Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 12

[Footnote 1: Bury: _loc. cit._, p. 13.]

THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALITY IN OPINION. There have been many notable doc.u.ments in support of the belief that society is the gainer and not the loser by permitting and encouraging individuality in thought and belief. The following, taken from one of the most famous of these, John Stuart Mill's _Essay on Liberty_, was written to ill.u.s.trate the fatal results of prohibiting dissenting opinions merely because most people think or call them immoral:

Mankind can hardly be too often reminded that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision.

Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness, this man has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous man in it.... This acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived--whose fame, still growing after two thousand years, all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which make his native city ill.u.s.trious--was put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the G.o.ds recognized by the State.... Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and instructions, a "corrupter of youth." Of these charges the tribunal, there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of mankind to be put to death as a criminal.[2]

[Footnote 2: J. S. Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. II.]

Every important step in human progress has been a variation from the normal or accustomed, something new. Most advances in science have been departures from older and accustomed ways of thinking. Through the permission and encouragement of individual variation in opinion we may discover in the first place that accepted beliefs are wrong.

Galileo thought differently from the accepted Ptolemaic astronomy of his day, and the demonstration of his diverging belief proved the Ptolemaic astronomy to be wrong. The evolutionary theory, bitterly attacked in its day, replaced Cuvier's doctrine of the forms of life upon earth coming about through a series of successive catastrophes. Lyell, in the face of the whole scientific world of his day, insisted on the gradual and uniform development of the earth's surface. Half the scientific doctrines now accepted as axiomatic were bitterly denounced when they were first suggested by an inquiring minority.

Milton in his famous _Areopagitica_, an address to Parliament written in 1644, protesting against the censors.h.i.+p of printing, stressed the importance of permitting liberty for the securing and developing of new ideas:

What should ye do then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers [censors] over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured us by their bushel? ... That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that unless ye reenforce an abrogated and merciless law.... Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.[1]

[Footnote 1: Milton: _Areopagitica_.]

Even if the currently accepted doctrines prove to be true, there is, as Mill pointed out, a vast social utility in permitting the expression of contrary opinion though it be an error.

New ideas, however extreme, "may and commonly do possess some portion of truth"; they bring to light and emphasize some aspect or point of view which prevailing theories fail to note. Thus the possible over-emphasis of certain contemporary writers on the socialization of man's life is a valuable corrective to the equal over-emphasis on individualism which was current among so many thinkers during the nineteenth century. The insistence with which present-day psychologists call our attention to the power of instinct, though it may possibly be over-emphasized, counterbalances that tendency exhibited by such earlier authors as Bentham to picture man as a purely rational being, whose every action was determined by sheer logic.

Finally, unless doctrines are subjected to criticism and inquiry, no matter how beneficial they are to society, they will become merely futile and empty formulae with very little beyond a mechanical influence on people's lives. The maxims of conventional morality and religion which everybody believes and few practice are solemnly bandied about with little comprehension of their meaning and no tendency to act upon them. A belief becomes, as Mill pointed out, living, vital, and influential in the clash of controversy. Whether novel and dissenting doctrines are true or false, therefore, the encouragement of their expression provides vitality and variation without which progress is not possible.

The social appreciation of persons who display marked individual opinions varies in different ages toward the same individual. The martyr stoned to death by one generation becomes the hero and prophet of the next. One has but to look back at the contemporary vilification and ridicule to which Lincoln was subjected to find an ill.u.s.tration. Or, on a more monumental scale:

The event which took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen hundred years ago. The man who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as what? As a blasphemer.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. II.]

One would suppose that men would have learned not only to tolerate and be receptive to novelty in belief after these repeatedly tardy recognitions of greatness. There are dozens of instances in the history of religious, social, and political belief, of men and women who, suppressed with the bitterest cruelty in one generation, have been in effect, and sometimes in fact, canonized by posterity. And a certain degree of tolerance and receptiveness has come to be the result. But while we no longer burn religious and social heretics, condemnation is still meted out in some form of ostracism.

Prejudice, custom, and special interest frequently move men to suppress in milder ways extremists, expression of whose opinions seems to them, as unusual opinions have frequently seemed, fraught only with the greatest of harm.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "SELF"

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF PERSONAL SELFHOOD.

The expression of individuality in opinion is only one way men have of expressing their personality, individuality, or self. From the beginnings of childhood, men experience an increasing sense of "personal selfhood" which finds various outlets in action or thought. So familiar, indeed, in the normal man is his realization that he is a "self," that it seldom occurs to him that this conception was an attainment gradually accomplished through long years of experience with the world about him. The very young baby does not distinguish between Itself and the Not-Self which const.i.tutes the remainder of the universe. It is nothing but a stream of experiences, of moment to moment pulsations of desire, of hunger and satisfaction, of bodily comfort and bodily pain. As it grows older, it begins dimly to distinguish between Itself and Everything-Else; it finds itself to be something different, more vivid, more personal and interesting than the chairs and tables, the crib and bottle, the faces and hands, the smiles and rattles that are its familiar setting. It discovers that "I am I," and that everything else ministers to or frustrates or remains indifferent to its desires. It becomes a person rather than a bundle of reactions. It develops a consciousness of "self."

In its simplest form this consciousness of self is nothing more than a continuous stream of inner organic sensations, and the constant process of the body and limbs "and the special interest of these as the seat of various pleasures and pains." This is what James calls the "bodily self." As it grows older, the baby distinguishes between persons and things. And as, in setting off his own body from other things, it discovers its "bodily self," so in setting off its own opinions, actions, and thoughts from other people, it discovers its "social self." It is because Nature does in some degree the "giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us," that we do discover our "selves" at all. "The normal human being, if it were possible for him to grow up from birth onward in a purely physical environment, deprived, that is, to say, of both animal and human companions.h.i.+p, would develop but a very crude and rudimentary idea of the self."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 183.]

THE SOCIAL SELF. A man's social self, that is, his consciousness of himself as set over against all the other individuals with whom he comes in contact, develops as his relations with other people grow more complex and various. A man's self, apart from his mere physical body, consists in his peculiar organization of instincts and habits. In common language this const.i.tutes his personality or character. We can infer from it what he will, as we say, characteristically do in any given situation. And a particular organization of instincts and habits is dependent very largely on the individual's social experience, on the types and varieties of contact with other people that he has established. There will be differences, it goes without saying, that depend on initial differences in native capacity. But both the consciousness of self and the overt organization of instinctive and habitual actions are dependent primarily on the groups with which an individual comes in contact. In the formation of habits, both of action and thought, the individual is affected, as we have seen, largely by praise and blame. He very early comes to detect signs of approval and disapproval, and both his consciousness of his individuality and the character of that individuality are, in the case of most persons, largely determined by these outward signs of the praise and blame of others. And since, in normal experience, a man comes into contact with several distinct groups, with varying codes of conduct, he will really have a number of distinct personalities. The professor is a different man in his cla.s.s and at his club; the judge displays a different character in the court and in the bosom of his family.

The self that comes to be most characteristic and distinctive of a man, however, is determined by the group with which he comes most habitually in contact, or to whose approvals he has become most sensitive. Thus there develop certain typical personalities or characters, such as those of the typical lawyer or soldier or judge. Their bearing, action, and consciousness of self are determined by the approvals and disapprovals of the group to which they are most completely and intimately exposed.

Both the consciousness of self which most men experience and the overt expression of that selfhood in act are thus seen to be a more or less direct reflex of the praise and blame of the groups with which they are in contact. Men learn from experience with the praise and blame of others to "place"

themselves socially, to discover in the mirror of other men's opinions the status and locus of their own lives. As we shall see in a succeeding section, the degree of satisfaction which men experience in their consciousness of themselves is dependent intimately on the praise and blame by which their selfhood is, in the first place, largely determined. In the chapter on the "Social Nature of Man," we examined in some detail the way in which praise and blame modified a man's habits. The total result of this process is to give a man a certain fixed set of overt habits that const.i.tute his character and a more or less fixed consciousness of that character.

On the other hand, a man's character and self-consciousness may develop more or less independently of the immediate forces of the public opinion to which he is exposed. One comes in contact in the course of his experience not merely with his immediate contemporaries, but with a wide variety of moral traditions. Except in the rigidly custom-bound life of primitive societies, a man is, even in practical life, exposed to a diversity of codes, standards, and expectations of behavior.

His family, his professional, his political, and his social groups expose him to various kinds of emphases and accent in behavior. And a man of some intelligence, education, and culture may be determined in his action by standards whose origin is remote in time, s.p.a.ce, and intention from those operative in the predominant public opinion of his day. He may come to act habitually on the basis of ideal standards which he has himself set up through reflection, or which he has acquired from some moral system or tradition, far in advance of those which are the staple determinants of character for most of his contemporaries. He may be one of those rare moral geniuses, singularly unsusceptible to praise and blame, who create a new ideal of character by the dominant individuality of their own. Or, as more frequently happens, he may follow the ideals set up by such a one, instead of accepting the orthodoxies which are generally observed. He may follow Christ instead of the Pharisees, Socrates instead of the habit-crusted citizens of Athens. We are, indeed, inclined to think of a man as a peculiarly distinctive personality, when his sense of selfhood, and the overt actions in which that selfhood finds expression, are not determined by the current dogmas of his day, but by ideal standards to which he has reflectively given allegiance. But so much is the self, both in its consciousness and expression, socially produced that men acting on purely imagined ideal standards, current nowhere in their day and generation, have imagined a group, no matter how small or how remote, who would praise them or a G.o.d who noted and approved their ways.

CHARACTER AND WILL. From the foregoing it would appear that the self is an organization of habitual tendencies, developed primarily through contact with other people and more specifically through their praise and blame. And consciousness of self is the awareness of the unique or specific character of the habit-organization one has acquired. Individuals differ natively in given capacities, and differences in fully developed personalities depend, certainly in part, on innate initial differences. But differences in the kinds of selfhood displayed and experienced by different men are due to something more than differences in native capacities and native desires. The self that a man exhibits and of which he is conscious, at any given period of his life, depends on the complex system of habits he has in the course of his experience developed.

One individual may, as we have seen, develop a number of sets of organized dispositions, a multiple character, as it were, as a consequence of the multiplicity of groups with which he has come in contact. But whether through deliberate or habitual conformity to one group as a norm, or the deliberate organization of habits of action and feeling and thought, on the basis of ideal or reflective standards, a man comes to develop a more or less "permanent self." That is, while men start with somewhat similar native equipments, each man's set of inborn tendencies comes to be fixed in a fairly definite and specific system. While all men start within limits equally responsive and similarly responsive to all stimuli, certain stimuli come to have the "right of way." They are more or less easily and more or less readily responded to, according as they do or as they do not fit in with the habit-organization which the individual has previously acquired.

When we say that a man has no character or individuality, we mean that he has developed no stable organization of actions, feelings, and thoughts, with reference to which and by the predominant drive of which his actions are determined.

There is no particular system of behavior which he has come consciously to identify as his person or self; no interweaving of motives and stimuli by the persistent momentum of which his conduct is controlled; no single group of stimuli rather than another has, in his pulpy person, attained priority in stimulating power. Such men are chameleons rather than characters. Their actions do not flow from a selfhood or individuality at all; they are merely the random results of the accidental situations in which such men find themselves.

The self exists, then, as a well-defined, systematic trend of behavior. Impulses to action attain a certain order of priority in an individual's conduct, and it is by the momentum of these primary drives to action that his life is controlled.

What is commonly known as "will" is simply another name for the power and momentum of a man's "personal self."

Will exists not as a thing, but as a process. To will an action means to identify it consciously with one's permanent self, to weigh and support it with all the emotions and energies connected with one's consciously realized habitual system of behavior.

A man may bring to bear on the accomplishment of a given action the deepest and most powerful motive forces of his developed personality. To pa.s.s a course or make a team a student may marshal all the habits of loyalty, of self-a.s.sertion (and the emotional energies a.s.sociated with them) which have become the leading ingredients of his character.

The "permanent self" becomes involved in the same way in the case of willing _not_ to perform a certain action. Any stimulus may, on occasion, be strong even if it has ceased to be characteristic or habitual in a man's behavior. This is particularly the case with some of the primary physical drives to action. Even the ascetic feels the strong sting of sense-desire.

A man in resisting temptation, in denying the pressure of an immediate stimulus, is setting up to block or inhibit it all the contrary reactions and emotions which have become part of the "permanent self." In more familiar language he is setting will over against desire. The temporary desire may be strong, but it is consciously regarded by the individual as alien to his "real" or "better" self. And _will_ is this whole complex organization of the permanent self set over against an alien intruding impulse.

The phenomenon of will contending against desire occurs usually when a stimulus not characteristically powerful in a man's conduct becomes so through special conditions of excitement or fatigue. When a man is tired, or stirred by violent emotion, his systematic organization of habits begins to break down. The ideal permanent or inclusive self is then brought into conflict with a temporary pa.s.sion. Love conflicts with duty, the lower with the higher self, flesh with spirit, desire with will. Few men have so thoroughly integrated a self that such conflicts altogether cease. Every one carries about with him a more or less divided soul.

Fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night.

There are, in the records of abnormal psychology, many cases of really divided personalities, cases of two or more completely separate habit-organizations inhabiting the same physical body. Such a complete Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde dissociation of a personality is clearly abnormal. But it is almost as rare to find a completely integrated character. We are all of us more or less multiple personalities. Our various personalities usually keep their place and do not interfere with each other. Our professional and family selves may be different; they do not always collide. But the various characters that we are in various situations not infrequently do clash. The self whose keynote is ambition or learning may conflict with the self whose focus is love.

"Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery!"

wrote Matthew Arnold. And it does seem to be true that a man whose will is never divided or confused by contending currents of desire, whose character is unified and whose action is consistent, is saved from the perturbations, the confusions, the tossings of spirit which possess less organized souls. But to find one's self, and to keep one's self whole and undivided, is a difficult achievement and a rare one. Even men whose interests and activities are fairly well defined find their characters divided and their wills, consequently, confused. A man's duties as a husband and father may conflict with his professional ambitions; his love of adventure, with his desire for wealth and social position; his artistic interests, with his philanthropic activities; his business principles, with his religious scruples. A man can achieve a selfhood by thrusting out all interests save one, and achieving thereby unity at the expense of breadth. There are men who choose to be, and succeed in being, first and last, scholars or poets or musicians or doctors. All activities, interests, and ideals that do not contribute to that particular and exclusive self are practically negligible in their conduct. Such men, although they have attained a permanent self, have not achieved a broad, comprehensive, or inclusive one. They are like instruments which can sound only one note, however clear that may be; or like singers with only a single song. All lives are necessarily finite and exclusive; every choice of an interest or ideal very possibly precludes some other. A man cannot be all things at once; "the philosopher and the lady-killer," as James merrily remarks, "could not very well keep house in the same tenement of clay." But a strong character need not necessarily mean a narrow one, nor need a determined will be the will of a fanatic. The self may be--in the case of rare geniuses it has been--diverse in its interests, activities, and sympathies, yet unified and consistent in action. A character may be various without being confused; versatility is not synonymous with chaos. A man's interests and activities may be given a certain order, rank, and proportion, so that his life may exhibit at once the color, consistency, clarity, and variety of a finished symphony.

The consciousness of "self" which starts as a mere continuum of bodily sensations comes to be the net result of one's social and intellectual as well as physical activities. The "self" of which we are conscious ceases to be our merely physical person, and comes to include our possessions. The house we live in and the garden we tend, our children, our friends, our opinions, creations, or inventions, these become extensions and more or less inalienable parts of our personalities.

Our "selfhood" includes not simply us, but ours.

Our possessions, and especially such as are the fruits of our own actions, are indications of what we are. We judge, and within limits correctly, of a man by the company he keeps, the clothes he wears, by the books he reads, the pictures with which he decorates his home, the kind of home he builds or has built. And a man may feel as provoked by insult or injury to the person or things which have become an intimate part of his life as if he were being attacked in his physical person. Strip a man one by one of his physical acquisitions, of his a.s.sociates, of the indications and mementos of the things he has thought and done, and there would be no "self"

left. To speak of a man as a nonent.i.ty is to imply that he is no "self" worth speaking of; that he can be blown about hither and thither; that neither his opinions nor desires, nor possessions, nor a.s.sociates make an iota of difference in the world. A man who is a "somebody," a "person to be reckoned with," is one who is a "self." He is one whose physical possessions or personal abilities or standing in the community make him one of the "powers that be." And it is the desire to be a factor in the world, to increase the scope and consequence of one's self that is the leading ingredient in what we call ambition, and the desire for fame, and at least one ingredient in the desire for wealth. Men may want wealth merely for the sake of possession, or for bodily comfort, but part of the desire consists in the ability thereby to spread one's influence, to be "one of the happy sons of earth, who lord it over land and sea, in the full-blown l.u.s.tihood that wealth and power can give, and before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will ... we cannot escape an emotion, sneaking or open, of dread."[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 293.]

THE ENHANCEMENT OF THE SELF. The building-up of a more or less permanent self is natively satisfactory to most men, and every means will be taken to increase its scope and influence.

Biologically we are so const.i.tuted as to perform many acts making for our self-preservation. The ordinary reflexes and instincts such as those which prompt us to eat, to defend ourselves against blows and the threatening approach of animals, to keep our equilibrium and recover our balance, are examples of these.

The development and preservation of our social self is also made possible as it is initially prompted by our specifically social instincts. There is a native tendency, as already noted, to get ourselves noticed by other people, to seek their praise and avoid their blame. The instincts of self-display and leaders.h.i.+p, and many of the non-social instincts, such as curiosity and acquisitiveness, are frequently called into play in the service of the more directly social tendencies of the individual. A large part of our activity, whatever be its other motives, is determined to some degree by the desire to develop the social self, to be a "somebody," to cut a figure in the world.

In the enlargement of the social self, various people use various means, and with varying degrees of vigor, intensity, and persistency. There are a few who go through life with almost no sense of selfhood, who go through their daily routine with no more recognition of their acts as their own than that displayed by an animal or a machine. In most men the sense of their personality and their interest in it are high, and the development of the self is sought in all possible or legitimate ways. The ways in which the self is developed, and the kind of self that is sought, help to determine whether a man is self-seeking in the lowest sense of that epithet, or idealistic and ambitious in the approved popular sense.

The kind of self we seek to build up depends, as we have seen, largely on the type of praise and blame and the general character of the moral tradition to which we have been exposed.

But whichever type of self a man does select as his ideal or permanent self, all his activities will be more or less consciously and more or less consistently controlled by it.

His habits of action, his habitual choices, his habitual feelings, will be built up with this ideal self as a standard and control.

He will do those things which "carry on" toward the ideal self, leave undone those things which do not. The man or woman who wishes simply to cut a figure "socially" will cultivate the wit, the gayety, the facility, the smartness, which are the familiar ingredients of such a personality. The same persons will be singularly blind to abysses of ignorance which would be painfully in the consciousness of those who had set up for themselves ideals of erudition and culture. A laborer will live and move and have his being serenely in clothes and in surroundings that "would never do" for a professional man who had committed himself to live according to the social standards of his cla.s.s. Sometimes a man's actions will be directed toward the construction of an ideal self, on standards far in advance of those of his group. A man in developing such a self is, indeed, in some cases practically committing social suicide. The extreme dissenter from the current standards of action is attempting to build up what James has well called a "spiritual self," a self in the light of his own ideals, rather than those current among his contemporaries.