Chapter V: Part II: This Disillusionment Is Itself Illusory (1)

IX

THE PRECISE NATURE OF THE ISSUE

The disillusionment that creeps over twentieth-century man concerns, not the ability of the universe to supply what he desires, but his own capacity for really desiring anything greatly significant. Are our springs of action, then, all necessarily narrow, selfish, or sensual, and do we merely delude ourselves when we fancy that our souls have wings?

It is conceivable that we have wings, but that the surrounding atmosphere is not of sufficient density to sustain us in flight. In this case an old form of pessimism would be justifiable. We should be able to respect ourselves, but we should complain against the nature that brought us forth and now envelops us. The situation would have all the elements of the deepest tragedy--two irreconcilables meeting, and producing unrelievable woe thereby.

The general trend of our day is not towards pessimism of this kind. Modern man assumes, on the whole, that the world is large enough for our nature, and that his job is to get out of it what’s there. No slackening of enterprise confronts us, little world-weariness; rather unprecedented eagerness to explore, master, and appropriate. Nature does not scare and oppress us as she used to do, and she is immensely more responsive to our desires since the sciences taught us how to predict. Accordingly, not disappointed bitterness, not renunciation nor resignation, but exploitation is the characteristic attitude. “The world is my oyster.”

What directly affects our idealism, then, is not any general lack of exuberance in nature, but the conviction that there is a special lack at one point. What we want is there, it is believed, but our wants, our springs of action, are scant. It is assumed that we cannot want the common welfare as much as we want profits; that we cannot desire world-fellowship as much as we desire the perquisites of our present war-making system of economy; that sex-appetite never can be made to play a harmonious part in a symphony of life; and that aspiration for communion with the divine is a refined and self-deceived form of the very forces that religion fancies that it is bringing under control.

Our question concerns the truth of this view. Is it borne out by the facts? If it is not borne out by the facts, then another question will confront us. To conclude that we are capable of high motives is not to affirm that we live up to our capacities. He who is most ardently respectful towards human nature will not deny that we live below them. How, then, does this come about?

An old answer is that we are fundamentally at variance with ourselves. On one side of our nature, it was said, we are divine or at least have a spark of divinity, but on another side we are of the earth, earthy. Others affirm that to be conscious is to desire, and that desire, in and of itself, is a state of division and inherently painful, and that relief can be had only through the extinction of consciousness. Upon this supposed disunity with self another sort of pessimism has been built. However high some of our motivation may be, and whatever the rest of the universe is like, it is said, we are doomed to defeat through self-frustration.

Even if we found deep grounds for self-respect, therefore, the spirit of disillusionment with reference to ourselves might not be wholly exorcized. In the present Part evidence will be given that neither the generalizations of science nor the run of everyday experience can justify the mood that has overflowed us. But this will have the effect of plunging us into an even more difficult problem--that of understanding the contrarieties within our nature. This will be the theme of Part III, and in Part IV the question will become, how to manage these contrarieties.

As far as the case permits, this line of inquiry postpones the problems usually called metaphysical. But they will hover near our every step, and the conclusions that we reach will necessarily have a metaphysical squint. If we can respect ourselves after looking one another squarely in the face, then score one for the universe that brought us forth! It is not altogether shabby. This we could maintain even if what is found worthy of respect should be in unresolvable conflict with some negative principle either within or without. For then the world-system would bring forth tragedy, which is the opposite of littleness and meanness. Tragedy is possible only in a world that contains inherent greatness. Even if some ultimate defeat awaits us, who knows what dignity man might attain by some superior method of meeting his fate?

But if, as I hope to show in the concluding division, there are ways in which we can utilize even the contrarieties of our nature--if we can win victories even through our defeats--then this, too, will suggest something concerning our world-system. An experience like this is an experience of freedom--an _experience_ of freedom, not proof except in the sense that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Such experience would, however, become a datum for any metaphysics that fully takes in man. But all this belongs in the final section of the book.

X

“HUMAN NATURE BEING WHAT IT IS”

Two lines of thought are discernible in the minds of those who judge that human motivation is and must remain of low quality, namely, generalizations from direct observation of the life about us, and inferences from the truth that we are a part of nature and a manifestation of her unchanging laws. Both these grounds must be considered. I shall show, in the present section, what is implied as to motivation in our being enmeshed in the totality of animate nature; in the following section attention will be given to the bearing of current psychology upon our problem, and afterwards, I shall endeavor to pluck some of the fruits of direct observation.

For more than half a century, now, naturalistic views of man have had their center in the theory of evolution. We have come to know ourselves as blood relatives of the species that we call lower, and “blood relative” has come to mean not only bodily but also mental kinship. This, of itself, would scarcely argue anything as to the level of our capacities as compared with the level of the beasts, for various levels of conduct and apparently of capacity exist within our own species. It is not the fact of kinship, but the fact of law and continuity within this kinship that seems to furnish a basis for moderating our self-respect. Law is interpreted as if we were fatalistically assigned our place, and continuity is interpreted in the sense of sameness with that from which we have sprung. Hence the notion that, “human nature being what it is” by virtue of our place in the evolutionary order, our motives are only complex forms of the impulses that we find in the lower animals.

Yet the story of development is a story of variation, of variation piled upon variation, and of sudden mutations. The continuity that pervades the whole is continuity of process, not the perpetuation of sameness. The connectedness of nature’s forms is like the connectedness of a merchant’s goods--all were acquired by purchase, all will be disposed of by sale; all appear in the same inventory and upon the same ledger; they have all this in common, and there is this continuity from one piece of merchandise to another. But this says nothing as to the range of differences. It was said of one of the great London “stores” some years ago that it would accept orders for any kind of commodity known to man.

By means of natural law we can pass from any event in nature to any other event, just as by the merchant’s books he can pass--say--from a necktie to a delivery truck. But, just as unprecedented kinds of goods may be bought and sold without interrupting the system, so unprecedented natural events may occur, and unprecedented forms of life may appear, without any breach of continuity. Evolution is, indeed, not repetition of the same, but the bringing forth of that which is not the same. Expectancy is the atmosphere appropriate to it. Not that progress is implicit in evolution as such, but rather plasticity, roominess, and versatility. The fact that usually the development of new organs and new species takes place through the gradual accumulation of slight changes does not alter the logic of the situation; gradualness of change does not mean sameness. Even if it did, the fact of mutations would still confront us.

As we have bodily organs that once were non-existent anywhere in our world-system, so we perform functions that are special to us. Instances will be given in a moment; but before going on to them, it is worth remarking that the argument from kinship to sameness works just as well backward as forward. If it be maintained that the blood relationship between an Abraham Lincoln and a coyote implies that the impulsions of the two are the same, it then becomes just as legitimate--and illegitimate--to interpret the coyote by Lincoln as the reverse.

Let us now examine a case or two of our immersion within the totality of animate nature. The statement has been made that the whole of human conduct turns upon two fundamental drives, the appetite for food and the appetite for sex. The reasoning by which this broad generalization is supported starts with the assumption that survival is the all-inclusive objective of organic impulses. Survival means, however, according to circumstances, either continuance of an individual life, or maintenance of a species. Nutrition, it is said, is the basic condition of individual survival; reproduction, that of species survival. Hence the conclusion is drawn that human life is ruled by just two drives, each proliferating into many details, the drive for food and the drive for sex-intercourse.

The theory has the attractiveness of simplicity, at least apparent simplicity; but it is the simplicity of abstractions substituted for the complexity of concrete facts. First of all, “survival,” “individual,” and “species” are our after-thoughts, products of our reflection and systematization. They are not a description of the facts of animal conduct or of human conduct. We can perceive that a given act is related to survival, but this by no means proves that survival was in any sense an objective of the act.

In the second place, the two-drive theory is not fundamental in its own sense of the term “fundamental drive.” For, since sexual reproduction is known to have been preceded by a-sexual, and since a-sexual reproduction roots in cell-division as a phase of nutrition, the conclusion, upon the assumed basis, should be that there is only one basic drive, the nutritional!

In the third place, the theory confuses instead of clarifying human conduct in the sphere of sex and reproduction. Desire for sex-relations is not by any means the same as desire for offspring or for the maintenance of our species. Our race had been on the scene a long time before anybody suspected the causal relation between the sex function and the birth of babies. Desire for children does not root in sex appetite; it arises only after being with children. Desire for the maintenance of our species arises, of course, only through reflection, and its object is apprehended only through imagination. As a matter of unadorned fact, does not the sex-impulsion in human beings struggle to free itself from all necessary association with reproduction?

A fourth consideration concerns the other supposedly basic and inclusive drive, the nutritional. If we take the impulse to eat in its primary and simple sense, then we must see that a plentiful supply of food at any moment produces quiescence of food-getting activities; a full belly is, so to say, the _summum bonum_ of this branch of motivation. But the theory goes on to classify with food-getting a whole lot of other activities of getting, storing, guarding, and competing--almost the whole economic system, indeed. In subsequent chapters (15 and 16) we shall see how complicated, in fact, is the motivation of our system of production and distribution. At the present moment it is sufficient to point out how strained is the theory that all our individualistic getting is at bottom food-getting, and that all individualistic getting is directed towards the prolongation of the individual’s existence.

Thus far our considerations are negative; but there are positive ones also. For it can be shown that within these two general areas unprecedented inclinations, or likes and dislikes, have repeatedly arrived. Sex-inclinations are the most easily-read instance. Since sexual reproduction was preceded by a-sexual, the sex-appetite in its totality had a beginning; it entered into a system in which it had been non-existent; it was an utterly new attraction. Moreover, it has undergone modifications and reversals. In some species promiscuity is attractive; in others sex-inclination spontaneously selects one permanent mate--among the pigeons, for example. In the case of man, so many differentiations, and such profound ones, have taken place that we are put to it to make our terminology consistent. Shall we classify the satisfaction that personal beauty in the opposite sex gives us as sexual, esthetic, or both? Certainly there was a stage in evolution at which appreciation of beauty had nothing whatever to do with sex. And what shall we say of mental graces--of wit, humor, originality, sincerity, good taste? These attract men toward women and women toward men; somehow these primarily non-sexual mental graces become a sex bond. It is clear, then, that this drive is no single, unchanging thing; it is the scene and area of spontaneous, new, unprecedented inclinations; its first, raw stages, which chiefly attract biological interest, taken by themselves, misrepresent the truth as much as they represent it. Would it be old-fashioned, or rather merely “getting up to date,” to add that fellowship between two personal spirits, recognizing and prizing and cultivating themselves as such, and therefore placing the primary sex-relation upon a basis of mutual respect and reverence--that such fellowship must be recognized and appreciated if one is to understand the sex drive as a human desire and motive?

A similar creativeness in the realm of drives has appeared somewhere in the world in relation to every type of human desire. The interests of men do not move in any straight line; they dart and quiver; explore, discover, make new habitations, and then migrate from the homes that they have builded for themselves. There was a time, for example, when our ancestors had no taste, no drive, for artistic creation. But at last there arose--we need not stop to say by what stages--a satisfaction that was not entirely dependent upon utility or consumption. Objects began to be made for the pleasure that the mere sight of them gave. Here is the evolution of a new species of motivation. We might almost say “species” in the biological sense, for art-interests breed freely among themselves but tend to become infertile when they are crossed with other interests.

The existence of the sciences, of which the doctrine of evolution is a conspicuous part, may itself be taken as an example of the emergence of a new motive. For here bursts forth a self-sustaining impulsion to intellectual activity that is free from fear, free from authority, and free from utilitarian considerations. Here intelligence not only rises above the clod, not only disengages its interests from all the conditions of biological survival, but also reverses itself. For science is a mighty damming back of the historical momentum of mind, and the creation of new channels for its flow. Indeed, the emergence of individual and social self-criticism, whether in the scientific or the ethical sphere, would of itself be sufficient to prove that we belong to an order in which superior motivation can evolve out of inferior.

Said a youthful and inexperienced fish to an old and experienced one in the long, long ago before there were any land animals, “What fun it is to leap into the air! I wonder what it would be like to live on the land and only occasionally take a bath in water, just as we live in the water and only occasionally take a bath in air.” “Nonsense!” replied the old and experienced fish. “Nobody could enjoy living in the air. How would one breathe? Your gills would dry up, and you would suffocate. The idea is contrary to nature and perfectly preposterous!”

XI

SOME NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTIVATION

Various phases of current psychology and would-be psychology--methods, points of view, particular facts--have given an apparent color of scientific justification, as we have seen, to the popular estimate of our motivation. We have done them full justice as part causes of the tendency to disillusionment, but we have not yet asked how far they logically justify it. This is the question that we now have to consider.

The attribution to psychology of magisterial authority in the realm of the interests of life is a bit of popular superstition. Probably something of the thrill evoked by the thought of unseen ghostly forces is in it; certainly it contains an over-wrought estimate of the psychologist, as though he had something of the medicine-man in him. Psychologists themselves know better, of course. Anyone who has observed the development of the science since, say, James published his two massive and fascinating volumes knows that cross-currents and choppy seas and changeable winds prevail in this quarter. The enormous expenditure of labor and of resources is, indeed, justified by the results, partly because a substantial body of detailed facts has been ascertained, and partly because basic issues as to subject-matter, method, and interpretation have been brought to the fore. But these issues have not been settled to the satisfaction of psychologists themselves, who are divided into several apparently irreconcilable groups. And it is these basic issues that are chiefly important when we seek light upon our life-policies.

The problem of human motivation, for example--the ascertainment of both our actual motives and our capacities for motives--is not a matter of simple detail, like color-blindness or the curve of learning in typewriting. Rather, it seems as though we can scarcely touch the edges of motivation without plunging at once into the difficulties that are systemic to the science as a whole. First and foremost is the difficulty involved in the atomistic conception of analysis, a conception taken over from the physical sciences before they had reached their present insight into the all-embracing sweep of dynamic problems. It was taken for granted that to analyse mental life is to look for simple mental elements that correspond to material corpuscles characterized by what Whitehead calls “simple location.” Then it was assumed--simply assumed--that mind is an aggregate of simple elements and that mental dynamic (very little attended to until recently) corresponds to this supposed aggregate of quasi-independent elements. That is, the main tradition of scientific psychology runs to the effect that our whole behavior is actuated by particular relations of a mechanical sort between elements (psychical or psycho-physical) that are as remote from experience as atoms.

This amounted, practically, to making a concept of method--a type of analysis--guarantee a particular metaphysics. The incontinence of the thing has been repeatedly pointed out from the early days of the present psychological movement. First, all the logical objections to English associationism applied here. Next, eminent psychologists of the new type--Ladd, Münsterberg and (in a sense) James--warned us that simple sensations or other mental elements are not existing things, but only mental constructs of the psychologists, a kind of technical language, like equations or statistical curves. Finally, the physical prototypes from which the psychological assumption took its start, such as corpuscular indivisible atoms, have now been resolved by physics into systems of a dynamic sort. Whitehead maintains that the whole physical conception of elements and aggregates must now be replaced by that of organism--the parts are not before the whole, and the real wholes or organisms are dynamic, not corpuscular.

Meantime, there have been specific happenings in psychology that bear upon our quest. The chief recognition of the dynamic problem came through the theory of instincts. At first there appeared a tendency to attribute every main division of conduct to an instinct. Thus, the fact of reproduction was referred to an instinct of reproduction; moral conduct to a moral instinct; religion to a religious instinct; esthetic interests to an esthetic instinct, etc. This was, of course, a crude popular starting point, and the particulars had to be refined, but psychology did little more with mental dynamics for a long time than just reorganize or refine some old list of instincts. The number increased and the generality decreased. Instead of a social instinct, we have, it is held, a whole group of instincts that care for particular phases of our associated life--a gregarious instinct, a motherly or parental instinct, an instinct for dominance, and for submission, for example. But there never was any approximation to an accepted list, nor does there appear to be any sure way to determine the matter.

The instincts, whatever they are, have been taken, as a rule, as so many drives or impulsions not only rooted in our nature but also destined to express themselves willy-nilly; and the totality of instincts has been accepted as constituting the total drive of a man. But, over and above the fact that the list of instincts is unstable, this theory of the human drive encounters numerous obstacles.

In the _first_ place, some of the instincts apply only within situations that may or may not arise. Fear-reactions, under some circumstances, have the marks usually attributed to instinct, but it does not follow that we have any drive towards fear. Similarly, pugnacity appears when experience takes a certain form, as restraint or attack from another, but pugnacity in the sense of not being at peace with oneself unless one can fight somebody else appears to be non-existent.

In the _second_ place, habit plays an enormous rôle in the entire matter. That is, the outfit of instincts, if there is such an outfit, does not determine the configuration of the drives in any individual. Here is the general truth that underlies the possibly doubtful theory of sublimation. Apparently instincts can atrophy; certainly what are called instincts can be either active or quiescent.

_Third_, “satisfiers and annoyers,” as Thorndike calls them, are not identical with instincts in every case. There are conditions in which it is annoying not to act, and other conditions in which it is annoying to act. Further, as he likewise maintains, there are “original tendencies of the original tendencies,” as to repeat, to form habits, to organize; and, finally, there is the fact of self-criticism, with its impelling or restraining influence exercised from the standpoint of the whole rather than of any specific instinct. More of this later.

_Fourth_, further study of our drives increases the certainty of their enormous plasticity. Woodworth has maintained that any mental mechanism can become a drive, that is, that we can develop a positive interest in and tendency to repeat anything that we ever do--we can “take an interest” in anything. Watson, too, from his point of view, and with his own conception of the method, holds that a man can acquire practically any qualities. “Condition” the few original reflexes in appropriate manner, and you will make of an individual a religious devotee, a monster of vice, or what you will. Finally, the whole notion that we possess an equipment of just such and so many instincts is threatened, not only from the Watsonian angle but also from several others. Instincts, various writers point out, appear to be classificatory devices and nothing more.

For our present purpose it is not essential to forecast the ultimate outcome of researches that bear upon these points. It is sufficient to recognize the great range of human motivation, the great plasticity of it (that is, the indefinitely many possibilities of character for the same individual), and the organic character of it (that is, the capacity for action from the standpoint of a desired whole). Anyone who is interested in the future development of thought upon this matter will do well to watch the discussions of the concept of “organism” (Whitehead’s term) in the physical sciences and of “configuration” (an English translation of the German, _Gestalt_, as used by Koffka) or an equivalent in psychology.

The physics of today already has transcended the notion that bodies are aggregates of elements--transcended it, not upon speculative or metaphysical grounds alone, but also upon the basis of experiment and mathematical analysis. Throughout nature, so Whitehead says, any concrete actuality is a dynamic whole, a complex event, not a corpuscle or an aggregate of corpuscles. These are merely abstractions, useful in their way, but matter is not even the residence of energy. Further, these dynamic wholes act spontaneously, and they even transform themselves from within themselves--they do not wait to be acted upon like billiard balls; rather, initiative is everywhere present.

If this conception of physical nature should become the accepted view, it would remove at a stroke the methodological foundation of much psychology that regards itself as particularly entitled to be called scientific. In particular, the whole of psychology would become dynamic psychology, and motivation would be recognized as _in limine_ both organizing and self-transforming action. It is a safe guess that, in this case, _the self_ would be accorded a far less grudging place than it has had in the psychology of the last generation. Professor Calkins has recently pointed out, in fact, that several contemporary movements of psychology are converging in this general direction.

It is an interesting coincidence that the concept of organism should emerge in physics and the concept of configuration in psychology almost simultaneously. As far as I am aware, there has been no connection or interdependence between them. It is even more interesting that both concepts should spring directly from experimentation. Much more experimental research must be made before we shall definitely know just what truth there is in the _Gestalt_-psychology, and just how the concept of “configuration” applies, if it applies at all, at different levels of conduct. Prediction is precarious, and it is uncalled for; but again it lies upon the surface that here is a movement, experimental in method, that is destined, if it goes on, to instate the self as an actual determiner and organizer of behavior at the levels usually called social and ethical. And the self will not only not be conceived as an aggregate (even of forces); it will not be construed primarily by its antecedents of whatever sort. Adjustment, that is, will not be conceived as accommodation of a given organism to a given environment merely, but as also re-creation of both organism and environment. An entirely reasonable attitude might then be expressed as follows: “This is the sort of self, and this is the sort of society, that we want to be; let us, then, create educational, physiological, and economic conditions favorable thereto.”

The position of psychoanalysis in the total movement of psychology is somewhat ambiguous, or at least not well worked out. On the one hand, we have here a genuine attempt at a dynamic psychology. The object under contemplation is not the brain; it is scarcely psycho-physical; it is predominantly, almost exclusively, mental, and the mental is conceived of not as a perceiving, knowledge-getting function, but as overwhelmingly desire--designing, scheme-forming, outward-pressing desire. Further, the individual is treated predominantly as an individual rather than as an aggregate. The disorders of personality are the main interest, and the treatment of these disorders is directed toward a reorganization of the personality so that it shall function as a unit. On the other hand, the raw material of human nature appears to be much like a congeries of instincts, or a collection of wild animals each of which is ready to spring into action upon the slightest occasion. The endeavor to discover some central desire that uses these instincts for its own purposes is, indeed, a movement towards an organic view of the individual; but even the central desire, in the absence of help from the psychoanalyst, seems to have a substantially wild, instinctive quality.

“The Unconscious,” or desire before psychoanalysis has enabled it to understand itself, may be either a literal description of mental dynamics, or a symbol that psychiatrists find useful in their practice, a symbol that abstracts from the psychical actuality much as atoms and ethers do from physical actuality. That psychoanalytic treatments have some success does not prove the truth of the practitioner’s mental pictures. The Ptolemaic astronomy correctly predicted eclipses; the Mesmeric fluid, animal magnetism, the king’s touch, spirits of deceased Indian chiefs--all have been effective for purposes of mental healing. Recently a psychoanalyst, MacCurdy, has pointed out that the patient’s emotional reorganization and recovery may take place around a secondary or minor complex instead of the one that is the primary cause of the disturbance; the essential thing is to secure the proper attitude and procedure for reconstruction. The cure, then, does not prove that any theory of the contents or the processes of “the Unconscious” is correct.

There remains as evidence of the wild-animal-den view the fact that the patient himself accepts it as true in his own case. “Yes,” he says, “I see that I have desired to commit incest with my mother, or to murder my father. I didn’t realize it until now.” In other words, a psychoanalytic theory has been transferred to him in the course of the analysis. There is no evidence that he has become a psychologist, or that his ability at introspection has achieved a trustworthy stage. When witchcraft was believed, confessions were made, apparently sincere confessions, that one had “signed the Devil’s book,” or that one had done other monstrous deeds. Under questioning in court witnesses have recalled things that they never witnessed. A still closer parallel with psychoanalysis is the success of many a revivalist in convincing people of their utter moral worthlessness and helplessness, that they are creatures of the devil, moved solely by evil desires. In both cases the person who brings the relief is the one through whom the certainty of one’s inner baseness first arises.

The upshot of the evidence, then, is about as follows: Psychoanalysis has extended in important ways our knowledge of the ramifications of the sex impulses and of the impulse to egoistic dominance; it has increased our knowledge of the motivation of much that mistakenly, through “rationalization,” offers itself as reasonable conduct; it has put us upon our guard against a considerable range of self-deceptions; but it has not proved the actual existence of the diabolism that is pictured in “the Unconscious.” And let it be remembered that, in front of the patient whose mind is supposed to be a den of wild beasts, sits the psychoanalyst himself, a self-controlled, benevolent, and high-minded man. Over against the theoretical Unconscious let us place the certainly actual honor of the psychiatrist in his handling of his patient--scrupulous honor in a situation that brings to the fore the most enticing emotions and impulses.

A word should be said concerning the bearing of intelligence-tests upon our knowledge of the motives of men. There is a popular tendency, which is not altogether absent from academic circles, to jump at conclusions concerning motivation from the results of experiments upon something else. The adjectives “superior” and “inferior,” applied primarily to levels of intelligence, come almost insensibly to be a designation of levels of manhood or of decency in general. Now, the most that can be said as yet concerning the interrelations between the various desirable and undesirable factors of personal make-up is that, on the whole, the more desirable tend to bunch together, and the undesirable likewise tend to go in bunches. It cannot be said, however, that there is only one worthwhile type, and that the core of this type is superior intelligence. We do not yet know just what this “intelligence” that we have been measuring is, nor what it guarantees at its various levels. It is certain that achievement depends upon other qualities also, so that failure may attend a high IQ, and success may be won by steady and persistent employment of an intelligence distinctly lower. Wisdom and goodness and efficiency have other foundations in addition to some as yet undetermined degree of intelligence. Further, it appears that within the general concept, “intelligence,” we are required to distinguish between types. There is, for example, in addition to the abstract or conceptual type that is most cultivated in schools, a mechanical type of intelligence, very likely there is a social intelligence, and there may be others. We do not yet know, except in the vaguest way, how these varieties of intelligence are dynamically related to the requirements of wise living, either individual or social.

Yet bold conclusions have been drawn on this very point. Without waiting for any research upon the possible connections between different intelligence-levels, on the one hand, and different sorts of drives on the other not a few persons have somehow assured themselves that superiority of intelligence tends and must tend to create a ruling class and that this ruling class will automatically run affairs in its own interest, making other classes means thereto. There is scarcely a shadow of evidence for this view. History seems to show that superior intelligence has aspired to all kinds of power and all kinds of excellence. Further, it is notorious that the resort to force, and even to less external means of putting halter and bridle upon one’s fellows, is a second-class resource for those who lack strength to meet their fellows upon the basis of intelligent trust, good-will, and mutual sharing. Was it because William Penn lacked high intelligence that he treated the Indians in such an unconventional manner? The almost certain fact of a high average of intelligence among monarchs and high officials generally does not account for the specific principles upon which they administer government. For these principles run through the entire scale from Nero to Confucius, and from Louis XIV to Washington and Lincoln. If we were in position to measure the intelligence of rulers and heads of states through a considerable period of political history we might find--we probably should find--that the higher intelligence leans, on the whole, towards universal good according to the understanding of it that each period of culture makes possible; that it correlates with sensitiveness towards people, and in this sense makes for appreciation of others’ points of view and therefore for a common human measure of the good. Truly efficient love of one another may yet turn out to be the supremely satisfying accomplishment of the highest intelligence.

In the entire museum of misconstructions of intelligence-test results nothing, perhaps, is more grotesque than the inference, or assumption, that high intelligence will of course accept and profit by the motivation of industrialism in its present form. The average IQ of the financially successful is somewhat higher than that of the economically under-dog portion of the populace. In other words, the _degree_ of success is due _in some measure_ to this factor. In some measure only, for there is no evidence that all the more intelligent succeed and all the others fail; and the degree only, for in a general way intelligence connotes success in the pursuit of any end that it consents to serve, and moreover we know of particular circumstances that induce men to pursue wealth and the power that it brings. We know that the environmental influences of our time shunt men’s ambitions in particular directions. We are trained from infancy by an economic order that takes for granted the service of self rather than of others. Some persons who possess high native intelligence go in for the ends that this training promotes, and of course such persons have more than average success in getting what they want. Meantime, other possessors of the gift go in for other things--research, original production in literature and the fine arts, humanitarian service, the championship of unpopular causes, the development of a cooperative society, the promotion of religion.

Moreover, we have no comparative measures of the intelligence of different types of successful men of affairs. What should we find if we compared these three sorts: Men who rely upon compulsion; men who rely upon indirection or intrigue; and men who rely upon frankness, conciliation, and moderation? We do not know which of these would exhibit the highest intelligence; but it is allowable to guess!

The relation between the insight of the literary artist and that of the psychologist is sufficiently close to require a comment, finally, upon the evidential value of the literature of disillusion that was mentioned in Chapter V. Is it not the business of the imaginative writer, one may ask, to see life as it is; to be more sensitive than the common run of men to the devices and desires of the heart, and thus to reveal us to ourselves? Look in the mirror of current literature, then, and see what a rank thing your nature is! An appropriate part-reply to this would be: Why this mirror more than scores of others that literature, past and present, has held up to nature? What guarantee is there that this reflecting surface has fewer distorting curves than others that render a different image? Why accept at its own value, without analysis, the cynical “realism” of one group, or the “barbaric naturalism” of another? Their borrowings from the psychologists are mixed and partly dubious or worse, and the marks of the seer are scarcely discernible.

That some value as a revealer of ourselves to ourselves may reside in even a distorted image must be granted. The literature in question is uncovering naïve insincerities and evasions that infest our life, and it is almost compelling us to see that there are forces within and around us that require a rational control that never yet has been provided. Nevertheless, in this total phenomenon we are witnessing one of the literary fashions that have succeeded one another for thousands of years. These pictures have truth in them, but it is truth selected and isolated in accordance with a mood, a drift, a spirit of the times, and then imaginatively reorganized in the interest of composition or picture-making. The literature of tomorrow will turn to other phases of experience, other types of motivation, and it will leave a different taste in the mouth of readers and theater-goers.

It turns out, then, that the psychology of motivation, and the quasi-psychology of it, have drifted here and there into disillusioning allegations, but without definitely proving them. On the one hand we have the hang-over of an unworkable theory of instincts; a decadent atomistic point of view and method; behavioristic metaphysics based upon nothing more substantial than a preference as to what one shall attend to; hasty inferences from the results of intelligence-testing; the rough-and-ready symbols of practicing psychiatrists, and literary exploitation of the whole. On the other hand, we find failure of every theory that assimilates human motivation in its totality to either the movements of matter or the impulses of the lower animals, and instead, growth of contrary views within general science and specifically within psychology; in particular, a definite reaffirmation that the individual mind acts as a true integer, a genuine one-in-many.

This does not solve our whole problem; we still have much to learn about ourselves. But it furnishes at least a “not proved” to set against our temptation too easily to believe the loud voices of disillusionment. It furnishes, likewise, a visa for those who would travel outside of technical psychology in order to see more of humanity. We should not be surprised if we find organization of drives by some sort of ruling drive; the consequent shifting of satisfactions and dissatisfactions, approvals and disapprovals; the possible approval or disapproval of the ruling drive, with consequent redirection of the central tendency. All this implies, likewise, readiness to question the extent and significance of the term “drive.” Perhaps we are moved only in part by a _vis a tergo_; possibly man is a forward-reacher, an initiator, a creator. And perhaps this disillusionment that threatens or seems to threaten paralysis of our wants may turn out to be the vague, confused beginning of a new want, the darkness upon the face of the deep whence a new world is to appear.

Note. The authors and works referred to in this Chapter are as
follows:

Calkins, M. W. “Converging Lines in Contemporary Psychology,” Brit.
Jour. Psy. (Gen’l Section), Jan., 1926, pp. 171-179.

Koffka, K. Growth of the Mind. New York, 1925.

MacCurdy, J. T. Problems in Dynamic Psychology, New York, 1922.

Thorndike, E. L. The Original Nature of Man. New York, 1913.

Watson, J. B. Behaviorism. New York: People’s Institute Pub. Co.

Whitehead, A. N. Science and the Modern World. New York, 1925.

Woodworth, R. S. Dynamic Psychology. New York, 1918.

XII

CHILDHOOD AS A REVEALER OF HUMAN CAPACITIES

The attitude of disillusionment puts the mind into a prison upon whose walls hang pictures of life at which the prisoner continually gazes. Make the round of your cell, O prisoner, and tell me what stages of life you find represented. There are no children in any of the pictures!

The apparent evidence that humanity is doomed to low types of motivation is drawn from a fraction of experience at particular stages of life. None is derived from childhood, scarcely any from adolescence; nearly all of it comes from the fully adult period which, being most conventionalized and least plastic, is least able to reveal to us our unrealized possibilities.

If we desire to witness our elemental propensities, or nearly all of them, in unrestrained swing, let us observe children. Not yet encrusted with custom, not yet halter-broken to the emotional restraints of their elders, they “let go” readily. What is inside shows outwardly. At least this is relatively true as compared with us who have endured the bit so long that we take it to be a part of our nature. And a great variety, indeed, there is inside a child; in an hour you shall witness a range of motivation that you might not discover in a grown-up in a score of years. Here is nature in the raw, or nearly so. What impression, then, does childhood make upon us when we become intimate with it?

A mixed impression: Amusement at the simple, literal, and unashamed reproduction of our own foibles; something like astonishment at the (usually) easy transitions between desirable and undesirable conduct; a sort of fascination by the utter naturalness of generosity, alongside the equal naturalness of pinching self-regard; and (if we are analytic) a bit of self-searching when we realize the deep dependence of both upon conditioning circumstances as well as upon original tendencies. All this, but never disrespect--at least never after one has taken the trouble to trace the processes of children’s minds. A really understanding intimacy with the young appears invariably to produce respect for them.

The drama of disillusionment is never played upon this stage. Cynicism, depression, revolt, and either surly, regretful, or ghoulish acquiescence in mean ways of living, all are shoved aside, forgotten, made impossible when we sympathetically enter into the experiences and attitudes of dawning life. Spirits bruised by adult experience find healing in play with children; calloused minds recover their sensitiveness by merely watching them. If a small child is perceived to be in immediate peril, the most hardened adult will suddenly exhibit a glint of nobility.

All this constitutes evidence with respect to the validity of the reasoning that is offered by the current disillusionment. Evidence, not merely incitement to change of mood; though such a change may itself be evidential in some conditions. Depression of spirit can disappear under the influence of children, or under the influence of alcohol. But the difference is twofold: Alcohol dulls the edge of judgment, and it introduces us to no fresh facts, whereas acquaintance with children does not impair the judgment, and it does introduce us to pertinent facts. The fact that when original nature displays its rudiments with frankness and unrestraint we do not find confirmation for a certain view of life, but on the whole find ourselves drifting in the opposite direction, is distinctly evidential.

There is no need to be afraid that we shall yield too much to naïve impressions--at least no one who has lived through the child-study movement is likely to remain naïve. For a whole generation analytical study has consciously and of set purpose put aside the gush of parental impulse and the sentimentality of certain kindergarten traditions in a determination to be objective and to hitch up child-life with the scientific study of nature generally. Now, not only has the child-study movement not slurred over the unlovely traits of the young; it has actually picked out and emphasized every shred of evidence of irrationality, social insensitiveness, selfishness, cruelty, and whatever else might seem to reflect the drives of pre-human species.

At the outset of the child-study movement, genetic psychology enthusiastically believed that the human individual rather closely recapitulates the developmental stages of lower species, and that childhood is a genuine savagery. This was an unsentimental theory; at least it made of children creatures of instincts to which nobility could not be attributed. If science ever had an opportunity to lay the foundations of a pessimistic view of man, it was now; for its eyes were straining to see animality and irrationality wherever they could be found. Higher, more social and rational drives, it was held, appear spontaneously at adolescence, and they are consolidated in maturity. We now know that this was an exaggeration of the spontaneous values of adolescence. Suppose this exaggeration had been discovered at the time; the conditions then would have been ripe for explaining human motivation at its best as merely a set of complicated and sophisticated forms of drives that are both low and blind.

Thus, modern child-study has leaned over backward in its endeavor not to be complimentary in its interpretations of the young of the species. If an anthropoid ape should acquire ability to read English, he would not discover any race-prejudice against apes in the American publications that represented this point of view! But the point of view did not maintain itself. It rested upon three supports each of which proved to be weak. _First_, the embryological facts that formed the substructure turned out to be too few and too scattered to establish recapitulation even in pre-natal life. _Second_, the view of instinct that was employed was speculative, almost animistic. _Third_, observation of children was skewed by the theory under which it proceeded--the theory that children recapitulate savagery and barbarism. Disproportionate attention was given to conduct that is disagreeable to elders; socially neglected or mistrained youngsters were incautiously taken to be “the child”; everything obstreperous was a shining nugget. The movement actually reached the point of awakening apprehension as to the normality or sincerity of untroublesome children.

The decadence of this mode of approach, and the rise of more objective methods, have brought us insight that is of the utmost importance to anyone who desires to understand the motivation of adults. First of all, psychical continuity rather than discontinuity between childhood and maturity has been proved to exist; in the second place, the remarkable plasticity or modifiability of childhood, taken in connection with this continuity, has given us clues hitherto lacking concerning the real origin of many adult traits.

Small children can respond to nearly if not quite every sort of stimulus that adults feel. We cannot longer regard even sex as a completely delayed drive, for traces of sex-stimulation are found in infancy, and definite sex interest follows very early. Any social impulse, good or bad, that adults exhibit can be found in early childhood also under appropriate conditions of stimulation. Moreover, in respect to the employment of intelligence there is no necessary break between childhood and maturity, for rational processes mingle with impulse and emotion from infancy. In fact, old-fashioned parental authority met scarcely any obstacle greater than the capacity of children to have a reason and to stick to it. We now know that scientific attitudes and types of observation and inference no more need to be postponed than does good pronunciation, which is taking the place of the old-fashioned “baby-talk.” It is worth noting, by the way, that “baby-talk,” wherever it exists, has been learned largely from adults!

This psychical continuity between childhood and maturity vacates the notion that adulthood is a ready-made set of drives or characteristics into which we are ushered by natural laws of growth. We are what we are, not because nature acts after the manner of destiny or fate, but because some selective process has been at work in each individual case. Each of us has the capacity to be very different from what he is. It is true, of course, that there are inborn and ineradicable differences between individuals, differences in degree of energy, in degree of intellectual capacity, in degree of sensitiveness towards a given sort of stimulus, and therefore differences in emotional type. But these are entirely generic; they do not shut up an individual to just this or that occupation, social bond, way of thinking, or policy and habit of weighing values. If we desire to account for the particular qualities of an individual, we must look into his whole experience from infancy onward.

This point of view is now no longer a merely general probability. Psychiatrists and experts in child-guidance are daily tracing to particular experiences what seem at first sight to be native and ineradicable personal traits. Moreover, many a bound personality is being released by the interjection of new experiences and the formation of corresponding new habits. This is true of both children and adults, and it is particularly noteworthy that the release of adults often depends upon undoing a knot that was tied in childhood.

If the plasticity of childhood and the psychical continuity between maturity and immaturity are, in one aspect, portentous, they are likewise heartening. For the fine qualities that children are capable of--their spontaneity, their capacity for reversing themselves, their generosity and affection, their sense of humor, their unabashed candor, their frequently startling objectivity--we of adult years also are capable of. Childhood is not a shut-off room which we are permitted to visit now and then in order to forget the disagreeable apartment in which we are compelled to live; childhood is a part of what we still are! Plasticity, we are learning, though it may decline with the hardening of the arteries, has no dead line. Experiment has disproved the view, held as late as William James, that after adolescence we are practically incapable of learning qualitatively new habits. We can both increase already used powers by further use of them, and also bring into action neglected powers.

Anyone who can enter sympathetically into the life of another has capacity for developing in himself the qualities of this other. The fact that our cynicism, our distrust of others, and our doubt of ourselves shrink when we make ourselves companions of the young is a direct evidence of what our nature contains, in however undeveloped form. And who does not grow mellow--who does not experience a measure of regeneration (becoming “as a little child”)--upon witnessing in children such admirable graces as candor, responsiveness to affection, generosity, the habit of laughter--all spontaneous, unreserved, uncalculating? It is because there is something of the child within me that I am capable of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

At first sight, psychoanalytic studies may seem to work against the view both that childhood is so plastic and that it is so beautiful. Certainly these studies are sobering. After making due deduction for speculation that expresses itself as statement of fact, and for an almost mythological symbolism that spreads a fog of fatalistic mysticism over simple and controllable facts, there is still excellent reason for growing sober. But the reason is the one already given for regarding as portentous our new knowledge of the possibilities that reside in early mind-sets. These possibilities are both portentous and heartening, we have said, and there is nothing in the ascertained facts of psychoanalysis that goes against this statement. Sex-tangles can start in infancy, and they can persist into maturity, thwarting life at almost any point. Attitudes of dependence upon a parent may be so overwrought, or they may be continued so long, that again the mature person never quite comes to himself. But these are not fated tragedies; they are errors that can be prevented. Psychoanalysts are clear upon this point. There remains, then, no difficulty unless it be the shock that some persons experience upon hearing that small children are capable of sex response and that their sex attraction may be towards a parent. If such persons will only take notice that psychoanalysts employ the term “sex” in an exceedingly broad manner, sometimes making it as inclusive as the term “affection”; and if they will further reflect that there is nothing unclean in sex as such, so that a psychically sexless child would be no more “innocent” than one psychically sexed, the psychoanalytic view, even if it be wholly true, will be seen not to rob childhood of any spiritual beauty.