The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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semi-diabolical personality need be postulated, any more than it
need be postulated for the automatic mechanism that regulates
heartbeat or digestion. The organic tensions and depressions that
constitute instinct are not conscious or subconscious; they
affect our conscious personalities so that we desire something,
we fit that desire in with the rest of our desires, we seek the
means of gratifying that desire first in accordance with means
that Nature has given us and second in accordance with social
teaching and our intelligence. If the desire brings us sharply in
contact with obstacles imposed either by circumstances or more
precious desire, we inhibit that desire,—and thus the instinct.
Because organic tensions and depressions are periodic and are
dependent upon the activities of glands and tissues not within
our control, the desires may never be completely squelched and
may arise as often as some outer stimulus brings them into
activity, to plague and disorder the life of the conscious
personality.
3. With this preliminary consideration of instinct, we pass on to
certain of the phases of intelligence. How to define intelligence
is a difficulty best met by ignoring definition. But this much is
true: that the prime function of intelligence is to store up the
past and present experiences so that they can be used in the
future, and that it adds to the rigid mechanism of instinct a
plastic force which by inhibiting and exciting activity according
to need steers the organism through intricate channels.
Instinct, guided by a plan, conveniently called Nature’s plan, is
not itself a planner. The discharge of one mechanism discharges
another and so on through a series until an end is reached,—an
end apparently not foreseen by the organism but acting for the
good of the race to which the organism belongs. Intelligence,
often enough not conscious of the plans of Nature,[1] indeed,
decidedly ignorant of these plans, works for some good
established by itself out of stimuli set up by the instincts. It
plans, looks backward and forward, reaches the height of
reflecting on itself, gets to recognize the existence of instinct
and sets itself the task of controlling instinct. Often enough it
fails, instinct breaks through, takes possession of the means of
achievement, accomplishes its purpose—but the failure of
intelligence to control and the misguided control it attempts and
assumes are merely part of the general imperfections of the
organism. A perfect intelligence would be clearly able to
understand its instincts, to give each of them satisfaction by a
perfect compromise, would pick the methods for accomplishment
without error, and storing up the past experiences without loss,
would meet the future according to a plan.
[1] We are at this stage in a very dark place in human thought.
We say that instincts seek the good of the race, or have some
racial purpose, as the sexual instinct has procreation as its
end. But the lover wooing his sweetheart has no procreation plan
in his mind; he is urged on by a desire to win this particular
girl, a desire which is in part sexual, in part admiration of her
beauty, grace, and charm; again it is the pride of possession and
achievement; and further is the result of the social and romantic
ideals taught in books, theaters, etc. He may not have the
slightest desire for a child; as individual he plans one
thing,—but we who watch him see in his approach the racial urge
for procreation and even disregard his purposes as unimportant.
Who and what is the Race, where does it reside, how can it have
purposes? Call it Nature, and we are no better off. We must fall
back on an ancient personalization of forces, and our minds rest
easier when we think of a Planner operating in all of us and
perhaps smiling as He witnesses our strivings.
As we study the nervous systems of animals, we find that with the
apparent growth of intelligence there is a development of that
part of the brain called the cerebrum. In so far as certain other
parts of the brain are concerned—medulla, pons, mid-brain, basal
ganglia cerebellum—we who are human are not essentially superior
to the dog, the cow, the elephant or the monkey. But when the
neopallium, or the cerebrum, is considered, the enormous
superiority of man (and the superiority of the higher over the
lower animals) becomes striking. Anatomically the cerebrum is a
complex elaboration of cells and fibers that have these main
purposes: First, to record in perfect and detailed fashion the
EXPERIENCES of the organism, so that here are memory centers for
visual and auditory experiences, for skin, joint and bone
experiences of all kinds, speech memories, action memories, and
undoubtedly for the recording in some way not understood of the
pleasure-pain feelings. Second, it has a hold, a grip on the
motor mechanism of the body, on the muscles that produce action,
so that the intelligence can nicely adapt movement to the
circumstances, to purpose, and can inhibit the movements that
arise reflexly. Thus in certain diseases, where the part of the
brain involved in movement is injured, voluntary movement
disappears but reflex action is increased. Third, the neopallium,
or cerebrum, is characterized by what are known as association
tracts, i.e., connections of intricate kinds which link together
areas of the brain having different functions and thus allow for
combinations of activity of all kinds. The brain thus acts to
increase the memories of the past, and, as we all know, man is
probably the only animal to whom the past is a controlling force,
sometimes even an overpowering force. It acts to control the
conduct of the individual, to delay or to inhibit it, and it acts
to increase in an astonishing manner the number of reactions
possible. One stimulus arousing cerebral excitement may set going
mechanisms of the brain through associated tracts that will
produce conduct of one kind or another for years to come.
We spoke in a previous chapter of choice as an integral function
of the organism. While choice, when two competing stimuli awake
competing mechanisms, may be non-cerebral in its nature, largely
speaking it is a function of the cerebrum, of the intelligence.
To choose is a constant work of the intelligence, just as to
doubt is an unavailing effort to find a choice. Choice blocked is
doubt, one of the unhappiest of mental states. I shall not
pretend to solve the mystery of WHO chooses,—WHAT chooses;
perhaps there is a constant immortal ego; perhaps there is built
up a series of permanently excited areas which give rise to ego
feeling and predominate in choice; perhaps competing mechanisms,
as they struggle (in Sherrington’s sense) for motor pathways,
give origin to the feeling of choice. At any rate, because we
choose is the reason that the concept of will has arisen in the
minds of both philosopher and the man in the street, and much of
our feeling of worth, individuality and power—mental factors of
huge importance in character—arises from the power to choose.
Choice is influenced by—or it is a net result of—the praise and
blame of others, conscience, memory, knowledge of the past, plans
for the future. It is the fulcrum point of conduct!
That animals have intelligence in the sense in which I have used
the term is without doubt. No one who reads the work of Morgan,
the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse and other recent investigators of
the instincts can doubt it. Whether animals think in anything
like the form our thought takes is another matter. We are so
largely verbal in thought that speech and the capacity to speak
seem intimately related to thought. For the mechanics of thought,
for the laws of the association of ideas, the reader is referred
to the psychologists. That minds differ according to whether they
habitually follow one type of associations or another is an old
story. The most annoying individual in the world is the one whose
associations are unguided by a controlling purpose, who rambles
along misdirected by sound associations or by accidental
resemblances in structure of words, or by remote meanings,—who
starts off to tell you that she (the garrulous old lady) went to
the store to get some eggs, that she has a friend in the country
whose boy is in the army (aren’t the Germans dreadful, she’s glad
she’s born in this country), city life is very hard, it isn’t so
healthy as the country, thank God her health is good, etc.,
etc.,” and she never arrives at the grocery store to buy the
eggs. The organizing of the associations through a goal idea is
part of that organizing energy of the mind and character
previously spoken of. The mind tends automatically to follow the
stimuli that reach it, but the organizing energy has as one of
its functions the preventing of this, and controlled thinking
follows associations that are, as it were, laid down by the goal.
In fatigue, in illness, in certain of the mental diseases, the
failure of the organizing energy brings about failure “to
concentrate” and the tyranny of casual associations annoys and
angers. The stock complaint of the neurasthenic that everything
distracts his attention is a reversion back to the unorganized
conditions of childhood, with this essential difference: that the
neurasthenic rebels against his difficulty in thinking, whereas
the child has no rebellion against that which is his normal
state. Minds differ primarily and hugely in their power of
organizing experience, in so studying and recording the past that
it becomes a guide for the, future. Basic in this is the power of
resisting the irrelevant association, of checking those automatic
mental activities that tend to be stirred up by each sound, each
sight, smell, taste and touch. The man whose task has no appeal
for him has to fight to keep his mind on it, and there are other
people, the so-called absent-minded, who are so overconcentrated, so wedded to a goal in thought, that lesser matters
are neither remembered nor noticed. In its excess
overconcentration is a handicap, since it robs one of that
alertness for new impressions, new sources of thought so
necessary for growth. The fine mind is that which can pursue
successfully a goal in thought but which picks en route to that
goal, out of the irrelevant associations, something that enriches
its conclusions.
Not often enough is mechanical skill, hand-mindedness, considered
as one of the prime phases of intelligence. Intelligence, en
route to the conquest of the world, made use of that marvelous
instrument, the human hand, which in its opposable thumb and
little finger sharply separates man from the rest of creation.
Studying causes and effects, experimenting to produce effect, the
hand became the principal instrument in investigation, and the
prime verifier of belief. “Seeing is believing” is not nearly so
accurate as “Handling is believing,” for there is in touch, and
especially in touch of the hands and in the arm movements, a
Reality component of the first magnitude. But not only in
touching and investigating, but in pushing and pulling and
striking, IN CAUSING CHANGE, does the hand become the symbol and
source of power and efficiency. Undoubtedly this phase of the
hands’ activities remained predominant for untold centuries,
during which man made but slow progress in his career toward the
leadership of the world. Then came the phase of tool-making and
using and with that a rush of events that built the cities,
bridged the waters, opened up the Little and the Big as sources
of knowledge and energy for man and gave him the power which he
has used,—but poorly. It is the skill of human hands upon which
the mind of man depends; though we fly through the air and speed
under water, some one has made the tools that made the machine we
use. Therefore, the mechanical skill of man, the capacity to
shape resisting material
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