Chapter I: Preface

Now that the long labor of writing this book is done, what does it all amount to? Only the reader can answer this question; but perhaps the reader’s labor can be facilitated by knowing what moved the author to write. This, then, as nearly as I can tell the story, is the way it all happened.

Imagine yourself to be the following kind of polyglot being: Your daily occupation is teaching the principles of education with particular reference to the formation of moral and religious character; you have taken some part in developing the psychology of religion, and you teach a class in this subject also; you are likewise keenly interested in the movements of the religious and social life of our time.

On each of these three sides of you there emerges one and the same problem--the dynamics of mind, specifically the human mind. As teacher of education you must consider what motives are in operation in both adult life and child life, how selection among them is made, and how some can be caused to grow, and others not to grow. As student of the psychology of religion you must inquire what it is that allures men into their enormous involvement in religious practices and institutions. As churchman and as citizen of the world you pause before the waning influence of churches upon civilization, and before the waxing influence of industrialism; and you cannot ignore either the large-scale ignoble conduct that we are witnessing or the cynical explanations of it that are rife.

Thus the task of identifying the good and the evil at the springs of conduct forces itself upon you. Scientific psychology meets your curiosity only half way, or less than half way. Until recently it has been too little interested in mental dynamics; it has felt a compulsion to generalize the human and sub-human, the mental and the biological, the biological and the physical, with no corresponding concentration upon the specific performances of the human mind; it has been, that is to say, _self-forgetting_; and, even now that the dynamic problem is coming to the fore, the question what we human beings specifically are, dynamically considered, has only begun to be asked.

But, surrounding the uncertainties of technical psychology, there is a world of certainties, or at least assumptions, on the part of “practical” men. The nature of “human nature” has become everybody’s concern. From our sex-tangles up through our industrial and economic tangles to our international tangles, some notion of human motives is a controlling factor in thought and policy. Literature is, of course, saturated with assumptions concerning the springs of action. With great frequency in recent years exposition of such assumptions has been the theme of fiction and of drama. The schools and the churches, on their part, make one or another view of our motives the base-line of all their planning.

A general survey of this partly technical but mostly untechnical mass of opinions appears to be worth undertaking. It is doubly needed just now because there is extensive and growing dissent from assumptions concerning the inherent nobility of our nature that were taken for granted not so long ago. We have entered upon a period of spiritual depression. The opinion may be ventured, moreover, that some view of human motives is going to be the turning point of every perilous issue in modern life and civilization.

This is the area that I have surveyed. I have done it with any critical apparatus that I could lay my hands upon, not scrupling to place side by side considerations drawn from psychology, biology, current history, education, and common experience.

Throughout my treatment of this theme I have freely applied valuational terms such as “good,” “bad,” “high,” and “low” to facts of conduct and to motives, and I have treated various experiences as desirable or undesirable. This involves an assumption, of course. For it is possible to entertain a view of motivation that forbids us to think that anything is better than anything else.

I bring to life; I bring to death.
I know no more.

It has seemed unnecessary to confront this view with a theory of valuation; rather, I have taken for granted--as even the exponents of a-morality do when their theory has to be defended--that better and worse have objective meaning. Further, I have assumed the validity of the general trend of valuations that has already put the common good above egoistic satisfactions, and that would add to physiological welfare a growing experience of knowledge, beauty, and fellowship.

An invitation to give the Nathaniel Taylor lectures at the Divinity School of Yale University in the spring of 1926 jogged me into the present effort to systematize problems and considerations that long had made my roof their habitation. The interest that was shown in the problem of the lectures--for which, as well as the jogging just mentioned I am deeply indebted--instead of making me ready to print, drove me to further study. As a consequence, though the general organization of the discussion still follows the course of the four lectures, additional problems have been attacked, the material has been multiplied, and further solutions have been offered.

George A. Coe.

_In the Sunshine,
Glendora, California,
May, 1928._

CONTENTS

PAGE
Preface v

INTRODUCTION

I On Having a Good Supply of Wants 3

PART I
DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO
HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

II Our Belief in Man Yesterday and Today 7
III What the War Did to Our Belief in Man 12
IV Has the Theory of Evolution Degraded Us in Our Own Eyes? 21
V The Irrationality of Man as a Literary Motif 27
VI Has Psychology Undermined Our Self-Respect? 36
VII According to Industrialism, “What Is Man?” 47
VIII The Dilemma of Christianity 56

PART II
THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY

IX The Precise Nature of the Issue 69
X “Human Nature Being What It Is” 73
XI Some Notes on the Psychology of Motivation 80
XII Childhood as a Revealer of Human Capacities 95
XIII Capacities Revealed by New Types of Education 104
XIV Smallness in Great Men and Greatness in Small Men 112
XV The Mixed Motives of Business 120
XVI Motives of the Workingman 129
XVII Economic Production as a Mode of Self-Realization 135
XVIII The Motive That Is in All and Through All 143

PART III
YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE

XIX The Cynic Interjects a Question 151
XX Our “Lower” Nature Does Not Explain Our Bondage 156
XXI How Reason Itself Binds Us to the Irrational 164
XXII The Deep Depravity of Our Respectable Faults 170
XXIII Even Our Passions Are Precedent-Ridden 178
XXIV Free Men Fear Their Freedom. Why? 185
XXV The Motives of Youth Compared with Those of Age 196

PART IV
HOW CAN THEY BE RELEASED?

XXVI The Inescapable Task 209
XXVII The Function of Minorities 216
XXVIII Release Through Cooperative Thinking 230
XXIX My Intractable Self 242
XXX The Realm of Free Spirits 252

Index 261