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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER III

REFLECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: Dewey: How We Think, p. 67.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: Santayana: Reason in Art, p. 16.]

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV

THE BASIC HUMAN ACTIVITIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: McDougall: Social Psychology, 11th ed., pp. 399-400.]

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

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

[Footnote 2: Hobhouse: Mind in Evolution, p. 195.]

[Footnote 3 Dewey: How We Think, p. 31.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: See Helen Marot: Creative Impulse in Industry.]

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

[Footnote 1: Dewey: How We Think, p. 2.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: Dewey: loc. cit., p. 32.]

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: Goldmark, J.: Fatigue and Efficiency, p. 13.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: T. Arai: Mental Fatigue.]

[Footnote 2: Thorndike: Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 322.]

[Footnote 1*: Thorndike: Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 326.]

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER V

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

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