Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
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Title: Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Author: John Dewey
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HUMAN NATURE
AND CONDUCT
An Introduction to Social Psychology
BY
JOHN DEWEY
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
First Printing, Jan., 1922
Second Printing, Mar., 1922
Third Printing, June, 1922
Fourth Printing, Aug., 1922
Fifth Printing, Nov., 1922
Sixth Printing, April, 1923
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
PREFACE
In the spring of 1918 I was invited by Leland Stanford Junior University
to give a series of three lectures upon the West Memorial Foundation.
One of the topics included within the scope of the Foundation is Human
Conduct and Destiny. This volume is the result, as, according to the
terms of the Foundation, the lectures are to be published. The lectures
as given have, however, been rewritten and considerably expanded. An
Introduction and Conclusion have been added. The lectures should have
been published within two years from delivery. Absence from the country
rendered strict compliance difficult; and I am indebted to the
authorities of the University for their indulgence in allowing an
extension of time, as well as for so many courtesies received during the
time when the lectures were given.
Perhaps the sub-title requires a word of explanation. The book does not
purport to be a treatment of social psychology. But it seriously sets
forth a belief that an understanding of habit and of different types of
habit is the key to social psychology, while the operation of impulse
and intelligence gives the key to individualized mental activity. But
they are secondary to habit so that mind can be understood in the
concrete only as a system of beliefs, desires and purposes which are
formed in the interaction of biological aptitudes with a social
environment.
J. D.
February, 1921
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
Contempt for human nature; pathology of goodness; freedom;
value of science.
_PART ONE_
THE PLACE OF HABIT IN CONDUCT
SECTION I: HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 14
Habits as functions and arts; social complicity; subjective
factor.
SECTION II: HABITS AND WILL 24
Active means; ideas of ends; means and ends; nature of
character.
SECTION III: CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 43
Good will and consequences; virtues and natural goods;
objective and subjective morals.
SECTION IV: CUSTOM AND HABIT 58
Human psychology is social; habit as conservative; mind and
body.
SECTION V: CUSTOM AND MORALITY 75
Customs as standards; authority of standards; class
conflicts.
SECTION VI: HABIT AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 84
Isolation of individuality; newer movements.
_PART TWO_
THE PLACE OF IMPULSE IN CONDUCT
SECTION I: IMPULSES AND CHANGE OF HABITS 89
Present interest in instincts; impulses as re-organizing.
SECTION II: PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE 95
Impulse and education; uprush of impulse; fixed codes.
SECTION III: CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 106
Habits the inert factor; modification of impulses; war a
social function; economic regimes as social products; nature
of motives.
SECTION IV: IMPULSE AND CONFLICT OF HABITS 125
Possibility of social betterment; conservatism.
SECTION V: CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 131
False simplifications; "self-love"; will to power;
acquisitive and creative.
SECTION VI: NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 149
Uniqueness of acts; possibilities of operation; necessity of
play and art; rebelliousness.
SECTION VII: IMPULSE AND THOUGHT 169
_PART THREE_
THE PLACE OF INTELLIGENCE IN CONDUCT
SECTION I: HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE 172
Habits and intellect; mind, habit and impulse.
SECTION II: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING 181
The trinity of intellect; conscience and its alleged separate
subject-matter.
SECTION III: THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION 189
Deliberation as imaginative rehearsal; preference and choice;
strife of reason and passion; nature of reason.
SECTION IV: DELIBERATION AND CALCULATION 199
Error in utilitarian theory; place of the pleasant;
hedonistic calculus; deliberation and prediction.
SECTION V: THE UNIQUENESS OF GOOD 210
Fallacy of a single good; applied to utilitarianism; profit
and personality; means and ends.
SECTION VI: THE NATURE OF AIMS 223
Theory of final ends; aims as directive means; ends as
justifying means; meaning well as an aim; wishes and aims.
SECTION VII: THE NATURE OF PRINCIPLES 238
Desire for certainty; morals and probabilities; importance of
generalizations.
SECTION VIII: DESIRE AND INTELLIGENCE 248
Object and consequence of desire; desire and quiescence;
self-deception in desire; desire needs intelligence; nature
of idealism; living in the ideal.
SECTION IX: THE PRESENT AND FUTURE 265
Subordination of activity to result; control of future;
production and consummation; idealism and distant goals.
_PART FOUR_
CONCLUSION
SECTION I: THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY 278
Better and worse; morality a process; evolution and progress;
optimism; Epicureanism; making others happy.
SECTION II: MORALS ARE HUMAN 295
Humane morals; natural law and morals; place of science.
SECTION III: WHAT IS FREEDOM? 303
Elements in freedom; capacity in action; novel possibilities;
force of desire.
SECTION IV: MORALITY IS SOCIAL 314
Conscience and responsibility; social pressure and
opportunity; exaggeration of blame; importance of social
psychology; category of right; the community as religious
symbol.
INTRODUCTION
"Give a dog a bad name and hang him." Human nature has been the dog of
professional moralists, and consequences accord with the proverb. Man's
nature has been regarded with suspicion, with fear, with sour looks,
sometimes with enthusiasm for its possibilities but only when these were
placed in contrast with its actualities. It has appeared to be so evilly
disposed that the business of morality was to prune and curb it; it
would be thought better of if it could be replaced by something else. It
has been supposed that morality would be quite superfluous were it not
for the inherent weakness, bordering on depravity, of human nature. Some
writers with a more genial conception have attributed the current
blackening to theologians who have thought to honor the divine by
disparaging the human. Theologians have doubtless taken a gloomier view
of man than have pagans and secularists. But this explanation doesn't
take us far. For after all these theologians are themselves human, and
they would have been without influence if the human audience had not
somehow responded to them.
Morality is largely concerned with controlling human nature. When we are
attempting to control anything we are acutely aware of what resists us.
So moralists were led, perhaps, to think of human nature as evil because
of its reluctance to yield to control, its rebelliousness under the
yoke. But this explanation only raises another question. Why did
morality set up rules so foreign to human nature? The ends it insisted
upon, the regulations it imposed, were after all outgrowths of human
nature. Why then was human nature so averse to them? Moreover rules can
be obeyed and ideals realized only as they appeal to something in human
nature and awaken in it an active response. Moral principles that exalt
themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide.
Or else they involve human nature in unending civil war, and treat it as
a hopeless mess of contradictory forces.
We are forced therefore to consider the nature and origin of that
control of human nature with which morals has been occupied. And the
fact which is forced upon us when we raise this question is the
existence of classes. Control has been vested in an oligarchy.
Indifference to regulation has grown in the gap which separates the
ruled from the rulers. Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors have
supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were
imposed, to the young, laymen, ordinary folk; a few have given and
administered rule, and the mass have in a passable fashion and with
reluctance obeyed. Everybody knows that good children are those who make
as little trouble as possible for their elders, and since most of them
cause a good deal of annoyance they must be naughty by nature. Generally
speaking, good people have been those who did what they were told to do,
and lack of eager compliance is a sign of something wrong in their
nature.
But no matter how much men in authority have turned moral rules into an
agency of class supremacy, any theory which attributes the origin of
rule to deliberate design is false. To take advantage of conditions
after they have come into existence is one thing; to create them for the
sake of an advantage to accrue is quite another thing. We must go back
to the bare fact of social division into superior and inferior. To say
that accident produced social conditions is to perceive they were not
produced by intelligence. Lack of understanding of human nature is the
primary cause of disregard for it. Lack of insight always ends in
despising or else unreasoned admiration. When men had no scientific
knowledge of physical nature they either passively submitted to it or
sought to control it magically. What cannot be understood cannot be
managed intelligently. It has to be forced into subjection from without.
The opaqueness of human nature to reason is equivalent to a belief in
its intrinsic irregularity. Hence a decline in the authority of social
oligarchy was accompanied by a rise of scientific interest in human
nature. This means that the make-up and working of human forces afford a
basis for moral ideas and ideals. Our science of human nature in
comparison with physical sciences is rudimentary, and morals which are
concerned with the health, efficiency and happiness of a development of
human nature are correspondingly elementary. These pages are a
discussion of some phases of the ethical change involved in positive
respect for human nature when the latter is associated with scientific
knowledge. We may anticipate the general nature of this change through
considering the evils which have resulted from severing morals from the
actualities of human physiology and psychology. There is a pathology of
goodness as well as of evil; that is, of that sort of goodness which is
nurtured by this separation. The badness of good people, for the most
part recorded only in fiction, is the revenge taken by human nature for
the injuries heaped upon it in the name of morality. In the first place,
morals cut off from positive roots in man's nature is bound to be mainly
negative. Practical emphasis falls upon avoidance, escape of evil, upon
not doing things, observing prohibitions. Negative morals assume as many
forms as there are types of temperament subject to it. Its commonest
form is the protective coloration of a neutral respectability, an
insipidity of character. For one man who thanks God that he is not as
other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other
men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention. Absence of social
blame is the usual mark of goodness for it shows that evil has been
avoided. Blame is most readily averted by being so much like everybody
else that one passes unnoticed. Conventional morality is a drab
morality, in which the only fatal thing is to be conspicuous. If there
be flavor left in it, then some natural traits have somehow escaped
being subdued. To be so good as to attract notice is to be priggish, too
good for this world. The same psychology that brands the convicted
criminal as forever a social outcast makes it the part of a gentleman
not to obtrude virtues noticeably upon others.
The Puritan is never popular, not even in a society of Puritans. In case
of a pinch, the mass prefer to be good fellows rather than to be good
men. Polite vice is preferable to eccentricity and ceases to be vice.
Morals that professedly neglect human nature end by emphasizing those
qualities of human nature that are most commonplace and average; they
exaggerate the herd instinct to conformity. Professional guardians of
morality who have been exacting with respect to themselves have accepted
avoidance of conspicuous evil as enough for the masses. One of the most
instructive things in all human history is the system of concessions,
tolerances, mitigations and reprieves which the Catholic Church with its
official supernatural morality has devised for the multitude. Elevation
of the spirit above everything natural is tempered by organized leniency
for the frailties of flesh. To uphold an aloof realm of strictly ideal
realities is admitted to be possible only for a few. Protestantism,
except in its most zealous forms, has accomplished the same result by a
sharp separation between religion and morality in which a higher
justification by faith disposes at one stroke of daily lapses into the
gregarious morals of average conduct.
There are always ruder forceful natures who cannot tame themselves to
the required level of colorless conformity. To them conventional
morality appears as an organized futility; though they are usually
unconscious of their own attitude since they are heartily in favor of
morality for the mass as making it easier to manage them. Their only
standard is success, putting things over, getting things done. Being
good is to them practically synonymous with ineffectuality; and
accomplishment, achievement is its own justification. They know by
experience that much is forgiven to those who succeed, and they leave
goodness to the stupid, to those whom they qualify as boobs. Their
gregarious nature finds sufficient outlet in the conspicuous tribute
they pay to all established institutions as guardians of ideal
interests, and in their denunciations of all who openly defy
conventionalized ideals. Or they discover that they are the chosen
agents of a higher morality and walk subject to specially ordained laws.
Hypocrisy in the sense of a deliberate covering up of a will to evil by
loud-voiced protestations of virtue is one of the rarest of occurrences.
But the combination in the same person of an intensely executive nature
with a love of popular approval is bound, in the face of conventional
morality, to produce what the critical term hypocrisy.
Another reaction to the separation of morals from human nature is a
romantic glorification of natural impulse as something superior to all
moral claims. There are those who lack the persistent force of the
executive will to break through conventions and to use them for their
own purposes, but who unite sensitiveness with intensity of desire.
Fastening upon the conventional element in morality, they hold that all
morality is a conventionality hampering to the development of
individuality. Although appetites are the commonest things in human
nature, the least distinctive or individualized, they identify
unrestraint in satisfaction of appetite with free realization of
individuality. They treat subjection to passion as a manifestation of
freedom in the degree in which it shocks the bourgeois. The urgent need
for a transvaluation of morals is caricatured by the notion that an
avoidance of the avoidances of conventional morals constitutes positive
achievement. While the executive type keeps its eyes on actual
conditions so as to manipulate them, this school abrogates objective
intelligence in behalf of sentiment, and withdraws into little coteries
of emancipated souls.
There are others who take seriously the idea of morals separated from
the ordinary actualities of humanity and who attempt to live up to it.
Some become engrossed in spiritual egotism. They are preoccupied with
the state of their character, concerned for the purity of their motives
and the goodness of their souls. The exaltation of conceit which
sometimes accompanies this absorption can produce a corrosive inhumanity
which exceeds the possibilities of any other known form of selfishness.
In other cases, persistent preoccupation with the thought of an ideal
realm breeds morbid discontent with surroundings, or induces a futile
withdrawal into an inner world where all facts are fair to the eye. The
needs of actual conditions are neglected, or dealt with in a
half-hearted way, because in the light of the ideal they are so mean and
sordid. To speak of evils, to strive seriously for change, shows a low
mind. Or, again, the ideal becomes a refuge, an asylum, a way of escape
from tiresome responsibilities. In varied ways men come to live in two
worlds, one the actual, the other the ideal. Some are tortured by the
sense of their irreconcilability. Others alternate between the two,
compensating for the strains of renunciation involved in membership in
the ideal realm by pleasurable excursions into the delights of the
actual.
If we turn from concrete effects upon character to theoretical issues,
we single out the discussion regarding freedom of will as typical of the
consequences that come from separating morals from human nature. Men are
wearied with bootless discussion, and anxious to dismiss it as a
metaphysical subtlety. But nevertheless it contains within itself the
most practical of all moral questions, the nature of freedom and the
means of its achieving. The separation of morals from human nature leads
to a separation of human nature in its moral aspects from the rest of
nature, and from ordinary social habits and endeavors which are found in
business, civic life, the run of companionships and recreations. These
things are thought of at most as places where moral notions need to be
applied, not as places where moral ideas are to be studied and moral
energies generated. In short, the severance of morals from human nature
ends by driving morals inwards from the public open out-of-doors air and
light of day into the obscurities and privacies of an inner life. The
significance of the traditional discussion of free will is that it
reflects precisely a separation of moral activity from nature and the
public life of men.
One has to turn from moral theories to the general human struggle for
political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought,
speech, assemblage and creed, to find significant reality in the
conception of freedom of will. Then one finds himself out of the
stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the
open-air world. The cost of confining moral freedom to an inner region
is the almost complete severance of ethics from politics and economics.
The former is regarded as summed up in edifying exhortations, and the
latter as connected with arts of expediency separated from larger issues
of good.
In short, there are two schools of social reform. One bases itself upon
the notion of a morality which springs from an inner freedom, something
mysteriously cooped up within personality. It asserts that the only way
to change institutions is for men to purify their own hearts, and that
when this has been accomplished, change of institutions will follow of
itself. The other school denies the existence of any such inner power,
and in so doing conceives that it has denied all moral freedom. It says
that men are made what they are by the forces of the environment, that
human nature is purely malleable, and that till institutions are
changed, nothing can be done. Clearly this leaves the outcome as
hopeless as does an appeal to an inner rectitude and benevolence. For it
provides no leverage for change of environment. It throws us back upon
accident, usually disguised as a necessary law of history or evolution,
and trusts to some violent change, symbolized by civil war, to usher in
an abrupt millennium. There is an alternative to being penned in between
these two theories. We can recognize that all conduct is _interaction_
between elements of human nature and the environment, natural and
social. Then we shall see that progress proceeds in two ways, and that
freedom is found in that kind of interaction which maintains an
environment in which human desire and choice count for something. There
are in truth forces in man as well as without him. While they are
infinitely frail in comparison with exterior forces, yet they may have
the support of a foreseeing and contriving intelligence. When we look at
the problem as one of an adjustment to be intelligently attained, the
issue shifts from within personality to an engineering issue, the
establishment of arts of education and social guidance.
The idea persists that there is something materialistic about natural
science and that morals are degraded by having anything seriously to do
with material things. If a sect should arise proclaiming that men ought
to purify their lungs completely before they ever drew a breath it ought
to win many adherents from professed moralists. For the neglect of
sciences that deal specifically with facts of the natural and social
environment leads to a side-tracking of moral forces into an unreal
privacy of an unreal self. It is impossible to say how much of the
remediable suffering of the world is due to the fact that physical
science is looked upon as merely physical. It is impossible to say how
much of the unnecessary slavery of the world is due to the conception
that moral issues can be settled within conscience or human sentiment
apart from consistent study of facts and application of specific
knowledge in industry, law and politics. Outside of manufacturing and
transportation, science gets its chance in war. These facts perpetuate
war and the hardest, most brutal side of modern industry. Each sign of
disregard for the moral potentialities of physical science drafts the
conscience of mankind away from concern with the interactions of man and
nature which must be mastered if freedom is to be a reality. It diverts
intelligence to anxious preoccupation with the unrealities of a purely
inner life, or strengthens reliance upon outbursts of sentimental
affection. The masses swarm to the occult for assistance. The cultivated
smile contemptuously. They might smile, as the saying goes, out of the
other side of their mouths if they realized how recourse to the occult
exhibits the practical logic of their own beliefs. For both rest upon a
separation of moral ideas and feelings from knowable facts of life, man
and the world.
It is not pretended that a moral theory based upon realities of human
nature and a study of the specific connections of these realities with
those of physical science would do away with moral struggle and defeat.
It would not make the moral life as simple a matter as wending one's way
along a well-lighted boulevard. All action is an invasion of the future,
of the unknown. Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate traits. But morals
based upon concern with facts and deriving guidance from knowledge of
them would at least locate the points of effective endeavor and would
focus available resources upon them. It would put an end to the
impossible attempt to live in two unrelated worlds. It would destroy
fixed distinction between the human and the physical, as well as that
between the moral and the industrial and political. A morals based on
study of human nature instead of upon disregard for it would find the
facts of man continuous with those of the rest of nature and would
thereby ally ethics with physics and biology. It would find the nature
and activities of one person coterminous with those of other human
beings, and therefore link ethics with the study of history, sociology,
law and economics.
Such a morals would not automatically solve moral problems, nor resolve
perplexities. But it would enable us to state problems in such forms
that action could be courageously and intelligently directed to their
solution. It would not assure us against failure, but it would render
failure a source of instruction. It would not protect us against the
future emergence of equally serious moral difficulties, but it would
enable us to approach the always recurring troubles with a fund of
growing knowledge which would add significant values to our conduct even
when we overtly failed--as we should continue to do. Until the integrity
of morals with human nature and of both with the environment is
recognized, we shall be deprived of the aid of past experience to cope
with the most acute and deep problems of life. Accurate and extensive
knowledge will continue to operate only in dealing with purely technical
problems. The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature,
man and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be
serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality,
adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the
form of calculation of profits, idealistic without being romantic.
PART ONE
THE PLACE OF HABIT IN CONDUCT
I
Habits may be profitably compared to physiological functions, like
breathing, digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while
habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many
purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like functions
in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of
organism and environment. Breathing is an affair of the air as truly as
of the lungs; digesting an affair of food as truly as of tissues of
stomach. Seeing involves light just as certainly as it does the eye and
optic nerve. Walking implicates the ground as well as the legs; speech
demands physical air and human companionship and audience as well as
vocal organs. We may shift from the biological to the mathematical use
of the word function, and say that natural operations like breathing
and digesting, acquired ones like speech and honesty, are functions of
the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things done _by_ the
environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions. The
same air that under certain conditions ruffles the pool or wrecks
buildings, under other conditions purifies the blood and conveys
thought. The outcome depends upon what air acts upon. The social
environment acts through native impulses and speech and moral habitudes
manifest themselves. There are specific good reasons for the usual
attribution of acts to the person from whom they immediately proceed.
But to convert this special reference into a belief of exclusive
ownership is as misleading as to suppose that breathing and digesting
are complete within the human body. To get a rational basis for moral
discussion we must begin with recognizing that functions and habits are
ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has
its say as surely as the former.
We may borrow words from a context less technical than that of biology,
and convey the same idea by saying that habits are arts. They involve
skill of sensory and motor organs, cunning or craft, and objective
materials. They assimilate objective energies, and eventuate in command
of environment. They require order, discipline, and manifest technique.
They have a beginning, middle and end. Each stage marks progress in
dealing with materials and tools, advance in converting material to
active use. We should laugh at any one who said that he was master of
stone working, but that the art was cooped up within himself and in no
wise dependent upon support from objects and assistance from tools.
In morals we are however quite accustomed to such a fatuity. Moral
dispositions are thought of as belonging exclusively to a self. The self
is thereby isolated from natural and social surroundings. A whole school
of morals flourishes upon capital drawn from restricting morals to
character and then separating character from conduct, motives from
actual deeds. Recognition of the analogy of moral action with functions
and arts uproots the causes which have made morals subjective and
"individualistic." It brings morals to earth, and if they still aspire
to heaven it is to the heavens of the earth, and not to another world.
Honesty, chastity, malice, peevishness, courage, triviality, industry,
irresponsibility are not private possessions of a person. They are
working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces. All
virtues and vices are habits which incorporate objective forces. They
are interactions of elements contributed by the make-up of an individual
with elements supplied by the out-door world. They can be studied as
objectively as physiological functions, and they can be modified by
change of either personal or social elements.
If an individual were alone in the world, he would form his habits
(assuming the impossible, namely, that he would be able to form them) in
a moral vacuum. They would belong to him alone, or to him only in
reference to physical forces. Responsibility and virtue would be his
alone. But since habits involve the support of environing conditions, a
society or some specific group of fellow-men, is always accessory before
and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up
reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest,
encourage, share and resist. Even letting a man alone is a definite
response. Envy, admiration and imitation are complicities. Neutrality is
non-existent. Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between
it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical "ought" that
conduct _should_ be social. It _is_ social, whether bad or good.
Washing one's hands of the guilt of others is a way of sharing guilt so
far as it encourages in others a vicious way of action. Non-resistance
to evil which takes the form of paying no attention to it is a way of
promoting it. The desire of an individual to keep his own conscience
stainless by standing aloof from badness may be a sure means of causing
evil and thus of creating personal responsibility for it. Yet there are
circumstances in which passive resistance may be the most effective form
of nullification of wrong action, or in which heaping coals of fire on
the evil-doer may be the most effective way of transforming conduct. To
sentimentalize over a criminal--to "forgive" because of a glow of
feeling--is to incur liability for production of criminals. But to
suppose that infliction of retributive suffering suffices, without
reference to concrete consequences, is to leave untouched old causes of
criminality and to create new ones by fostering revenge and brutality.
The abstract theory of justice which demands the "vindication" of law
irrespective of instruction and reform of the wrong-doer is as much a
refusal to recognize responsibility as is the sentimental gush which
makes a suffering victim out of a criminal.
Courses of action which put the blame exclusively on a person as if his
evil will were the sole cause of wrong-doing and those which condone
offense on account of the share of social conditions in producing bad
disposition, are equally ways of making an unreal separation of man from
his surroundings, mind from the world. Causes for an act always exist,
but causes are not excuses. Questions of causation are physical, not
moral except when they concern future consequences. It is as causes of
future actions that excuses and accusations alike must be considered. At
present we give way to resentful passion, and then "rationalize" our
surrender by calling it a vindication of justice. Our entire tradition
regarding punitive justice tends to prevent recognition of social
partnership in producing crime; it falls in with a belief in
metaphysical free-will. By killing an evil-doer or shutting him up
behind stone walls, we are enabled to forget both him and our part in
creating him. Society excuses itself by laying the blame on the
criminal; he retorts by putting the blame on bad early surroundings, the
temptations of others, lack of opportunities, and the persecutions of
officers of the law. Both are right, except in the wholesale character
of their recriminations. But the effect on both sides is to throw the
whole matter back into antecedent causation, a method which refuses to
bring the matter to truly moral judgment. For morals has to do with acts
still within our control, acts still to be performed. No amount of guilt
on the part of the evil-doer absolves us from responsibility for the
consequences upon him and others of our way of treating him, or from our
continuing responsibility for the conditions under which persons develop
perverse habits.
We need to discriminate between the physical and the moral question. The
former concerns what _has_ happened, and how it happened. To consider
this question is indispensable to morals. Without an answer to it we
cannot tell what forces are at work nor how to direct our actions so as
to improve conditions. Until we know the conditions which have helped
form the characters we approve and disapprove, our efforts to create the
one and do away with the other will be blind and halting. But the moral
issue concerns the future. It is prospective. To content ourselves with
pronouncing judgments of merit and demerit without reference to the fact
that our judgments are themselves facts which have consequences and that
their value depends upon _their_ consequences, is complacently to dodge
the moral issue, perhaps even to indulge ourselves in pleasurable
passion just as the person we condemn once indulged himself. The moral
problem is that of modifying the factors which now influence future
results. To change the working character or will of another we have to
alter objective conditions which enter into his habits. Our own schemes
of judgment, of assigning blame and praise, of awarding punishment and
honor, are part of these conditions.
In practical life, there are many recognitions of the part played by
social factors in generating personal traits. One of them is our
habit of making social classifications. We attribute distinctive
characteristics to rich and poor, slum-dweller and captain of
industry, rustic and suburbanite, officials, politicians, professors,
to members of races, sets and parties. These judgments are usually too
coarse to be of much use. But they show our practical awareness that
personal traits are functions of social situations. When we generalize
this perception and act upon it intelligently we are committed by it
to recognize that we change character from worse to better only by
changing conditions--among which, once more, are our own ways of
dealing with the one we judge. We cannot change habit directly: that
notion is magic. But we can change it indirectly by modifying
conditions, by an intelligent selecting and weighting of the objects
which engage attention and which influence the fulfilment of desires.
A savage can travel after a fashion in a jungle. Civilized activity is
too complex to be carried on without smoothed roads. It requires signals
and junction points; traffic authorities and means of easy and rapid
transportation. It demands a congenial, antecedently prepared
environment. Without it, civilization would relapse into barbarism in
spite of the best of subjective intention and internal good disposition.
The eternal dignity of labor and art lies in their effecting that
permanent reshaping of environment which is the substantial foundation
of future security and progress. Individuals flourish and wither away
like the grass of the fields. But the fruits of their work endure and
make possible the development of further activities having fuller
significance. It is of grace not of ourselves that we lead civilized
lives. There is sound sense in the old pagan notion that gratitude is
the root of all virtue. Loyalty to whatever in the established
environment makes a life of excellence possible is the beginning of all
progress. The best we can accomplish for posterity is to transmit
unimpaired and with some increment of meaning the environment that makes
it possible to maintain the habits of decent and refined life. Our
individual habits are links in forming the endless chain of humanity.
Their significance depends upon the environment inherited from our
forerunners, and it is enhanced as we foresee the fruits of our labors
in the world in which our successors live.
For however much has been done, there always remains more to do. We can
retain and transmit our own heritage only by constant remaking of our
own environment. Piety to the past is not for its own sake nor for the
sake of the past, but for the sake of a present so secure and enriched
that it will create a yet better future. Individuals with their
exhortations, their preachings and scoldings, their inner aspirations
and sentiments have disappeared, but their habits endure, because these
habits incorporate objective conditions in themselves. So will it be
with _our_ activities. We may desire abolition of war, industrial
justice, greater equality of opportunity for all. But no amount of
preaching good will or the golden rule or cultivation of sentiments of
love and equity will accomplish the results. There must be change in
objective arrangements and institutions. We must work on the environment
not merely on the hearts of men. To think otherwise is to suppose that
flowers can be raised in a desert or motor cars run in a jungle. Both
things can happen and without a miracle. But only by first changing the
jungle and desert.
Yet the distinctively personal or subjective factors in habit count.
Taste for flowers may be the initial step in building reservoirs and
irrigation canals. The stimulation of desire and effort is one
preliminary in the change of surroundings. While personal exhortation,
advice and instruction is a feeble stimulus compared with that which
steadily proceeds from the impersonal forces and depersonalized
habitudes of the environment, yet they may start the latter going.
Taste, appreciation and effort always spring from some accomplished
objective situation. They have objective support; they represent the
liberation of something formerly accomplished so that it is useful in
further operation. A genuine appreciation of the beauty of flowers is
not generated within a self-enclosed consciousness. It reflects a world
in which beautiful flowers have already grown and been enjoyed. Taste
and desire represent a prior objective fact recurring in action to
secure perpetuation and extension. Desire for flowers comes after actual
enjoyment of flowers. But it comes before the work that makes the desert
blossom, it comes before _cultivation_ of plants. Every ideal is
preceded by an actuality; but the ideal is more than a repetition in
inner image of the actual. It projects in securer and wider and fuller
form some good which has been previously experienced in a precarious,
accidental, fleeting way.
II
It is a significant fact that in order to appreciate the peculiar place
of habit in activity we have to betake ourselves to bad habits, foolish
idling, gambling, addiction to liquor and drugs. When we think of such
habits, the union of habit with desire and with propulsive power is
forced upon us. When we think of habits in terms of walking, playing a
musical instrument, typewriting, we are much given to thinking of habits
as technical abilities existing apart from our likings and as lacking in
urgent impulsion. We think of them as passive tools waiting to be called
into action from without. A bad habit suggests an inherent tendency to
action and also a hold, command over us. It makes us do things we are
ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. It
overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are
honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because
it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold upon us because
we are the habit.
Our self-love, our refusal to face facts, combined perhaps with a sense
of a possible better although unrealized self, leads us to eject the
habit from the thought of ourselves and conceive it as an evil power
which has somehow overcome us. We feed our conceit by recalling that the
habit was not deliberately formed; we never intended to become idlers or
gamblers or rouès. And how can anything be deeply ourselves which
developed accidentally, without set intention? These traits of a bad
habit are precisely the things which are most instructive about all
habits and about ourselves. They teach us that all habits are
affections, that all have projectile power, and that a predisposition
formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and
fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious
choices. All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they
constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they
_are_ will. They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our
working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall
appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity.
We may think of habits as means, waiting, like tools in a box, to be
used by conscious resolve. But they are something more than that. They
are active means, means that project themselves, energetic and
dominating ways of acting. We need to distinguish between materials,
tools and means proper. Nails and boards are not strictly speaking means
of a box. They are only materials for making it. Even the saw and hammer
are means only when they are employed in some actual making. Otherwise
they are tools, or potential means. They are actual means only when
brought in conjunction with eye, arm and hand in some specific
operation. And eye, arm and hand are, correspondingly, means proper only
when they are in active operation. And whenever they are in action they
are cooperating with external materials and energies. Without support
from beyond themselves the eye stares blankly and the hand moves
fumblingly. They are means only when they enter into organization with
things which independently accomplish definite results. These
organizations are habits.
This fact cuts two ways. Except in a contingent sense, with an "if,"
neither external materials nor bodily and mental organs are in
themselves means. They have to be employed in coordinated conjunction
with one another to be actual means, or habits. This statement may seem
like the formulation in technical language of a common-place. But belief
in magic has played a large part in human history. And the essence of
all hocus-pocus is the supposition that results can be accomplished
without the joint adaptation to each other of human powers and physical
conditions. A desire for rain may induce men to wave willow branches and
to sprinkle water. The reaction is natural and innocent. But men then go
on to believe that their act has immediate power to bring rain without
the cooperation of intermediate conditions of nature. This is magic;
while it may be natural or spontaneous, it is not innocent. It obstructs
intelligent study of operative conditions and wastes human desire and
effort in futilities.
Belief in magic did not cease when the coarser forms of superstitious
practice ceased. The principle of magic is found whenever it is hoped to
get results without intelligent control of means; and also when it is
supposed that means can exist and yet remain inert and inoperative. In
morals and politics such expectations still prevail, and in so far the
most important phases of human action are still affected by magic. We
think that by feeling strongly enough about something, by wishing hard
enough, we can get a desirable result, such as virtuous execution of a
good resolve, or peace among nations, or good will in industry. We slur
over the necessity of the cooperative action of objective conditions,
and the fact that this cooperation is assured only by persistent and
close study. Or, on the other hand, we fancy we can get these results by
external machinery, by tools or potential means, without a corresponding
functioning of human desires and capacities. Often times these two false
and contradictory beliefs are combined in the same person. The man who
feels that _his_ virtues are his own personal accomplishments is likely
to be also the one who thinks that by passing laws he can throw the fear
of God into others and make them virtuous by edict and prohibitory
mandate.
Recently a friend remarked to me that there was one superstition current
among even cultivated persons. They suppose that if one is told what to
do, if the right _end_ is pointed to them, all that is required in order
to bring about the right act is will or wish on the part of the one who
is to act. He used as an illustration the matter of physical posture;
the assumption is that if a man is told to stand up straight, all that
is further needed is wish and effort on his part, and the deed is done.
He pointed out that this belief is on a par with primitive magic in its
neglect of attention to the means which are involved in reaching an end.
And he went on to say that the prevalence of this belief, starting with
false notions about the control of the body and extending to control of
mind and character, is the greatest bar to intelligent social progress.
It bars the way because it makes us neglect intelligent inquiry to
discover the means which will produce a desired result, and intelligent
invention to procure the means. In short, it leaves out the importance
of intelligently controlled habit.
We may cite his illustration of the real nature of a physical aim or
order and its execution in its contrast with the current false
notion.[1] A man who has a bad habitual posture tells himself, or is
told, to stand up straight. If he is interested and responds, he braces
himself, goes through certain movements, and it is assumed that the
desired result is substantially attained; and that the position is
retained at least as long as the man keeps the idea or order in his
mind. Consider the assumptions which are here made. It is implied that
the means or effective conditions of the realization of a purpose exist
independently of established habit and even that they may be set in
motion in opposition to habit. It is assumed that means are there, so
that the failure to stand erect is wholly a matter of failure of purpose
and desire. It needs paralysis or a broken leg or some other equally
gross phenomenon to make us appreciate the importance of objective
conditions.
[1] I refer to Alexander, "Man's Supreme Inheritance."
Now in fact a man who _can_ stand properly does so, and only a man who
can, does. In the former case, fiats of will are unnecessary, and in the
latter useless. A man who does not stand properly forms a habit of
standing improperly, a positive, forceful habit. The common implication
that his mistake is merely negative, that he is simply failing to do the
right thing, and that the failure can be made good by an order of will
is absurd. One might as well suppose that the man who is a slave of
whiskey-drinking is merely one who fails to drink water. Conditions have
been formed for producing a bad result, and the bad result will occur as
long as those conditions exist. They can no more be dismissed by a
direct effort of will than the conditions which create drought can be
dispelled by whistling for wind. It is as reasonable to expect a fire to
go out when it is ordered to stop burning as to suppose that a man can
stand straight in consequence of a direct action of thought and desire.
The fire can be put out only by changing objective conditions; it is the
same with rectification of bad posture.
Of course something happens when a man acts upon his idea of standing
straight. For a little while, he stands differently, but only a
different kind of badly. He then takes the unaccustomed feeling which
accompanies his unusual stand as evidence that he is now standing right.
But there are many ways of standing badly, and he has simply shifted his
usual way to a compensatory bad way at some opposite extreme. When we
realize this fact, we are likely to suppose that it exists because
control of the _body_ is physical and hence is external to mind and
will. Transfer the command inside character and mind, and it is fancied
that an idea of an end and the desire to realize it will take immediate
effect. After we get to the point of recognizing that habits must
intervene between wish and execution in the case of bodily acts, we
still cherish the illusions that they can be dispensed with in the case
of mental and moral acts. Thus the net result is to make us sharpen the
distinction between non-moral and moral activities, and to lead us to
confine the latter strictly within a private, immaterial realm. But in
fact, formation of ideas as well as their execution depends upon habit.
_If_ we could form a correct idea without a correct habit, then possibly
we could carry it out irrespective of habit. But a wish gets definite
form only in connection with an idea, and an idea gets shape and
consistency only when it has a habit back of it. Only when a man can
already perform an act of standing straight does he know what it is like
to have a right posture and only then can he summon the idea required
for proper execution. The act must come before the thought, and a habit
before an ability to evoke the thought at will. Ordinary psychology
reverses the actual state of affairs.
Ideas, thoughts of ends, are not spontaneously generated. There is no
immaculate conception of meanings or purposes. Reason pure of all
influence from prior habit is a fiction. But pure sensations out of
which ideas can be framed apart from habit are equally fictitious. The
sensations and ideas which are the "stuff" of thought and purpose are
alike affected by habits manifested in the acts which give rise to
sensations and meanings. The dependence of thought, or the more
intellectual factor in our conceptions, upon prior experience is usually
admitted. But those who attack the notion of thought pure from the
influence of experience, usually identify experience with sensations
impressed upon an empty mind. They therefore replace the theory of
unmixed thoughts with that of pure unmixed sensations as the stuff of
all conceptions, purposes and beliefs. But distinct and independent
sensory qualities, far from being original elements, are the products of
a highly skilled analysis which disposes of immense technical scientific
resources. To be able to single out a definitive sensory element in any
field is evidence of a high degree of previous training, that is, of
well-formed habits. A moderate amount of observation of a child will
suffice to reveal that even such gross discriminations as black, white,
red, green, are the result of some years of active dealings with things
in the course of which habits have been set up. It is not such a simple
matter to have a clear-cut sensation. The latter is a sign of training,
skill, habit.
Admission that the idea of, say, standing erect is dependent upon
sensory materials is, therefore equivalent to recognition that it is
dependent upon the habitual attitudes which govern concrete sensory
materials. The medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our
perception and thought. The filter is not, however, chemically pure. It
is a reagent which adds new qualities and rearranges what is received.
Our ideas truly depend upon experience, but so do our sensations. And
the experience upon which they both depend is the operation of
habits--originally of instincts. Thus our purposes and commands
regarding action (whether physical or moral) come to us through the
refracting medium of bodily and moral habits. Inability to think aright
is sufficiently striking to have caught the attention of moralists. But
a false psychology has led them to interpret it as due to a necessary
conflict of flesh and spirit, not as an indication that our ideas are as
dependent, to say the least, upon our habits as are our acts upon our
conscious thoughts and purposes.
Only the man who can maintain a correct posture has the stuff out of
which to form that idea of standing erect which can be the starting
point of a right act. Only the man whose habits are already good can
know what the good is. Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the
direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling
of habits working below direct consciousness. The psychology of
illusions of perception is full of illustrations of the distortion
introduced by habit into observation of objects. The same fact accounts
for the intuitive element in judgments of action, an element which is
valuable or the reverse in accord with the quality of dominant habits.
For, as Aristotle remarked, the untutored moral perceptions of a good
man are usually trustworthy, those of a bad character, not. (But he
should have added that the influence of social custom as well as
personal habit has to be taken into account in estimating who is the
good man and the good judge.)
What is true of the dependence of execution of an idea upon habit is
true, then, of the formation and quality of the idea. Suppose that by a
happy chance a right concrete idea or purpose--concrete, not simply
correct in words--has been hit upon: What happens when one with an
incorrect habit tries to act in accord with it? Clearly the idea can be
carried into execution only with a mechanism already there. If this is
defective or perverted, the best intention in the world will yield bad
results. In the case of no other engine does one suppose that a
defective machine will turn out good goods simply because it is invited
to. Everywhere else we recognize that the design and structure of the
agency employed tell directly upon the work done. Given a bad habit and
the "will" or mental direction to get a good result, and the actual
happening is a reverse or looking-glass manifestation of the usual
fault--a compensatory twist in the opposite direction. Refusal to
recognize this fact only leads to a separation of mind from body, and to
supposing that mental or "psychical" mechanisms are different in kind
from those of bodily operations and independent of them. So deep seated
is this notion that even so "scientific" a theory as modern
psycho-analysis thinks that mental habits can be straightened out by
some kind of purely psychical manipulation without reference to the
distortions of sensation and perception which are due to bad bodily
sets. The other side of the error is found in the notion of "scientific"
nerve physiologists that it is only necessary to locate a particular
diseased cell or local lesion, independent of the whole complex of
organic habits, in order to rectify conduct.
Means are means; they are intermediates, middle terms. To grasp this
fact is to have done with the ordinary dualism of means and ends. The
"end" is merely a series of acts viewed at a remote stage; and a means
is merely the series viewed at an earlier one. The distinction of means
and end arises in surveying the _course_ of a proposed _line_ of action,
a connected series in time. The "end" is the last act thought of; the
means are the acts to be performed prior to it in time. To _reach_ an
end we must take our mind off from it and attend to the act which is
next to be performed. We must make that the end. The only exception to
this statement is in cases where customary habit determines the course
of the series. Then all that is wanted is a cue to set it off. But when
the proposed end involves any deviation from usual action, or any
rectification of it--as in the case of standing straight--then the main
thing is to find some act which is different from the usual one. The
discovery and performance of this unaccustomed act is the "end" to which
we must devote all attention. Otherwise we shall simply do the old thing
over again, no matter what is our conscious command. The only way of
accomplishing this discovery is through a flank movement. We must stop
even thinking of standing up straight. To think of it is fatal, for it
commits us to the operation of an established habit of standing wrong.
We must find an act within our power which is disconnected from any
thought about standing. We must start to do another thing which on one
side inhibits our falling into the customary bad position and on the
other side is the beginning of a series of acts which may lead into the
correct posture.[2] The hard-drinker who keeps thinking of not drinking
is doing what he can to initiate the acts which lead to drinking. He is
starting with the stimulus to his habit. To succeed he must find some
positive interest or line of action which will inhibit the drinking
series and which by instituting another course of action will bring him
to his desired end. In short, the man's true aim is to discover some
course of action, having nothing to do with the habit of drink or
standing erect, which will take him where he wants to go. The discovery
of this other series is at once his means and his end. Until one takes
intermediate acts seriously enough to treat them as ends, one wastes
one's time in any effort at change of habits. Of the intermediate acts,
the most important is the _next_ one. The first or earliest means is the
most important _end_ to discover.
[2]The technique of this process is stated in the book of Mr.
Alexander already referred to, and the theoretical statement
given is borrowed from Mr. Alexander's analysis.
Means and ends are two names for the same reality. The terms denote not
a division in reality but a distinction in judgment. Without
understanding this fact we cannot understand the nature of habits nor
can we pass beyond the usual separation of the moral and non-moral in
conduct. "End" is a name for a series of acts taken collectively--like
the term army. "Means" is a name for the same series taken
distributively--like this soldier, that officer. To think of the end
signifies to extend and enlarge our view of the act to be performed. It
means to look at the next act in perspective, not permitting it to
occupy the entire field of vision. To bear the end in mind signifies
that we should not stop thinking about our _next_ act until we form some
reasonably clear idea of the _course_ of action to which it commits us.
To attain a remote end means on the other hand to treat the end as a
series of means. To say that an end is remote or distant, to say in fact
that it is an end at all, is equivalent to saying that obstacles
intervene between us and it. If, however, it remains a distant end, it
becomes a _mere_ end, that is a dream. As soon as we have projected it,
we must begin to work backward in thought. We must change _what_ is to
be done into a _how_, the means whereby. The end thus re-appears as a
series of "what nexts," and the what next of chief importance is the one
nearest the present state of the one acting. Only as the end is
converted into means is it definitely conceived, or intellectually
defined, to say nothing of being executable. Just as end, it is vague,
cloudy, impressionistic. We do not _know_ what we are really after until
a _course_ of action is mentally worked out. Aladdin with his lamp could
dispense with translating ends into means, but no one else can do so.
Now the thing which is closest to us, the means within our power, is a
habit. Some habit impeded by circumstances is the source of the
projection of the end. It is also the primary means in its realization.
The habit is propulsive and moves anyway toward some end, or result,
whether it is projected as an end-in-view or not. The man who can walk
does walk; the man who can talk does converse--if only with himself. How
is this statement to be reconciled with the fact that we are not always
walking and talking; that our habits seem so often to be latent,
inoperative? Such inactivity holds only of _overt_, visibly obvious
operation. In actuality each habit operates all the time of waking life;
though like a member of a crew taking his turn at the wheel, its
operation becomes the dominantly characteristic trait of an act only
occasionally or rarely.
The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps
still, even in dreams. The recognition of distances and directions of
things from his place at rest is the obvious proof of this statement.
The habit of locomotion is latent in the sense that it is covered up,
counteracted, by a habit of seeing which is definitely at the fore. But
counteraction is not suppression. Locomotion is a potential energy, not
in any metaphysical sense, but in the physical sense in which potential
energy as well as kinetic has to be taken account of in any scientific
description. Everything that a man who has the habit of locomotion does
and thinks he does and thinks differently on that account. This fact is
recognized in current psychology, but is falsified into an association
of sensations. Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in
every act, no such thing as character could exist. There would be simply
a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. Character is the
interpenetration of habits. If each habit existed in an insulated
compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others,
character would not exist. That is, conduct would lack unity being only
a juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations. But
since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those
remote from one another contain like elements, a continuous modification
of habits by one another is constantly going on. A man may give himself
away in a look or a gesture. Character can be read through the medium of
individual acts.
Of course interpenetration is never total. It is most marked in what we
call strong characters. Integration is an achievement rather than a
datum. A weak, unstable, vacillating character is one in which different
habits alternate with one another rather than embody one another. The
strength, solidity of a habit is not its own possession but is due to
reinforcement by the force of other habits which it absorbs into itself.
Routine specialization always works against interpenetration. Men with
"pigeon-hole" minds are not infrequent. Their diverse standards and
methods of judgment for scientific, religious, political matters testify
to isolated compartmental habits of action. Character that is unable to
undergo successfully the strain of thought and effort required to bring
competing tendencies into a unity, builds up barriers between different
systems of likes and dislikes. The emotional stress incident to conflict
is avoided not by readjustment but by effort at confinement. Yet the
exception proves the rule. Such persons are successful in keeping
different ways of reacting apart from one another in consciousness
rather than in action. Their character is marked by stigmata resulting
from this division.
The mutual modification of habits by one another enables us to define
the nature of the moral situation. It is not necessary nor advisable to
be always considering the interaction of habits with one another, that
is to say the effect of a particular habit upon character--which is a
name for the total interaction. Such consideration distracts attention
from the problem of building up an effective habit. A man who is
learning French, or chess-playing or engineering has his hands full with
his particular occupation. He would be confused and hampered by constant
inquiry into its effect upon character. He would resemble the centipede
who by trying to think of the movement of each leg in relation to all
the others was rendered unable to travel. At any given time, certain
habits must be taken for granted as a matter of course. Their operation
is not a matter of moral judgment. They are treated as technical,
recreational, professional, hygienic or economic or esthetic rather than
moral. To lug in morals, or ulterior effect on character at every point,
is to cultivate moral valetudinarianism or priggish posing. Nevertheless
any act, even that one which passes ordinarily as trivial, may entail
such consequences for habit and character as upon occasion to require
judgment from the standpoint of the whole body of conduct. It then comes
under moral scrutiny. To know when to leave acts without distinctive
moral judgment and when to subject them to it is itself a large factor
in morality. The serious matter is that this relative pragmatic, or
intellectual, distinction between the moral and non-moral, has been
solidified into a fixed and absolute distinction, so that some acts are
popularly regarded as forever within and others forever without the
moral domain. From this fatal error recognition of the relations of one
habit to others preserves us. For it makes us see that character is the
name given to the working interaction of habits, and that the cumulative
effect of insensible modifications worked by a particular habit in the
body of preferences may at any moment require attention.
The word habit may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use when
employed as we have been using it. But we need a word to express that
kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that
sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or
systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective,
dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is
operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously
dominating activity. Habit even in its ordinary usage comes nearer to
denoting these facts than any other word. If the facts are recognized we
may also use the words attitude and disposition. But unless we have
first made clear to ourselves the facts which have been set forth under
the name of habit, these words are more likely to be misleading than is
the word habit. For the latter conveys explicitly the sense of
operativeness, actuality. Attitude and, as ordinarily used, disposition
suggest something latent, potential, something which requires a positive
stimulus outside themselves to become active. If we perceive that they
denote positive forms of action which are released merely through
removal of some counteracting "inhibitory" tendency, and then become
overt, we may employ them instead of the word habit to denote subdued,
non-patent forms of the latter.
In this case, we must bear in mind that the word disposition means
predisposition, readiness to act overtly in a specific fashion whenever
opportunity is presented, this opportunity consisting in removal of the
pressure due to the dominance of some overt habit; and that attitude
means some special case of a predisposition, the disposition waiting as
it were to spring through an opened door. While it is admitted that the
word habit has been used in a somewhat broader sense than is usual, we
must protest against the tendency in psychological literature to limit
its meaning to repetition. This usage is much less in accord with
popular usage than is the wider way in which we have used the word. It
assumes from the start the identity of habit with routine. Repetition is
in no sense the essence of habit. Tendency to repeat acts is an incident
of many habits but not of all. A man with the habit of giving way to
anger may show his habit by a murderous attack upon some one who has
offended. His act is nonetheless due to habit because it occurs only
once in his life. The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to
_ways_ or modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under
special conditions, these express a way of behaving. Habit means special
sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing
predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific
acts. It means will.
III
The dynamic force of habit taken in connection with the continuity of
habits with one another explains the unity of character and conduct, or
speaking more concretely of motive and act, will and deed. Moral
theories have frequently separated these things from each other. One
type of theory, for example, has asserted that only will, disposition,
motive counts morally; that acts are external, physical, accidental;
that moral good is different from goodness in act since the latter is
measured by consequences, while moral good or virtue is intrinsic,
complete in itself, a jewel shining by its own light--a somewhat
dangerous metaphor however. The other type of theory has asserted that
such a view is equivalent to saying that all that is necessary to be
virtuous is to cultivate states of feeling; that a premium is put on
disregard of the actual consequences of conduct, and agents are deprived
of any objective criterion for the rightness and wrongness of acts,
being thrown back on their own whims, prejudices and private
peculiarities. Like most opposite extremes in philosophic theories, the
two theories suffer from a common mistake. Both of them ignore the
projective force of habit and the implication of habits in one another.
Hence they separate a unified deed into two disjoined parts, an inner
called motive and an outer called act.
The doctrine that the chief good of man is good will easily wins
acceptance from honest men. For common-sense employs a juster psychology
than either of the theories just mentioned. By will, common-sense
understands something practical and moving. It understands the body of
habits, of active dispositions which makes a man do what he does. Will
is thus not something opposed to consequences or severed from them. It
is a _cause_ of consequences; it is causation in its personal aspect,
the aspect immediately preceding action. It hardly seems conceivable to
practical sense that by will is meant something which can be complete
without reference to deeds prompted and results occasioned. Even the
sophisticated specialist cannot prevent relapses from such an absurdity
back into common-sense. Kant, who went the limit in excluding
consequences from moral value, was sane enough to maintain that a
society of men of good will would be a society which in fact would
maintain social peace, freedom and cooperation. We take the will for the
deed not as a substitute for doing, or a form of doing nothing, but in
the sense that, other things being equal, the right disposition will
produce the right deed. For a disposition means a tendency to act, a
potential energy needing only opportunity to become kinetic and overt.
Apart from such tendency a "virtuous" disposition is either hypocrisy or
self-deceit.
Common-sense in short never loses sight wholly of the two facts which
limit and define a moral situation. One is that consequences fix the
moral quality of an act. The other is that upon the whole, or in the
long run but not unqualifiedly, consequences are what they are because
of the nature of desire and disposition. Hence there is a natural
contempt for the morality of the "good" man who does not show his
goodness in the results of his habitual acts. But there is also an
aversion to attributing omnipotence to even the best of good
dispositions, and hence an aversion to applying the criterion of
consequences unreservedly. A holiness of character which is celebrated
only on holy-days is unreal. A virtue of honesty, or chastity or
benevolence which lives upon itself apart from definite results consumes
itself and goes up in smoke. The separation of motive from motive-force
in action accounts both for the morbidities and futilities of the
professionally good, and for the more or less subconscious contempt for
morality entertained by men of a strong executive habit with their
preference for "getting things done."
Yet there is justification for the common assumption that deeds cannot
be judged properly without taking their animating disposition as well as
their concrete consequences into account. The reason, however, lies not
in isolation of disposition from consequences, but in the need for
viewing consequences broadly. _This_ act is only one of a multitude of
acts. If we confine ourselves to the consequences of this one act we
shall come out with a poor reckoning. Disposition is habitual,
persistent. It shows itself therefore in many acts and in many
consequences. Only as we keep a running account, can we judge
disposition, disentangling its tendency from accidental accompaniments.
When once we have got a fair idea of its tendency, we are able to place
the particular consequences of a single act in a wider context of
continuing consequences. Thus we protect ourselves from taking as
trivial a habit which is serious, and from exaggerating into
momentousness an act which, viewed in the light of aggregate
consequences, is innocent. There is no need to abandon common-sense
which tells us in judging acts first to inquire into disposition; but
there is great need that the estimate of disposition be enlightened by a
scientific psychology. Our legal procedure, for example, wobbles between
a too tender treatment of criminality and a viciously drastic treatment
of it. The vacillation can be remedied only as we can analyze an act in
the light of habits, and analyze habits in the light of education,
environment and prior acts. The dawn of truly scientific criminal law
will come when each individual case is approached with something
corresponding to the complete clinical record which every competent
physician attempts to procure as a matter of course in dealing with his
subjects.
Consequences include effects upon character, upon confirming and
weakening habits, as well as tangibly obvious results. To keep an eye
open to these effects upon character may signify the most reasonable of
precautions or one of the most nauseating of practices. It may mean
concentration of attention upon personal rectitude in neglect of
objective consequences, a practice which creates a wholly unreal
rectitude. But it may mean that the survey of objective consequences is
duly extended in time. An act of gambling may be judged, for example, by
its immediate overt effects, consumption of time, energy, disturbance of
ordinary monetary considerations, etc. It may also be judged by its
consequences upon character, setting up an enduring love of excitement,
a persistent temper of speculation, and a persistent disregard of sober,
steady work. To take the latter effects into account is equivalent to
taking a broad view of future consequences; for these dispositions
affect future companionships, vocation and avocations, the whole tenor
of domestic and public life.
For similar reasons, while common-sense does not run into that sharp
opposition of virtues or moral goods and natural goods which has played
such a large part in professed moralities, it does not insist upon an
exact identity of the two. Virtues are ends because they are such
important means. To be honest, courageous, kindly is to be in the way of
producing specific natural goods or satisfactory fulfilments. Error
comes into theories when the moral goods are separated from their
consequences and also when the attempt is made to secure an exhaustive
and unerring identification of the two. There is a reason, valid as far
as it goes, for distinguishing virtue as a moral good resident in
character alone, from objective consequences. As matter of fact, a
desirable trait of character does not always produce desirable results
while good things often happen with no assistance from good will. Luck,
accident, contingency, plays its part. The act of a good character is
deflected in operation, while a monomaniacal egotism may employ a desire
for glory and power to perform acts which satisfy crying social needs.
Reflection shows that we must supplement the conviction of the moral
connection between character or habit and consequences by two
considerations.
One is the fact that we are inclined to take the notions of goodness in
character and goodness in results in too fixed a way. Persistent
disparity between virtuous disposition and actual outcome shows that we
have misjudged either the nature of virtue or of success. Judgments of
both motive and consequences are still, in the absence of methods of
scientific analysis and continuous registration and reporting,
rudimentary and conventional. We are inclined to wholesale judgments of
character, dividing men into goats and sheep, instead of recognizing
that all character is speckled, and that the problem of moral judgment
is one of discriminating the complex of acts and habits into tendencies
which are to be _specifically_ cultivated and condemned. We need to
study consequences more thoroughly and keep track of them more
continuously before we shall be in a position where we can pass with
reasonable assurance upon the good and evil in either disposition or
results. But even when proper allowances are made, we are forcing the
pace when we assume that there is or ever can be an exact equation of
disposition and outcome. We have to admit the rôle of accident.
We cannot get beyond tendencies, and must perforce content ourselves
with judgments of tendency. The honest man, we are told, acts upon
"principle" and not from considerations of expediency, that is, of
particular consequences. The truth in this saying is that it is not safe
to judge the worth of a proposed act by its probable consequences in an
isolated case. The word "principle" is a eulogistic cover for the fact
of _tendency_. The word "tendency" is an attempt to combine two facts,
one that habits have a certain causal efficacy, the other that their
outworking in any particular case is subject to contingencies, to
circumstances which are unforeseeable and which carry an act one side of
its usual effect. In cases of doubt, there is no recourse save to stick
to "tendency," that is, to the probable effect of a habit in the long
run, or as we say upon the whole. Otherwise we are on the lookout for
exceptions which favor our immediate desire. The trouble is that we are
not content with modest probabilities. So when we find that a good
disposition may work out badly, we say, as Kant did, that the
working-out, the consequence, has nothing to do with the moral quality
of an act, or we strain for the impossible, and aim at some infallible
calculus of consequences by which to measure moral worth in each
specific case.
Human conceit has played a great part. It has demanded that the whole
universe be judged from the standpoint of desire and disposition, or at
least from that of the desire and disposition of the good man. The
effect of religion has been to cherish this conceit by making men think
that the universe invariably conspires to support the good and bring the
evil to naught. By a subtle logic, the effect has been to render morals
unreal and transcendental. For since the world of actual experience does
not guarantee this identity of character and outcome, it is inferred
that there must be some ulterior truer reality which enforces an
equation that is violated in this life. Hence the common notion of
another world in which vice and virtue of character produce their exact
moral meed. The idea is equally found as an actuating force in Plato.
Moral realities must be supreme. Yet they are flagrantly contradicted in
a world where a Socrates drinks the hemlock of the criminal, and where
the vicious occupy the seats of the mighty. Hence there must be a truer
ultimate reality in which justice is only and absolutely justice.
Something of the same idea lurks behind every aspiration for realization
of abstract justice or equality or liberty. It is the source of all
"idealistic" utopias and also of all wholesale pessimism and distrust of
life.
Utilitarianism illustrates another way of mistreating the situation.
Tendency is not good enough for the utilitarians. They want a
mathematical equation of act and consequence. Hence they make light of
the steady and controllable factor, the factor of disposition, and
fasten upon just the things which are most subject to incalculable
accident--pleasures and pains--and embark upon the hopeless enterprise
of judging an act apart from character on the basis of definite results.
An honestly modest theory will stick to the probabilities of tendency,
and not import mathematics into morals. It will be alive and sensitive
to consequences as they actually present themselves, because it knows
that they give the only instruction we can procure as to the meaning of
habits and dispositions. But it will never assume that a moral judgment
which reaches certainty is possible. We have just to do the best we can
with habits, the forces most under our control; and we shall have our
hands more than full in spelling out their general tendencies without
attempting an exact judgment upon each deed. For every habit
incorporates within itself some part of the objective environment, and
no habit and no amount of habits can incorporate the entire environment
within itself or themselves. There will always be disparity between them
and the results actually attained. Hence the work of intelligence in
observing consequences and in revising and readjusting habits, even the
best of good habits, can never be foregone. Consequences reveal
unexpected potentialities in our habits whenever these habits are
exercised in a different environment from that in which they were
formed. The assumption of a stably uniform environment (even the
hankering for one) expresses a fiction due to attachment to old habits.
The utilitarian theory of equation of acts with consequences is as much
a fiction of self-conceit as is the assumption of a fixed transcendental
world wherein moral ideals are eternally and immutably real. Both of
them deny in effect the relevancy of time, of change, to morals, while
time is of the essence of the moral struggle.
We thus come, by an unexpected path, upon the old question of the
objectivity or subjectivity of morals. Primarily they are objective. For
will, as we have seen, means, in the concrete, habits; and habits
incorporate an environment within themselves. They are adjustments _of_
the environment, not merely _to_ it. At the same time, the environment
is many, not one; hence will, disposition, is plural. Diversity does not
of itself imply conflict, but it implies the possibility of conflict,
and this possibility is realized in fact. Life, for example, involves
the habit of eating, which in turn involves a unification of organism
and nature. But nevertheless this habit comes into conflict with other
habits which are also "objective," or in equilibrium with _their_
environments. Because the environment is not all of one piece, man's
house is divided within itself, against itself. Honor or consideration
for others or courtesy conflict with hunger. Then the notion of the
complete objectivity of morals gets a shock. Those who wish to maintain
the idea unimpaired take the road which leads to transcendentalism. The
empirical world, they say, is indeed divided, and hence any natural
morality must be in conflict with itself. This self-contradiction
however only points to a higher fixed reality with which a true and
superior morality is alone concerned. Objectivity is saved but at the
expense of connection with human affairs. Our problem is to see what
objectivity signifies upon a naturalistic basis; how morals are
objective and yet secular and social. Then we may be able to decide in
what crisis of experience morals become legitimately dependent upon
character or self--that is, "subjective."
Prior discussion points the way to the answer. A hungry man could not
conceive food as a good unless he had actually experienced, with the
support of environing conditions, food as good. The objective
satisfaction comes first. But he finds himself in a situation where the
good is denied in fact. It then lives in imagination. The habit denied
overt expression asserts itself in idea. It sets up the thought, the
ideal, of food. This thought is not what is sometimes called thought, a
pale bloodless abstraction, but is charged with the motor urgent force
of habit. Food as a good is now subjective, personal. But it has its
source in objective conditions and it moves forward to new objective
conditions. For it works to secure a change of environment so that food
will again be present in fact. Food is a "subjective" good during a
temporary transitional stage from one object to another.
The analogy with morals lies upon the surface. A habit impeded in overt
operation continues nonetheless to operate. It manifests itself in
desireful thought, that is in an ideal or imagined object which embodies
within itself the force of a frustrated habit. There is therefore demand
for a changed environment, a demand which can be achieved only by some
modification and rearrangement of old habits. Even Plato preserves an
intimation of the natural function of ideal objects when he insists upon
their value as patterns for use in reorganization of the actual scene.
The pity is that he could not see that patterns exist only within and
for the sake of reorganization, so that they, rather than empirical or
natural objects, are the instrumental affairs. Not seeing this, he
converted a function of reorganization into a metaphysical reality. If
we essay a technical formulation we shall say that morality becomes
legitimately subjective or personal when activities which once included
objective factors in their operation temporarily lose support from
objects, and yet strive to change existing conditions until they regain
a support which has been lost. It is all of a kind with the doings of a
man, who remembering a prior satisfaction of thirst and the conditions
under which it occurred, digs a well. For the time being water in
reference to his activity exists in imagination not in fact. But this
imagination is not a self-generated, self-enclosed, psychical existence.
It is the persistent operation of a prior object which has been
incorporated in effective habit. There is no miracle in the fact that an
object in a new context operates in a new way.
Of transcendental morals, it may at least be said that they retain the
intimation of the objective character of purposes and goods. Purely
subjective morals arise when the incidents of the temporary (though
recurrent) crisis of reorganization are taken as complete and final in
themselves. A self having habits and attitudes formed with the
cooperation of objects runs ahead of immediately surrounding objects to
effect a new equilibration. Subjective morals substitutes a self always
set over against objects and generating its ideals independently of
objects, and in permanent, not transitory, opposition to them.
Achievement, any achievement, is to it a negligible second best, a cheap
and poor substitute for ideals that live only in the mind, a compromise
with actuality made from physical necessity not from moral reasons. In
truth, there is but a temporal episode. For a time, a self, a person,
carries in his own habits against the forces of the immediate
environment, a good which the existing environment denies. For this self
moving temporarily, in isolation from objective conditions, between a
good, a completeness, that has been and one that it is hoped to restore
in some new form, subjective theories have substituted an erring soul
wandering hopelessly between a Paradise Lost in the dim past and a
Paradise to be Regained in a dim future. In reality, even when a person
is in some respects at odds with his environment and so has to act for
the time being as the sole agent of a good, he in many respects is still
supported by objective conditions and is in possession of undisturbed
goods and virtues. Men do die from thirst at times, but upon the whole
in their search for water they are sustained by other fulfilled powers.
But subjective morals taken wholesale sets up a solitary self without
objective ties and sustenance. In fact, there exists a shifting mixture
of vice and virtue. Theories paint a world with a God in heaven and a
Devil in hell. Moralists in short have failed to recall that a severance
of moral desire and purpose from immediate actualities is an inevitable
phase of activity when habits persist while the world which they have
incorporated alters. Back of this failure lies the failure to recognize
that in a changing world, old habits must perforce need modification, no
matter how good they have been.
Obviously any such change can be only experimental. The lost objective
good persists in habit, but it can recur in objective form only through
some condition of affairs which has not been yet experienced, and which
therefore can be anticipated only uncertainly and inexactly. The
essential point is that anticipation should at least guide as well as
stimulate effort, that it should be a working hypothesis corrected and
developed by events as action proceeds. There was a time when men
believed that each object in the external world carried its nature
stamped upon it as a form, and that intelligence consisted in simply
inspecting and reading off an intrinsic self-enclosed complete nature.
The scientific revolution which began in the seventeenth century came
through a surrender of this point of view. It began with recognition
that every natural object is in truth an event continuous in space and
time with other events; and is to be _known_ only by experimental
inquiries which will exhibit a multitude of complicated, obscure and
minute relationships. Any observed form or object is but a challenge.
The case is not otherwise with ideals of justice or peace or human
brotherhood, or equality, or order. They too are not things
self-enclosed to be known by introspection, as objects were once
supposed to be known by rational insight. Like thunderbolts and
tubercular disease and the rainbow they can be known only by extensive
and minute observation of consequences incurred in action. A false
psychology of an isolated self and a subjective morality shuts out from
morals the things important to it, acts and habits in their objective
consequences. At the same time it misses the point characteristic of the
personal subjective aspect of morality: the significance of desire and
thought in breaking down old rigidities of habit and preparing the way
for acts that re-create an environment.
IV
We often fancy that institutions, social custom, collective habit, have
been formed by the consolidation of individual habits. In the main this
supposition is false to fact. To a considerable extent customs, or
wide-spread uniformities of habit, exist because individuals face the
same situation and react in like fashion. But to a larger extent customs
persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions
set by prior customs. An individual usually acquires the morality as he
inherits the speech of his social group. The activities of the group are
already there, and some assimilation of his own acts to their pattern is
a prerequisite of a share therein, and hence of having any part in what
is going on. Each person is born an infant, and every infant is subject
from the first breath he draws and the first cry he utters to the
attentions and demands of others. These others are not just persons in
general with minds in general. They are beings with habits, and beings
who upon the whole esteem the habits they have, if for no other reason
than that, having them, their imagination is thereby limited. The nature
of habit is to be assertive, insistent, self-perpetuating. There is no
miracle in the fact that if a child learns any language he learns the
language that those about him speak and teach, especially since his
ability to speak that language is a pre-condition of his entering into
effective connection with them, making wants known and getting them
satisfied. Fond parents and relatives frequently pick up a few of the
child's spontaneous modes of speech and for a time at least they are
portions of the speech of the group. But the ratio which such words bear
to the total vocabulary in use gives a fair measure of the part played
by purely individual habit in forming custom in comparison with the part
played by custom in forming individual habits. Few persons have either
the energy or the wealth to build private roads to travel upon. They
find it convenient, "natural," to use the roads that are already there;
while unless their private roads connect at some point with the high-way
they cannot build them even if they would.
These simple facts seem to me to give a simple explanation of matters
that are often surrounded with mystery. To talk about the priority of
"society" to _the_ individual is to indulge in nonsensical metaphysics.
But to say that some pre-existent association of human beings is prior
to every particular human being who is born into the world is to
mention a commonplace. These associations are definite modes of
interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form
customs, institutions. There is no problem in all history so
artificial as that of how "individuals" manage to form "society." The
problem is due to the pleasure taken in manipulating concepts, and
discussion goes on because concepts are kept from inconvenient contact
with facts. The facts of infancy and sex have only to be called to
mind to see how manufactured are the conceptions which enter into this
particular problem.
The problem, however, of how those established and more or less deeply
grooved systems of interaction which we call social groups, big and
small, modify the activities of individuals who perforce are caught-up
within them, and how the activities of component individuals remake
and redirect previously established customs is a deeply significant
one. Viewed from the standpoint of custom and its priority to the
formation of habits in human beings who are born babies and gradually
grow to maturity, the facts which are now usually assembled under the
conceptions of collective minds, group-minds, national-minds,
crowd-minds, etc., etc., lose the mysterious air they exhale when mind
is thought of (as orthodox psychology teaches us to think of it) as
something which precedes action. It is difficult to see that
collective mind means anything more than a custom brought at some
point to explicit, emphatic consciousness, emotional or
intellectual.[3]
[3] Mob psychology comes under the same principles, but in a
negative aspect. The crowd and mob express a disintegration
of habits which releases impulse and renders persons
susceptible to immediate stimuli, rather than such a
functioning of habits as is found in the mind of a club or
school of thought or a political party. Leaders of an
organization, that is of an interaction having settled
habits, may, however, in order to put over some schemes
deliberately resort to stimuli which will break through the
crust of ordinary custom and release impulses on such a scale
as to create a mob psychology. Since fear is a normal
reaction to the unfamiliar, dread and suspicion are the
forces most played upon to accomplish this result, together
with vast vague contrary hopes. This is an ordinary technique
in excited political campaigns, in starting war, etc. But an
assimilation like that of Le Bon of the psychology of
democracy to the psychology of a crowd in overriding
individual judgment shows lack of psychological insight. A
political democracy exhibits an overriding of thought like
that seen in any convention or institution. That is, thought
is submerged in habit. In the crowd and mob, it is submerged
in undefined emotion. China and Japan exhibit crowd
psychology more frequently than do western democratic
countries. Not in my judgment because of any essentially
Oriental psychology but because of a nearer background of
rigid and solid customs conjoined with the phenomena of a
period of transition. The introduction of many novel stimuli
creates occasions where habits afford no ballast. Hence great
waves of emotion easily sweep through masses. Sometimes they
are waves of enthusiasm for the new; sometimes of violent
reaction against it--both equally undiscriminating. The war
has left behind it a somewhat similar situation in western
countries.
The family into which one is born is a family in a village or city which
interacts with other more or less integrated systems of activity, and
which includes a diversity of groupings within itself, say, churches,
political parties, clubs, cliques, partnerships, trade-unions,
corporations, etc. If we start with the traditional notion of mind as
something complete in itself, then we may well be perplexed by the
problem of how a common mind, common ways of feeling and believing and
purposing, comes into existence and then forms these groups. The case is
quite otherwise if we recognize that in any case we must start with
grouped action, that is, with some fairly settled system of interaction
among individuals. The problem of origin and development of the various
groupings, or definite customs, in existence at any particular time in
any particular place is not solved by reference to psychic causes,
elements, forces. It is to be solved by reference to facts of action,
demand for food, for houses, for a mate, for some one to talk to and to
listen to one talk, for control of others, demands which are all
intensified by the fact already mentioned that each person begins a
helpless, dependent creature. I do not mean of course that hunger, fear,
sexual love, gregariousness, sympathy, parental love, love of bossing
and of being ordered about, imitation, etc., play no part. But I do mean
that these words do not express elements or forces which are psychic or
mental in their first intention. They denote _ways of behavior_. These
ways of behaving involve interaction, that is to say, and prior
groupings. And to understand the existence of organized ways or habits
we surely need to go to physics, chemistry and physiology rather than to
psychology.
There is doubtless a great mystery as to why any such thing as being
conscious should exist at all. But _if_ consciousness exists at all,
there is no mystery in its being connected with what it is connected
with. That is to say, if an activity which is an interaction of various
factors, or a grouped activity, comes to consciousness it seems natural
that it should take the form of an emotion, belief or purpose that
reflects the interaction, that it should be an "our" consciousness or a
"my" consciousness. And by this is meant both that it will be shared by
those who are implicated in the associative custom, or more or less
alike in them all, and that it will be felt or thought to concern others
as well as one's self. A family-custom or organized habit of action
comes into contact and conflict for example with that of some other
family. The emotions of ruffled pride, the belief about superiority or
being "as good as other people," the intention to hold one's own are
naturally _our_ feeling and idea of _our_ treatment and position.
Substitute the Republican party or the American nation for the family
and the general situation remains the same. The conditions which
determine the nature and extent of the particular grouping in question
are matters of supreme import. But they are not as such subject-matter
of psychology, but of the history of politics, law, religion, economics,
invention, the technology of communication and intercourse. Psychology
comes in as an indispensable tool. But it enters into the matter of
understanding these various special topics, not into the question of
what psychic forces form a collective mind and therefore a social group.
That way of stating the case puts the cart a long way before the horse,
and naturally gathers obscurities and mysteries to itself. In short, the
primary facts of social psychology center about collective habit,
custom. In addition to the general psychology of habit--which _is_
general not individual in any intelligible sense of that word--we need
to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs,
purposes of those who are affected by them. The problem of social
psychology is not how either individual or collective mind forms social
groups and customs, but how different customs, established interacting
arrangements, form and nurture different minds. From this general
statement we return to our special problem, which is how the rigid
character of past custom has unfavorably influenced beliefs, emotions
and purposes having to do with morals.
We come back to the fact that individuals begin their career as infants.
For the plasticity of the young presents a temptation to those having
greater experience and hence greater power which they rarely resist. It
seems putty to be molded according to current designs. That plasticity
also means power to change prevailing custom is ignored. Docility is
looked upon not as ability to learn whatever the world has to teach, but
as subjection to those instructions of others which reflect _their_
current habits. To be truly docile is to be eager to learn all the
lessons of active, inquiring, expanding experience. The inert, stupid
quality of current customs perverts learning into a willingness to
follow where others point the way, into conformity, constriction,
surrender of scepticism and experiment. When we think of the docility of
the young we first think of the stocks of information adults wish to
impose and the ways of acting they want to reproduce. Then we think of
the insolent coercions, the insinuating briberies, the pedagogic
solemnities by which the freshness of youth can be faded and its vivid
curiosities dulled. Education becomes the art of taking advantage of the
helplessness of the young; the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for
the maintenance of hedges of custom.
Of course it is not wholly forgotten that habits are abilities, arts.
Any striking exhibition of acquired skill in physical matters, like that
of an acrobat or billiard-player, arouses universal admiration. But we
like to have innovating power limited to technical matters and reserve
our admiration for those manifestations that display virtuosity rather
than virtue. In moral matters it is assumed that it is enough if some
ideal has been exemplified in the life of a leader, so that it is now
the part of others to follow and reproduce. For every branch of conduct,
there is a Jesus or Buddha, a Napoleon or Marx, a Froebel or Tolstoi,
whose pattern of action, exceeding our own grasp, is reduced to a
practicable copy-size by passage through rows and rows of lesser
leaders.
The notion that it suffices if the idea, the end, is present in the mind
of some authority dominates formal schooling. It permeates the
unconscious education derived from ordinary contact and intercourse.
Where following is taken to be normal, moral originality is pretty sure
to be eccentric. But if independence were the rule, originality would be
subjected to severe, experimental tests and be saved from cranky
eccentricity, as it now is in say higher mathematics. The regime of
custom assumes that the outcome is the same whether an individual
understands what he is about or whether he goes through certain motions
while mouthing the words of others--repetition of formulæ being esteemed
of greater importance, upon the whole, than repetition of deeds. To say
what the sect or clique or class says is the way of proving that one
also understands and approves what the clique clings to. In theory,
democracy should be a means of stimulating original thought, and of
evoking action deliberately adjusted in advance to cope with new forces.
In fact it is still so immature that its main effect is to multiply
occasions for imitation. If progress in spite of this fact is more rapid
than in other social forms, it is by accident, since the diversity of
models conflict with one another and thus give individuality a chance in
the resulting chaos of opinions. Current democracy acclaims success more
boisterously than do other social forms, and surrounds failure with a
more reverberating train of echoes. But the prestige thus given
excellence is largely adventitious. The achievement of thought attracts
others not so much intrinsically as because of an eminence due to
multitudinous advertising and a swarm of imitators.
Even liberal thinkers have treated habit as essentially, not because of
the character of existing customs, conservative. In fact only in a
society dominated by modes of belief and admiration fixed by past custom
is habit any more conservative than it is progressive. It all depends
upon its quality. Habit is an ability, an art, formed through past
experience. But whether an ability is limited to repetition of past acts
adopted to past conditions or is available for new emergencies depends
wholly upon what kind of habit exists. The tendency to think that only
"bad" habits are disserviceable and that bad habits are conventionally
enumerable, conduces to make all habits more or less bad. For what makes
a habit bad is enslavement to old ruts. The common notion that
enslavement to good ends converts mechanical routine into good is a
negation of the principle of moral goodness. It identifies morality with
what _was_ sometime rational, possibly in some prior experience of one's
own, but more probably in the experience of some one else who is now
blindly set up as a final authority. The genuine heart of reasonableness
(and of goodness in conduct) lies in effective mastery of the conditions
which _now_ enter into action. To be satisfied with repeating, with
traversing the ruts which in other conditions led to good, is the surest
way of creating carelessness about present and actual good.
Consider what happens to thought when habit is merely power to repeat
acts without thought. Where does thought exist and operate when it is
excluded from habitual activities? Is not such thought of necessity shut
out from effective power, from ability to control objects and command
events? Habits deprived of thought and thought which is futile are two
sides of the same fact. To laud habit as conservative while praising
thought as the main spring of progress is to take the surest course to
making thought abstruse and irrelevant and progress a matter of accident
and catastrophe. The concrete fact behind the current separation of body
and mind, practice and theory, actualities and ideals, is precisely this
separation of habit and thought. Thought which does not exist within
ordinary habits of action lacks means of execution. In lacking
application, it also lacks test, criterion. Hence it is condemned to a
separate realm. If we try to act upon it, our actions are clumsy,
forced. In fact, contrary habits (as we have already seen) come into
operation and betray our purpose. After a few such experiences, it is
subconsciously decided that thought is too precious and high to be
exposed to the contingencies of action. It is reserved for separate
uses; thought feeds only thought not action. Ideals must not run the
risk of contamination and perversion by contact with actual conditions.
Thought then either resorts to specialized and technical matters
influencing action in the library or laboratory alone, or else it
becomes sentimentalized.
Meantime there are certain "practical" men who combine thought and habit
and who are effectual. Their thought is about their own advantage; and
their habits correspond. They dominate the actual situation. They
encourage routine in others, and they also subsidize such thought and
learning as are kept remote from affairs. This they call sustaining the
standard of the ideal. Subjection they praise as team-spirit, loyalty,
devotion, obedience, industry, law-and-order. But they temper respect
for law--by which they mean the order of the existing status--on the
part of others with most skilful and thoughtful manipulation of it in
behalf of their own ends. While they denounce as subversive anarchy
signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves, on the part of
others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit,
they think quite literally _for_ themselves, that is, _of_ themselves.
This is the eternal game of the practical men. Hence it is only by
accident that the separate and endowed "thought" of professional
thinkers leaks out into action and affects custom.
For thinking cannot itself escape the influence of habit, any more than
anything else human. If it is not a part of ordinary habits, then it is
a separate habit, habit alongside other habits, apart from them, as
isolated and indurated as human structure permits. Theory is a
possession of the theorist, intellect of the intellectualist. The
so-called separation of theory and practice means in fact the separation
of two kinds of practice, one taking place in the outdoor world, the
other in the study. The habit of thought commands some materials (as
every habit must do) but the materials are technical, books, words.
Ideas are objectified in action but speech and writing monopolize their
field of action. Even then subconscious pains are taken to see that the
words used are not too widely understood. Intellectual habits like other
habits demand an environment, but the environment is the study, library,
laboratory and academy. Like other habits they produce external results,
possessions. Some men acquire ideas and knowledge as other men acquire
monetary wealth. While practising thought for their own special ends
they deprecate it for the untrained and unstable masses for whom
"habits," that is unthinking routines, are necessities. They favor
popular education--up to the point of disseminating as matter of
authoritative information for the many what the few have established by
thought, and up to the point of converting an original docility to the
new into a docility to repeat and to conform.
Yet all habit involves mechanization. Habit is impossible without
setting up a mechanism of action, physiologically engrained, which
operates "spontaneously," automatically, whenever the cue is given. But
mechanization is not of necessity _all_ there is to habit. Consider the
conditions under which the first serviceable abilities of life are
formed. When a child begins to walk he acutely observes, he intently and
intensely experiments. He looks to see what is going to happen and he
keeps curious watch on every incident. What others do, the assistance
they give, the models they set, operate not as limitations but as
encouragements to his own acts, reinforcements of personal perception
and endeavor. The first toddling is a romantic adventuring into the
unknown; and every gained power is a delightful discovery of one's own
powers and of the wonders of the world. We may not be able to retain in
adult habits this zest of intelligence and this freshness of
satisfaction in newly discovered powers. But there is surely a middle
term between a normal exercise of power which includes some excursion
into the unknown, and a mechanical activity hedged within a drab world.
Even in dealing with inanimate machines we rank that invention higher
which adapts its movements to varying conditions.
All life operates through a mechanism, and the higher the form of life
the more complex, sure and flexible the mechanism. This fact alone
should save us from opposing life and mechanism, thereby reducing the
latter to unintelligent automatism and the former to an aimless splurge.
How delicate, prompt, sure and varied are the movements of a violin
player or an engraver! How unerringly they phrase every shade of emotion
and every turn of idea! Mechanism is indispensable. If each act has to
be consciously searched for at the moment and intentionally performed,
execution is painful and the product is clumsy and halting. Nevertheless
the difference between the artist and the mere technician is
unmistakeable. The artist is a masterful technician. The technique or
mechanism is fused with thought and feeling. The "mechanical" performer
permits the mechanism to dictate the performance. It is absurd to say
that the latter exhibits habit and the former not. We are confronted
with two kinds of habit, intelligent and routine. All life has its élan,
but only the prevalence of dead habits deflects life into mere élan.
Yet the current dualism of mind and body, thought and action, is so
rooted that we are taught (and science is said to support the teaching)
that the art, the habit, of the artist is acquired by previous
mechanical exercises of repetition in which skill apart from thought is
the aim, until suddenly, magically, this soulless mechanism is taken
possession of by sentiment and imagination and it becomes a flexible
instrument of mind. The fact, the scientific fact, is that even in his
exercises, his practice _for_ skill, an artist uses an art he already
has. He acquires greater skill because practice _of_ skill is more
important to him than practice _for_ skill. Otherwise natural endowment
would count for nothing, and sufficient mechanical exercise would make
any one an expert in any field. A flexible, sensitive habit grows more
varied, more adaptable by practice and use. We do not as yet fully
understand the physiological factors concerned in mechanical routine on
one hand and artistic skill on the other, but we do know that the latter
is just as much habit as is the former. Whether it concerns the cook,
musician, carpenter, citizen, or statesman, the intelligent or artistic
habit is the desirable thing, and the routine the undesirable
thing:--or, at least, desirable and undesirable from every point of view
except one.
Those who wish a monopoly of social power find desirable the separation
of habit and thought, action and soul, so characteristic of history. For
the dualism enables them to do the thinking and planning, while others
remain the docile, even if awkward, instruments of execution. Until this
scheme is changed, democracy is bound to be perverted in realization.
With our present system of education--by which something much more
extensive than schooling is meant--democracy multiplies occasions for
imitation not occasions for thought in action. If the visible result is
rather a messy confusion than an ordered discipline of habits, it is
because there are so many models of imitation set up that they tend to
cancel one another, so that individuals have the advantage neither of
uniform training nor of intelligent adaptation. Whence an
intellectualist; the one with whom thinking is itself a segregated
habit, infers that the choice is between muss-and-muddling and a
bureaucracy. He prefers the latter, though under some other name,
usually an aristocracy of talent and intellect, possibly a dictatorship
of the proletariat.
It has been repeatedly stated that the current philosophical dualism of
mind and body, of spirit and mere outward doing, is ultimately but an
intellectual reflex of the social divorce of routine habit from thought,
of means from ends, practice from theory. One hardly knows whether most
to admire the acumen with which Bergson has penetrated through the
accumulation of historic technicalities to this essential fact, or to
deplore the artistic skill with which he has recommended the division
and the metaphysical subtlety with which he has striven to establish its
necessary and unchangeable nature. For the latter tends to confirm and
sanction the dualism in all its obnoxiousness. In the end, however,
detection, discovery, is the main thing. To envisage the relation of
spirit, life, to matter, body, as in effect an affair of a force which
outruns habit while it leaves a trail of routine habits behind it, will
surely turn out in the end to imply the acknowledgment of the need of a
continuous unification of spirit and habit, rather than to be a sanction
of their divorce. And when Bergson carries the implicit logic to the
point of a clear recognition that upon this basis concrete intelligence
is concerned with the habits which incorporate and deal with objects,
and that nothing remains to spirit, pure thought, except a blind onward
push or impetus, the net conclusion is surely the need of revision of
the fundamental premiss of separation of soul and habit. A blind
creative force is as likely to turn out to be destructive as creative;
the vital _élan_ may delight in war rather than in the laborious arts of
civilization, and a mystic intuition of an ongoing splurge be a poor
substitute for the detailed work of an intelligence embodied in custom
and institution, one which creates by means of flexible continuous
contrivances of reorganization. For the eulogistic qualities which
Bergson attributes to the _élan vital_ flow not from its nature but from
a reminiscence of the optimism of romanticism, an optimism which is only
the reverse side of pessimism about actualities. A spiritual life which
is nothing but a blind urge separated from thought (which is said to be
confined to mechanical manipulation of material objects for personal
uses) is likely to have the attributes of the Devil in spite of its
being ennobled with the name of God.
V
For practical purposes morals mean customs, folkways, established
collective habits. This is a commonplace of the anthropologist, though
the moral theorist generally suffers from an illusion that his own place
and day is, or ought to be, an exception. But always and everywhere
customs supply the standards for personal activities. They are the
pattern into which individual activity must weave itself. This is as
true today as it ever was. But because of present mobility and
interminglings of customs, an individual is now offered an enormous
range of custom-patterns, and can exercise personal ingenuity in
selecting and rearranging their elements. In short he can, if he will,
intelligently adapt customs to conditions, and thereby remake them.
Customs in any case constitute moral standards. For they are active
demands for certain ways of acting. Every habit creates an unconscious
expectation. It forms a certain outlook. What psychologists have
laboriously treated under the caption of association of ideas has little
to do with ideas and everything to do with the influence of habit upon
recollection and perception. A habit, a routine habit, when interfered
with generates uneasiness, sets up a protest in favor of restoration and
a sense of need of some expiatory act, or else it goes off in casual
reminiscence. It is the essence of routine to insist upon its own
continuation. Breach of it is violation of right. Deviation from it is
transgression.
All that metaphysics has said about the nisus of Being to conserve its
essence and all that a mythological psychology has said about a special
instinct of self-preservation is a cover for the persistent
self-assertion of habit. Habit is energy organized in certain channels.
When interfered with, it swells as resentment and as an avenging force.
To say that it will be obeyed, that custom makes law, that _nomos_ is
lord of all, is after all only to say that habit is habit. Emotion is a
perturbation from clash or failure of habit, and reflection, roughly
speaking, is the painful effort of disturbed habits to readjust
themselves. It is a pity that Westermarck in his monumental collection
of facts which show the connection of custom with morals[4] is still so
much under the influence of current subjective psychology that he
misstates the point of his data. For although he recognizes the
objectivity of custom, he treats sympathetic resentment and approbation
as distinctive inner feelings or conscious states which give rise to
acts. In his anxiety to displace an unreal rational source of morals he
sets up an equally unreal emotional basis. In truth, feelings as well as
reason spring up within action. Breach of custom or habit is the source
of sympathetic resentment, while overt approbation goes out to fidelity
to custom maintained under exceptional circumstances.
[4] "The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas."
Those who recognize the place of custom in lower social forms generally
regard its presence in civilized society as a mere survival. Or, like
Sumner, they fancy that to recognize its abiding place is equivalent to
the denial of all rationality and principle to morality; equivalent to
the assertion of blind, arbitrary forces in life. In effect, this point
of view has already been dealt with. It overlooks the fact that the real
opposition is not between reason and habit but between routine,
unintelligent habit, and intelligent habit or art. Even a savage custom
may be reasonable in that it is adapted to social needs and uses.
Experience may add to such adaptation a conscious recognition of it, and
then the custom of rationality is added to a prior custom.
External reasonableness or adaptation to ends precedes reasonableness of
mind. This is only to say that in morals as well as in physics things
have to be there before we perceive them, and that rationality of mind
is not an original endowment but is the offspring of intercourse with
objective adaptations and relations--a view which under the influence of
a conception of knowing the like by the like has been distorted into
Platonic and other objective idealisms. Reason as observation of an
adaptation of acts to valuable results is not however a mere idle
mirroring of pre-existent facts. It is an additional event having its
own career. It sets up a heightened emotional appreciation and provides
a new motive for fidelities previously blind. It sets up an attitude of
criticism, of inquiry, and makes men sensitive to the brutalities and
extravagancies of customs. In short, it becomes a custom of expectation
and outlook, an active demand for reasonableness in other customs. The
reflective disposition is not self-made nor a gift of the gods. It
arises in some exceptional circumstance out of social customs, as we see
in the case of the Greeks. But when it has been generated it establishes
a new custom, which is capable of exercising the most revolutionary
influence upon other customs.
Hence the growing importance of personal rationality or intelligence, in
moral theory if not in practice. That current customs contradict one
another, that many of them are unjust, and that without criticism none
of them is fit to be the guide of life was the discovery with which the
Athenian Socrates initiated conscious moral theorizing. Yet a dilemma
soon presented itself, one which forms the burden of Plato's ethical
writings. How shall thought which is personal arrive at standards which
hold good for all, which, in modern phrase, are objective? The solution
found by Plato was that reason is itself objective, universal, cosmic
and makes the individual soul its vehicle. The result, however, was
merely to substitute a metaphysical or transcendental ethics for the
ethics of custom. If Plato had been able to see that reflection and
criticism express a conflict of customs, and that their purport and
office is to re-organize, re-adjust customs, the subsequent course of
moral theory would have been very different. Custom would have provided
needed objective and substantial ballast, and personal rationality or
reflective intelligence been treated as the necessary organ of
experimental initiative and creative invention in remaking custom.
We have another difficulty to face: a greater wave rises to overwhelm
us. It is said that to derive moral standards from social customs is to
evacuate the latter of all authority. Morals, it is said, imply the
subordination of fact to ideal consideration, while the view presented
makes morals secondary to bare fact, which is equal to depriving them of
dignity and jurisdiction. The objection has the force of the custom of
moral theorists behind it; and therefore in its denial of custom avails
itself of the assistance of the notion it attacks. The criticism rests
upon a false separation. It argues in effect that either ideal standards
antecede customs and confer their moral quality upon them, or that in
being subsequent to custom and evolved from them, they are mere
accidental by-products. But how does the case stand with language? Men
did not intend language; they did not have social objects consciously in
view when they began to talk, nor did they have grammatical and phonetic
principles before them by which to regulate their efforts at
communication. These things come after the fact and because of it.
Language grew out of unintelligent babblings, instinctive motions called
gestures, and the pressure of circumstance. But nevertheless language
once called into existence is language and operates as language. It
operates not to perpetuate the forces which produced it but to modify
and redirect them. It has such transcendent importance that pains are
taken with its use. Literatures are produced, and then a vast apparatus
of grammar, rhetoric, dictionaries, literary criticism, reviews, essays,
a derived literature _ad lib_. Education, schooling, becomes a
necessity; literacy an end. In short language when it is produced meets
old needs and opens new possibilities. It creates demands which take
effect, and the effect is not confined to speech and literature, but
extends to the common life in communication, counsel and instruction.
What is said of the institution of language holds good of every
institution. Family life, property, legal forms, churches and schools,
academies of art and science did not originate to serve conscious ends
nor was their generation regulated by consciousness of principles of
reason and right. Yet each institution has brought with its development
demands, expectations, rules, standards. These are not mere
embellishments of the forces which produced them, idle decorations of
the scene. They are additional forces. They reconstruct. They open new
avenues of endeavor and impose new labors. In short they are
civilization, culture, morality.
Still the question recurs: What authority have standards and ideas which
have originated in this way? What claim have they upon us? In one sense
the question is unanswerable. In the same sense, however, the question
is unanswerable whatever origin and sanction is ascribed to moral
obligations and loyalties. Why attend to metaphysical and transcendental
ideal realities even if we concede they are the authors of moral
standards? Why do this act if I feel like doing something else? Any
moral question may reduce itself to this question if we so choose. But
in an empirical sense the answer is simple. The authority is that of
life. Why employ language, cultivate literature, acquire and develop
science, sustain industry, and submit to the refinements of art? To ask
these questions is equivalent to asking: Why live? And the only answer
is that if one is going to live one must live a life of which these
things form the substance. The only question having sense which can be
asked is _how_ we are going to use and be used by these things, not
whether we are going to use them. Reason, moral principles, cannot in
any case be shoved behind these affairs, for reason and morality grow
out of them. But they have grown into them as well as out of them. They
are there as part of them. No one can escape them if he wants to. He
cannot escape the problem of _how_ to engage in life, since in any case
he must engage in it in some way or other--or else quit and get out. In
short, the choice is not between a moral authority outside custom and
one within it. It is between adopting more or less intelligent and
significant customs.
Curiously enough, the chief practical effect of refusing to recognize
the connection of custom with moral standards is to deify some special
custom and treat it as eternal, immutable, outside of criticism and
revision. This consequence is especially harmful in times of rapid
social flux. For it leads to disparity between nominal standards, which
become ineffectual and hypocritical in exact ratio to their theoretical
exaltation, and actual habits which have to take note of existing
conditions. The disparity breeds disorder. Irregularity and confusion
are however practically intolerable, and effect the generation of a new
rule of some sort or other. Only such complete disturbance of the
physical bases of life and security as comes from plague and starvation
can throw society into utter disorder. No amount of intellectual
transition can seriously disturb the main tenor of custom, or morals.
Hence the greater danger which attends the attempt in period of social
change to maintain the immutability of old standards is not general
moral relaxation. It is rather social clash, an irreconciled conflict of
moral standards and purposes, the most serious form of class warfare.
For segregated classes develop their own customs, which is to say their
own working morals. As long as society is mainly immobile these diverse
principles and ruling aims do not clash. They exist side by side in
different strata. Power, glory, honor, magnificence, mutual faith here;
industry, obedience, abstinence, humility, and reverence there: noble
and plebeian virtues. Vigor, courage, energy, enterprise here;
submission, patience, charm, personal fidelity there: the masculine and
feminine virtues. But mobility invades society. War, commerce, travel,
communication, contact with the thoughts and desires of other classes,
new inventions in productive industry, disturb the settled distribution
of customs. Congealed habits thaw out, and a flood mixes things once
separated.
Each class is rigidly sure of the rightness of its own ends and hence
not overscrupulous about the means of attaining them. One side proclaims
the ultimacy of order--that of some old order which conduces to its own
interest. The other side proclaims its rights to freedom, and identifies
justice with its submerged claims. There is no common ground, no moral
understanding, no agreed upon standard of appeal. Today such a conflict
occurs between propertied classes and those who depend upon daily wage;
between men and women; between old and young. Each appeals to its own
standard of right, and each thinks the other the creature of personal
desire, whim or obstinacy. Mobility has affected peoples as well.
Nations and races face one another, each with its own immutable
standards. Never before in history have there existed such numerous
contacts and minglings. Never before have there been such occasions for
conflict which are the more significant because each side feels that it
is supported by moral principles. Customs relating to what has been and
emotions referring to what may come to be go their independent ways. The
demand of each side treats its opponent as a wilful violator of moral
principles, an expression of self-interest or superior might.
Intelligence which is the only possible messenger of reconciliation
dwells in a far land of abstractions or comes after the event to record
accomplished facts.
VI
The prior discussion has tried to show why the psychology of habit is an
objective and social psychology. Settled and regular action must contain
an adjustment of environing conditions; it must incorporate them in
itself. For human beings, the environing affairs directly important are
those formed by the activities of other human beings. This fact is
accentuated and made fundamental by the fact of infancy--the fact that
each human being begins life completely dependent upon others. The net
outcome accordingly is that what can be called distinctively individual
in behavior and mind is not, contrary to traditional theory, an original
datum. Doubtless physical or physiological individuality always colors
responsive activity and hence modifies the form which custom assumes in
its personal reproductions. In forceful energetic characters this
quality is marked. But it is important to note that it is a quality of
habit, not an element or force existing apart from adjustment of the
environment and capable of being termed a separate individual mind.
Orthodox psychology starts however from the assumption of precisely such
independent minds. However much different schools may vary in their
definitions of mind, they agree in this premiss of separateness and
priority. Hence social psychology is confused by the effort to render
its facts in the terms characteristic of old psychology, when the
distinctive thing about it is that it implies an abandonment of that
psychology.
The traditional psychology of the original separate soul, mind or
consciousness is in truth a reflex of conditions which cut human nature
off from its natural objective relations. It implies first the severance
of man from nature and then of each man from his fellows. The isolation
of man from nature is duly manifested in the split between mind and
body--since body is clearly a connected part of nature. Thus the
instrument of action and the means of the continuous modification of
action, of the cumulative carrying forward of old activity into new,
is regarded as a mysterious intruder or as a mysterious parallel
accompaniment. It is fair to say that the psychology of a separate and
independent consciousness began as an intellectual formulation of those
facts of morality which treated the most important kind of action as a
private concern, something to be enacted and concluded within character
as a purely personal possession. The religious and metaphysical
interests which wanted the ideal to be a separate realm finally
coincided with a practical revolt against current customs and
institutions to enforce current psychological individualism. But this
formulation (put forth in the name of science) reacted to confirm the
conditions out of which it arose, and to convert it from a historic
episode into an essential truth. Its exaggeration of individuality is
largely a compensatory reaction against the pressure of institutional
rigidities.
Any moral theory which is seriously influenced by current psychological
theory is bound to emphasize states of consciousness, an inner private
life, at the expense of acts which have public meaning and which
incorporate and exact social relationships. A psychology based upon
habits (and instincts which become elements in habits as soon as they
are acted upon) will on the contrary fix its attention upon the
objective conditions in which habits are formed and operate. The rise at
the present time of a clinical psychology which revolts at traditional
and orthodox psychology is a symptom of ethical import. It is a protest
against the futility, as a tool of understanding and dealing with human
nature in the concrete, of the psychology of conscious sensations,
images and ideas. It exhibits a sense for reality in its insistence upon
the profound importance of unconscious forces in determining not only
overt conduct but desire, judgment, belief, idealization.
Every moment of reaction and protest, however, usually accepts some of
the basic ideas of the position against which it rebels. So the most
popular forms of the clinical psychology, those associated with the
founders of psycho-analysis, retain the notion of a separate psychic
realm or force. They add a statement pointing to facts of the utmost
value, and which is equivalent to practical recognition of the
dependence of mind upon habit and of habit upon social conditions. This
is the statement of the existence and operation of the "unconscious," of
complexes due to contacts and conflicts with others, of the social
censor. But they still cling to the idea of the separate psychic realm
and so in effect talk about unconscious consciousness. They get their
truths mixed up in theory with the false psychology of original
individual consciousness, just as the school of social psychologists
does upon its side. Their elaborate artificial explanations, like the
mystic collective mind, consciousness, over-soul, of social psychology,
are due to failure to begin with the facts of habit and custom.
What then is meant by individual mind, by mind as individual? In effect
the reply has already been given. Conflict of habits releases impulsive
activities which in their manifestation require a modification of habit,
of custom and convention. That which was at first the individualized
color or quality of habitual activity is abstracted, and becomes a
center of activity aiming to reconstruct customs in accord with some
desire which is rejected by the immediate situation and which therefore
is felt to belong to one's self, to be the mark and possession of an
individual in partial and temporary opposition to his environment. These
general and necessarily vague statements will be made more definite in
the further discussion of impulse and intelligence. For impulse when it
asserts itself deliberately against an existing custom is the beginning
of individuality in mind. This beginning is developed and consolidated
in the observations, judgments, inventions which try to transform the
environment so that a variant, deviating impulse may itself in turn
become incarnated in objective habit.
PART TWO
THE PLACE OF IMPULSE IN CONDUCT
I
Habits as organized activities are secondary and acquired, not native
and original. They are outgrowths of unlearned activities which are part
of man's endowment at birth. The order of topics followed in our
discussion may accordingly be questioned. Why should what is derived and
therefore in some sense artificial in conduct be discussed before what
is primitive, natural and inevitable? Why did we not set out with an
examination of those instinctive activities upon which the acquisition
of habits is conditioned?
The query is a natural one, yet it tempts to flinging forth a paradox.
In conduct the acquired is the primitive. Impulses although first in
time are never primary in fact; they are secondary and dependent. The
seeming paradox in statement covers a familiar fact. In the life of the
individual, instinctive activity comes first. But an individual begins
life as a baby, and babies are dependent beings. Their activities could
continue at most for only a few hours were it not for the presence and
aid of adults with their formed habits. And babies owe to adults more
than procreation, more than the continued food and protection which
preserve life. They owe to adults the opportunity to express their
native activities in ways which have meaning. Even if by some miracle
original activity could continue without assistance from the organized
skill and art of adults, it would not amount to anything. It would be
mere sound and fury.
In short, the _meaning_ of native activities is not native; it is
acquired. It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium. In
the case of a tiger or eagle, anger may be identified with a serviceable
life-activity, with attack and defense. With a human being it is as
meaningless as a gust of wind on a mud puddle apart from a direction
given it by the presence of other persons, apart from the responses they
make to it. It is a physical spasm, a blind dispersive burst of wasteful
energy. It gets quality, significance, when it becomes a smouldering
sullenness, an annoying interruption, a peevish irritation, a murderous
revenge, a blazing indignation. And although these phenomena which have
a meaning spring from original native reactions to stimuli, yet they
depend also upon the responsive behavior of others. They and all similar
human displays of anger are not pure impulses; they are habits formed
under the influence of association with others who have habits already
and who show their habits in the treatment which converts a blind
physical discharge into a significant anger.
After ignoring impulses for a long time in behalf of sensations, modern
psychology now tends to start out with an inventory and description of
instinctive activities. This is an undoubted improvement. But when it
tries to explain complicated events in personal and social life by
direct reference to these native powers, the explanation becomes hazy
and forced. It is like saying the flea and the elephant, the lichen and
the redwood, the timid hare and the ravening wolf, the plant with the
most inconspicuous blossom and the plant with the most glaring color are
alike products of natural selection. There may be a sense in which the
statement is true; but till we know the specific environing conditions
under which selection took place we really know nothing. And so we need
to know about the social conditions which have educated original
activities into definite and significant dispositions before we can
discuss the psychological element in society. This is the true meaning
of social psychology.
At some place on the globe, at some time, every kind of practice seems
to have been tolerated or even praised. How is the tremendous diversity
of institutions (including moral codes) to be accounted for? The native
stock of instincts is practically the same everywhere. Exaggerate as
much as we like the native differences of Patagonians and Greeks, Sioux
Indians and Hindoos, Bushmen and Chinese, their original differences
will bear no comparison to the amount of difference found in custom and
culture. Since such a diversity cannot be attributed to an original
identity, the development of native impulse must be stated in terms of
acquired habits, not the growth of customs in terms of instincts. The
wholesale human sacrifices of Peru and the tenderness of St. Francis,
the cruelties of pirates and the philanthropies of Howard, the practice
of Suttee and the cult of the Virgin, the war and peace dances of the
Comanches and the parliamentary institutions of the British, the
communism of the Southsea islander and the proprietary thrift of the
Yankee, the magic of the medicine man and the experiments of the chemist
in his laboratory, the non-resistance of Chinese and the aggressive
militarism of an imperial Prussia, monarchy by divine right and
government by the people; the countless diversity of habits suggested by
such a random list springs from practically the same capital-stock of
native instincts.
It would be pleasant if we could pick and choose those institutions
which we like and impute them to human nature, and the rest to some
devil; or those we like to our kind of human nature, and those we
dislike to the nature of despised foreigners on the ground they are not
really "native" at all. It would appear to be simpler if we could point
to certain customs, saying that they are the unalloyed products of
certain instincts, while those other social arrangements are to be
attributed wholly to other impulses. But such methods are not feasible.
The same original fears, angers, loves and hates are hopelessly
entangled in the most opposite institutions. The thing we need to know
is how a native stock has been modified by interaction with different
environments.
Yet it goes without saying that original, unlearned activity has its
distinctive place and that an important one in conduct. Impulses are the
pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are
agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and
changing their quality. Consequently whenever we are concerned with
understanding social transition and flux or with projects for reform,
personal and collective, our study must go to analysis of native
tendencies. Interest in progress and reform is, indeed, the reason for
the present great development of scientific interest in primitive human
nature. If we inquire why men were so long blind to the existence of
powerful and varied instincts in human beings, the answer seems to be
found in the lack of a conception of orderly progress. It is fast
becoming incredible that psychologists disputed as to whether they
should choose between innate ideas and an empty, passive, wax-like mind.
For it seems as if a glance at a child would have revealed that the
truth lay in neither doctrine, so obvious is the surging of specific
native activities. But this obtuseness to facts was evidence of lack of
interest in what could be done with impulses, due, in turn, to lack of
interest in modifying existing institutions. It is no accident that men
became interested in the psychology of savages and babies when they
became interested in doing away with old institutions.
A combination of traditional individualism with the recent interest in
progress explains why the discovery of the scope and force of instincts
has led many psychologists to think of them as the fountain head of all
conduct, as occupying a place before instead of after that of habits.
The orthodox tradition in psychology is built upon isolation of
individuals from their surroundings. The soul or mind or consciousness
was thought of as self-contained and self-enclosed. Now in the career of
an individual if it is regarded as complete in itself instincts clearly
come before habits. Generalize this individualistic view, and we have an
assumption that all customs, all significant episodes in the life of
individuals can be carried directly back to the operation of instincts.
But, as we have already noted, if an individual be isolated in this
fashion, along with the fact of primacy of instinct we find also the
fact of death. The inchoate and scattered impulses of an infant do not
coordinate into serviceable powers except through social dependencies
and companionships. His impulses are merely starting points for
assimilation of the knowledge and skill of the more matured beings upon
whom he depends. They are tentacles sent out to gather that nutrition
from customs which will in time render the infant capable of independent
action. They are agencies for transfer of existing social power into
personal ability; they are means of reconstructive growth. Abandon an
impossible individualistic psychology, and we arrive at the fact that
native activities are organs of re-organization and re-adjustment. The
hen precedes the egg. But nevertheless this particular egg may be so
treated as to modify the future type of hen.
II
In the case of the young it is patent that impulses are highly flexible
starting points for activities which are diversified according to the
ways in which they are used. Any impulse may become organized into
almost any disposition according to the way it interacts with
surroundings. Fear may become abject cowardice, prudent caution,
reverence for superiors or respect for equals; an agency for credulous
swallowing of absurd superstitions or for wary scepticism. A man may be
chiefly afraid of the spirits of his ancestors, of officials, of
arousing the disapproval of his associates, of being deceived, of fresh
air, or of Bolshevism. The actual outcome depends upon how the impulse
of fear is interwoven with other impulses. This depends in turn upon the
outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social environment.
In a definite sense, then, a human society is always starting afresh. It
is always in process of renewing, and it endures only because of
renewal. We speak of the peoples of southern Europe as Latin peoples.
Their existing languages depart widely from one another and from the
Latin mother tongue. Yet there never was a day when this alteration of
speech was intentional or explicit. Persons always meant to reproduce
the speech they heard from their elders and supposed they were
succeeding. This fact may stand as a kind of symbol of the
reconstruction wrought in habits because of the fact that they can be
transmitted and be made to endure only through the medium of the crude
activities of the young or through contact with persons having different
habits.
For the most part, this continuous alteration has been unconscious and
unintended. Immature, undeveloped activity has succeeded in modifying
adult organized activity accidentally and surreptitiously. But with the
dawn of the idea of progressive betterment and an interest in new uses
of impulses, there has grown up some consciousness of the extent to
which a future new society of changed purposes and desires may be
created by a deliberate humane treatment of the impulses of youth. This
is the meaning of education; for a truly humane education consists in an
intelligent direction of native activities in the light of the
possibilities and necessities of the social situation. But for the most
part, adults have given training rather than education. An impatient,
premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of
adult habits of thought and affection has been desired. The combined
effect of love of power, timidity in the face of the novel and a
self-admiring complacency has been too strong to permit immature impulse
to exercise its re-organizing potentialities. The younger generation has
hardly even knocked frankly at the door of adult customs, much less been
invited in to rectify through better education the brutalities and
inequities established in adult habits. Each new generation has crept
blindly and furtively through such chance gaps as have happened to be
left open. Otherwise it has been modeled after the old.
We have already noted how original plasticity is warped and docility is
taken mean advantage of. It has been used to signify not capacity to
learn liberally and generously, but willingness to learn the customs of
adult associates, ability to learn just those special things which those
having power and authority wish to teach. Original modifiability has not
been given a fair chance to act as a trustee for a better human life. It
has been loaded with convention, biased by adult convenience. It has
been practically rendered into an equivalent of non-assertion of
originality, a pliant accommodation to the embodied opinions of others.
Consequently docility has been identified with imitativeness, instead of
with power to re-make old habits, to re-create. Plasticity and
originality have been opposed to each other. That the most precious part
of plasticity consists in ability to form habits of independent judgment
and of inventive initiation has been ignored. For it demands a more
complete and intense docility to form flexible easily re-adjusted habits
than it does to acquire those which rigidly copy the ways of others. In
short, among the native activities of the young are some that work
towards accommodation, assimilation, reproduction, and others that work
toward exploration, discovery and creation. But the weight of adult
custom has been thrown upon retaining and strengthening tendencies
toward conformity, and against those which make for variation and
independence. The habits of the growing person are jealously kept within
the limit of adult customs. The delightful originality of the child is
tamed. Worship of institutions and personages themselves lacking in
imaginative foresight, versatile observation and liberal thought, is
enforced.
Very early in life sets of mind are formed without attentive thought,
and these sets persist and control the mature mind. The child learns to
avoid the shock of unpleasant disagreement, to find the easy way out, to
appear to conform to customs which are wholly mysterious to him in order
to get his own way--that is to display some natural impulse without
exciting the unfavorable notice of those in authority. Adults distrust
the intelligence which a child has while making upon him demands for a
kind of conduct that requires a high order of intelligence, if it is to
be intelligent at all. The inconsistency is reconciled by instilling in
him "moral" habits which have a maximum of emotional empressment and
adamantine hold with a minimum of understanding. These habitudes, deeply
engrained before thought is awake and even before the day of experiences
which can later be recalled, govern conscious later thought. They are
usually deepest and most unget-at-able just where critical thought is
most needed--in morals, religion and politics. These "infantalisms"
account for the mass of irrationalities that prevail among men of
otherwise rational tastes. These personal "hang-overs" are the cause of
what the student of culture calls survivals. But unfortunately these
survivals are much more numerous and pervasive than the anthropologist
and historian are wont to admit. To list them would perhaps oust one
from "respectable" society.
And yet the intimation never wholly deserts us that there is in the
unformed activities of childhood and youth the possibilities of a better
life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This
dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood. For
with all its extravagancies and uncertainties, its effusions and
reticences, it remains a standing proof of a life wherein growth is
normal not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where
habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrinkage. Habit and
impulse may war with each other, but it is a combat between the habits
of adults and the impulses of the young, and not, as with the adult, a
civil warfare whereby personality is rent asunder. Our usual measure for
the "goodness" of children is the amount of trouble they make for
grownups, which means of course the amount they deviate from adult
habits and expectations. Yet by way of expiation we envy children their
love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting the last drop of
significance from each situation, their vital seriousness in things that
to us are outworn.
We compensate for the harshness and monotony of our present insistence
upon formed habits by imagining a future heaven in which we too shall
respond freshly and generously to each incident of life. In consequence
of our divided attitude, our ideals are self-contradictory. On the one
hand, we dream of an attained perfection, an ultimate static goal, in
which effort shall cease, and desire and execution be once and for all
in complete equilibrium. We wish for a character which shall be
steadfast, and we then conceive this desired faithfulness as something
immutable, a character exactly the same yesterday, today and forever.
But we also have a sneaking sympathy for the courage of an Emerson in
declaring that consistency should be thrown to the winds when it stands
between us and the opportunities of present life. We reach out to the
opposite extreme of our ideal of fixity, and under the guise of a return
to nature dream of a romantic freedom, in which _all_ life is plastic to
impulse, a continual source of improvised spontaneities and novel
inspirations. We rebel against all organization and all stability. If
modern thought and sentiment is to escape from this division in its
ideals, it must be through utilizing released impulse as an agent of
steady reorganization of custom and institutions.
While childhood is the conspicuous proof of the renewing of habit
rendered possible by impulse, the latter never wholly ceases to play its
refreshing rôle in adult life. If it did, life would petrify, society
stagnate. Instinctive reactions are sometimes too intense to be woven
into a smooth pattern of habits. Under ordinary circumstances they
appear to be tamed to obey their master, custom. But extraordinary
crises release them and they show by wild violent energy how superficial
is the control of routine. The saying that civilization is only skin
deep, that a savage persists beneath the clothes of a civilized man, is
the common acknowledgment of this fact. At critical moments of unusual
stimuli the emotional outbreak and rush of instincts dominating all
activity show how superficial is the modification which a rigid habit
has been able to effect.
When we face this fact in its general significance, we confront one of
the ominous aspects of the history of man. We realize how little the
progress of man has been the product of intelligent guidance, how
largely it has been a by-product of accidental upheavals, even though by
an apologetic interest in behalf of some privileged institution we later
transmute chance into providence. We have depended upon the clash of
war, the stress of revolution, the emergence of heroic individuals, the
impact of migrations generated by war and famine, the incoming of
barbarians, to change established institutions. Instead of constantly
utilizing unused impulse to effect continuous reconstruction, we have
waited till an accumulation of stresses suddenly breaks through the
dikes of custom.
It is often supposed that as old persons die, so must old peoples. There
are many facts in history to support the belief. Decadence and
degeneration seems to be the rule as age increases. An irruption of some
uncivilized horde has then provided new blood and fresh life--so much so
that history has been defined as a process of rebarbarization. In truth
the analogy between a person and a nation with respect to senescence and
death is defective. A nation is always renewed by the death of its old
constituents and the birth of those who are as young and fresh as ever
were any individuals in the hey-day of the nation's glory. Not the
nation but its customs get old. Its institutions petrify into rigidity;
there is social arterial sclerosis. Then some people not overburdened
with elaborate and stiff habits take up and carry on the moving process
of life. The stock of fresh peoples is, however, approaching exhaustion.
It is not safe to rely upon this expensive method of renewing
civilization. We need to discover how to rejuvenate it from within. A
normal perpetuation becomes a fact in the degree in which impulse is
released and habit is plastic to the transforming touch of impulse. When
customs are flexible and youth is educated as youth and not as premature
adulthood, no nation grows old.
There always exists a goodly store of non-functioning impulses which may
be drawn upon. Their manifestation and utilization is called conversion
or regeneration when it comes suddenly. But they may be drawn upon
continuously and moderately. Then we call it learning or educative
growth. Rigid custom signifies not that there are no such impulses but
that they are not organically taken advantage of. As matter of fact, the
stiffer and the more encrusted the customs, the larger is the number of
instinctive activities that find no regular outlet and that accordingly
merely await a chance to get an irregular, uncoordinated manifestation.
Routine habits never take up all the slack. They apply only where
conditions remain the same or recur in uniform ways. They do not fit the
unusual and novel.
Consequently rigid moral codes that attempt to lay down definite
injunctions and prohibitions for every occasion in life turn out in fact
loose and slack. Stretch ten commandments or any other number as far as
you will by ingenious exegesis, yet acts unprovided for by them will
occur. No elaboration of statute law can forestall variant cases and the
need of interpretation _ad hoc_. Moral and legal schemes that attempt
the impossible in the way of definite formulation compensate for
explicit strictness in some lines by implicit looseness in others. The
only truly severe code is the one which foregoes codification, throwing
responsibility for judging each case upon the agents concerned, imposing
upon them the burden of discovery and adaptation.
The relation which actually exists between undirected instinct and
over-organized custom is illustrated in the two views that are current
about savage life. The popular view looks at the savage as a wild man;
as one who knows no controlling principles or rules of action, who
freely follows his own impulse, whim or desire whenever it seizes him
and wherever it takes him. Anthropologists are given to the opposed
notion. They view savages as bondsmen to custom. They note the network
of regulations that order his risings-up and his sittings-down, his
goings-out and his comings-in. They conclude that in comparison with
civilized man the savage is a slave, governed by many inflexible tribal
habitudes in conduct and ideas.
The truth about savage life lies in a combination of these two
conceptions. Where customs exist they are of one pattern and binding on
personal sentiment and thought to a degree unknown in civilized life.
But since they cannot possibly exist with respect to all the changing
detail of daily life, whatever is left uncovered by custom is free from
regulation. It is therefore left to appetite and momentary circumstance.
Thus enslavement to custom and license of impulse exist side by side.
Strict conformity and unrestrained wildness intensify each other. This
picture of life shows us in an exaggerated form the psychology current
in civilized life whenever customs harden and hold individuals enmeshed.
Within civilization, the savage still exists. He is known in his degree
by oscillation between loose indulgence and stiff habit.
Impulse in short brings with itself the possibility but not the
assurance of a steady reorganization of habits to meet new elements in
new situations. The moral problem in child and adult alike as regards
impulse and instinct is to utilize them for formation of new habits, or
what is the same thing, the modification of an old habit so that it may
be adequately serviceable under novel conditions. The place of impulse
in conduct as a pivot of re-adjustment, re-organization, in habits may
be defined as follows: On one side, it is marked off from the territory
of arrested and encrusted habits. On the other side, it is demarcated
from the region in which impulse is a law unto itself.[5] Generalizing
these distinctions, a valid moral theory contrasts with all those
theories which set up static goals (even when they are called
perfection), and with those theories which idealize raw impulse and find
in its spontaneities an adequate mode of human freedom. Impulse is a
source, an indispensable source, of liberation; but only as it is
employed in giving habits pertinence and freshness does it liberate
power.
[5] The use of the words instinct and impulse as practical
equivalents is intentional, even though it may grieve
critical readers. The word instinct taken alone is still too
laden with the older notion that an instinct is always
definitely organized and adapted--which for the most part is
just what it is not in human beings. The word impulse
suggests something primitive, yet loose, undirected, initial.
Man can progress as beasts cannot, precisely because he has
so many 'instincts' that they cut across one another, so that
most serviceable actions must be _learned_. In learning
habits it is possible for man to learn the habit of learning.
Then betterment becomes a conscious principle of life.
III
Incidentally we have touched upon a most far-reaching problem: The
alterability of human nature. Early reformers, following John Locke,
were inclined to minimize the significance of native activities, and to
emphasize the possibilities inherent in practice and habit-acquisition.
There was a political slant to this denial of the native and a priori,
this magnifying of the accomplishments of acquired experience. It held
out a prospect of continuous development, of improvement without end.
Thus writers like Helvetius made the idea of the complete malleability
of a human nature which originally is wholly empty and passive, the
basis for asserting the omnipotence of education to shape human society,
and the ground of proclaiming the infinite perfectibility of mankind.
Wary, experienced men of the world have always been sceptical of schemes
of unlimited improvement. They tend to regard plans for social change
with an eye of suspicion. They find in them evidences of the proneness
of youth to illusion, or of incapacity on the part of those who have
grown old to learn anything from experience. This type of conservative
has thought to find in the doctrine of native instincts a scientific
support for asserting the practical unalterability of human nature.
Circumstances may change, but human nature remains from age to age the
same. Heredity is more potent than environment, and human heredity is
untouched by human intent. Effort for a serious alteration of human
institutions is utopian. As things have been so they will be. The more
they change the more they remain the same.
Curiously enough both parties rest their case upon just the factor which
when it is analyzed weakens their respective conclusions. That is to
say, the radical reformer rests his contention in behalf of easy and
rapid change upon the psychology of habits, of institutions in shaping
raw nature, and the conservative grounds his counter-assertion upon the
psychology of instincts. As matter of fact, it is precisely custom which
has greatest inertia, which is least susceptible of alteration; while
instincts are most readily modifiable through use, most subject to
educative direction. The conservative who begs scientific support from
the psychology of instincts is the victim of an outgrown psychology
which derived its notion of instinct from an exaggeration of the fixity
and certainty of the operation of instincts among the lower animals. He
is a victim of a popular zoology of the bird, bee and beaver, which was
largely framed to the greater glory of God. He is ignorant that
instincts in the animals are less infallible and definite than is
supposed, and also that the human being differs from the lower animals
in precisely the fact that his native activities lack the complex
ready-made organization of the animals' original abilities.
But the short-cut revolutionist fails to realize the full force of the
things about which he talks most, namely institutions as embodied
habits. Any one with knowledge of the stability and force of habit will
hesitate to propose or prophesy rapid and sweeping social changes. A
social revolution may effect abrupt and deep alterations in external
customs, in legal and political institutions. But the habits that are
behind these institutions and that have, willy-nilly, been shaped by
objective conditions, the habits of thought and feeling, are not so
easily modified. They persist and insensibly assimilate to themselves
the outer innovations--much as American judges nullify the intended
changes of statute law by interpreting legislation in the light of
common law. The force of lag in human life is enormous.
Actual social change is never so great as is apparent change. Ways of
belief, of expectation, of judgment and attendant emotional dispositions
of like and dislike, are not easily modified after they have once taken
shape. Political and legal institutions may be altered, even abolished;
but the bulk of popular thought which has been shaped to their pattern
persists. This is why glowing predictions of the immediate coming of a
social millennium terminate so uniformly in disappointment, which gives
point to the standing suspicion of the cynical conservative about
radical changes. Habits of thought outlive modifications in habits of
overt action. The former are vital, the latter, without the sustaining
life of the former, are muscular tricks. Consequently as a rule the
moral effects of even great political revolutions, after a few years of
outwardly conspicuous alterations, do not show themselves till after the
lapse of years. A new generation must come upon the scene whose habits
of mind have been formed under the new conditions. There is pith in the
saying that important reforms cannot take real effect until after a
number of influential persons have died. Where general and enduring
moral changes do accompany an external revolution it is because
appropriate habits of thought have previously been insensibly matured.
The external change merely registers the removal of an external
superficial barrier to the operation of existing intellectual
tendencies.
Those who argue that social and moral reform is impossible on the ground
that the Old Adam of human nature remains forever the same, attribute
however to native activities the permanence and inertia that in truth
belong only to acquired customs. To Aristotle slavery was rooted in
aboriginal human nature. Native distinctions of quality exist such that
some persons are by nature gifted with power to plan, command and
supervise, and others possess merely capacity to obey and execute. Hence
slavery is natural and inevitable. There is error in supposing that
because domestic and chattel slavery has been legally abolished,
therefore slavery as conceived by Aristotle has disappeared. But matters
have at least progressed to a point where it is clear that slavery is a
social state not a psychological necessity. Nevertheless the worldlywise
Aristotles of today assert that the institutions of war and the present
wage-system are so grounded in immutable human nature that effort to
change them is foolish.
Like Greek slavery or feudal serfdom, war and the existing economic
regime are social patterns woven out of the stuff of instinctive
activities. Native human nature supplies the raw materials, but custom
furnishes the machinery and the designs. War would not be possible
without anger, pugnacity, rivalry, self-display, and such like native
tendencies. Activity inheres in them and will persist under every
condition of life. To imagine they can be eradicated is like supposing
that society can go on without eating and without union of the sexes.
But to fancy that they must eventuate in war is as if a savage were to
believe that because he uses fibers having fixed natural properties in
order to weave baskets, therefore his immemorial tribal patterns are
also natural necessities and immutable forms.
From a humane standpoint our study of history is still all too
primitive. It is possible to study a multitude of histories, and yet
permit history, the record of the transitions and transformations of
human activities, to escape us. Taking history in separate doses of this
country and that, we take it as a succession of isolated finalities,
each one in due season giving way to another, as supernumeraries succeed
one another in a march across the stage. We thus miss the fact of
history and also its lesson; the diversity of institutional forms and
customs which the same human nature may produce and employ. An infantile
logic, now happily expelled from physical science, taught that opium put
men to sleep because of its dormitive potency. We follow the same logic
in social matters when we believe that war exists because of bellicose
instincts; or that a particular economic regime is necessary because of
acquisitive and competitive impulses which must find expression.
Pugnacity and fear are no more native than are pity and sympathy. The
important thing morally is the way these native tendencies interact, for
their interaction may give a chemical transformation not a mechanical
combination. Similarly, no social institution stands alone as a product
of one dominant force. It is a phenomenon or function of a multitude of
social factors in their mutual inhibitions and reinforcements. If we
follow an infantile logic we shall reduplicate the unity of result in an
assumption of unity of force behind it--as men once did with natural
events employing teleology as an exhibition of causal efficiency. We
thus take the same social custom twice over: once as an existing fact
and then as an original force which produced the fact, and utter sage
platitudes about the unalterable workings of human nature or of race. As
we account for war by pugnacity, for the capitalistic system by the
necessity of an incentive of gain to stir ambition and effort, so we
account for Greece by power of esthetic observation, Rome by
administrative ability, the middle ages by interest in religion and so
on. We have constructed an elaborate political zoology as mythological
and not nearly as poetic as the other zoology of phoenixes,
griffins and unicorns. Native racial spirit, the spirit of the people or
of the time, national destiny are familiar figures in this social zoo.
As names for effects, for existing customs, they are sometimes useful.
As names for explanatory forces they work havoc with intelligence.
An immense debt is due William James for the mere title of his essay:
The Moral Equivalents of War. It reveals with a flash of light the true
psychology. Clans, tribes, races, cities, empires, nations, states have
made war. The argument that this fact proves an ineradicable belligerent
instinct which makes war forever inevitable is much more respectable
than many arguments about the immutability of this and that social
tradition. For it has the weight of a certain empirical generality back
of it. Yet the suggestion of an _equivalent_ for war calls attention to
the medley of impulses which are casually bunched together under the
caption of belligerent impulse; and it calls attention to the fact that
the elements of this medley may be woven together into many differing
types of activity, some of which may function the native impulses in
much better ways than war has ever done.
Pugnacity, rivalry, vainglory, love of booty, fear, suspicion, anger,
desire for freedom from the conventions and restrictions of peace, love
of power and hatred of oppression, opportunity for novel displays, love
of home and soil, attachment to one's people and to the altar and the
hearth, courage, loyalty, opportunity to make a name, money or a career,
affection, piety to ancestors and ancestral gods--all of these things
and many more make up the war-like force. To suppose there is some one
unchanging native force which generates war is as naive as the usual
assumption that our enemy is actuated solely by the meaner of the
tendencies named and we only by the nobler. In earlier days there was
something more than a verbal connection between pugnacity and fighting;
anger and fear moved promptly through the fists. But between a loosely
organized pugilism and the highly organized warfare of today there
intervenes a long economic, scientific and political history. Social
conditions rather than an old and unchangeable Adam have generated wars;
the ineradicable impulses that are utilized in them are capable of being
drafted into many other channels. The century that has witnessed the
triumph of the scientific doctrine of the convertibility of natural
energies ought not to balk at the lesser miracle of social equivalences
and substitutes.
It is likely that if Mr. James had witnessed the world war, he would
have modified his mode of treatment. So many new transformations entered
into the war, that the war seems to prove that though an equivalent has
not been found for war, the psychological forces traditionally
associated with it have already undergone profound changes. We may take
the Iliad as a classic expression of war's traditional psychology as
well as the source of the literary tradition regarding its motives and
glories. But where are Helen, Hector and Achilles in modern warfare? The
activities that evoke and incorporate a war are no longer personal love,
love of glory, or the soldier's love of his own privately amassed booty,
but are of a collective, prosaic political and economic nature.
Universal conscription, the general mobilization of all agricultural and
industrial forces of the folk not engaged in the trenches, the
application of every conceivable scientific and mechanical device, the
mass movements of soldiery regulated from a common center by a
depersonalized general staff: these factors relegate the traditional
psychological apparatus of war to a now remote antiquity. The motives
once appealed to are out of date; they do not now induce war. They
simply are played upon after war has been brought into existence in
order to keep the common soldiers keyed up to their task. The more
horrible a depersonalized scientific mass war becomes, the more
necessary it is to find universal ideal motives to justify it. Love of
Helen of Troy has become a burning love for all humanity, and hatred of
the foe symbolizes a hatred of all the unrighteousness and injustice and
oppression which he embodies. The more prosaic the actual causes, the
more necessary is it to find glowingly sublime motives.
Such considerations hardly prove that war is to be abolished at some
future date. But they destroy that argument for its necessary
continuance which is based on the immutability of specified forces in
original human nature. Already the forces that once caused wars have
found other outlets for themselves; while new provocations, based on new
economic and political conditions, have come into being. War is thus
seen to be a function of social institutions, not of what is natively
fixed in human constitution. The last great war has not, it must be
confessed, made the problem of finding social equivalents simpler and
easier. It is now naive to attribute war to specific isolable human
impulses for which separate channels of expression may be found, while
the rest of life is left to go on about the same. A general social
re-organization is needed which will redistribute forces, immunize,
divert and nullify. Hinton was doubtless right when he wrote that the
only way to abolish war was to make peace heroic. It now appears that
the heroic emotions are not anything which may be specialized in a
side-line, so that the war-impulses may find a sublimation in special
practices and occupations. They have to get an outlet in all the tasks
of peace.
The argument for the abiding necessity of war turns out, accordingly, to
have this much value. It makes us wisely suspicious of all cheap and
easy equivalencies. It convinces us of the folly of striving to
eliminate war by agencies which leave other institutions of society
pretty much unchanged. History does not prove the inevitability of war,
but it does prove that customs and institutions which organize native
powers into certain patterns in politics and economics will also
generate the war-pattern. The problem of war is difficult because it is
serious. It is none other than the wider problem of the effective
moralizing or humanizing of native impulses in times of peace.
The case of economic institutions is as suggestive as that of war. The
present system is indeed much more recent and more local than is the
institution of war. But no system has ever as yet existed which did not
in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the
advantage of others. And it is argued that this trait is unassailable
because it flows from the inherent, immutable qualities of human nature.
It is argued, for example, that economic inferiorities and disabilities
are incidents of an institution of private property which flows from an
original proprietary instinct; it is contended they spring from a
competitive struggle for wealth which in turn flows from the absolute
need of profit as an inducement to industry. The pleas are worth
examination for the light they throw upon the place of impulses in
organized conduct.
No unprejudiced observer will lightly deny the existence of an original
tendency to assimilate objects and events to the self, to make them part
of the "me." We may even admit that the "me" cannot exist without the
"mine." The self gets solidity and form through an appropriation of
things which identifies them with whatever we call myself. Even a
workman in a modern factory where depersonalization is extreme gets to
have "his" machine and is perturbed at a change. Possession shapes and
consolidates the "I" of philosophers. "I own, therefore I am" expresses
a truer psychology than the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." A man's
deeds are imputed to him as their owner, not merely as their creator.
That he cannot disown them when the moment of their occurrence passes is
the root of responsibility, moral as well as legal.
But these same considerations evince the versatility of possessive
activity. My worldly goods, my good name, my friends, my honor and shame
all depend upon a possessive tendency. The need for appropriation has
had to be satisfied; but only a calloused imagination fancies that the
institution of private property as it exists A. D. 1921 is the sole or
the indispensable means of its realization. Every gallant life is an
experiment in different ways of fulfilling it. It expends itself in
predatory aggression, in forming friendships, in seeking fame, in
literary creation, in scientific production. In the face of this
elasticity, it requires an arrogant ignorance to take the existing
complex system of stocks and bonds, of wills and inheritance, a system
supported at every point by manifold legal and political arrangements,
and treat it as the sole legitimate and baptized child of an instinct of
appropriation. Sometimes, even now, a man most accentuates the fact of
ownership when he gives something away; use, consumption, is the normal
end of possession. We can conceive a state of things in which the
proprietary impulse would get full satisfaction by holding goods as mine
in just the degree in which they were visibly administered for a benefit
in which a corporate community shared.
Does the case stand otherwise with the other psychological principle
appealed to, namely, the need of an incentive of personal profit to keep
men engaged in useful work? We need not content ourselves with pointing
out the elasticity of the idea of gain, and possible equivalences for
pecuniary gain, and the possibility of a state of affairs in which only
those things would be counted personal gains which profit a group. It
will advance the discussion if we instead subject to analysis the whole
conception of incentive and motive.
There is doubtless some sense in saying that every conscious act has an
incentive or motive. But this sense is as truistic as that of the not
dissimilar saying that every event has a cause. Neither statement throws
any light on any particular occurrence. It is at most a maxim which
advises us to search for some other fact with which the one in question
may be correlated. Those who attempt to defend the necessity of existing
economic institutions as manifestations of human nature convert this
suggestion of a concrete inquiry into a generalized truth and hence into
a definitive falsity. They take the saying to mean that nobody would do
anything, or at least anything of use to others, without a prospect of
some tangible reward. And beneath this false proposition there is
another assumption still more monstrous, namely, that man exists
naturally in a state of rest so that he requires some external force to
set him into action.
The idea of a thing intrinsically wholly inert in the sense of
absolutely passive is expelled from physics and has taken refuge in the
psychology of current economics. In truth man acts anyway, he can't help
acting. In every fundamental sense it is false that a man requires a
motive to make him do something. To a healthy man inaction is the
greatest of woes. Any one who observes children knows that while periods
of rest are natural, laziness is an acquired vice--or virtue. While a
man is awake he will do something, if only to build castles in the air.
If we like the form of words we may say that a man eats only because he
is "moved" by hunger. The statement is nevertheless mere tautology. For
what does hunger mean except that one of the things which man does
naturally, instinctively, is to search for food--that his activity
naturally turns that way? Hunger primarily names an act or active
process not a motive to an act. It is an act if we take it grossly, like
a babe's blind hunt for the mother's breast; it is an activity if we
take it minutely as a chemico-physiological occurrence.
The whole concept of motives is in truth extra-psychological. It is an
outcome of the attempt of men to influence human action, first that of
others, then of a man to influence his own behavior. No sensible person
thinks of attributing the acts of an animal or an idiot to a motive. We
call a biting dog ugly, but we don't look for his motive in biting. If
however we were able to direct the dog's action by inducing him to
reflect upon his acts, we should at once become interested in the dog's
motives for acting as he does, and should endeavor to get him interested
in the same subject. It is absurd to ask what induces a man to activity
generally speaking. He is an active being and that is all there is to be
said on that score. But when we want to get him to act in this specific
way rather than in that, when we want to direct his activity that is to
say in a specified channel, then the question of motive is pertinent. A
motive is then that element in the total complex of a man's activity
which, if it can be sufficiently stimulated, will result in an act
having specified consequences. And part of the process of intensifying
(or reducing) certain elements in the total activity and thus regulating
actual consequence is to impute these elements to a person as his
actuating motives.
A child naturally grabs food. But he does it in our presence. His manner
is socially displeasing and we attribute to his act, up to this time
wholly innocent, the motive of greed or selfishness. Greediness simply
means the quality of his act as socially observed and disapproved. But
by attributing it to him as his motive for acting in the disapproved
way, we induce him to refrain. We analyze his total act and call his
attention to an obnoxious element in its outcome. A child with equal
spontaneity, or thoughtlessness, gives way to others. We point out to
him with approval that he acted considerately, generously. And this
quality of action when noted and encouraged becomes a reinforcing
stimulus of that factor which will induce similar acts in the future. An
element in an act viewed as a tendency to produce such and such
consequences is a motive. A motive does not exist prior to an act and
produce it. It is an act _plus_ a judgment upon some element of it, the
judgment being made in the light of the consequences of the act.
At first, as was said, others characterize an act with favorable or
condign qualities which they impute to an agent's character. They react
in this fashion in order to encourage him in future acts of the same
sort, or in order to dissuade him--in short to build or destroy a habit.
This characterization is part of the technique of influencing the
development of character and conduct. It is a refinement of the ordinary
reactions of praise and blame. After a time and to some extent, a person
teaches himself to think of the results of acting in this way or that
before he acts. He recalls that if he acts this way or that some
observer, real or imaginary, will attribute to him noble or mean
disposition, virtuous or vicious motive. Thus he learns to influence his
own conduct. An inchoate activity taken in this forward-looking
reference to results, especially results of approbation and
condemnation, constitutes a motive. Instead then of saying that a man
requires a motive in order to induce him to act, we should say that when
a man is going to act he needs to know _what_ he is going to do--what
the quality of his act is in terms of consequences to follow. In order
to act properly he needs to view his act as others view it; namely, as a
manifestation of a character or will which is good or bad according as
it is bent upon specific things which are desirable or obnoxious. There
is no call to furnish a man with incentives to activity in general. But
there is every need to induce him to guide his own action by an
intelligent perception of its results. For in the long run this is the
most effective way of influencing activity to take this desirable
direction rather than that objectionable one.
A motive in short is simply an impulse viewed as a constituent in a
habit, a factor in a disposition. In general its meaning is simple. But
in fact motives are as numerous as are original impulsive activities
multiplied by the diversified consequences they produce as they operate
under diverse conditions. How then does it come about that current
economic psychology has so tremendously oversimplified the situation?
Why does it recognize but one type of motive, that which concerns
personal gain. Of course part of the answer is to be found in the
natural tendency in all sciences toward a substitution of artificial
conceptual simplifications for the tangles of concrete empirical facts.
But the significant part of the answer has to do with the social
conditions under which work is done, conditions which are such as to put
an unnatural emphasis upon the prospect of reward. It exemplifies again
our leading proposition that social customs are not direct and necessary
consequences of specific impulses, but that social institutions and
expectations shape and crystallize impulses into dominant habits.
The social peculiarity which explains the emphasis put upon profit as an
inducement to productive serviceable work stands out in high relief in
the identification of work with labor. For labor means in economic
theory something painful, something so onerously disagreeable or
"costly" that every individual avoids it if he can, and engages in it
only because of the promise of an overbalancing gain. Thus the question
we are invited to consider is what the social condition is which makes
productive work uninteresting and toilsome. Why is the psychology of the
industrialist so different from that of inventor, explorer, artist,
sportsman, scientific investigator, physician, teacher? For the latter
we do not assert that activity is such a burdensome sacrifice that it is
engaged in only because men are bribed to act by hope of reward or are
coerced by fear of loss.
The social conditions under which "labor" is undertaken have become so
uncongenial to human nature that it is not undertaken because of
intrinsic meaning. It is carried on under conditions which render it
immediately irksome. The alleged need of an incentive to stir men out of
quiescent inertness is the need of an incentive powerful enough to
overcome contrary stimuli which proceed from the social conditions.
Circumstances of productive service now shear away direct satisfaction
from those engaging in it. A real and important fact is thus contained
in current economic psychology, but it is a fact about existing
industrial conditions and not a fact about native, original activity.
It is "natural" for activity to be agreeable. It tends to find
fulfilment, and finding an outlet is itself satisfactory, for it marks
partial accomplishment. If productive activity has become so inherently
unsatisfactory that men have to be artificially induced to engage in it,
this fact is ample proof that the conditions under which work is carried
on balk the complex of activities instead of promoting them, irritate
and frustrate natural tendencies instead of carrying them forward to
fruition. Work then becomes labor, the consequence of some aboriginal
curse which forces man to do what he would not do if he could help it,
the outcome of some original sin which excluded man from a paradise in
which desire was satisfied without industry, compelling him to pay for
the means of livelihood with the sweat of his brow. From which it
follows naturally that Paradise Regained means the accumulation of
investments such that a man can live upon their return without labor.
There is, we repeat, too much truth in this picture. But it is not a
truth concerning original human nature and activity. It concerns the
form human impulses have taken under the influence of a specific social
environment. If there are difficulties in the way of social
alteration--as there certainly are--they do not lie in an original
aversion of human nature to serviceable action, but in the historic
conditions which have differentiated the work of the laborer for wage
from that of the artist, adventurer, sportsman, soldier, administrator
and speculator.
IV
War and the existing economic regime have not been discussed primarily
on their own account. They are crucial cases of the relation existing
between original impulse and acquired habit. They are so fraught with
evil consequences that any one who is disposed can heap up criticisms
without end. Nevertheless they persist. This persistence constitutes the
case for the conservative who argues that such institutions are rooted
in an unalterable human nature. A truer psychology locates the
difficulty elsewhere. It shows that the trouble lies in the inertness of
established habit. No matter how accidental and irrational the
circumstances of its origin, no matter how different the conditions
which now exist to those under which the habit was formed, the latter
persists until the environment obstinately rejects it. Habits once
formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native
stock of activities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select,
concentrate and organize the latter into their own likeness. They create
out of the formless void of impulses a world made in their own image.
Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.
Recognition of the correct psychology locates the problem but does not
guarantee its solution. Indeed, at first sight it seems to indicate that
every attempt to solve the problem and secure fundamental
reorganizations is caught in a vicious circle. For the direction of
native activity depends upon acquired habits, and yet acquired habits
can be modified only by redirection of impulses. Existing institutions
impose their stamp, their superscription, upon impulse and instinct.
They embody the modifications the latter have undergone. How then can we
get leverage for changing institutions? How shall impulse exercise that
re-adjusting office which has been claimed for it? Shall we not have to
depend in the future as in the past upon upheaval and accident to
dislocate customs so as to release impulses to serve as points of
departure for new habits?
The existing psychology of the industrial worker for example is slack,
irresponsible, combining a maximum of mechanical routine with a maximum
of explosive, unregulated impulsiveness. These things have been bred by
the existing economic system. But they exist, and are formidable
obstacles to social change. We cannot breed in men the desire to get
something for as nearly nothing as possible and in the end not pay the
price. We satisfy ourselves cheaply by preaching the charm of
productivity and by blaming the inherent selfishness of human nature,
and urging some great moral and religious revival. The evils point in
reality to the necessity of a change in economic institutions, but
meantime they offer serious obstacles to the change. At the same time,
the existing economic system has enlisted in behalf of its own
perpetuity the managerial and the technological abilities which must
serve the cause of the laborer if he is to be emancipated. In the face
of these difficulties other persons seek an equally cheap satisfaction
in the thought of universal civil war and revolution.
Is there any way out of the vicious circle? In the first place, there
are possibilities resident in the education of the young which have
never yet been taken advantage of. The idea of universal education is as
yet hardly a century old, and it is still much more of an idea than a
fact, when we take into account the early age at which it terminates for
the mass. Also, thus far schooling has been largely utilized as a
convenient tool of the existing nationalistic and economic regimes.
Hence it is easy to point out defects and perversions in every existing
school system. It is easy for a critic to ridicule the religious
devotion to education which has characterized for example the American
republic. It is easy to represent it as zeal without knowledge,
fanatical faith apart from understanding. And yet the cold fact of the
situation is that the chief means of continuous, graded, economical
improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing the opportunities
of educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire.
The young are not as yet as subject to the full impact of established
customs. Their life of impulsive activity is vivid, flexible,
experimenting, curious. Adults have their habits formed, fixed, at least
comparatively. They are the subjects, not to say victims, of an
environment which they can directly change only by a maximum of effort
and disturbance. They may not be able to perceive clearly the needed
changes, or be willing to pay the price of effecting them. Yet they wish
a different life for the generation to come. In order to realize that
wish they may create a special environment whose main function is
education. In order that education of the young be efficacious in
inducing an improved society, it is not necessary for adults to have a
formulated definite ideal of some better state. An educational
enterprise conducted in this spirit would probably end merely in
substituting one rigidity for another.
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