits can be deliberately
inculcated in the immature members of a society by their
elders. The whole process of education is a utilization of
man's prolonged period of infancy, for the deliberate acquisition
of habits. This is all the more important since only by
such habit formation during the long period of human infancy
can the achievements of civilization be handed down from
generation to generation. Art, science, industrial methods,
social customs, these are not inherited by the individual as
are the instincts of sex, pugnacity, etc. They are preserved
only because they can be taught as habits to those beings who
come into the world with a plastic equipment of instincts
which lend themselves for a long time to modification.

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF AND REACTION TO IDEAS. A significant
difference between the actions of human beings and those of
animals is that human beings are conscious of themselves as
agents. They may be said not only to be the only creatures
who know what they are doing, but the only ones who realize
their individuality in doing it. Dogs and cats are not, so far
as we can draw inferences from extended observation of even
their most complex actions, conscious of themselves. It is
not very long, however, before the human animal begins to
set itself off against the remainder of the universe, to discover
that it is something different from the chairs, tables, and
surrounding people and faces that at first constitute for it only a
"blooming, buzzing confusion." A human being performs
actions with a feeling of awareness; he is conscious of himself.
This consciousness of self (see chapters VII and VIII) becomes
more acute as the individual grows older. It has consequences
of the gravest character in social, political, and
economic life. It is a large factor at once in such different
qualities of character as ambition, friendship, humility, and
self-sacrifice, and is responsible in large measure for whatever
truth there is in the familiarly spoken-of conflict
between "the individual and society."

Human beings are, furthermore, susceptible to a unique
stimulation to action, namely, ideas. Animals respond to
things only, that is, to things in gross:

It may be questioned whether a dog _sees_ a rainbow any more
than he apprehends the political constitution of the country in which
he lives. The same principle applies to the kennel in which he sleeps
and the meat that he eats. When he is sleepy, he goes to the kennel;
when he is hungry, he is excited by the smell and color of meat;
beyond this, in what sense does he see an _object?_ Certainly he does not
see a house--_i.e._, a thing with all the properties and relations of a
permanent residence, _unless_ he is capable of making what is present
a uniform sign of what is absent--unless he is capable of thought.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 17.]

Human beings can respond to objects as _signs_ of other
things, and, what is perhaps more important, can abstract
from those gross total objects certain qualities, features, elements,
which are universally associated with certain consequences.
They can respond to the meaning or bearing of an
object; they can respond to ideas.

To respond to ideas means to respond to significant similarities
in objects and also to significant differences. It
means to note certain qualities that objects have in common,
and to classify these common qualities and their consequences
in the behavior of objects. To note similarities and differences
in the behavior of objects is to enable individuals to act
in the light of the future. The printing on this page would be
to a dog or to a baby merely a blur. To the reader the black
imprints are signs or symbols. To the animal a red lantern is
a haze of light; to a locomotive engineer it is a sign to halt.
To respond to ideas is thus to act in the light of a future. It
makes possible acting in the light of the consequences that
can be foreseen. Present objects or features of objects are
responded to as signs of future or absent opportunities or
dangers. Every time we read a letter, or act in response to
something somebody has told us, we are responding not to
physical stimuli as such, but to those stimuli as signs of other
things.

HUMAN BEINGS ALONE POSSESS LANGUAGE. The value of the
period of infancy in the acquisition of habits and the unique
ability of human beings to respond to ideas is inseparably
connected with the fact that man alone possesses a language,
both oral and written. That is to say, men alone have an
instrument whereby to communicate to each other feelings,
attitudes, ideas, information. To a very limited degree, of
course, animals have vocal and gesture habits; specific cries of
hunger, of sex desire, or distress. But they cannot, with their
limited number of vocal mechanisms, possibly develop language
habits, develop a system of sounds associated with definite
actions and capable of controlling actions. Only human
beings can produce even the simplest system of written symbols,
by which visual stimuli become symbols of actions, objects,
emotions, or ideas. Biologists--in particular the experimentalist,
Watson--find, in the capacity for language,
man's most important distinction from the brute.

Language may be said, in fact, to be the most indispensable
instrument of civilization. It is the means whereby the whole
life of the past has been handed to us in the present. It is the
means whereby we in turn record, preserve, and transmit our
science, our industrial methods, our laws, our customs. If
human relations were possible at all without a language, they
would have to begin anew, without any cultural inheritance,
in each generation. Education, the transmitter of the
achievements of the mature generation to the one maturing,
is dependent on this unique human capacity to make seen
marks and heard sounds stand for other things. The extent
to which civilization may advance is contingent upon the
development of adequate language habits. And human beings
have perfected a language sufficiently complicated to
communicate in precise and permanent form their discoveries of
the complex relations between things and between men.

MAN THE ONLY MAKER AND USER OF TOOLS. One of the most
important ways in which man is distinguished from the lower
animals is in his manufacture and use of tools. So far as we
know the ability to manufacture and understand the use of
tools is possessed by man alone. "Monkeys may be taught a
few simple operations with tools, such as cracking nuts with
a stone, but usually they merely mimic a man."[1] Man's
uniqueness as the exclusive maker and user of tools is made
possible by two things. The first is his hand, which with its
four fingers and a thumb, as contrasted with the monkey's
five fingers, enables him to pick up objects. The second is his
capacity for reflection, presently to be discussed, which
enables him to foresee the consequences of the things he does.

[Footnote 1: Mills: _The Realities of Modern Science_, p. 1.]

The use of tools of increasing refinement and complexity is
the chief method by which man has progressed from the life
of the cave man to the complicated industrial civilization of
to-day. Bergson writes in this connection:

As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently noted
that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential
feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the
manufacture and use of artificial instruments, that the inventions which
strew the road of progress have also traced its direction. This we
hardly realize, because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to
change our tools. Our individual and even social habits survive a
good while the circumstances for which they were made, so that the
ultimate effects of an invention are not observed until its novelty
is already out of sight. A century has elapsed since the invention of
the steam engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths
of the shock it gave us. But the revolution it has effected in industry
has nevertheless upset human relations altogether. New ideas
are arising, new feelings are on the way to flower. In thousands of
years, when, seen from the distance, only the broad lines of the
present age will still be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count
for little, even supposing they are remembered at all; but the steam
engine and the procession of inventions that accompanied it, will
perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped
stone of prehistoric times: it will serve to define an age. If we could
rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to
what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us to be the
constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should not say
_Homo sapiens_, but _Homo faber_.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bergson: _Creative Evolution_, pp. 138-39.]

Man's intelligence, it has so often been said, enables him to
control Nature, but his intelligence in the control of natural
resources is dependent for effectiveness on adequate material
instruments. One may subscribe, though with qualification,
to Bergson's further statement, that "intelligence, considered
in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of
manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make
tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture."

Anthropologists distinguish the prehistoric epochs, by such
terms as the Stone, Copper or Bronze, and Iron Ages, meaning
thereby to indicate what progress man had made in the
utilization of the natural resources about him. We date the
remote periods of mankind chiefly by the mementos we have
of the kinds of tools they used and the methods they had
developed in the control of their environment. The knowledge
of how to start and maintain a fire has been set down
as the practical beginning of civilization. Certainly next in
importance was the invention of the simplest tools. There
came in succession, though æons apart, the use of chipped
stone implements, bronze or copper instruments, and instruments
made of iron. In the ancient world we find the invention
of such simple machines as the pulley, the use of rope,
and the inclined plane.

Without tracing the history of invention, it will suffice for
our purpose to point out that agriculture and industry, men's
modes of exploiting Nature, are dependent intimately on the
effectiveness of the tools at their disposal. It is a far cry
from the flint hatchet to the McCormick reaper and the modern
steel works, but these are two ends of the same process,
that process which distinguishes man from all other animals,
and makes human civilization possible: that is, the use and
the manufacture of tools.




CHAPTER II

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL
SIGNIFICANCE--INSTINCT, HABIT, AND EMOTION

INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOR. We have already noted the fact that
both men and animals are equipped with a wide variety of
unlearned responses to given stimuli. In the case of human
beings, this original equipment varies from such a specific
reaction as pulling away the hand when it is pinched or burned,
to such general innate tendencies as those of herding or playing
with other people. In a later stage of this discussion we
shall examine the more important of these primary modes of
behavior. At this point our chief concern is with certain
general considerations that apply to them all.

The equipment of instincts with which a human being is at
birth endowed must be considered in two ways. It consists,
in the first place, of definite and unlearned mechanisms of
behavior, fixed original responses to given stimuli. These
are, at the same time, the original driving forces of action.
An instinct is at once an unlearned mechanism for making a
response and an unlearned tendency to make it. That is,
given certain situations, human beings do not simply utilize
inborn reactions, but exhibit inborn drives or desires to make
those reactions. There is thus an identity in man's native
endowment between what he can do and what he wants to do.
Instincts must thus be regarded as both native capacities and
native desires.

Instincts define, therefore, not only what men can do, but
what they want to do. They are at once the primary instruments
and the primary provocatives to action. As we shall
presently see in some detail, human beings may acquire
mechanisms of behavior with which they are not at birth
endowed. These acquired mechanisms of response are called
habits. And with the acquisition of new responses, new motives
or tendencies to action are established. Having learned
how to do a certain thing, individuals at the same time learn
to want to do it. But just as all acquired mechanisms of
behavior are modifications of some original instinctive
response, so all desires, interests, and ideals are derivatives of
such original impulses as fear, curiosity, self-assertion, and
sex. All human motives can be traced back to these primary
inborn impulses to make these primary inborn responses.[1]

[Footnote 1:
The clearest statement of the status of instincts as both mechanisms of
action and "drives" to action has been made by Professor Woodworth in his
_Dynamic Psychology_. No one else, to the best of the author's knowledge,
has made the distinction with the same clarity and emphasis, though it has
been suggested in the work of Thorndike and McDougall. In McDougall's
definition of an instinct he recognizes both the responsive self and the
tendency to make the response. An instinct is, for him, an inherited
disposition which determines its possessor, in respect to any object,
"to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least to
experience an impulse to such action."]

THE NECESSITY FOR THE CONTROL OF INSTINCT. The human
being's original equipment of impulses and needs constitutes
at once an opportunity and a problem. Instincts are the
natural resources of human behavior, the raw materials of
action, feeling, and thought. All behavior, whether it be the
"making of mud pies or of metaphysical systems," is an
expression, however complicated and indirect, of some of the
elements of the native endowments of human beings.
Instinctive tendencies are, as we have seen, the primary motives
and the indispensable instruments of action. Without them
there could be no such thing as human purpose or preference;
without their utilization in some form no human purpose
or preference could be fulfilled. But like other natural
resources, men's original tendencies must be controlled and
redirected, if they are to be fruitfully utilized in the interests
of human welfare.

There are a number of conditions that make imperative the
control of native tendencies. The first of these is intrinsic
to the organization of instincts themselves. Human beings
are born with a plurality of desires, and happiness consists in
an equilibrium of satisfactions. But impulses are stimulated
at random and collide with one another. Often one impulse,
be it that of curiosity or pugnacity or sex, can be indulged
only at the expense or frustration of many others just as natural,
normal, and inevitable. There is a certain school of
philosophical radicals who call us back to Nature, to a life of
unconsidered impulse. They paint the rapturous and passionate
moments in which strong human impulses receive
satisfaction without exhibiting the disease and disorganization
of which these indulgences are so often the direct antecedents.
A life is a long-time enterprise and it contains a diversity
of desires. If all of these are to receive any measure of
fulfillment there must be compromise and adjustment between
them; they must all be subjected to some measure of control.

A second cause for the control of instinct lies in the fact that
people live and have to live together. The close association
which is so characteristic of human life is, as we shall see,
partly attributable to a specific gregarious instinct, partly to
the increasing need for coöperation which marks the increasing
complexity of civilization. But whatever be its causes,
group association makes it necessary that men regulate their
impulses and actions with reference to one another. Endowed
as human beings are with more or less identical sets of
original native desires, the desires of one cannot be freely
fulfilled without frequently coming into conflict with the
similar desires of others. Compromise and adjustment must be
brought about by some intelligent modification both of action
and desire. The child's curiosity, the acquisitiveness or sex
desire or self-assertiveness of the adult must be checked and
modified in the interests of the group among which the individual
lives. One may take a simple illustration from the
everyday life of a large city. There is, for most individuals,
an intrinsic satisfaction in fast and free movement. But that
desire, exhibited in an automobile on a crowded thoroughfare,
will interfere with just as normal, natural, and inevitable
desires on the part of other motorists and pedestrians.

Still another imperative reason for the control of our instinctive
equipment lies in the fact that instincts as such are inadequate
to adjust either the individual or the group to contemporary
conditions. They were developed in the process
of evolution as useful methods for enabling the human animal
to cope with a radically different and incomparably simpler
environment. While the problems and processes of his life
and environment have grown more complex, man's inborn
equipment for controlling the world he lives in has, through
the long history of civilization, remained practically
unchanged. But as his equipment of mechanisms for reacting
to situations is the same as that of his prehistoric ancestors,
so are his basic desires. And the satisfaction of man's primary
impulses is less and less attainable through the simple,
unmodified operation of the mechanisms of response with
which they are associated. In the satisfaction of the desire
for food, for example, which remains the same as it was under
primitive forest conditions, much more complex trains of
behavior are required than are provided by man's native
equipment. To satisfy the hunger of the contemporary citizens
of New York or London requires the transformation of
capricious instinctive responses into systematic and controlled
processes of habit and thought. The elaborate systems of
agriculture, transportation, and exchange which are necessary
in the satisfaction of the simplest wants of men in civilization
could never be initiated or carried on if we depended on the
instincts with which we are born.

There are thus seen to be at least three distinct reasons why
our native endowment of capacities and desires needs control
and direction. In the life of the individual, instinctive
desires must be adjusted to one another in order that their
harmonious fulfillment may be made possible. The desires and
native reactions of individuals must be checked and modified
if individuals are to live successfully and amiably in group
association, in which they must, in any case, live. And, finally,
so vastly complicated have become the physical and the
social machinery of civilized life that it is literally impossible
to depend on instincts to adjust us to an environment far different
from that to which they were in the process of evolution
adapted. In the light of these conditions men have found
that if they are to live happily and fruitfully together, certain
original tendencies must be stimulated and developed, others
weakened, redirected, and modified, and still others, within
limits possibly, altogether repressed. Individuals display at
once curiosity and fear, pity and pugnacity, acquisitiveness
and sympathy. Some of these it has been found useful to
allow free play; others, even if moderately indulged, may
bring injury to the individual and the group in which his own
life is involved. Education, public opinion, and law are
more or less deliberate methods society has provided for the
stimulation and repression of specific instinctive tendencies.
Curiosity and sympathy are valued and encouraged because
they contribute, respectively, to science and to coöperation;
pugnacity and acquisitiveness must be kept in check if people
are not simply to live, but to live together happily.

But the substitution of control for caprice in the living-out
of our native possibilities is as difficult as it is imperative. As
already noted, instincts are imperious driving forces as well
as mechanisms. While we can modify and redirect our native
tendencies of fear, curiosity, pugnacity, and the like, they
remain as strong currents of human behavior. They can be
turned into new channels; they cannot simply be blocked.
Indeed, in some cases, it is clearly the social environment that
needs to be modified rather than human behavior. Though
it be juvenile delinquency for a boy to play baseball on a
crowded street, it is not because there is intrinsically anything
unwholesome or harmful in play. What is clearly demanded
is not a crushing of the play instinct, but better facilities
for its expression. A boy's native sociability and gift for
leadership may make him, for want of a better opportunity, a
gangster. But to cut off those impulses altogether would be
to cut off the sources of good citizenship. The settlement
clubs or the Boy Scout organizations in our large cities are
instances of what may be accomplished in the way of providing
a social environment in which native desires can be freely and
fruitfully fulfilled.

Social conditions can thus be modified so as to give satisfaction
to a larger proportion of natural desires. On the other
hand, civilization in the twentieth century remains so divergent
from the mode of life to which man's inborn nature
adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable.
Impulses, in the first place, arise capriciously, and one
of the conditions of our highly organized life is regularity and
canalization of action. Our businesses and professions cannot
be conducted on the spontaneous promptings of instinct.
The engineer, the factory worker, the business man, cannot
allow themselves to follow out whatever casual desire occurs
to them whenever it occurs. Stability and regularity of procedure,
demanded in most professions, are incompatible with
random impulsive behavior. To facilitate the effectiveness
of certain industries, for example, it may be necessary to
check impulses that commonly receive adequate satisfaction.
Thus it may be essential to enforce silence, as in the case of
telephone operators or motormen, simply because of the demands
of the industry, not because there is anything intrinsically
deserving of repression in the impulse to talk.

Again, the mere fact that a man lives in a group subjects
him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion
and law. A child may come to restrain his curiosity when he
finds it condemned as inquisitiveness. We cannot, when we
will, vent our pugnacity on those who have provoked it; we
cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our
native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything
within our reach.

But because there are all these social forces making for the
repression of instincts, it does not mean that these latter
therefore disappear. If any one of them is unduly repressed,
it does not simply vanish as a driving force in human behavior.
It will make its enduring presence felt in roundabout
ways, or in sudden extreme and violent outbursts. Or, if it
cannot find even such sporadic or fruitive fulfillments, "a
balked disposition" will leave the individual with an uneasiness
and irritation that may range from mere pique to serious
forms of morbidity and hysteria. A man may for eight or ten
hours be kept repeating the same operation at a machine in a
factory. He may thereby repress those native desires for
companionship and for variety of reaction which constitute
his biological inheritance. But too often postponed satisfaction
takes the violent form of lurid, over-exciting amusements
and dissipation. The suppression of the sex instinct
not infrequently results in a morbid pruriency in matters of
sex, a distortion of all other interests and activities by a
preoccupation with the frustrated sex motive. Assaults and
lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with
which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence
of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts
have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization.
The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance
which marked the reported signing of the armistice at
the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those
immense primitive energies which the control and discipline
of civilization cannot altogether repress.

There has been, furthermore, a great deal of evidence adduced
in recent years by students of abnormal psychology
concerning the results of the frustration of native desires.
When the individual is "balked" in respect to particular
impulses or desires, these may take furtive and obscure
fulfillments; they may play serious though obscure and unnoticed
havoc with a man's whole mental life. Unfulfilled desires
may give rise to various forms of "complex," distortions of
thought, action, and emotion of which the individual himself
may be unaware. They may make a man unduly sensitive,
or fearful, or pugnacious. He may, for example, cover up a
sense of mortification at failure by an unwarranted degree of
bluster and brag. A particular baffling of desire may be
compensated by a bitterness against the whole universe or by
a melancholy of whose origin the victim may be quite unconscious.
These maladjustments between an individual's desires
and his satisfactions are certainly responsible for a
considerable degree of that irritation and neurasthenia which are
so frequently observable in normal individuals.[1]

[Footnote 1: While the evidence in this field has been taken
largely from extremely pathological cases, the distortions and
perversions of mental behavior, noticeable in such cases, are
simply extreme forms of the type of distortion that takes place
in the case of normal individuals whose desires are seriously
frustrated. See the very clear statement on the subject of
"repressions" and "conflicts" in R. B. Hart's _Psychology of
Insanity_.]

The facts enumerated above should make it clear why it is
difficult to modify, much less completely to overcome, these
strong original drives to action. They serve to emphasize
the fact that by control of instinctive responses is not meant
their suppression. For just as instinctive tendencies are our
basic instruments of action, so instinctive desires are our
basic ingredients of happiness. Just as all we can do is
limited by the mechanisms with which we are endowed, so what
we want is ultimately determined by the native desires with
which we are born. The control of action and of desire is
justified in so far as such control will the more surely promote
a harmonious satisfaction of all our desires. A society whose
arrangements are such that instincts are, on the whole, being
repressed rather than stimulated and satisfied, is frustrating
happiness rather than promoting it. At the very least, a life
whose natural impulses are not being fulfilled is a life of
boredom. The ennui which is so often and so conspicuously associated
with the routine and desolate "gayeties" of society,
the listlessness of those bored with their work or their play, or
both, are symptoms of social conditions where the native
endowments of man are handicaps rather than assets, dead
weights rather than motive forces. It means that society is
working against rather than with the grain. Discontent,
ranging from mere pique and irritability to overt violence, is
the penalty that is likely to be paid by a society the majority
of whose members are chronically prevented from satisfying
their normal human desires. No one who has seen whole
lives immeasurably brightened by the satisfaction of a suitable
employment, or melancholy and irritability removed by
companionship and stimulating surroundings, can fail to
realize how important it is to happiness that human instincts
be given generous opportunity for fulfillment.

One may say, indeed, that the evils of too complete repression
of individual impulses are more than that they produce
nervous strain, dissatisfaction, and, not infrequently, crime.
Happiness, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is a complete
living-out of all a man's possibilities. It is most in evidence
when people are, as we say, doing what they like to do. And
people like to do that which they are prompted to do by the
nature which is their inheritance. Freshness, originality, and
spontaneity are perhaps particularly valued in our own
civilization because of the multiple restraints of business and
professional occupations. Even under the most perfect social
arrangements there will always exist among men conflicts of
desire. Their control over their environment will, of necessity,
be imperfect, as will their mastery of their own passions
and their clear adjustment to one another. That complete
agreement between man's desires and the environment in
which alone they can find their satisfaction remains at
best an ideal. But it is an ideal which indicates clearly the function
of control. This is obviously not to crush native desires, but
to organize their harmonious fulfillment. Where men have
an opportunity to utilize their native gifts they will be satisfied
and interested; where native capacities and desires are
continually balked, men will be discontented though
well-regimented machines.

HABITUAL BEHAVIOR. Except for purposes of analysis, life on
the purely instinctive level may be said scarcely to exist in
contemporary society, or for that matter, since the beginnings
of recorded history. As has been already pointed out,
while men are born with an even wider variety of tendencies
to act than animals, these are much more plastic and modifiable,
more susceptible of training, and much more in need of it
than those of the sub-human forms. Even among animals
under conditions of domestication, instinct tends largely to be
replaced by habitual or acquired modes of behavior. The
human being, born with a nervous system and a brain in extremely
unformed and plastic condition, is so susceptible to
every influence current in his environment that most of his
actions within a few years after birth are, when they are not
the result of deliberate reflection, secondary or habitual rather
than genuinely instinctive. That is, few of the simplest actions
of human beings are not in some degree modified by experience.
They may appear just as automatic and immediate
as if they were instinctive, and indeed they are, but they are
learned ways rather than the unlearned ways man has as his
possession at birth.

THE MECHANISM OF HABIT. The implications of habitual behavior
can better be understood after a brief analysis of the
mechanism of such action. An instinct has been defined as a
tendency to act in a given way in response to a given stimulus.
What happens when a stimulus prompts the organism
to respond in a given way, is that some sensory nerve, whether
of taste or touch or sound, sight, smell, or muscular sensitivity,
receives a stimulus which passes through the spinal cord
to a motor nerve through which some muscle is "innervated"
and a response made. In the simplest type of reflex action,
such as the winking of an eye in a blinding light, or the
withdrawing of a hand from flame, such is the physiology of the
process. But where an immediate adjustment cannot be
made by an instinctive response, where satisfaction is not
secured by the passage of a sensory stimulus to an immediate
motor response, the nervous impulse is, as it were, deflected
to the brain area, auditory, visual, or whatever it may be,
which is associated with that particular type of sensation.
The path to the brain area is far from simple; the nervous impulse,
which might be compared to an electric current, must
pass through many nerve junctions known as "synapses," at
which points there is some not completely understood chemical
resistance offered to the passage of the nerve current. On
passing through the network of nerves in the brain area, the
current passes back again through a complicated maze of connections
to a motor nerve which insures a muscular response.
The first time a stimulus passes through this network the
resistance offered at the nerve junction or synapse is very high;
at succeeding repetitions of the stimulus the resistance is
reduced, the nerve current passes more rapidly and fluently
over the paths it has already traveled, and the action resulting
becomes as direct and automatic as if it were an original
reflex action.[1]

[Footnote 1: See McDougall: _Physiological Psychology_.]

THE ACQUISITION OF NEW MODES OF RESPONSE. Expressed in
less technical language this means simply that human beings
can learn by experience, and that they tend to repeat actions
they have once learned. Where an animal is perfectly adjusted
to its environment, all stimuli issue in immediate and
nicely adjusted responses. This happens only where the
environment is very simple and stable, and where in
consequence no complexity of structure or action is necessary. In
the clam and the oyster, and in some of the lower vertebrates,
perhaps, instinctive activity is almost exclusively
present. But in the case of man, so complicated are the
situations to which he is exposed that random instinctive
responses will not solve his problems. He must, as with his
highly modifiable nervous system he can, acquire new modes
of response which will, in the complexity of new situations
serve as effectively as his original tendencies to act would
serve him in a simpler and stabler environment. A human
being in a modern city cannot live by instinct alone; he must
acquire an enormous number of habits to meet the variety of
complex situations he meets in daily life. A monkey exists
with fairly fixed native tendencies to act. But civilization
could never have developed if in man new ways could not be
acquired to meet new situations, and if these new ways could
not be retained and made habitual in the individual and the
race.

TRIAL AND ERROR AND DELIBERATE LEARNING. Whenever, as
happens a large number of times daily in the life of the average
man, old ways of response, inborn or formerly acquired,
are inadequate to meet a new situation, there are two methods
of acquiring a new and more adequate response. One is the
method of trial and error, already discussed, whereby animals
and humans try every possible instinctive response to a
situation until one brings satisfaction and is retained as a habitual
reaction when that situation recurs. The other is a delay in
response, during which delay reflection, a consideration of
possible alternatives, and a conscious decision, take place.
The technique of this latter process will be discussed more
specifically in the next chapter.

Whether acquired by trial and error, or through reflection,
learned acts are, the first time they are performed, frequently
imperfect, only partly effective, and performed with some
difficulty. With successive repetitions their performance
becomes more rapid, more immediate, and more adjusted to
the specific situation to be met. And as they become more
familiar responses to familiar stimuli they cease to be
conscious at all. They are performed with almost as little
difficulty or attention as normal breathing.

SOME CONDITIONS OF HABIT-FORMATION. The acquisition of
habits is so important in the education of human beings that
the conditions under which they can be acquired and made
permanently effective have been closely studied. From
experiments certain fundamental conclusions stand out. A
habit is acquired by repetition, and the "curves of learning"
show certain recurrent features. In the first few repetitions
of an acquired activity, there is progress in the rapidity,
effectiveness, and accuracy with which the response is made.
There is, up to a certain point, an almost vertical rise in the
learning curve. After varying numbers of repetitions, depending
somewhat on the particular individual, there occur
what are known as "plateaux," during which no progress in
speed or accuracy of response is to be observed. In experiments
with the learning of typewriting, for example, it has
been found that the beginner makes rapid progress up to the
point, say, where he can write fifty words a minute without
error; there is a long interval not infrequently before he can
raise his efficiency to the point of writing seventy words a
minute correctly. Analogous conditions have been observed
in the speed with which the sending and receiving of telegraphic
messages is learned. These "plateaux" of learning
are sometimes to be accounted for by muscular fatigue.
Frequently there is actual progress in learning during these
apparent intervals of marking time. Some of the less observable
features of skill in performance which only later become
overt in speed and accuracy are being attained during these
seemingly profitless and discouraging intervals. Not infrequently
in the acquisition of skill in the playing of tennis or
the piano, or in the solution of mathematical problems, a
decided gain in skill and speed comes after what seems to
be not only lack of progress but decided backsliding.[1] It is
this which led William James to quote with approval the
aphorism that one learns to skate in summer and swim in
winter.

DRILL _VERSUS_ ATTENTIVE REPETITION IN LEARNING. The rapidity
with which habits may be acquired and the permanency with
which they may be retained depend on other factors than
simply that of repetition. Mere mechanical drill is effective
in the acquisition of simple mechanical habits. The most
attentive appreciation of the proper things to be done in playing
tennis or the piano will not by itself make one an expert in
those activities. The effective responses must actually be
performed in order that the appropriate connections within
the nervous system may be made, and may become habitual.
A habit is physiologically nothing but a certain set or direction
given to paths in the nervous system. These paths become
fixed, embedded, and ingrained only when nerve currents
pass over them time and time again.

[Footnote 1: See Ladd and Woodworth: _Physiological Psychology_, pp. 542-92.]

Mere repetition, on the other hand, will not suffice in the
acquisition of complex habits of action. The learning of
these requires a deliberate noting and appreciation of the
significant factors in the performance of an activity, and the
consciously chosen repetition of these in succeeding instances
until the habit is well fixed. One reason why animals cannot
be taught so wide a variety of complex habits as can the human
being is that they cannot keep their attention fixed on
successive repetitions, and that in learning they literally do
not know what they are doing. They cannot, as can humans,
break up the activity which they are in process of learning
into its significant factors, and attend to these in successive
repetitions. The superiority of deliberate learning over the
brute method of trial and error consists precisely in that the
deliberate and attentive learner can pick out the important
steps of any process, and learn rapidly to eliminate random
and useless features of his early performances without waiting
to have the right way "knocked into him" by experience.
He will short-circuit the process of learning by choosing
appropriate responses in advance, noting how they may be
made more effective and discovering methods for making
them so, and for eliminating useless, random, and ineffective
acts. What we call the "capacity to learn" is evident in
marked degree where there is alert attention to the steps of
the process in successive repetitions. The truth in the assertion
that an intelligent man will shortly outclass the merely
automatically skillful in any occupation or profession requiring
training, lies not in any mysterious faculty, but in the
peculiarly valuable habit of attending with discriminating
interest to any process, and learning it thereby with vastly more
economical rapidity. Genius may be more than what one
writer described it, "a painstaking attention to detail"; but a
painstaking attention to the meaning and bearing of details it
most decidedly is.

LEARNING AFFECTED BY AGE, FATIGUE, AND HEALTH. There are
certain conditions not altogether within the control of the
individual which affect the rapidity with which habits are
acquired. One of the most important of these is fatigue.
Connections among the fibers that go to make up the nervous
system cannot be made with ease and rapidity when the
organism is fatigued. At such times there seems to be an
unusually high resistance at the synapses or nerve junctions
(where there is a lowering of resistance to the passage of a
nerve current when habits are easily formed). After a certain
point of fatigue, whether in the acquisition of motor habits
or the memorizing of information, in which the process is
much the same, the rate of learning is much slower and the
degree of accuracy much less. The length of time through
which habits are retained when acquired during a state of
fatigue is also much less than under a more healthy and
resilient condition of the organism.

The point of fatigue varies among different individuals and
in consequence the conditions of habit-formation vary. But
some conditions remain constant. For instance, in experiments
with memory tests (memory being a form of habit in
the nervous system), material memorized in the morning
seems to be most rapidly acquired and most permanently
retained.

The age and health of the individual also are important
factors in the capacity to learn, or habit-formation.
Conditions during disease are similar to those obtaining during
fatigue, only to a more acute degree. The toxins and poisons
in the nervous system at such times operate to prevent the
formation of new habits and the breaking of old ones. For
while the synapses (nerve junctions) may offer high resistance
to the passage of a new stimulus, they will lend themselves
more and more readily to the passage of stimuli by which
they have already been traversed.

That the age of the individual should make a vast difference
in the capacity to acquire new habits and to modify old ones
is obvious from the physiology of habit already described.
When the brain and nervous system are both young, there are
few neural connections established, and the organism is plastic
to all stimuli. As the individual grows older, connections
once made tend to be repeated and to be, as it were,
unconsciously preferred by the nervous system. The capacity to
form habits is most pronounced in the young child in whose
nervous structure no one action rather than another has yet
had a chance to be ingrained. The more connections that are
made, the more habits that are acquired, the less, in a sense,
can be made. For the organism will tend to repeat those
actions to which it has previously been stimulated, and the
more frequently it repeats them the more frequently it will
tend to. So that, as William James pointed out, by twenty-five
we are almost literally bundles of habits. When the
majority of acts of life have become routine and fixed, it is
almost impossible to acquire new ways of acting, since the
acquisition of new habits seriously interferes with the old, and
old habits physiologically stay put.

HABIT AS A TIME-SAVER. This fact, that habits can be
acquired most easily early in life, and that those early acquired
become so fixed that they are almost inescapable, is of supreme
importance to the individual and society. It is in one
sense a great advantage; it is an enormous saver of time. In
the famous words of James:[1]

The great thing, then, in all education, is to _make our nervous system
our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to fund and capitalize our
acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. _For this
we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many
useful actions as we can_, and guard against the growing into ways
that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard
against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can
hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our
higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing
is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar,
the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every
day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express
volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the
deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in
him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there
be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let
him begin this very hour to set the matter right.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 122.]

The ideal of efficiency is the ideal of having the effective
thing habitually done with as little effort and difficulty as
possible. This in the case of human beings is, as James points
out, attained when good habits are early acquired and when
as large a proportion as possible of purely routine activity is
made effortless and below the level of consciousness. To do
as many things as possible without thinking is to free thinking
for new situations. Our experiences would be very restricted
indeed if we could not reduce a large portion of the things we
do to the mechanics of habit. Walking, eating, these, though
partly instinctive, were once problems requiring thought,
effort, and attention. If we had to spend all our lives learning
to dress and undress, to find our way about our own house
or city, to spell and to pronounce correctly, it is clear how
little variety and diversity we should ever attain in our lives.
By the time we are twenty these fundamental habits are so
firmly fixed in us that, for better or for worse, they are ours
for life, and we are free to give our attention to other things.
Again in the words of James:

We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain
daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting
of familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centers know the
order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their "surprise"
if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be
made in a different way. But our higher thought centers know
hardly anything about the matter. Few men can tell off-hand
which sock, shoe, or trousers-leg they put on first. They must first
mentally rehearse the act; and even that is often insufficient--the
act must be _performed_. So of the questions, Which valve of my
double door opens first? Which way does my door swing? etc. I
cannot _tell_ the answer; yet my _hand_ never makes a mistake. No
one can _describe_ the order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet
it is likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 115.]

HABIT AS A STABILIZER OF ACTION. Habit not only thus saves
time, but stabilizes action, and where the habits acquired are
effective ones, this is invaluable. Habits of prompt performance
of certain daily duties on the part of the individual are a
distinct benefit both to him and to others, as certain customary
efficient office practices, when they are really habitual,
immensely facilitate the operation of a business. On a larger
scale habit is "society's most precious conservative agent."
Individuals not only develop personal habits of dress, speech,
etc., but become habituated to social institutions, to certain
occupations, to the prestige attaching to some types of action
and the punishment correlated with others. Education in
the broadest sense is simply the acquisition of those habits
which adapt an individual to his social environment. It is
the instrument society uses to hand down the habits of thinking,
feeling, and action which characterize a civilization. Society
is protected from murder, theft, and pillage by law and
the police, but it is even better protected by the fact that living
together peacefully and coöperatively is for most adults
habitual. In a positive sense the multifarious occupations
and professions of a great modern city are carried on from
day to day in all their accustomed detail, not because the
lawyers, the business men, the teachers, who practice them
continuously reason them out, nor from continuous instinctive
promptings. They are striking testimony to the influence
of habit. As a recent English writer puts it:

The population of London would be starved in a week if the flywheel
of habit were removed, if no signalman or clerk or policeman
ever did anything which was not suggested by a first-hand impulse,
or if no one were more honest or punctual or industrious than he was
led to be by his conscious love, on that particular day, for his master
or for his work, or by his religion, or by a conviction of danger from
the criminal law.[1]

[Footnote 1: Graham Wallas: _Great Society_, p. 74.]

From etiquette and social distinction, from formalities of
conversation and correspondence, of greeting and farewell, of
condolence and congratulation to the most important "customs
of the country," with respect to marriage, property, and
the like, ways of acting are maintained by the mechanism of
habit rather than by arbitrary law or equally arbitrary
instinctive caprice.

DISSERVICEABLE HABITS IN THE INDIVIDUAL. Habitual behavior
which can become so completely controlling in the lives of so
many people is not without its dangers. The nervous system
is originally neutral, and can be involved on the side either of
good or evil. A human born with a plastic brain and nervous
system must acquire habits, but that he will acquire good habits
(that is, habits serviceable to his own happiness and to
that of his fellows) is not guaranteed by nature. Habits are
indeed more notorious than famous, and examples are more
frequently chosen from evil ones than from good. Promptness
in the performance of one's professional or domestic duties,
care in speech, in dress and in demeanor, are, once they
are acquired, permanent assets. But if these fail to be
developed, dishonesty or superficiality, slovenliness in dress and
speech, and surliness in manner, may and do become equally
habitual. The significance of this has been eloquently stated
at the close of James's famous discussion:

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no
worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually
fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but
realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little
scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses
himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this
time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not
count it, but it is being counted none the less. Down among his
nerve cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and
storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 127.]

SOCIAL INERTIA. If the acquisition of bad, that is, disserviceable
habits, is disastrous to the individual, it is in some respects
even worse in the group. The inertia of the nervous
system, the tendency to go on repeating connections that
have once been made is one of the strongest obstacles to
change, however desirable. It is not only that habits of
action have been established, but that with them go deep-seated
habits of thought and feeling. The repression of people's
accustomed ways of doing things may bring with it a sense of
frustration almost as complete and painful as if these
obstructed activities were instinctive. This is not true merely
in the melodramatic instances of drug addicts and drunkards.
It is true in the case of social habits which have become
established in a large group. Any Utopian that dreams of revolutionizing
society overnight fails to take into account the
enormous control of habits over groups which have acquired
them, and the powerful emotions, amounting sometimes to
passion, which are aroused by their frustration.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEARNING HABIT. That habit is at
once the conserver and the petrifier of society has long been
recognized by social philosophers. There is one habit, however,
the acquisition of which is itself a preventive of the
complete domination of the individual or the group by hard and
fast routine. This is the habit of learning, which is necessary
to the acquisition of any habits at all. Man in learning new
habits, "learns to learn." This ability to learn is, of course,
correlated with a plasticity of brain and nerve fiber which is
most present in early youth. The disappearance of this
capacity is hastened by the pressure which forces individuals in
their business and professional life to cling fast to certain
habits which are prized and rewarded by the group. A sedulous
cultivation on the part of the individual of the habit of
open-minded inquiry, of the habit of learning, and the
encouragement of this tendency by the group are the only antidotes
that can be provided against this marked physiological
tendency to fossilization and the frequent social tendencies in
the same direction.

Whether habits shall master us, or whether we shall be
their masters, depends also on the method by which they
were acquired. If they were learned merely through mechanical
drill, they will be fixed and rigid. If they were learned
deliberately to meet new situations, they will not be retained
when the conditions they were acquired to meet are utterly
changed.

THE SPECIFICITY OF HABITS. One important consideration,
finally, that must be brought to consideration is that habits
are, like instincts, specific. They are not general "open sesames"
which, learned in one situation, will apply with indiscriminate
miraculousness to a variety of others. Just as an
instinct is a definite response to a definite stimulus, so is a
habit. The chief and almost only observable difference is
that the former is unlearned, while the latter is learned or
acquired.

But while habits are specific, they are within limits transferable.
Such is the case when a situation which calls out a
certain habitual response is paralleled in significant points by
another. Thus the situation,
one's-room-at-home-cluttered-up-with-a-miscellany-of-books-papers-tennis-apparatus-and-clothing,
has sufficiently similar significant points to the situation,
one's-office-littered-with-documents-old-letters-manuscripts-blueprints-and-proofs,
to call forth, if the habit has
been established in one case, the identical response of "tidying
up" in the other. But unless there are marked points of
similarity between two different sets of circumstances, specific
habits remain specific and non-transferable. There is in the
laws of habit no guarantee that an industrious application to
the batting averages of the major league on the part of an
alert twelve-year-old will provoke the same assiduous assimilation
of the facts of the American Revolution; that a boy
who works hard at his chemistry will work equally hard at his
English, or that one who is careful about his manners and
pronunciation in school will display the slightest heed to them
among his companions on the ball-field. One of the most
cogent arguments against the stereotyped teaching of Latin
and Greek has been the serious doubt psychologists have held
as to whether four years' training in Latin syntax will develop
in the student general mental habits which will be applicable
or useful outside the Latin classroom.

The older "faculty" psychologists presumed that different
subjects trained various so-called "faculties" of "memory,"
"imagination," and "intellect." It has now become clear on
experimental evidence that in education we are training no
isolated faculties, but are training the individual to certain
specific habits. The more widely applicable the habits are,
obviously the more valuable or dangerous will they be in the
conduct of life. But when habits do become general, such as
a habit of promptness, honesty, and regularity, not in one
situation but "in general," it is because they are something
more than habits in the strict physiological sense. They are
intellectual as well as merely motor in character; they are
deliberate and conscious methods rather than mechanical
rules of thumb. Habits that have been drilled into an
individual will appear only when the situation very closely
approximates the one in which the drill has been performed.
The cat that has learned to get out of a certain type of cage
by pressing a button will be utterly at a loss if the familiar
features of the cage are changed. The intelligent human
will detect and take pains to detect among the minor
differences of the situation some significant fact which he has met
in another setting, and he will apply a habit useful in this new
situation despite the slightly changed accompanying circumstances.
The man who can drive an automobile with reflective
appreciation of the processes involved, who knows, as
we say, what he is doing, will not long be baffled by a car
with a slightly different arrangement of levers and steering-gear,
nor be completely frustrated when the car for some
reason fails to move. As happened in many notable instances
during the World War, trained executives were not long at a
loss when they shifted from the management of a steel plant
to a shipyard, or from large-scale mining operations in Montana
to large-scale relief work in Belgium.

THE CONSCIOUS TRANSFERENCE OF HABITS. When habits are
consciously acquired, they may be consciously transferred
with modifications to situations slightly different from those
in which they were first learned. Merely mechanical habits
are a hindrance in any save the most mechanical work. An
alert and conscious method of learning, which means the
development of habits _as_ methods of control, will enable the
individual to modify habits acquired in slightly different
circumstances to new situations where the major conditions
remain the same. To be merely habitual is to be at best an
efficient machine, utterly unable to do anything except to run
along certain grooves, to respond like an animal trained to
certain tricks. It means, moreover, a loss of richness in
experience. When a profession becomes routinated it becomes
meaningless; a mere making of the wheels go round.
The spirit of alert and conscious inquiry must be maintained
if life is not to become a mere repeated monotony.

An alert and conscious adjustment of habits to a changing
environment constitutes intelligence. The technique of this
adjustment is the technique of thinking or of reflective
behavior, which we shall examine in more detail in the following
chapter.

EMOTION. All human action, whether on the plane of
instinct, habit, or reflection, is, to a lesser or greater degree,
accompanied by emotion. While there is considerable controversy
among psychologists as to the precise nature of emotion,
and the precise conditions of its causation, its general
features and significance are fairly clear. Emotion may be
most generally defined as an awareness or consciousness on
the part of the individual of his experiences, both those in
which he is the actor and those in which he is being passively
acted upon. This awareness or consciousness is not detached
intellectual perception, but is accompanied by, as it is by
some held to be merely the consciousness of, certain specific
bodily disturbances. Thus the emotions of fear and grief
are not cold and abstract perceptions of situations that belong
in the classes dangerous or deplorable, respectively. The
awareness of these situations by the individual is intimately
and invariably connected with certain outward bodily manifestations
and certain inner organic disturbances. Fear, rage,
pity, and the like are not unimpassioned judgments, but
highly charged physical changes. So close, indeed, is the
connection between specific bodily conditions and the subjective
or inner consciousness that we call emotion, that James and
Lange simultaneously came to the conclusion that emotions
are nothing more nor less than the blending of the complex
organic changes that occur in any given emotional state.
Thus James:

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither
of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling
lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral
stirrings, were present, it is impossible for me to think. Can
anyone fancy the state of rage, and picture no ebullition in the chest,
no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the
teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles,
calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly
cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensations
of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can
possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold blooded and
dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm,
to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for
their sins. In like manner of grief; what would it be without its
tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?
A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and
nothing more.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 452.]

Indeed, so completely did James think the emotions were
explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations
which go to make up each of them that he did not think
it misleading to say "we feel sorry because we cry, angry
because we strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not cry,
strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as
the case may be."

Whether or not emotions are completely to be explained
as the inner or subjective aspect of the complex of organic
disturbances which accompany fear, rage, and the like, and
which are caused immediately by the perception of the appropriate
objects of these emotions, it is certainly true that
emotional awareness and bodily disturbances are very closely
connected.[1]

[Footnote 1: Recent experiments by Dr. Cannon at Harvard have shown the specific
bodily disturbances which accompany anger, fear, etc. In particular, Dr.
Cannon, and others, have noted that in the emotional conditions of fear and
anger the glands, located near the kidneys, discharge a fluid into the blood
stream, which fluid stimulates the heart to activity, constricts the blood
vessels of the internal organs, causes the liver to pour out into the blood its
stores of sugar, and affects in one way or another all the organs of the body.
The general effect is to put the body into a state of preparedness for the
activities connected with the emotion, whether flight in the case of fear,
attack as in the case of anger. This has led Professor Woodworth to define
emotion as, at least in part, "the way the body feels when it is prepared for a
certain reaction." See the latter's _Dynamic Psychology_, pp. 51-59.]

Various attempts have been made to classify the emotions
which are, in ordinary experience, infinitely subtle and complex.
The subtlety and variety of emotion James explains
as the result of the subtle and imperceptible differences in the
complex of sensations which occur in any given situation. In
general, it has been recognized that the emotions are very
closely connected with the primary tendencies of man.
McDougall, for example, says that each of the great primary
impulses is accompanied by an emotion. Indeed, McDougall
considers, as earlier noted, that the emotion is the affective
or conscious aspect of an instinct which, at the same time, has
a perceptual and impulsive aspect; that, in the case of fear,
the perceptual aspect is the instinctive mechanism for recognizing
objects of danger, the impulsive aspect is the tendency
toward flight, and the affective aspect is the inner feeling or
awareness of fear. Thus, for McDougall, the tender emotion
is the emotional aspect of the instinct of pity, anger of the
instinct of pugnacity, which is, as an impulse, the tendency
to strike and destroy.

As a matter of fact, as McDougall himself admits, emotions
are seldom experienced in unmixed forms, and it is very
difficult to reduce the infinite variety of emotional experiences
to any primary forms. One may well agree with James that
"subdivisions [in the psychological demarcation of the emotions]
are to a great extent either fictitious or unimportant,
and ... pretenses to accuracy, a sham." In general, one
may say that emotions are closely connected with the native
tendencies of human beings and are aroused by both their
fulfillment, their conflict, and their frustration. The variety
of emotions results from the fact that no single one of our
instincts is stimulated at a time, and that the peculiar specific
quality of each emotional experience is due to the specific
point of conflict, fulfillment, or frustration in each particular
case. It may be further noted that those emotions are, in
general, pleasantly toned which accompany the fulfillment or
the approach to the fulfillment of a native disposition; and
those are unpleasantly toned which accompany their frustration
or conflict. The depth and intensity of the emotional
disturbance seem to depend on the degree and extent to which
strong instinctive or habitual impulses have become involved.
For as habits of action may be acquired, so also may emotions
become associated habitually with them. The emotional
disturbances connected with the fulfillment, frustration, and
conflict of habits may be just as intense as those connected
with similar phenomena in the case of instincts.

In one sense these emotional disturbances impede action,
certainly action on the reflective level. It is the capacity
and function of reflection to solve and adjust precisely those
conflicts of competing impulses during which emotional disturbances
occur. But the reflective process is confused and
distorted in conflicts of native or habitual desires by these
emotional disturbances which accompany them. It is proverbially
difficult to think straight when angry; the surgeon
in performing an operation must not be moved by pity or fear;
and love is notoriously blind. The facts with which reflection
must deal are presented in distorted and exaggerated form
under the stress of competing impulses. Stimuli become
loaded with emotional associations. They are glaring and
conspicuous on the basis of their emotional urgency rather
than on the ground of their logical significance. The paralysis
or complete disorganization of action which occurs in
extreme cases of hysteria takes place to some extent in all less
extreme instances of emotional disturbances.

Emotions, on the other hand, serve to sustain, and, in their
less violent form, to facilitate action. It has already been
noted that the organic disturbances which are so conspicuous
a feature of emotion are extremely important in preparing the
body for the overt actions in which these emotions always
tend to issue. And it is unquestionable that emotions,
though in more or less obscure ways, call up reserves of energy
in the service of the activity in connection with which the
emotion has been aroused. While very violent emotions, as
in the case of extreme anger or fear or pity, confuse,
disorganize, and even paralyze action, in more moderate form
they rather serve to stimulate and reinforce it. Emotions
are, in many cases, merely the inner or subjective awareness
of one of these great driving forces, or a complex of them.
Anger, pity, and fear, in their less extreme forms, pour floods
of energy into the activities in which they take overt expression.
It needs no special knowledge to recognize the fact
that the normal interests and enterprises of life are quickened
and sustained when some great emotional drive can be roused
in their support. Ambition, loyalty, love, or hate may stir
men to and sustain them in long and difficult enterprises
which they would neither undertake nor continue were these
motive forces removed. The soldier does not fight persistently
and well wholly, or often even in part, because he has
thought out the situation and found the cause of his country
to be just. He is stirred and sustained by the energies which
the emotional complex called "patriotism" has roused and
concentrated toward action. A scientist performing long and
difficult researches, a father sacrificing rest and comfort that
his children may be well provided for, a boy working to pay
his way through college, are all persisting in courses of action,
because of the driving power which the emotions, more
or less mixed, of curiosity, or tenderness, or self-assertion
have released.

But just as the original nature with which man is born is
modifiable, so are his emotional reactions. Each individual's
emotional reactions are peculiar and specific, because of the
particular contacts to which they have been exposed, and the
organization of instincts and habits which have come to be
their more or less fixed character. Any emotional experience
consists of an intermingling of many and diverse feelings.
And these particular complexes of emotions become for each
individual organized about particular persons or objects or
situations. The emotional reactions of an individual are,
indeed, accurately symptomatic of the character of the
individual and the culture of his time. They are aroused, it goes
without saying, on very different occasions and by very
different objects, among different men and different groups.
In the sixteenth century pious persons could watch heretics
being burned in oil with a sense of deep religious exaltation.
Certain Fijian tribes slaughter their aged parents with the
most tender filial devotion. In certain savage communities,
to eat in public arouses on the part of the individual a sense
of acute shame.

Since those emotions are, on the whole, pleasantly toned
which accompany the fulfillment of instinctive and habitual
impulses, and those unpleasantly toned which accompany
their frustration, it becomes, as Aristotle pointed out, of the
most "serious importance" early to habituate men to the
performance of socially useful actions. If good or useful
actions are early made habitual, their performance will bring
pleasure, and will thereby be better insured than by any
amount of preaching or punishment. If the actions which
the group approves are not early made habitual in the younger
members of the group, they will not be enforced either through
logic or electrocution. It is not enough to give people reasons
for doing good, they will only do it consistently if the opposite
arouses in them more or less abhorrence. People learn to
modify their actions on the basis of the pleasure or pain they
find in their performance, and the pleasure or pain they will
experience depends on the actions to which they are habituated
and the emotions which have come to be their characteristic
accompaniments.




CHAPTER III

REFLECTION.

INSTINCT AND HABIT _VERSUS_ REFLECTION. In the two types of
behavior already discussed, man is, as it were, "pushed from
behind." In the case of instinct he performs an action simply
because he _must_ perform it. Willy-nilly he withdraws his
hand from fire, eats when hungry, and sleeps when tired. In
the case of habits, once they are acquired, he is also largely
dominated by circumstances beyond his own control. The
bottle is to the confirmed drunkard almost an irresistible command
to drink, the alarm clock to one accustomed to it an
equally imperative and not-to-be-disregarded order to arise.
The story of the old veteran who was carrying home his dinner
and who dropped his hands to his side and his dinner to the
gutter when a practical joker called "Attention"; the pathetic
plight of the superannuated business man who is totally at a
loss away from his familiar duties, are often quoted illustrations
of how completely habit may determine a man's actions.

But while in a large portion of our daily duties we are thus
at the beck and call of the instincts which are our inheritance
and the habits which we have acquired, we may also _control_
our actions. Instead of performing actions as immediate and
automatic responses to accustomed stimuli, we may determine
our actions, single or consecutive, in the light of absent
and future results. To act thus is to act reflectively, and to
act reflectively is the only escape from random acts prompted
by instinct and routine ones prompted by habit.

To act reflectively is to delay response to an instinctive or
habitual stimulus until the various possibilities of action and
the results associated with each have been considered. An
action performed instinctively or habitually is automatic; it
is performed not on the basis of what will be the result, but
simply as an immediate response to a present stimulus. But
an act (or a series of acts) reflectively performed is performed
in the light of the results that are prophetically associated
with them. In the case of instinct and habit, the individual
almost literally does not know what he is about. In reflective
activity he does know, and the more thorough the reflective
process, the more thorough and precise is his knowledge. He
performs actions _because_ they will achieve certain results, and
he is conscious of that causal connection, both before the
action is performed when he perceives the results imaginatively,
and after it is performed when he sees them in fact.

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF REFLECTION. Reflection, it must be
noted in the first place, is not a thing, but a process. It is a
process whereby human beings adjust themselves to a continuously
changing environment. Our instincts and habits
suffice to adapt us to that large number of recurrent similar
situations of which our experience in no small measure exists.
In such cases the habitual response will bring the usual satisfaction.
Walking, dressing, getting to familiar places, finding
the electric button in well-known rooms, opening often-opened
combinations--these operations are all adequately
accomplished by the fixed mechanisms of habit. But we
meet as frequently with novel situations where the accustomed
or instinctive reactions will not bring the desired satisfaction.
One response or a number of responses will not
adjust the individual satisfactorily to external conditions; or
there may be a conflict between a number of impulses all
clamoring for satisfaction at once. Reflection thus begins
either in a maladjustment between the individual and his
environment or in a conflict of impulses within the same
person.

Where such a maladjustment occurs, the uneasiness, discomfort,
and frustration of action may be removed in one of
two ways. Adjustment may be achieved, as we have already
seen, through physical trial and error, through a hit-and-miss
experimentation with every possible response until the appropriate
one is made. This is the only way in which animals
can learn to modify their instinctive tendencies into habits
more adequate to their conditions. The more economical
and effective process, one peculiar to human beings, is that
of reflection. To think or to reflect means to postpone response
to a given problematic situation until the possible consequences
of the possible responses have been mentally traced
out. Instead of _actually_ making every response that occurs
to us, we make all of them _imaginatively_. Instead of consuming
time and energy in physical trial and error, we go through
the process of mental trial and error. We make no response
at all in action until we have surveyed all the possibilities of
action and their possible consequences. And when we do
make a response we make it on the basis of those foreseen
consequences.[1]

[Footnote 1: The possibilities of response that do occur to us are, on
the whole, determined by past training and native differences in
temperament. But part of the process of reflection is, as we shall see
in the chapter on "Science and Scientific Method," concerned with
deliberately enlarging the field of possible responses in the solution
of a given problem.]

In other words, the situation is analyzed. What is the end
or adjustment sought, what are the possible responses, and
how far is each of them suited as a means to achieving the
satisfaction sought? Instead of going through every random
course of action that suggests itself, each one is "dramatically
rehearsed." Finally, that response is made which gives most
promise in terms of its prophesied consequences of adjusting
us to our situation.

ILLUSTRATION OF THE REFLECTIVE PROCESS. A student may, for
example, be seated at his study, preparing for an examination.
A friend enters and suggests going for a walk or to the
theater. If the student were to follow this first immediate
impulse he would, before he realized it, be off for an evening's
entertainment. But instead of responding immediately,
dropping his books, reaching for his hat, opening the door,
and ringing for the elevator (a series of habitual acts initiated
by the instinctive desire for rest, variety, and companionship),
he may rehearse in imagination the various possibilities
of action. In general terms, what happens is simply this:[1]

[Footnote 1: The technique of reflection will be discussed in detail
in the chapter on "Science and Scientific Method."]

On the one hand, the gregarious instinct, the desire for rest,
native curiosity, and an acquired interest in drama may
prompt him strongly to go to the theater. On the other
hand, the habits of industry, ambition, self-assertion, and
studying in the evening urge him to stay at home and study.
The first course of action may, for the moment, be immediately
attractive and stimulating. But instead of responding
to either immediately, the student rehearses dramatically the
possibilities associated with each. On the one hand are the
immediate satisfactions of rest, amusement, and companionship.
But as further consequences of the impulse to go out
to the theater are seen--or, rather, are foreseen--failure in
the examination, the loss of a scholarship, pain to one's family
or friends, and chagrin at the frustration of one's deepest and
most permanent ideals. The second course of action, to
stay at home and study, though it is seen to have connected
with it certain immediate privations, is foreseen to involve
the further consequences of passing the examination, keeping
one's scholarship, and maintaining certain personal or intellectual
standards one has set one's self. Even if the student
decides to follow the first course of action to which an immediate
impulse has prompted him, his act is different in quality
from what it would have been if he had not reflected at all.
The student goes out fully aware of the consequences of what
he is doing; he goes _for_ the immediate pleasure and _in spite
of_ the possible failure in the examination. The very heart
of reflective behavior is thus seen to lie in the fact that present
stimuli are reacted to, not for what they are as immediate
stimuli, but for what they signify, portend, imply, in the way
of consequences or results. And a response made upon reflection
is made on the basis of these imaginatively realized consequences.
We connect what we do with the results that
flow from the doing, and control our action in the light of that
prophetically realized connection.

The process is obviously not always so simple as that described
in the above illustration. In the first place, more
than two courses of action may suggest themselves. And the
consequences of any one of them may be far more complex
and far more obscure than any suggested in the above. For
an individual to be able to decide a problem on the basis of
consequences imaginatively foreseen, it is often necessary to
institute a very elaborate system of connecting links between
an immediately suggested course of action and its not at all
obvious results. "Thinking a thing out" involves precisely
this introduction of connecting links, or "middle terms," between
what is immediately given or suggested and what
necessarily, though by no means obviously, follows. This
is illustrated in the case of any more or less theoretical problem
and its solution. To perceive, for example, the connection
between atmospheric pressure and the rise of water in a
suction pump involves the introduction of connecting links
in the form of the general law of gravitation, of which atmospheric
pressure is a special case.

But the same is true of practical problems. A young man
may be trying to decide whether or not to take a nomination
to the training course at West Point. He may be attracted
by the four years' training, and highly value the results of it.
He may think, however, that the training involves an obligation
to serve in the army; it may mean, for a long time, service
in some remote army post. His decision may be determined
by this last consideration, which required a series of
intermediate "linking" ideas to bring to light.

The technique of scientific or expert thinking is, in large
part, concerned with devices for enabling the thinker more
securely to trace the obscure and remote connections between
actions and their consequences, between causes and effects.
But, whether simple or complex, the essential feature of
reflective activity is that it is action performed in the light of
consequences foreseen in imagination. Physical stimuli are
not responded to immediately with physical action. They
are responded to as symbols, signs, or portents; they are
taken as symptoms of the results that _would_ follow if they
_were_ acted upon. That is, they are, until decision is made,
reacted to imaginatively. When an actual response is finally
made, it is made on the basis of the results that have been
more or less accurately and directly anticipated in imagination.

REFLECTION AS THE MODIFIER OF INSTINCT. Reflection is
primarily a revealer of consequences. Instead of yielding to
the first impulse that occurs to him, the thinking man
considers where that impulse, if followed out, will lead. And
since man is moved by more than one impulse at a time, reflection
traces the consequences of each, and determines action
on the basis of the relative satisfactions it can prophesy after
careful inquiry into the situation. To reflect is primarily to
query a stimulus, to find out what it means in terms of its
consequences. The more alert, persistent, and careful this
inquiry, the more will instinctive tendencies be checked and
modified and adjusted to new situations.

In the discussion of the acquisition of habits, it was pointed
out that useful habits may be acquired most rapidly by an
analysis of them into their significant features. The speed
with which random instinctive actions are modified into a
series of useful habitual ones depends intimately upon how
clear and detailed is the individual's appreciation of the
results to be achieved by one action rather than another. A
large part of learning even among humans is doubtless trial
and error, random hit-or-miss attempts, until after successive
repetitions, a successful response is made and retained. But
human learning and habit-formation are so much more various
and fruitful than those of animals precisely because human
beings can check and modify instinctive responses in the
light of consequences which they can foresee. These foreseen
consequences are, of course, derived from previous experience;
that is, they are "remembered." But reflection short-circuits
the process. The more deliberate and reflective the process
of learning, the more the individual notes the connections
between the things he does and the results he gets, the fewer
repetitions will he need in order effectively to modify his
instinctive behavior into useful habits. He will anticipate
results; he will experience them in imagination. He will not
need to make every wrong move in paddling a canoe until he
finally hits upon the right one. He will not need to alienate
all his clients before learning to deal with them successfully.
In any given set of circumstances he will form the effective
habits rapidly. He will calculate, "figure out," find out in
advance. To keep one's temper under provocation, to refrain
from eating delicious and indigestible foods, to keep at
work when one would like to play, and sometimes to play
when one is engrossed in work, are familiar instances of how
our first impulses become checked, restrained, or modified in
the light of the results we have discovered to be associated
with them.

REFLECTIVE BEHAVIOR MODIFIES HABIT. The same conscious
breaking-up of a new type of action into its significant
features, the same connection of a given action with a given
result which makes the intelligent learner so much more
quickly acquire effective new habits than the one who is
mechanically drilled, leads also to a continuous criticism of
habits, and their discontinuance when they are no longer
adequate. Reflection, if it is itself a habit, is the most valuable
one of all. It is an important counterpoise to the hardening
and fossilization which repeated habitual actions bring about
in the nervous system.

In acting reflectively we subject our accustomed ways to
deliberate analysis, however immediately persuasive these
may have become, and deliberately institute new habits in
the light of the more desirable consequences they will bring.
Habits come to be regarded not as final or as good in themselves,
but as methods of accomplishing good. If they fail
to bring genuine satisfaction, reflection can indicate wherein
they are inadequate, wherein they may be changed, and
whether they should be altogether discarded.

Reflection thus makes conduct conscious; it is not the substitute
for instinct and habit; it is the guide and controller of
both. When we act thoughtfully and intelligently, we are
doing things not because we have done them that way in the
past, or because it is the first response that occurs to us, but
because, in the light of analysis, that way will bring about the
most desirable results.

THE LIMITS OF REFLECTION AS A MODIFIER OF INSTINCT AND HABIT.
While our impulses and habits may be subjected to the criticism
of reflection in the light of the consequences which it
can forecast, reflection is itself seriously limited by our
original impulses and our acquired habitual ones. On reflection,
we may not follow our first impulse, but to act at all is to act
on some original or acquired impulse or a combination of
them. Which original tendency we shall follow reflection can
tell us; it cannot tell us to follow none. In the illustration
already used, the student may upon reflection study rather
than go out. But the roots of his studying will also lie back
in the instincts and habits which are, for better or for worse,
his only equipment for action. They will lie back in the
tendencies to be curious, to gain the praise of other people
and to be a leader among them, in the habits of knowing work
thoroughly, of studying in the evening, of maintaining a
scholarship average to which he has been accustomed.
Reflection may weigh the relative persuasions of various
impulses; it cannot ignore them. We may think in order to
attain our desires, and may, through reflection, learn to
change them; we cannot abolish them. Whether we are
curious about our neighbors' business or about the movements
of the stars and the possible reactions of a strange
chemical element, depends on our previous training and the
extent to which inquiry itself has become a fixed and
persistent habit. But in any case we are curious. Whether we
fight in street brawls or in campaigns against tuberculosis,
we are still, as it were, born fighters.

Similarly, in the case of habit, we may upon reflection discover
that our habits of walking, writing, or speech are bad;
that we ought not to smoke, or drink, or waste time. We
may come, through reflection, to realize with the utmost
clarity the advantages to ourselves of acquiring the habits of
going to bed early, saving money, keeping our papers in order,
and persisting at work amid distractions. But the bad habits
and the good are already fixed in our nervous system, and in
physiology also possession is nine tenths of the law. We may
_intend_ to change, but by taking thought alone we cannot add
a cubit to our stature. Reflection can do no more than point
the way we should go. For unless the wrong actions are
systematically and repeatedly refrained from, and the proper
ones made habitual, thinking remains merely an impotent
summary of what can be done. Conduct is governed, it must
be repeated, by the satisfactions action can bring us, and
unless actions are made habitual they will not be performed
with satisfaction.

HOW INSTINCTS AND HABITS IMPAIR THE PROCESSES OF REFLECTION.
It is as important as it is paradoxical that thinking is impaired
in its efficiency by the instincts and habits in whose service it
arises, and whose conflicts and maladjustments it helps to
resolve. The situations of conflict or perplexity which provoke
thinking are determined by the particular tendencies
which, by nature or training, are brought into play in any
given situation. If we are committed by tradition or habitual
allegiance to a protective tariff, we will be concerned in our
thinking with details, what articles need protection and how
much do they need; the ultimate desirability of a protective
tariff will not be a problem remotely occurring to us. If we
are by training committed to capital punishment, we will be
concerned, if we think about it at all, with means and methods;
we will think about the relative merits of hanging or
electrocution; the ultimate justification or desirability of capital
punishment will not be a problem or issue for us at all.
Thus, it may be said in a sense that our thinking is determined
by what we do not think about as much as by what we do
think about. What we take for granted limits the field within
which we will inquire or reflect at all. But what we take for
granted is, on the whole, settled by our habitual reactions.
And the more settled habitual convictions we have, the narrower
becomes the field within which reflection takes place.
Force of habit may leave us blind to many situations genuinely
demanding solution. Originality in thinking consists,
in part at least, in an ability to see a problem where others,
through routine, see none. Apples have fallen on the heads
of others than Newton, but a habit-ridden rustic will not be
stirred by the falling of an apple to reflection on the problem
of falling bodies. The countryman may live all his life serenely
oblivious to a thousand problems that would pique
the curiosity and reflection of a botanist or geologist. A man
may go on for years accepting income on investments earned
in very dubious ways without ever pausing to reflect on the
sources or the justification of his wealth.[1]

[Footnote 1: According to the traditional anecdote, when Marie Antoinette
was told that the people were clamoring because they could not get any
bread, the one problem that occurred to her was why they didn't eat
cake. From the habits and conditions of life to which she was accustomed,
there had never arisen a problem as to how to get food at all; it was
merely a problem of what kind of food to eat.]

Instincts and habits, furthermore, limit the field of possible
courses of action that suggest themselves. We come, through
habit, to be alive only to certain possibilities to the practical
exclusion of all others. Thinking becomes fruitful and suggestive
when it is freed from the limited number of suggestions
that occur through force of habit. But original thinking is
rare precisely because habits do have such a compulsive
power in determining the possibilities of action that suggest
themselves to us. The man who moves in a rut of habitual
reactions will "never think" of possibilities that "stare in the
face" a less habit-ridden thinker. Inventiveness, originality,
creative intelligence, whatever one chooses to call it, consists,
in no small measure, in this ability to remain alive to a wide
variety of stimuli, to keep sensitive to all the possibilities that
are in a situation, instead of those only to which we are
immediately prompted by instinct or habit. The possibility of
using the current of a river as power is not the first possibility
that flowing water suggests.

Past training and individual differences in temperament
not only limit the possibilities that do occur to us; they
seriously distort, color, and qualify those of which we become
conscious. We forecast differently and with differing degrees
of accuracy the consequences of those possible courses of
action which do occur to us according to the influence and
stimulation which particular native traits and acquired impulses
have in our conduct. Ideally, the consequences which
we imaginatively forecast as following from a given course of
action, should tally with the consequences which genuinely
follow from it. But there is too often a sad discrepancy between
the consequences as they are foreseen by the individual
concerned and the genuine consequences that could be foreseen
by any disinterested observer. The discrepancy between
the genuine and the imagined consequences of given
ideas or suggestions is caused more than anything else by
the hopes, fears, aversions, and preferences which, by nature
or training, are controlling in a man's behavior. Facts are
weighed differently according as one or another of these
psychological influences is present. We intend unconsciously
to substitute a desired or expected consequence for the actual
one; we tend to be oblivious to consequences which we fear,
and quick to imagine those for which we hope. On the day
before an election the campaign managers on both sides, in
the glow and momentum of their activities, are confident of
the morrow's victory. The opponent of prohibition saw
nothing but drug fiends and revolution as its consequences;
its extreme advocates saw it as the salvation of mankind.

The causes of error in appraising the consequences of any
given course of action are partly individual and partly social
in character. From Francis Bacon down, there have been
various attempts to classify these factors in the distortion of
the reflective process. In connection with the particular
human traits, especially such as fear and gregariousness, we
shall have occasion to examine a few of these.

It will suffice to point out here that the aim of reflective
thinking is to discover the genuine consequences of things,
and to eliminate and discount those prejudices and preferences,
bred of early education and training, which might impair
our discovery of those consequences. To the untrained,
those things look most significant which stir their impulses
most strikingly. The beggar's sores seem much more important
and terrible than a gifted youngster deprived of education
through poverty. Instinctively we shrink back from the sight
of blood, but instinct is no safe clue in helping us to
distinguish between the poisons and the panaceas among the
brightly colored bottles of chemicals ranged along a shelf.
The whole technique of scientific method as opposed to the
shrewd but unreliable guesses of common sense is one of freeing
us from the compulsions of random habitual impulses.
It substitutes for caprice the measuring of consequences, the
detailed knowing of what we are about. That impartial judgment
has its difficulties is clear from the simple fact alone that
human beings start by being a bundle of instincts and soon
grow into a bundle of habits. To the extent to which they
can control these they are masters of themselves.

THE VALUE OF REFLECTION FOR LIFE. To many people there is
something terrifying about the idea of controlling life by
reason. Life (they point out correctly) is a vital process of
instincts which appear before thinking, and which are often
more powerful than reasoned judgments. Against advice to
live consciously, to be in control of ourselves, to know what
we are about, comes the call "Back to Nature." A life of
reflection appears chilling and arbitrary. Because reflection
so often reveals that impulses must be checked if disaster
is not to result, it has come to be associated with a metallic
and Stoic repression. To many a persuasive impulse we
must, after reflection, say, "No." Because of this a certain
school of philosophers, poets, and radicals urges us to trust
nature, to follow our impulses, which, being natural, must
be right.

All of these rebels against reason make the mistake of supposing
that the aim of reflective thinking is to quell instincts,
which, with the best will in the world, it cannot succeed in
doing. Instincts are present and powerful. In themselves
they are neither worth encouraging, nor ought they to be
repressed. The satisfaction of native desires _is_ what we want.
The importance of reflective thinking is precisely that it helps
us to secure those satisfactions. To surrender to every random
impulse or every habitual prompting is to have neither
satisfaction nor freedom. Reflection might be compared to
the traffic policeman at the junction of two crowded thoroughfares.
If everyone were to drive his car pell-mell through the
rush, if pedestrians, street cars, and automobiles were not to
abide by the rules, no one would get anywhere, and the result
would be perpetual accident and collision. In thinking we
simply control and direct our impulses in the light of the
consequences we can foresee. To thus guide and control action
makes us genuinely free.

If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, they
are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice,
or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered,
unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the
person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 67.]

Instincts and habits are fixed responses; being placed in
such and such circumstances we _must_ do such and such things.
Only when we can vary our actions in the light of our own
thinking are we masters of our environment rather than
mechanically controlled by it.

THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF REFLECTIVE BEHAVIOR. Reflection
in the life of the individual insures that he will not become the
slave of his own habits. He will regard habits as methods
to be followed when they produce good results, to be discarded
or modified when they do not. But if habit in the life of the
individual needs control lest it become dangerously controlling,
it needs it more conspicuously still in the life of the group.
Unless the individuals that compose a society are alert and
conscious of the bearings of their actions, they will be
completely and mechanically controlled by the customs to which
they have been exposed in the early periods of their lives.
What an individual regards as right or wrong, what he will
cherish or champion in industry, government, and art, depends
in large measure on his early education and training
and on the opinions and beliefs of other people with whom he
repeatedly comes in contact. A society may be democratic
in its political form and still autocratic in fact if the majority
of its citizens are merely machines which can be set off to
respond in certain determinate ways to customary stimuli of
names, leaders, and party slogans. A society becomes genuinely
democratic, precisely to the extent to which there is
on the part of its citizens participation in the important decisions
affecting all their lives. But the participation will only
be a formality if votes are decided and opinions formed on the
basis of habit alone.

REFLECTION REMOVED FROM IMMEDIATE APPLICATION--SCIENCE.
Thus far thinking has been discussed in its more practical
aspects. And thinking is in its origins a very practical matter.
Literally, most people think when they have to, and only
when they have to. Given a problem, a difficulty, a
maladjustment between the individual and his environment,
thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction,
thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently
practiced. This is illustrated in the performance of
any act that once required attention and discrimination, and
has later become habitual. We do not think how to walk,
eat, and spell familiar words, how to find our way about
familiar streets or even in familiar dark rooms. We _do_ think
about where we shall spend our evenings or our summer,
which courses we shall choose at college, which profession
we shall enter. Where we are uneasy, drawn by competing
impulses, we consider alternatives, measure consequences,
and choose our course of action in the light of the results we
can forecast. But while a large proportion of reflective behavior
is thus practical in its origins and its results, it also
occurs not infrequently where there is no immediate problem
to be solved. Not all of men's energies are concerned in
purely practical concerns. And part of man's superfluous
vitality is expended in disinterested and curious inquiry
into problems whose solutions afford no immediate practical
benefits, but in the mere solving of which man finds
satisfaction.

From the dawn of history, when some man a little more
curious than his fellows, a little less absorbed in the hunting,
the food-getting, and the fighting which were in those early
days man's chief imperative business, first began to observe
the mysterious recurrences in the world about him, the rising
and setting of the sun, the return of the seasons, the movements
of the tides and the stars, there have been individuals
born with a marked and sometimes a passionate desire to
observe Nature and to generalize their observations. They
have noted that, given certain conditions, certain results
follow. They observe that animals with given similarities of
form and structure have certain identical ways of life, that
some substances are malleable and others not, that dew
appears at certain times in the day on certain objects and not
on others. They have generalized from these; and we now
call such generalizations law. These generalizations when
gathered into a system constitute a science.

The sciences started out with unconfirmed guesses based
on not very accurate information. As man's methods became
more precise, he controlled the conditions under which
observations were made, and the conditions under which generalizations
were drawn from them. The control of the conditions
and methods of observation constitute what is known as
induction in science. To this phase of the reflective process
belong all the instruments for precise observation which
characterize the scientific laboratory. The control of the methods
by which generalizations or theories are built up from these
facts is also part of the logic of induction, and includes all the
canons and regulations for inductive inference.

But generalizations once made must be tested, and the
elaboration of these generalizations, the analysis of them into
their precise bearings, constitute that part of the process of
reasoning known as deduction. The final verification is again
inductive, an experimental corroboration of theories by the
facts already at hand and by facts additionally sought out
and observed.

(These processes will be discussed in detail in the chapter
on "Science and Scientific Method.")

However complicated the process of inquiry may become,
the sciences remain essentially man's mode of satisfying his
disinterested curiosity about the world in which he is living.
Through the sciences man makes himself, as has been so often
said, at home in the world. He substitutes for the "blooming,
buzzing confusion" which is the world as he first knows it,
order, system, and law. Primitive man, absurd as seems to
us his belief in a world of magic, of malicious demons and
capricious gods, was trying to make sense out of the meaningless
medley in which he seemed to find himself. Through
science, modern man is likewise trying to make sense out of
his world. The more apparently disconnected and incongruous
facts that can be brought within the compass of simple
and perfectly regular law, the less threatening or capricious
seems the world in which we live. Where everything that
happens is part of a system, we do not need, like the savage
trembling in a thunderstorm, to be frightened at what will
happen next. It is like moving in familiar surroundings
among familiar people. Not all that goes on may be pleasant,
but we can within limits predict what will happen, and are
not puzzled and pained by continuous shocks and surprises.
We like order in the places in which we live, in our homes, in
our cities, in the universe.

The sciences satisfy us not only in that they bring order
into what at first seems the chaos of our surroundings, but in
that they are themselves beautiful in their spaciousness and
their simplicity. We cannot pause here to consider the
physiological facts which make us admire symmetry, but it is
fundamental in our appreciation of music, poetry, and the
plastic arts. From the sciences, likewise, we derive the
satisfaction of symmetry on a magnificent scale. There is beauty
as of a great symphony in the sweep and movement of the
solar system. There is a quiet and infinite splendor about the
changeless and comparatively simple structure which physics,
in the broadest sense, reveals beneath the seeming multiplicity
and variety of things. It is a desire for beauty as well as
a thoroughgoing scientific passion which prompts men like
Poincaré and Karl Pearson to seek for one law, one formula
which, like "one clear chord to reach the ears of God,"
expresses the whole universe.

THE PRACTICAL ASPECT OF SCIENCE. But while the origins of
science may lie in man's thirst for system, simplicity, and
beauty in the world, the tremendous advance of science has
a more immediate and practical cause. To understand the
laws of Nature means to have the power of prediction; it
means to know that, given certain circumstances, certain
others follow always and inevitably; it means to discover
causes--and their effects. Man having attained through
patient inquiry this capacity to tell in advance, may take
advantage of it for his own good. The whole of modern
industry with its phenomenal control of natural powers and
resources is testimony to the use which man has found for
the facts and laws which he would never have found out
save for the curiosity which was his endowment and the
inquiry which he made his habit. "Knowledge is power,"
said Francis Bacon, and the three hundred years of science
that have made possible the whole modern world of electric
transportation, air travel between two continents, and
instantaneous communication between remote parts of the
world, have proved the aphorism. Man since his origin
has tried to control his environment for his own good. The
cave and the flint were his first rude attempts. In science
with its accurate observation of facts not apparent to the
unaided eye, and its discovery and demonstration of laws not
found by casual and unsystematic common sense, man has an
incomparably more refined instrument, and an incomparably
more effective one. Thus, paradoxically enough, man's most
disinterested and impartial activity is at the same time his
most practical asset.

THE CREATION OF BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS AND THE EXPRESSION OF
IDEAS AND FEELINGS IN BEAUTIFUL FORM. Most men spend most
of their lives necessarily in practical activity. Man's particular
equipment of instincts survived in "the struggle for existence"
precisely because they were practical, because they did
help the human creature to maintain his equilibrium in a
half-friendly, half-hostile environment. Man acquires also,
as already has been pointed out, habits that are useful to him,
that bring him satisfactions not attainable through the random
instinctive responses which are his at birth. Reflection,
too, is, for the most part, severely practical in its origins and
its responsibilities. It guides action into economical and useful
channels.

Most of man's actions are thus ways of modifying his environment
for immediately practical purposes. Man has instincts
and habits which enable him to live. But in making
those changes in the world which enable him to live better,
man, as it were by accident, makes them beautifully. Pottery
begins, for example, as a practical art, but the skilled
potter cannot help spending a little excess vitality and habitual
skill in adding a quite unnecessarily graceful curve, a
gratuitous decoration to the utilitarian vessel he is making.
In the words of Santayana, "What had to be done was, by
imaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken
or made was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully....
The ceaseless experimentation and fermentation of ideas, in
breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes
on figments that gave it delightful pause."[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 16.]

These accidental graces that man makes in the instinctive
and habitual control to which he subjects his environment
become the most cherished values of his experience. Men
may first have come to speak poetry accidentally, for
language arose, like other human habits, as a thing of use. But
the charming and delightful expression of feelings and ideas
came to be cherished in themselves, so that what was first an
accident in man's life, may become a deliberate practice.
When this creation of beautiful objects, or the beautiful
expression of feelings or ideas is intentional, we call it art. In
such intentional creation and cherishing of the beautiful man's
life becomes enriched and emancipated. He learns not only
to live, but to live beautifully.

In such activity men, as has been recognized by social reformers
from Plato to Bertrand Russell, are genuinely happy,
and there alone find freedom. For in the creation of beauty
man is not performing actions because he must, under the
brutal compulsion of keeping alive. He is acting simply because
action is delightful both in the process and in the result.
Whether in business, politics, or scholarship, men are happy
to the extent to which they have the sense of creation that is
peculiarly the artist's.

The products of art, moreover, are not desirable because
they bring other goods, but because they themselves are
intrinsically delightful. Men love to live in a world in which
their marble has been made into statues, in which their houses
are things of beauty rather than merely places in which to
live. Their lives are enriched by living in a society where
the thoughts and emotions which they communicate to one
another and which they must somehow express can be not
infrequently expressed with nobility and music. Through
science Nature becomes man's tool; through art it can
become a beautiful instrument to work with, and a lovely thing
in and for itself.




CHAPTER IV

THE BASIC HUMAN ACTIVITIES

FOOD, SHELTER, AND SEX. Thus far our analysis has been confined
to the general types of human behavior. We have
found that all human activity is conditioned by a native
equipment consisting of certain more or less specific tendencies
to action, and that these may be modified into acquired
tendencies called "habits." We have found that through the
processes of reflection, through imaginative trial and error,
both of these may, within limits, be controlled. We must
now proceed to an inventory of those elements of our native
equipment which have an especial significance in social life.

In the first place, we must note the three great primary
drives of human action, the unlearned and native demands
for food, shelter, and sex gratification.[1] Although the last-named
does not display itself in human beings until a considerable
degree of maturity has been attained there is indubitable
evidence that it is an inborn and not an acquired reaction.
The practical utility of the first two is apparent; they are the
most essential features of the group of so-called self-preservative
instincts, among which may be grouped the natural
tendency to recover one's equilibrium and the instinct of
flight in the face of dangerous or threatening objects. The
utility of the sex instinct is racial rather than individual. The
instinctive satisfaction human beings find in sex gratification
is the natural guarantee of the continuance of the race.

[Footnote 1: The reader must be reminded that the simpler reflexes
involved in the use of the heart, lungs, intestines, and all the
internal organs, must be classed as part of man's native equipment.
They differ from those reactions commonly classed as instincts in
that they are simpler and stabler, that in their normal functioning
they never rise to consciousness, and that they are almost completely
beyond the individual's modification or control.]

In a general survey of this nature it IS impossible, as it is
unnecessary, to examine in detail the physiological elements
of the demand for food and shelter. It will suffice to point
out that the first two are the ultimate biological bases of a
large proportion of our economic activities. They are primary,
not in the sense that they are constantly conscious
motives to action, but that their fulfillment is prerequisite to
the continuance of any of the other activities of the organism.
Agriculture and manufacture, the complicated systems of
credit and exchange which human beings have devised, are,
for the most part, contrivances for the fulfillment of these
fundamental demands. With the complexity of civilization
new demands, of course, arise, but these fundamental necessities
are still the ultimate mainsprings of economic production.

The demand for sex gratification, because of its enormous
driving force and the emotional disturbances connected with
it, offers a peculiarly acute instance of the difficulties brought
about in the control of man's native endowment in his own
best interest. While the production of offspring is its chief
biological utility, satisfaction of the sex instinct itself is
stimulated in human beings quite apart from considerations of the
desirability or undesirability of offspring. Since the sex
instinct is at once so deep-rooted and intense a driving force in
human action, and its consequences of such crucial importance
to both those directly involved and to the group as a
whole, societies have, through law and custom and tradition,
built up elaborate codes for its control. In civilized society
the free operation of this instinct is checked in a thousand
ways. But, as in the case of other primitive motives to action,
the sex instinct, obvious as are the disasters of disease
and disorganization which follow as consequences of its
uncontrolled indulgence, cannot altogether be repressed.

It is generally recognized that in men and animals alike the sex
impulse is apt to manifest itself in very vigorous and sustained
efforts toward its natural end; and that in ourselves it may
determine very strong desires, in the control of which all the organized
forces of the developed personality, all our moral sentiments and
ideals, and all the restraining influences of religion, law, custom
and convention too often are confronted with a task beyond their
strength.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, 11th ed., pp. 399-400.]

There is considerable agreement among students of the
subject that the emotional energies aroused in connection
with the sex instinct may be drained off into other channels,
and serve to quicken and sustain both artistic creation and
appreciation and social and religious enthusiasms of various
kinds. And the sex instinct, as we shall find in our discussion
of Racial Continuity (see p. 243) is the basis of the family.

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. The difference between sticks and stones
and living beings consists primarily in the fact that the latter
are positively active; the former are passively acted upon.
The stone will stay put, unless moved by some external agent,
but even the amoeba will do something to its environment.
It will stretch out pseudopodia to reach solid objects to which
to cling; it will attempt to return to these objects when dislodged;
it will actively absorb food. Higher up in the animal
scale, "Rats run about, smell, dig, or gnaw, without real reference
to the business in hand. In the same way Jack (a dog)
scrabbles and jumps, the kitten wanders and picks, the otter
slips about everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant
fumbles ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about."[2] "The
most casual notice of the activities of a young child reveals a
ceaseless display of exploring and testing activity. Objects
are sucked, fingered and thumped; drawn and pushed, handled
and thrown."[3]

[Footnote 2: Hobhouse: _Mind in Evolution_, p. 195.]

[Footnote 3 Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 31.]

When vitality is at its height in the waking period of a
young child, its environment is a succession of stimulations to
activity. Man's "innate tendency to fool" is notorious, a
tendency particularly noticeable in children. Objects are
responded to, not as means to ends, not with reference to their
use, but simply for the sheer satisfaction of manipulation.
Facial expressions, sounds, gestures, are made almost on any
provocation; they are the expressions of an abundant "physiological
uneasiness." The two-year-old is a mechanism that
simply must and will move about, make all kinds of superfluous
gestures and facial expressions, and random sounds, as
it were, just to get rid of its stored-up energy. Man's laziness
and inertia are not infrequently commented on by moralists,
but it is not laziness and inertia _per se_; certainly in normal
individuals in the temperate zone, to do _something_ most of their
waking time is a natural tendency and one intrinsically pleasant
to practice. That the tendency to be active should vary
in different individuals and at different times is, of course, as
important a fact as it is a familiar one. Some of the causes of
this variation will be noted in the succeeding.

In adult life for casual and random activity is substituted
activity directed by some end or purpose which determines
the responses called into play. Professional and business,
domestic and social enterprises and obligations take up most of
the adult's energy. The contrast between the play of the
child and the work of the adult is that in the case of the
former actions are done for their own sake; and in the latter
for some end. The child, we say, plays "for the fun of the
thing," the adult works for pay, for professional success, for
power, reputation, etc.

But even in the adult the desire for play powerfully persists.
Not all the grown-up's energy is absorbed in his work,
and even some types of work, like that of the poet or painter,
or the building-up of a great business organization, may be
intrinsically delightful and self-sufficient activity. Under the
conditions of modern industry, however, especially of machine
production, much--in many cases, most--of the activity
by which an individual earns his living, utilizes only some of
his native tendencies to act, while the working day does not,
under normal conditions, absorb all his energy. Whatever
vitality is not, therefore, absorbed in necessary work goes into
forms of purely gratuitous activity. Which form "play"
shall take in the adult depends on the degree to which certain
impulses are in him stronger than others, either by native
endowment or cultivation, and which impulses have not been
sufficiently utilized in him during the day's work. A man
musically gifted will find his recreation in some performance
on a musical instrument, let us say; on the other hand, if his
work is music, those impulses, strong though they be, that
make him a musician, will have been sufficiently exhausted in
the day's work to make some other activity a more satisfactory
recreation.

The relations between play and work can be better understood
by a consideration of the physiological importance of
variety in activity. A certain regular recurrence of response
may be pleasant, as in rowing or canoeing, or in listening to
the rhythms of poetry or music, but a prolonged repetition of
precisely the same stimulus or the same set of stimuli may
make responses dissatisfying to the degree of pain. Ideal
activity, biologically, would be one where every impulse was
just sufficiently frequently called upon to make response easy,
fluent, and satisfactory.

The reason "work" has traditionally come to be regarded
as unpleasant and "play" as pleasant is not because the former
is activity and the second is torpor. Leisure does not necessarily
mean laziness. Many a vacation, a camping party, a
walking expedition, is literally more strenuous than the work
an individual normally does. But work means human energy
expended for the sole purpose of accomplishing some end.
And an end involves the deliberate shutting-out of every
impulse which does not contribute to its fulfillment. A man
weeding a garden may tire of the weeding long before he is
really physically exhausted. One response is being repeatedly
made, while at the same time a dozen other impulses are
being stimulated. When Tom Sawyer, under the compulsion
of his aunt, is whitewashing a fence, it is shortly no fun for
him. But he can make other boys pay him apple-cores and
jackknives for the fun of wielding the brush.

What we call the feeling of boredom depends principally
upon the too repeated stimulation of one set of activities to
the exclusion of all others, the continuous presence of a kind of
stimulation to which we have been rendered unsusceptible, as,
for example, bad popular music to a cultivated musical taste,
or intricate chamber music to an uncultivated one. The
feeling of boredom may become physiologically acute, as in
the case, so frequent in machine production, of literally
monotonous or one-operation jobs. Long hours of labor at acts
calling out only one very simple response may have very serious
effects. In the first place, in the work itself, since repetitions
of one or one simple set of responses may impair speed
and accuracy. On the part of the worker, it promotes varying
degrees of stupefaction or irritation. Excesses of drink,
gambling, and dissipation among factory populations are
often traceable to this continual frustration of normal
instincts during working hours, followed by a violent search for
stimulation and relaxation after work is over. Under conditions
of machine production, the responses which the worker
must make are becoming increasingly simple and automatic.
Hence the problem of bringing variety into work and something
of the same vitality and spontaneity into industry that
goes into play and art is becoming serious and urgent.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Helen Marot: _Creative Impulse in Industry_.]

MENTAL ACTIVITY. Just as physical activity is a characteristic
of all living beings, so, from almost earliest infancy of
human beings, is mental activity. This does not mean that
individuals from their babyhood are continually solving problems.
Deliberation and reflection are simply the mature and
disciplined control of what goes on during all of our waking
hours--random play of the fancy, imagination. We are not
always controlling our thought, but so long as we are awake
something is, as we say, passing through our heads. Everything
that happens about us provokes some suggestion or idea.
"Day-dreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux
of casual and disconnected material that floats through our
minds in relaxed moments, are, in this random sense, _thinking_.
More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to
ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential
trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope."[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 2.]

This play of the imagination is most uncontrolled and
spontaneous in childhood, which is often characteristically
defined as the period of make-believe or fancy. It is this
capacity which enables the child to use chairs as locomotives,
sticks as rifles, and wheelbarrows as automobiles. As we
grow older we tend to discipline this vagrant dreaming, and to
draw only those suggestions from objects which tally with the
workaday world we live in. We stop playing with our imagination
and put our minds to work. But in adult life desire
for the play of the mind, like the desire for the play of the
body, persists. The endeavor of education is not to crush but
to control it.

Imagination, used here in the sense of random mental
activity, may be controlled in two ways, both significant for
human welfare. When it is controlled with reference to some
emotional theme, as in fiction, drama, and poetry, it has no
reference necessarily to actual objects or events; it is
concerned only with producing the effect of emotional congruity
between incidents, objects, forms, or sounds. A great novel
does not pretend to be a literal transcript of experience, nor
a portrait of an actual person. When random mental activity
is thus controlled, it is "imagination," in the popular sense,
the sense in which poets, painters, and dramatists are called
imaginative artists.

Imagination controlled with reference to facts produces
genuine reflection and science. To put it in another way, no
matter how complicated thinking becomes, no matter how
suggestions are examined and regulated with reference to the
facts at hand, new ideas, theories, and hypotheses occur to
the thinker precisely by this upshoot of irresponsible fancies
and suggestions. This free and fertile play of the imagination
is what characterizes the original thinker more than any
other single fact. Suggestions arise, as it were, willy-nilly,
depending on an individual's inheritance, his past experience,
his social position, all at the moment uncontrollable features
of his situation. We can, through scientific method, examine
and regulate suggestions once they arise, but their appearance
is in a sense casual and unpredictable, like the fancies in a
daydream. The greatest scientific discoveries have been made in
a sudden "flash of imagination," as when to the mind of Darwin,
after twenty years' painstaking collection of facts, their
explanation through the single encompassing formula of evolution
occurs, or when to the mind of Newton the hypothesis
of gravitation suddenly suggests itself.

The encouragement of a lively play of the mind over experience,
the stimulation of imagination or what Bertrand Russell
calls "the joy of mental adventure" is thus one of the
most important sources of art and science. The arousing of
imagination depends primarily on the inherited curiosity of
man which varies from the random and restless exploring
of the child to the careful and persistent investigation of the
trained scientist. The curiosity which prompts the child to
experiment with objects in a hit-or-miss fashion is little more
than the physiological overflow of action which has been noted
above.

Curiosity becomes more distinctively mental when it is
social in character, when the child explores and experiments
not by its own manipulations but by communication, by asking
questions of other people.

When the child learns that he can appeal to others to eke out his
store of experiences, so that, if objects fail to respond interestingly to
his experiments, he may call upon persons to provide interesting material,
a new epoch sets in. "What is that?" "Why?" become the
unfailing signs of a child's presence. At first this questioning is
hardly more than a projection into social relations of the physical
overflow which earlier kept the child pushing and pulling, opening
and shutting. He asks in succession what holds up the house, what
holds up the soil that holds the house, what holds up the earth that
holds the soil; but his questions are not evidence of any genuine
consciousness of rational connections. His _why_ is not a demand
for scientific explanation; the motive behind it is simply eagerness
for a larger acquaintance with the mysterious world in which he is
placed. The search is not for a law or principle, but only for a bigger
fact.... But in the feeling, however dim, that the facts which
directly meet the sense are not the whole story, that there is more
behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of
_intellectual_ curiosity.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _loc. cit._, p. 32.]

Curiosity passes thus from casual rudimentary inquiry
into genuinely scientific investigation. At first it is merely
physical manipulation, then merely disconnected questionings;
it becomes genuinely intellectual when it passes from
"inquisitiveness" to inquiry. To be inquisitive means
merely to want to know facts rather than to solve problems.
To be scientifically inquiring is to seek on one's own account
the significant relations between things. But these earlier
and more casual forms of curiosity are not to be despised. If
developed and controlled they lead to genuinely disinterested
study of Nature and of men, to the spirit and the methods of
science. That free play of imagination which was spoken of
above as the chief source of original thinking and discovery
is stimulated by an active hunting-out of new suggestions.
Curiosity might also be defined as aggressive imagination,
which, frequent enough in children, remains among adults to
a pronounced degree only in geniuses of art and science. We
may not agree with Bertrand Russell that "everything is done
in education to kill it," but the dogmatism and fixity of mind
which so soon settle down on maturity, the inability to be
sensitive to new experiences, these are discouragingly familiar
phenomena clearly inimical to science and to progress.

An active imagination that finds new materials to play
over is the basis of both science and art. A skillful manipulation
of its materials in words or sounds, colors, or lines makes
its result art. Their controlled examination and systematization
makes them science.

QUIESCENCE--FATIGUE. That all life, animal and human,
is characterized by activity of a more or less persistent and
positive kind has already been noted. But in human beings,
as well as in animals, activity displays a "fatigue curve."
The repeated stimulation of certain muscles produces
fatigue toxins which impair the efficiency of response and
make further stimulation painful. Of the causes of this
lessened functional efficiency we may quote from Miss Goldmark's
painstaking study:

During activity, as will be shown later, the products of chemical
change increase. A tired person is literally and actually a poisoned
person--poisoned by his own waste products. But so marvellously
is the body constructed that, like a running stream, it purifies itself,
and during repose these toxic impurities are normally burned up by
the oxygen brought by the blood, excreted by the kidneys, destroyed
in the liver, or eliminated from the body through the lungs. So rest
repaires fatigue.[1]

[Footnote 1: Goldmark, J.: _Fatigue and Efficiency_, p. 13.]

In physical activity, therefore, periods of lessened activity
or change of activity, or nearly complete inactivity as in
sleep, are not only desirable but necessary, if efficiency is to be
maintained. The demand for rest is an imperative physiological
demand. The amount of recuperation demanded by
the organism varies in different individuals, but that there are
certain limits of human productivity has been made increasingly
clear by a careful study of the effects of fatigue upon
output in industrial occupations. Repeatedly, the shortening
of working hours, especially when they have previously numbered
more than eight, has been found to be correlated with
an increase in efficiency. Likewise, the provision of rest
periods as in telephone-operating and the needle trades, has in
nearly every case increased the amount and quality of the
work performed. The human machine in order to be most
effective cannot be pressed too hard. A striking illustration
was offered in England at the beginning of the war. Under
pressure of war necessity, the munition factories relaxed all
restrictions on working hours and operated on a seven-day
week. The folly of this procedure was tersely summarized by
the British Commission investigating industrial fatigue,
which reported: "It is almost a commonplace that seven days'
labor produces six days' output."

In the study of industrial conditions, the effects of prolonged
and repeated fatigue upon output have not been the
only features taken into consideration. Not only are there
immediately observable effects in the decreased output of the
worker, but fatigue means, among other things, general loss
of control. This has the effect of producing on the part of
overworked factory hands dissipation and overstimulation in
free time, with a consequent permanent impairment of efficiency.[1]
Both for the laborer himself and for the efficiency
of the industrial system, it has been increasingly recognized
that limitation of working hours is imperatively demanded.
Rest is as fundamental a need as food, and its deprivation
almost as serious in its effects.

[Footnote 1:
For a striking array of testimony on this point see Goldmark: _loc. cit._,
pp. 220-35.]

NERVOUS AND MENTAL FATIGUE. The conditions of nervous
and mental fatigue have been less adequately studied than
the types of purely physiological fatigue just discussed. It is
difficult in experiments to discount the effects of muscular
fatigue, and to discover how far there is really impairment of
nervous tissue and functions. Experimental studies do show
that "nervous fatigue is an undoubted fact"[2] and that "we
cannot deny fatigue to the psychic centers"[3] which, like any
other part of the organism are subject to deterioration by
fatigue toxins. Most students report, however, a higher degree
of resistance to fatigue in the nerve fibers than in the
muscles, and a like high resistance to fatigue in the brain
centers.[4]

[Footnote 2:
Frederick S. Lee: "Physical Exercise from the Standpoint of Physiology,"
_Science_, N.S., vol. XXIX, no. 744, p. 525.]

[Footnote 3: Lee: _Fatigue_. Harvey Lectures, 1905-06, p. 180.]

[Footnote 4:
For a summary of nervous fatigue and extensive bibliography, see Goldmark:
_loc. cit._, p. 32.]

The conditions of mental fatigue, however, can be by no
means as simply described as those of physical fatigue. Elaborate
experiments by Professor Thorndike and others tend to
show that, in the strictest sense of the term, there is no such
thing as mental fatigue. That is, any mental function may
be performed for several hours with the most negligible decrease
in the efficiency of the results attained. The subject of
one experiment kept continuously for seven hours performing
mental multiplications of four-place numbers by four-place
numbers with scarcely any perceptible decrease in speed or
accuracy in results.[1] Professor Thorndike draws from this
and similar experiments the conclusion that it is practically
impossible to impair the efficiency of any mental function as
such. What happens when we say our mental efficiency is
being impaired is rather that we _will not_ than that we _cannot_
perform any given mental function. The causes of loss of
efficiency are rather competing impulses[2] than fatigue in
specific mental functions. We are tired _of_ the work, not _by_
it. Continuous mental work of any given kind, writing a
book, solving problems in calculus, translating French, etc.,
involves our being withheld from other activities, games,
music, or companionship, to which by force of habit or
instinct, we are diverted, and diverted more acutely the more
we remain at a fixed task. That it is not mental "fatigue" so
much as distraction that prevents us from persisting at work
is evidenced in the longer time we can stick to work that
really interests us than to tasks in which we have only a
perfunctory or compulsory interest. The college student who is
"too dead tired" to stay up studying trigonometry will,
though in the same condition, stay up studying football
strategy, rehearsing for a varsity show, or getting out the
next morning's edition of his college paper. "If each man
did the mental work for which he was fit, and which he
enjoyed, men would work willingly much longer than they now
do."[1*] The effects of mental fatigue are, when analyzed, due
chiefly to the physically injurious effects that do, but do not
necessarily, accompany mental work.

[Footnote 1: T. Arai: _Mental Fatigue_.]

[Footnote 2: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 322.]

[Footnote 1*: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 326.]

Proper air and light, proper posture and physical exercise, enough
food and sleep, and work whose purpose is rational, whose difficulty
is adapted to one's powers, and whose rewards are just, should be
tried before recourse to the abandonment of work itself. It is indeed
doubtful if sheer rest is the appropriate remedy for a hundredth part
of the injuries that result from mental work in our present irrational
conduct of it.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 328.]

The study of the conditions of mental work seems to reveal,
in brief, that the conditions of fatigue are essentially physical
in character. Given adequate physical conditions, in particular
guarding against eye-strain, over-excitement (which means
distraction from the work in hand), and loss of sleep, mental
work is itself peculiarly unaffected by fatigue conditions. The
degree in which mental work can be persisted in depends,
therefore, other things being equal, on the individual's own
interests, the number and intensity of rival interests which
persist during a given piece of mental work, and the habits of
mind with which the individual approaches his work.

The experimental demonstration that so-called mental
fatigue is largely physical in its conditions has thus a dual
significance. It indicates how arduous and persistent mental
endeavor may be and how wide are the possibilities of intellectual
accomplishment. It is an important fact for human life
that the brain is possibly the most tireless part of the human
machine. What seems to be mental fatigue can be materially
reduced if the physical conditions under which studying,
writing, and all other kinds of mental work are performed are
carefully regulated. Another large part of what passes for
mental fatigue will be removed if the individual becomes
trained to a reflective appreciation of the end of his work. A
habit of alert and conscious attention, if it is really habitual,
will enable one to persist at work in the face of tempting distractions.
Learning to "tend to business" by an intelligent
application to the aims of the work to be done, will be a
healthy antidote against that yielding to every dissuading
impulse which so often passes for mental weariness.




CHAPTER V

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

MAN AS A SOCIAL BEING. Man has long been defined as the
"social animal," and it is certainly characteristic of human
activity that it takes place largely with reference to other people.
Many of man's native tendencies, such as those of sex,
self-assertiveness, and the like, require the presence and
contact of other people for their operation. Nineteenth-century
philosophers attempted frequently to explain how individuals
who were natively self-seeking ever came to act socially. The
solution to this problem was usually found in the fact that precisely
those self-seeking and self-preservation instincts which
governed man's activity could not find satisfaction except
through coöperation with a group. All man's social activity
was conceived as purely instrumental to the gratification of
his own egoistic desires. Man got on with his fellows simply
because he could not get on without them. We shall see that,
in the light of the specific and natural tendencies toward
social behavior which are part of man's original equipment, this
sharp psychological isolation between the individual and the
group is an altogether unwarranted assumption. For it is
just as native to man to act socially as it is for him to be
hungry, or curious, or afraid. The element of truth in the
nineteenth-century exaggeration of man's individuality lies in the
fact that social activity is partly brought about in the
satisfaction of the more egoistic impulses of the individual. "The
fear motive drives men together in times of insecurity; the
pugnacity motive bands them together for group combat; the
economic motive brings industrial coöperation and organization;
the self-assertive and submissive tendencies bring emulation
as well as obedience; the expansion of the self to cover
one's family, one's clique, one's class, one's country contributes
to loyalty; while the parental instinct, expanding its
scope to cover others besides children who are helpless, leads
to self-sacrifice and altruism."[1]

[Footnote 1: R. S. Woodworth: _Dynamic Psychology_, p. 204.]

The fact is, however, that while social activity is promoted
because individuals find in coöperation the possibility of the
satisfaction of their egoistic desires, social activity is primarily
brought about through the specifically social tendencies
which are part of our native equipment. It is with these
natural bases of social activity that we shall in this chapter be
particularly concerned. We shall have to take note, in the
first place, of a native tendency to be with other people, to
feel an unlearned sense of comfort in their presence, and
uneasiness if too much separated from them, physically, or in
action, feeling, or thought. Human beings tend, furthermore,
to reproduce sympathetically the emotions of others,
especially those of their own social and economic groups.
Thirdly, man's conduct is natively social in that he is by
nature specifically sensitive to praise and blame, that he will
modify his conduct so as to secure the one and avoid the
other. Finally, besides the specific tendencies to respond to
the presence, the feelings, the actions, and the thoughts of
others, man displays a "capacity for social behavior." And,
as is the case with all native capacities, man has, therefore, a
native interest in group or social activity for its own sake.

The predominantly social character of human behavior has
thus a twofold explanation. It is based, in the first place, on
the group of native tendencies of a social character to which
we have already referred. It is based, secondly, on the necessity
for group activity and coöperation which the individual
experiences in the satisfaction of his egoistic impulses and
desires. Man, because of his original tendencies, wants to live,
act, think, and feel with others; for the satisfaction of his
nonsocial impulses he must live with others. And in civilized
society human action from almost earliest childhood is in, and
with reference to, a group. Human behavior is thus seen to
be that of an essentially social nature acting in an essentially
social environment. And, as in the case of other instinctive
and habitual activities, human beings experience in social
activity an immediate satisfaction apart from any satisfactions
toward which it may be the instrument.

GREGARIOUSNESS. The "herd instinct" is manifested by
many animals very low in the scale of animal development.
McDougall quotes in this connection Francis Galton's classical
account of this instinct in its crudest form: "Describing
the South African ox in Damaraland, he says he displays
no affection for his fellows, and hardly seems to notice their
existence, so long as he is among them; but, if he becomes
separated from the herd, he displays an extreme distress that
will not let him rest until he succeeds in rejoining it, when he
hastens to bury himself in the midst of it, seeking the closest
possible contact with the bodies of his fellows."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 84.]

This original tendency exhibits itself among human beings
in a variety of ways. The tendency of human beings to herd
together, for which there is evidence in the earliest history of
the race, may be observed on any crowded thoroughfare, or
in any amusement park, or city. That group life has expanded
partly through practical necessity, is, of course, true,
but groups of humans tend to become, as in our monster cities,
larger than they need be, or can be for economic efficiency.

The fascination of city life has not infrequently been set
down to the multiplicity of opportunities offered in the way
of companions, amusements, and occupations after one's own
taste. But the fascination has clearly a more instinctive
basis, the desire to be with other people. Many a man, as
has been pointed out, lives in a large city as unsociable and
secluded a life as if he were surrounded by miles of mountain
or prairie, who yet could not be happy elsewhere. Any one
who has failed to be amused by a really good comedy when
the theater was comparatively empty, or in the presence of
thousands of others hugely enjoyed a second-rate baseball
game, or gone down to the crowded shopping district to get
what he could have purchased on a side-street uptown, can
appreciate how instinctive is this undiscriminating desire for
companionship.

The native intensity of this desire is what makes rural
isolation, on the other hand, so unsatisfactory. The bleakness
of New England country life as pictured in Edith
Wharton's _Ethan Frome_, or in some of Robert Frost's _North
of Boston_, is due more than anything else to this privation
from companionship. Perhaps nothing better could be said
for the rural telephone, the interurban trolley, and the cheap
automobile than that they make possible the fulfillment of
this normal human longing to be near and with other people
in body and spirit. The horror which makes it practically
impossible in civilized countries to legalize punishment by
solitary confinement and the nervous collapse which such
confinement brings about are indications of how deep-seated
is this desire.

The "herd instinct," like all the other of man's original
tendencies, is educable. It can be trained to respond to
groups of various sizes and kinds. In its simplest manifestation
it tends to be aroused by the family, but in the history
of civilization the group tends progressively to enlarge. The
family, the town, the nation--the gregarious instinct may be
educated to respond to these ever-widening groups. The
intensity and controlling power of this instinct over our
actions seems to vary with the degree of intimacy and
intercommunication between the individual and the group. In
primitive society it is most intense among the family and
clan, and the family still remains in civilized society, certainly
in rural districts, a very closely knit primary group. But as
intercommunication widens, a sense of attachment to and
solidarity with a larger group begins to make itself felt. That
intercommunication is largely important in extending the
group in response to which the herd instinct may be aroused,
is well illustrated by the utter lack of national group feeling
exhibited during the Great War by recruits drafted from the
backwoods districts where they had been tied by no railroads
or newspapers to the national civilization of which they were
a part.

The devotion of generous-hearted souls to "lost causes,"
whether political or religious, of the individual to his family
or friends in the face of personal privation, are classic
illustrations of the power of men's gregarious instinct even in the
face of the dictates of reason. In the perhaps extreme but
nevertheless suggestive statement of Mr. Trotter:

He [man] is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any
other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct.
It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and
philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage and endurance,
and can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his
own punishment, and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty,
bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not
merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly,
but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly
preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is
this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most
absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature
of man.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_,
pp. 114-15.]

To how large a group the individual can respond with spontaneous
and instinctive loyalty is questionable. The small
child throws out his arms and exclaims passionately, "I love
the whole world." Auguste Comte could be imbued with a
fervor for "humanity" in the abstract. The idea of a League
of Nations arouses in some minds a passionate devotion to a
world order that to those themselves habituated to an intense
loyalty to the national group seems incredible. Certainly it is
true that we rapidly outgrow that state of mind common to
enthusiastic adolescence when we can develop a love for the
universe in the abstract. The instinct of gregariousness
seems unquestionably to be most intense where there is intimacy
and vividness of group association. The primary
groups, as Professor Ross calls them, are face-to-face associations,
the family, the play group, the neighborhood group.
If "world patriotism" is a possibility, it is because rapid
communication and the frequency of travel, and the education
of the industrial classes to "the international mind" tend
to break down barriers and to make distant countries and
persons vivid and directly imaginable. But there seems to be
no substitute for direct personal contact. Even devotion to
a country tends to take the form of phrases, places, persons,
and symbols, to which we have been familiarized.

GREGARIOUSNESS IMPORTANT FOR SOCIAL SOLIDARITY. The gregarious
instinct, powerful as it is, is of the greatest significance
for social solidarity, and, if misdirected, for seriously limiting
it. It is, in the first place, the trait without which social
solidarity would be almost impossible. "In early times when
population was scanty, it must have played an important
part in social evolution by keeping men together, and thereby
occasioning the need for social laws and institutions."[1] The
coherence of national, political, or religious groups depends
primarily on the extent to which the gregarious instinct may
be aroused. Allegiance to a group may, of course, be secured
through participation in common ideals. This is illustrated
in the case of the numerous literary and scientific associations
that cut across national boundaries and knit into groups
similarly interested persons all over the world. Groups may,
again, be formed through common economic interests, as in
the case of labor unions, or employers' associations. Groups
may be knit and strengthened through law and custom. And
all these factors play a smaller or larger part in any important
grouping of men in contemporary society. But unless there
is, on the part of the members of the group, a deep-seated
emotional attachment to the group itself, solidarity will be
very precarious. The intensity and solidarity, of feeling
exhibited so markedly during war-time is made possible by
the intense excitability of this instinct when the group is
under conditions of stress or danger. Any scheme for enlisting
a great number of individuals in modern society in a
scheme of social reform or improvement, must and does,
when it is successful, arouse in him a heightened sense of loyalty
to a group more than reasoned approval of a cause.
Effective recruiting posters more often told the passer-by,
"Your country needs you," than they attempted to convince
him in black-and-white logic of the justice of his country's
aims.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 301.]

GREGARIOUSNESS MAY HINDER THE SOLIDARITY OF LARGE GROUPS.
While gregariousness is the foundation of group solidarity, it
also interferes with the solidarity of large groups, and not
infrequently brings about conflicts between them, and within
groups themselves. Within even so small a community as
a college class, cliques may form; and so in a country,
attachment to the smaller group may inhibit attachment to
the larger. An individual may be vaguely patriotic, but
instinctively aroused more by his own economic or local or
racial group than by the country as a whole. A man may at
heart be more devoted to his town or home than to the United
States. (Not infrequently his town or home is what the
United States means to the citizen.) Even to-day the sectional
feeling that exists in many parts of the country cannot
be completely explained as occurring through separate economic
interests. The division of classes within a country is
largely an economic matter, but even in such a situation a
loyalty develops to the class as a class or group.

Again, the same instinct to herd with his fellows that makes
a man intensely loyal to his own group may operate to make
him indifferent to the difficulties or jealous and suspicious of
the aims of others Gregariousness is the basis not only of
patriotism, but of chauvinism, not only of civic pride, but of
provincialism. The narrowness and parochialism of group
attachments is most pronounced where groups and communities
are rigidly set off one from another. In such circumstances
community of feeling and understanding is largely reduced.
This may be seen even under contemporary conditions in the
comparatively complete inability of different professional,
social, and economic groups within the same society to
understand each other, and the proverbial ignorance and
carelessness of one half of the population as to "how the other half
lives." Narrowness of group feeling tends to grow less
pronounced under the mobile conditions of modern industry,
communication, and education. Trade relations knit the
farthest parts of the globe together; this morning's newspaper
puts us in touch with the whole of mankind. We have outgrown
the days when every stranger was an enemy. But
though the barriers between nations are tending to break
down, within nations individuals tend, as they grow older, to
experience an insulated devotion to their own set or social
group, a callous oblivion to the needs and desires of that great
majority of mankind with whom they have a less keen sense
of "consciousness of kind."

GREGARIOUSNESS IN BELIEF. Man's gregarious character, as
already pointed out, is manifested not only in his desire to be
physically with his fellows, but to be at one with them in their
actions, feelings, and thoughts. Beliefs once established tend
to remain established if for no other reason than that they are
believed in by the majority. That an opinion gains prestige
merely because we know other people believe it, is frequently
illustrated by the facility with which rumor travels. At the
end of the Great War, it will be recalled, the false news of the
armistice report flew from mouth to mouth and was accepted
with the most amazing credulity simply because "everybody
said so." The spread of superstitions and old wives' tales and
their long lingering in the minds even of intelligent people is
testimony that men tend mentally as well as physically to
herd together.

The tendency to find comfort in the presence of one's fellows
and uneasiness if too much separated from them, is as
pronounced in the sphere of moral and intellectual relations
as it is in the case of merely physical proximity. We like to
be one of a crowd in our opinions and beliefs, as well as in our
persons. There is hardly anything more painful than the
sense of being utterly alone in one's opinions. Even the
extreme dissenter from the accustomed ways of thinking and
feeling of the majority is associated with or pictures some
little group which agrees with him. And, if we cannot find
contemporaries to share our extreme opinions, we at least
imagine some ideal group now or in posterity to share it with
us.

GREGARIOUSNESS IN HABITS OF ACTION. But if men tend to
think in groups they tend more emphatically still to act in
groups, to be acutely uncomfortable when acting in a fashion
different from that customary among the majority of their
fellows. Habits of action are more deep-seated physiologically
than habits of thought (which is one reason why our theories
are so often in advance of our practice). People will accede
intellectually to new ideas which they would not and could
not practice, the mind being, as it were, more c

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