The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
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antagonism between emotional, instinctive and intelligent
responses. In fact, very few acts of the organized human being
are anything else. For every emotion awakens memories of past
emotions and the consequences; every instinct is hampered by
other instincts or by the inhibitions aroused by obstacles; and
intelligence continually struggles against emotion and blind
instinct. Teaching, experience, knowledge, all modify emotional
and instinctive responses so that sometimes they are hardly
recognizable as such. On the other hand, though intelligence
normally occupies the seat of power, it is easily ousted and in
reality only steers and directs the vehicle of life, choosing not
the goal but the road by which the goal can safely be reached.
In general terms we shall define emotions, instincts and
intelligence as follows:
1. For emotions we shall accept a modified James-Lange theory,
supplementing it by the developments of science since their day.
When a thing is seen or heard (or smelled or tasted or thought),
it arouses an emotion; that emotion consists of at least three
parts. First, the arousal of memories and experiences that give
it a value to the individual, make it a desired object or a
dreaded, distasteful object. Second, at the same time, or shortly
preceding or succeeding this, a great variety of changes takes
place in the organism, changes that we shall call the
vaso-visceral-motor changes. This means merely that there is a
series of reactions set up in the sympathetic nervous system, in
the blood vessels and bodily structures they control and in the
glands of internal secretion,—changes which include the blush or
the pallor, the rapid heartbeat, the quickened or labored
breathing, the changes in the digestive tract which include the
vomiting of disgust and the diarrhoea of fear; the changes that
passion brings in the male and the female and many other
alterations to be discussed again. Third, there is then the
feeling of these coenaesthetic changes,—a feeling of
pleasantness, unpleasantness mingled with the basic feeling of
excitement, and from then on that situation is linked in memory
with the feeling that we usually call the emotion but which is
only a part of it. Nevertheless, it becomes the part longed for
or thereafter avoided; it is the value of the emotion to us, as
conscious personalities, although it may be a false, disastrous,
dangerous value. Excitement is the generalized mood change that
results in consciousness in consequence of the
vaso-visceral-motor changes of emotion; it is therefore based on
bodily changes as is the feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, that
also occurs. William James said that we laugh and are therefore
happy; we weep and are therefore sad; the bodily changes are
primary and the feeling secondary. We do not accept this dictum
entirely, but we say that the organism reacts in a complicated
way and that the feeling—sadness, disgust, anger, joy—springs
from the memories and past experiences aroused by a situation as
well as from the widespread bodily excitement also so aroused.
For the neurologist both the cerebral and the sympathetic-endocrinal components of emotion are important.
For the moment we turn to instinct and instinctive reactions.
2. Man has always wondered that things can be known without
teaching. So slow and painful is the process of mastering a
technique, whether of handicraftsmanship or of art, so imbued are
we with the need of education for the acquirement of knowledge,
that we are taken aback by the realization that all around us are
creatures carrying on the most elaborate technique, going through
the most complicated procedures and apparently possessed of the
surest knowledge without the possibility of teaching. The flight
of birds, the obstetric and nursing procedures of all animals,
and especially the complicated and systematized labors of bees,
ants and other insects, have aroused the wonder, admiration and
awe of scientists. A chick pecks its way out of its egg and
shakes itself,—then immediately starts on the trail of food and
usually needs no instruction as to diet. The female insect lays
its eggs, the male insect fertilizes them, the progeny go through
the states of evolution leading to adult life without teaching
and without the possibility of previous experience. Since the
parent never sees the progeny, and the progeny assume various
shapes and have very varied capacities at these times, there can
be no possible teaching of what is remarkably skillful and
marvelously adapted conduct.[1]
[1] The nature of instinct has been a subject of discussion for
centuries, but it is only within the last fifty years or
thereabouts that instinctive actions have really been studied. I
refer the reader to the works of Darwin, Romanes, Lloyd Morgan,
the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse, and McDougall for details as to
the controversies and the facts obtained.
Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable
reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in
putrid meat in order that the larvae may have appropriate food,
although she never sees the larvae or cannot know through
experience their needs. “The smell of putrid meat attracts the
gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings
which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell,
and the contact combined stimulate the functions of
oviposition.”[1] But as all the critics have pointed out, the
theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there
are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the
same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in
that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so
inevitably.
[1] Hobhouse.
In fact, it is this internal condition in the living creature
that is the most important single link in instinct. In the
non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the
male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with
procreative cells; these change his coenaesthesia; that starts
desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search,
courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is
gravid. All instinctive acts have back of them either a tension
or a deficit of some kind or other, brought about by the
awakening of function of some glandular structure, so that the
organism becomes ready to respond to some appropriate outside
stimulus and inaccessible to others. During the mating season,
with certain animals, the stimulus of food has no effect until
there is effected the purposes of the sexual hunger. Changes in
the body due to the activity of sex glands or gastric juices or
any other organic product have two effects. They increase the
stimulation that comes from the thing sought and decrease the
stimulation that comes from other things. In physiological
language, the threshold for the first is lowered and for the
other it is raised.
But this does not explain HOW the changes in glands MAKE the
animal seek this or that, except by saying that the animal has
hereditary structures all primed to explode in the right way. We
may fall back on Bergson’s mystical idea that all life is a
unity, and that instinct, which makes one living thing know what
to do with another—to kill it in a scientific way for the good
of the posterity of the killer—is merely the knowledge,
unconscious, that life has of life. That pleasant explanation
projects us back to a darker problem than ever: how life knows
life and why one part of life so obviously seeks to circumvent
the purpose of another part of life.
For us it is best to say that instinct arises out of the racial
and individual needs; that physically there occur changes in the
glands and tissues; that these set up desires which arouse into
action simple or elaborate mechanisms which finally satisfy the
need of the organs and tissues.[1]
[1] Kempf in his book on the vegetative nervous system goes into
great detail the way the visceral needs force the animal or human
to satisfy them. Life is a sort of war between the vegetative and
the central nervous system. There is just enough truth in this
point of view to make it very entertaining.
Even in the low forms of life instincts are not perfect at the
start, or perfect in details, and almost every member of a
species will show individuality in dealing with an obstacle to an
instinctive action. In other words, though there is instinct and
this furnishes the basis for action in the lowest forms of life,
there is also the capacity for learning by experience,—and this
is Intelligence. “The basis of instinct is heredity and we can
impute an action to pure instinct only if it is hereditary. The
other class of actions are those devised by the individual animal
for himself on the basis of his own experience and these are
called generally intelligent. Of intelligence operating within
the sphere of instinct there is ample evidence. There are
modifications of instinctive action directly traceable to
experience which cannot be explained by the interaction of purely
hereditary tendencies and there are cases in which the whole
structure of the instinct is profoundly modified by the
experience of the individual.” Hobhouse, whom I quote, goes on to
give many examples of instinctive action modified by experience
and intelligence in the insect and lower animal world.
What I wish especially to point out is that man has many
instinctive bases for conduct, but instincts as such are not
often seen in pure form in man. They are constantly modified by
other instincts and through them runs the influence of
intelligence. The function of intelligence is to control
instincts, to choose ways and means for the fulfillment of
instincts that are blocked, etc. Moreover, the effects of
teachings, ethics, social organization and tradition, operating
through the social instincts, are to repress, inhibit and whip
into conformity every mode of instinctive conduct. The main
instincts are those relating to nutrition and reproduction, the
care of the young, to averting danger or destroying it, to play
and organized activity, to acquiring, perhaps to teaching and
learning and to the social relations generally. But manners creep
in to regulate our methods of eating and the things we shall eat;
and we may not eat at all unless we agree to get the things to
eat a certain way. We may not cohabit except under tremendous
restriction, and marriage with its aims and purposes is sexual in
origin but modified largely and almost beyond recognition by
social consideration, taste, esthetic matters, taboos and
economic conditions. We may not treat our enemy as instinct bids
us do,—for only in war may one kill and here one kills without
any personal purpose or anger, almost without instinct. We may be
compelled through social exigencies to treat our enemy politely,
eat with him, sleep with him and help him out of difficulties and
thus completely thwart one instinctive set of reactions. Play
becomes regulated by rules and customs, becomes motivated by the
desire for superiority, or the desire for gain, and may even
leave the physical field entirely and become purely mental. And
so on. It does no special practical good to discuss instincts as
if they operated in man as such. They become purposes. Therefore
we shall defer the consideration of instincts and purposes in
detail until later chapters of this book.
Since instincts are too rigid to meet the needs of the social and
traditional life of man, they become intellectualized and
socialized into purposes and ambitions, sometimes almost beyond
recognition. Nevertheless, the driving force of instinct is
behind every purpose, every ambition, even though the individual
himself has not the slightest idea of the force that is at work.
This does not mean that instinct acts as a sort of cellar-plotter, roving around in a subconsciousness, or at
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