The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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basic, and no one can really understand himself who is in doubt
about his memory. In such diseases as neurasthenia one of the
commonest complaints is the “loss of memory,” which greatly
troubles the patient. As a matter of fact, what is impaired is
interest and attention, and when the patient realizes this he is
usually quite relieved. The man who has a poor memory may become
very successful if he develops systems of recording, filing,
indexing, but his possibilities of knowledge are greatly reduced
by his defect.[1]
[1] It is the growth of the subject matter of knowledge that
makes necessary the elaborate systems of indexing, etc., now so
important. It is as much as man can do to follow the places where
the men work, let alone what they are doing. This growth of
knowledge is getting to be an extra-human phenomenon. Of this
Graham Wallas has written entertainingly.
A second fundamental ability of living tissue, and of particular
importance in character, is habit formation. Habit resides in the
fact that once living tissue has been traversed by a stimulus and
has responded by an act, three things result:
1. The pathway for that stimulus becomes more permeable; becomes,
as it were, grooved or like a track laid across the living
structure of the nervous system.
2. The responding element is more easily stirred into activity,
responds with more vigor and with less effort.
3. Consciousness, at first invoked, recedes more and more, until
the habit-action of whatever type tends to become automatic.
There is in this last peculiarity a tendency for the habit to
establish itself as independent of the personality, and if an
injurious or undesired habit, to set up the worst of the
conflicts of life,—a conflict between one’s intention and an
automaton in the shape of a powerfully entrenched habit.
Habits are economical of thought and energy, generally speaking;
that is their main recommendation. A dozen examples present
themselves at once as illustrative: piano playing, with its
intense concentration on each note, with consciousness attending
to the action of each muscle, and then practice, habit formation,
and the ease and power of execution with the mind free to wander
off in the moods suggested by the music, or to busy itself with
improvisations, flourishes and the artistic touches. Before true
artistry can come, technique must be relegated to habit. So with
typewriting, driving an automobile, etc.
More fundamental than these, which are largely skill habits, are
the organic habits. One of the triumphs of pediatrics depends
upon the realization that the baby’s welfare hangs on regular
habits of feeding, that he is not to be fed except at stated
intervals; as a result processes of digestion are set going in a
regular, harmonious manner. In other words, these processes may
be said to “get to know” what is expected of them and act
accordingly. The mother’s time is economized and the strain of
nursing is lessened. In adults, regular hours of eating make it
possible for the juices of digestion to be secreted as the food
is ingested; in other words, an habitual adjustment takes place.
If there were one single health habit that I would have
inculcated above all others, it would be the habit of regularly
evacuating the bowels. While constipation is not the worst ill in
the world, it causes much trouble, annoyance and a considerable
degree of ill health, and, in my opinion, a considerable degree
of unhappiness. A physician may be pardoned for frank advice: all
the matters concerning the bowels, such as coarse foods, plenty
of water and exercise, are secondary compared to the habit of
going to the stool at the same time each day, whether there be
desire or not. A child should be trained in this matter as
definitely as he is trained to brush his teeth. In fact, I think
that the former habit is more important than the latter. The mood
of man is remarkably related to the condition of his
gastro-intestinal tract and the involuntary muscle of that tract
is indirectly under the control of the will through habit
formation.
Sleep[1] the mysterious, the death in life which we all seek each
night, is likewise regulated by habit. Arising from the need of
relief from consciousness and bodily exertion, the mechanism of
sleep is still not well understood. Is there a toxic influence at
work? is the body poisoned by itself, as it were, as has been
postulated; is there a toxin of fatigue, or is there a
“vasomotor” reaction, a shift of the blood supply causing a
cerebral anaemia and thus creating the “sleepy” feeling? The
capacity to sleep is a factor of great importance and we shall
deal with it later under a separate heading as part of the
mechanism of success and failure. At present we shall simply
point out that each person builds up a set of habits regarding
sleep,—as to hour, kind of place, warmth, companionship,
ventilation and even the side of the body he shall lie on, and
that a change in these preliminary matters is often attended by
insomnia. Moreover, a change from the habitual in the general
conduct of life—a new city or town, a strange bed, a disturbance
in the moods and emotions—may upset the sleep capacity. Those in
whom excitement persists, or whose emotions are persistent,
become easily burdened with the dreaded insomnia. Sleep is
dependent on an exclusion of excitement and exciting influences.
If, however, exciting influences become habitual they lose their
power over the organism and then the individual can sleep on a
battle field, in a boiler factory, or almost anywhere.
Conversely, many a New Yorker is lulled to sleep by the roar of
the great city who, finds that the quiet of the country keeps him
awake.
[1] As good a book as any on the subject of sleep is Boris
Sidis’s little monograph.
Sleeplessness often enough is a habit. Something happens to a man
that deeply stirs him, as an insult, or a falling out with a
friend, or the loss of money,—something which disturbs what we
call his poise or peace of mind. He becomes sleepless because,
when he goes to bed and the shock-absorbing objects of daily
interest are removed, his thoughts revert back to his difficulty;
he becomes again humiliated or grieved or thrown into an
emotional turmoil that prevents sleep. After the first night of
insomnia a new factor enters,—the fear of sleeplessness and the
conviction that one will not sleep. After a time the insult has
lost its sting, or the difficulty has been adjusted, there is no
more emotional distress, but there is the established
sleeplessness, based on habitual emotional reaction to sleep. I
know one lady whose fear reached the stage where she could not
even bear the thought of night and darkness. It is in these cases
that a powerful drug used two or three nights in succession
breaks up the sleepless habit and reestablishes the power to
sleep.
People differ in their capacity to form habits and in their love
of habits. The normal habits, thoroughness, neatness and method
come easily to some and are never really acquired by others.
People of an impetuous, explosive or reckless character, keenly
alive to every shade of difference in things, find it hard to be
methodical, to carry on routine. The impatient person has similar
difficulties. Whereas others take readily to the same methods of
doing things day by day; and these are usually non-explosive,
well inhibited, patient persons, to whom the way a thing is done
is as important as the goal itself.
Here comes a very entertaining problem, the question of the value
of habits. Good habits save time and energy, tend to eliminate
useless labor and make for peace and quiet. But there is a large
body of persons who come to value habits for themselves and,
indeed, this is true to a certain extent of all of us. Once an
accustomed way of doing things is established it becomes not only
a path of least resistance, but a sort of fixed point of view,
and, if one may mix metaphors a trifle, a sort of trunk for the
ego to twine itself around. There is uneasiness in the thought of
breaking up habits, an uneasiness that grows the more as we
become older and is deepened into agony if the habit is tinged
with our status in life, if it has become a sort of measure of
our respectability. Thus a good housekeeper falls into the habits
of doing things which were originally a mark of her ability,
which she holds as sacred and values above her health and energy.
There are people who fiercely resent a new way of doing things;
they have woven their most minor habits into their ego feeling
and thus make a personal issue of innovations. These are the
upholders of the established; they hate change as such; they are
efficient but not progressive. In its pathological form this type
becomes the “health fiends” who never vary in their diet or in
their clothing, who arise at a certain time, take their “plunge”
regardless, take their exercise and their breakfasts alike as a
health measure without real enjoyment, etc., who grow weary if
they stay up half an hour or so beyond their ordinary bedtime;
they are the individuals who fall into health cults, become
vegetarians, raw food exponents, etc.
Opposed to the group that falls into habits very readily is the
group that finds it difficult to acquire habitual ways of working
and living. All of us seek change and variety, as well as
stability. Some cannot easily form habits because they are
quickly bored by the habitual. These restless folk are the
failures or the great successes, according to their intelligence
and good fortune. There is a low-grade intelligence type, without
purpose and energy, and there is a high-grade intelligence type,
seeking the ideal, restless under imperfection and restraint,
disdaining the commonplace and the habits that go with it. Is
their disdain of habit-forming and customs the result of their
unconventional ways, or do their unconventional ways result
because they cannot easily form habits? It is very probable that
the true wanderer and Bohemian finds it difficult, at least in
youth, to form habits, and that the pseudo-Bohemian is merely an
imitation.
Habit is so intimately a part of all traits and abilities that we
would be anticipating several chapters of this book did we go
into all the habit types. Social conditions, desire, fatigue,
monotony, purpose, intelligence, inhibition, all enter into habit
and habit formation. Youth experiments with habit; old age clings
to it. Efficiency is the result of good habits but originality is
the reward of some who discard habits. A nation forms habits
which seem to be part of its nature, until emigration to another
land shows the falsity of this belief. So with individuals: a man
feels he must eat or drink so much, gratify his sex appetite so
often, sleep so many hours, exercise this or that amount, seek
his entertainment in this or that fashion,—until something
happens to make the habit impossible and he finds that what he
thought a deeply rooted mode of living was a superficial routine.
Though good habits may lead to success they may also bar the way
to the pleasures of experience; that is their danger. A man who
finds that he must do this or that in such a way had better
beware; he is getting old, no matter what his age.[1] For we grow
older as we lose mobility,—in joints, muscles, skin and our ways
of doing, feeling and thinking! It is a transitory stage of the
final immobility of Death.
[1] Says the talkative Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: “There is
one mark of age
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