The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
- Author: Abraham Myerson
- Performer: 1596050667
Book online «The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗». Author Abraham Myerson
is a contractor, for every accelerator of action there is
inhibition. Nature drives by two reins, and one is a checkrein.
This function of inhibition, then, delays, retards or prevents an
action and is in one sense a higher function than the response to
stimulation. Its main seat is the cerebrum, the “highest” nervous
tissue, whereas reflex and instinctive actions usually are in the
vegetative nervous system, the spinal cord, the bulbar regions
and the mid-brain, all of which are lower centers. Choice, which
is intimately associated with inhibition, is par excellence a
cerebral function and in general is associated with intense
consciousness. The act of choosing brings to the circumstances
the whole past history of the individual; it marshals his
resources of judgment, intelligence, will, purposes and desires.
In choice lies the fate of the personality, for it is basically
related to habit formation. Further, in the dynamics of life a
right, proper choice, an appropriate choice, opens wide the door
of opportunity, whereas an unfortunate choice may commit one to
the mercies of wrecking forces. Education should aim to teach
proper choosing and then proper action.
The capacity for perceiving and responding to stimuli, for
inhibiting or delaying action and for choosing, are of cardinal
importance in our study. But there is another phase of life and
character without which everything else lacks unity and is
unintelligible. From the beginning of life to the end there is
choice. Who and what chooses? From infancy one sees the war of
purposes and desires and the gradual rise of one purpose or set
of purposes into dominance,—in short, the growth of unity, the
growth of personality. The common man calls this unity his soul,
the philosopher speaks of the ego and implies some such thing as
this organizing energy of character.
But a naturalistic view of character must reject such a
metaphysical entity, for one sees the organizing energy increase
and diminish with the rest of character through health, age,
environment, etc. Further, there is at work in all living things
a similar something that organizes the action of the humblest bit
of protoplasm. This organizing energy of character will be, for
us, that something inherent in all life which tends to
individualize each living thing. It is as if all life were
originally of one piece and then, spreading itself throughout the
world, it tended to differentiate and develop (according to the
Spencerian formula) into genera, species, groups and individuals.
This organizing energy works up the experiences of the individual
so that new formulae for action develop, so that what is
experienced becomes the basis of future reaction.
It must be remembered that the world we live in has its great
habits. Night follows day in a cycle that never fails, the
seasons are repeated each year, and there is a periodicity in the
lives of plants and animals that is manifested in growth,
nutrition, mating and resting. Things happen again and again,
though in slightly altered form, and our desires, satisfied now,
soon repeat their urge. The great organic needs and sensations
repeat themselves and with the periodic world of outer experience
must be dealt with according to a more or less settled policy. It
is the organizing energy that works out the policy, that learns,
inhibits, chooses and acts,—and it is the essential
character-developing principle. For like our bodily organs which
are whipped into line by the nervous system, our impulses,
instincts, and reflexes[1] have their own policy of action and
therefore need, for the good of the entire organism, discipline
and coordination. It may sound as if the body were made up of
warring entities and states and that there gradually arose a
centralized good, and though the analogy may lead to error, it
offers a convenient method of thinking.
[1] Roux, the great French biologist, has shown that each tissue
and each cell competes with the other tissues and the other
cells. The organism, though it reaches a practical working unity
as viewed by consciousness, is nevertheless no entity; it is a
collection, an aggregate of living cells which are organized on a
cooperation basis just as men are, but maintain individuality and
competition nevertheless.
Moreover, the organizing energy seems often to be at work when
consciousness itself is at rest, as in sleep. Often enough a man
debates and debates on lines of conduct and wakes up with his
problem solved. Or he works hard to learn and goes to bed
discouraged, because the matter is a jumble, and wakes up in the
morning with an orderly and useful arrangement of the facts. A
writer seeks to find the proper opening,—and gives up in a
frenzy of despair. He is perhaps walking or driving when suddenly
he lifts his head as one does who is listening to a longed-for
voice, and in himself he finds the phrases that he longs for.
Something within has set itself, so it seems, the task of
bringing the right associations into consciousness. What we call
quickness of mind, energy of mind, is largely this function.
It is this which adapts us to different situations, different
groups, by calling into play organized modes of talking or
acting. We pass from a group of ladies in whose presence we have
been friendly but decorous, perhaps unconventionally formal, to a
group of business intimates, men of long acquaintance. Without
even being conscious of it we lounge around, feet on the table,
carelessly dropping cigarette ash to the floor, using language
chosen for force rather than elegance; we discuss sports, women,
business and a whole group of different emotions, habits and
purposes come to the surface, though we were not at all conscious
of having repressed them while in the presence of the ladies. A
faux pas is where the organizer has “slipped” on his job; lack of
tact implies in part a rigid organizing energy, neither plastic
nor versatile enough.
We are now ready to face certain developments of these three main
factors, viz., the response to stimuli; choice and inhibition,
and the organizing energy. Largely we might classify people
according to the type of vigor of their reactions to stimuli, the
quality and vigor of choice and of inhibition, and the quality
and vigor of the organizing energy. We note that there are people
who have, as it were, exquisitely sensitive feelers for the
stimuli of one kind or another and who react vigorously, perhaps
excessively; that there are others of a duller, less reactive
nature, largely because they are stimuli-proof. Others are
under-inhibited, follow desire or outer stimulus without heed,
without a brake; others are over-inhibited, too cautious, too
full of doubt, unable to choose the reaction that seems
appropriate. The organizing energy of some is low; they never
seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living;
they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with
disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy
is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the
metaphor) they weld life’s happenings, their memories, their
emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I,
harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end
and striving bravely towards it. Or there is over-unification and
fanaticism, with narrow aim and little sympathy for other aims.
Sketched in this very broad way we see masses of people, rather
than individuals, and we are not finely adjusted to our subject.
Psychologists rarely concern themselves to any extent with these
matters; they deal mainly with their outgrowths,—emotions,
instinct, intelligence and will. We are at once beset with
difficulties which are resolved mainly by ignoring them. In such
a book as this we are not concerned with the fundamental nature
of these divisions of the mental life, we must omit such
questions as the relation of instinct to racial habit, or the
evolution of instinct from habit, if that is really its origin.
Again I must repeat that we shall deal with these as organic, as
arising in the sensitized individual as a result of environmental
forces, as manifestations of a life which is as yet—and perhaps
always will be—mysterious to us. We shall best consider these
manifestations of mental activity as an interplay of the
reactions of stimulation, inhibition, choice, organizing energy,
and not as separate and totally different matters. We shall see
that probably emotion is one aspect of reaction to the world,
while instinct is merely another aspect; that intelligence is a
cerebral shift of instinct, and that will is no unity but the
energy of instincts and purposes.
Before we go farther we must squarely face a problem of human
thought. Man, since he started reflecting about himself, has been
puzzled about his consciousness. How can a person be aware of
himself, and what identifies and links together each phase of
consciousness? There is an enormous range of thought on this
subject: from those who identified consciousness as the only
reality and considered what the average person holds as
realities—things and people—as only phases of consciousness, to
those who, like Huxley, regard consciousness as an
“epi-pbenomenon,” a sort of overture to brain activity and having
nothing whatever to do with action, nothing to do with choice and
plan, so that, as Lloyd Morgan points out, “An unconscious
Shakespeare writes plays acted by an unconscious troupe of actors
to an unconscious audience.” The first extreme view, that of
Berkeley and the idealists, nullifies all other realities save
that of the individual thinker and reduces one to the absurdities
of Solipsism where a man writes books to convince persons
conjured up by himself and having no existence outside of
himself; the other view nullifies that which seems to each of us
the very essence of himself.
I shall take a very simple view of consciousness,[1] simply
because I shall deliberately dodge the great difficulties.
Consciousness is the result of the activities of a group of more
or less permanently excited areas of the brain—areas having to
do with positions of the head, eyes and shoulders; areas having
to do with vision, hearing and smell; areas having to do with
speech,—these constituting extremely mobile, extremely active
parts of the organism. From these consciousness may irradiate to
the activities of almost every part of the organism, in different
degrees. We are often extremely conscious of the activities of
the hands, in less degree of the legs; we may become wrapped up
almost completely in a sensation emanating from the sex organs,
and under fear or excitement the heart may pound so that we feel
and are conscious of it as ordinarily we can never be. The state
of consciousness called interest may shift our feeling of self to
any part of our body (as in pain, when a part usually out of
consciousness swings into it, or when the hand of a lover grips
our own so that the great reality of our life at the moment seems
to be the consciousness of the hand) or it may fasten us to an
outside object until our world narrows to that object, nothing
else having any conscious value. This latter phenomenon is very
striking in children; they become fascinated by something they
hear or see and project themselves, as it were, into that object;
they become the “soapiness of soap, or the wetness of water” (to
use Chesterton’s phrase), and when they listen to a story they
hold nothing in reserve. Consciousness may busy itself with its
past phases, with the preceding thought, emotion, sensation
—how, I do not know—or it may occupy itself mainly with the
world of things which are hereby declared to have a reality in
our theory. In the first instances we have introspection and
subjectiveness, and in the second we have extroversion and
objectivity.
[1] For discussion of consciousness read Berkeley, Locke, Hume,
Spencer, Lotze, Moyan,
Comments (0)