The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
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a plea and a summons. Anticipation of good to come appears and
with it the germ of hope and forward looking, and there is
realization or disappointment, joy or anger or sorrow. Thus
desire is linked up with satisfaction in a definite way, ideas
and feelings of demand and supply begin to appear and perhaps
power itself, in the vague notion, “I can get milk,” commences to
be felt. Social life starts when the child associates the mother
with the milk, with the desire and the satisfaction. In the
relationship established between mother and baby is the first
great social contact; love, friendship, discipline, teaching and
belief have their origin when, at the mother’s breast, the child
separates its mother from the rest of the things of the world.
And not only in the relief of hunger is the mother active, but
she gets to be associated with the relief from wet and irritating
clothes, the pleasant bath, and the pleasure of the change of
position that babies cry for. Her bosom and her arms become
sources of pleasure, and the race has immortalized them as
symbolic of motherhood, in song, in story and in myth.
Not only does he associate the mother with the milk but her very
presence brings him comfort, even when he is not hungry. It is
within the first few months of life that the child shows that he
is a gregarious[1] animal,—gregarious in the sense that he is
unhappy away from others. To be alone is thus felt to be
essentially an evil, to be with others is in itself a good. This
gregarious feeling is the sine qua non of social life: when we
punish any one we draw away from him; when we reward we get
closer to him. All his life the child is to find pleasure in
being with people and unhappiness when away from them, unless he
be one of those in whom the gregarious instinct is lacking. For
instincts may be absent, just as eye pigment is; there are mental
albinos, lacking the color of ordinary human feeling. Or else
some experience may make others hateful to him, or he may have so
intellectualized his life that this instinct has atrophied. This
gregarious feeling will heighten his emotions, he will gather
strength from the feeling that “others are with him,” he will
join societies, clubs, organizations in response to the same
feeling that makes sheep graze on a hillside in a group, that
makes the monkeys in a cage squat together, rubbing sides and
elbows. The home in which our child finds himself, though a
social institution, is not gregarious; it gives him only a
limited contact, and as soon as he is able and self-reliant he
seeks out a little herd, and on the streets, in the schoolroom
and playground, he really becomes a happy little herd animal.
[1] One of my children would stop crying if some one merely
entered his room when he was three weeks old. He was, and is, an
intensely gregarious boy.
Let us turn back to the desire for activity. As the power to
direct the eyes develops, as hands become a little more sure,
because certain pathways in brain and cord “myelinize,”[1] become
functional, the outside world attracts in a definite manner and
movements become organized by desires, by purpose. It’s a
red-letter day in the calendar of a human being when he first
successfully “reaches” something; then and there is the birth of
power and of successful effort. All our ideas of cause and effect
originate when we cause changes in the world, when we move a
thing from thither to yon. No philosopher, though he becomes so
intellectualized that he cannot understand how one thing or event
causes another, ever escapes from the feeling that HE causes
effects. Purpose, resistance, success, failure, cause, effect,
these become inextricably wound up with our thoughts and beliefs
from the early days when, looking at a dangling string, we
reached for it once, twice, a dozen times and brought it in
triumph to our mouth. And our idea that there were forbidden
things came when the watchful mother took it out of our mouth,
saying, “No, no, baby mustn’t!”
[1] At birth, though most of the great nervous pathways are laid
down, they are non-functional largely because the fibers that
compose them are unclothed, non-myelinated. The various kinds of
tracts have different times for becoming “myelinated” as was the
discovery of the great analogist, Flechsig.
At any rate, the organization of activity for definite purposes
starts. The little investigator is apparently obsessed with the
idea that everything it can reach, including its fingers and
toes, are good to eat, for everything reached is at once brought
to the mouth, the primitive curiosity thus being gustatory. In
this research the baby finds that some few things are pleasant,
many indifferent and quite a few disgusting and even painful,
which may remain as a result not far different from that obtained
by investigation in later years. The desire for pleasant things
commences to guide its activities. Every new thing is at once an
object for investigation, perhaps because its possibilities for
pleasure are unknown. That curiosity may have some such origin is
at least a plausible statement. At any rate, desire of a definite
type steps in to organize the mere desire for activity; and
impulse is controlled by purpose.
The child learns to creep, and the delight in progression lies in
the fact that far more things are accessible for investigation,
for rearrangement, for tasting. It is no accident that we speak
of our “tastes” that we say, “I want to taste of experience.”
That is exactly what the child creeping on the floor seeks,—to
taste of experience and to anticipate, to realize, to learn. Out
of the desire for activity grows a desire for experience born of
the pleasure of excitement that we spoke of previously. This
desire for experience becomes built up into strange forms under
teaching and through the results of experience. It is very strong
in some who become explorers, roues, vagabonds, scientists as a
result, and it is very weak in others who stay at home and seek
only the safe and limited experience. You see two children in one
room,—and one sits in the middle of the floor, perhaps playing
with a toy or looking around, and the other has investigated the
stove and found it hotter than he supposed, has been under the
table and bumped his head, has found an unusually sweet white
lump which in later life he will call sugar. The good child is
often without sufficient curiosity to be bad, whereas the bad
child may be an overzealous seeker of experience.
So our child reaching out for things develops ideas of cause,
effect and power, commences to have an idea of himself as a cause
and likes the feeling of power. As he learns to walk, the world
widens, his sense of power grows, and his feeling of personality
increases. Meanwhile another side of his nature has been
developing and one fully as important.
The persons in his world have become quite individual; mother is
now not alone, for father is recognized with pleasure as one who
likewise is desirable. He carries one on his shoulder so that a
pleasurable excitement results; he plays with one, holds out
strings and toys and other instruments for the obtaining of
experience. Usually both of these great personages are friendly,
their faces wear a smile or a tender look, and our little one is
so organized that smiles and tender looks awaken comfortable
feelings and he smiles in return. The smile is perhaps the first
great message one human being sends to another; it says, “See, I
am friendly, I wish you well.” Later on in the history of the
child, he will learn much about smiles of other kinds, but at
this stage they are all pleasant. Though his parents are usually
friendly and give, now and then they deprive, and they look
different; they say, “No, no!” This “no, no” is social
inhibition, it is backed up by the power of deprivation,
punishment, disapproval; it has its power in a something in our
nature that gives society its power over us. From now there steps
in a factor in the development of character of which we have
already spoken, a group of desires that have their source in the
emotional response of the child to the parent, in the emotional
response of an individual to his group. Out of the social
pressure arises the desire to please, to win approval, to get
justification, and these struggle in the mind of the child with
other desires.
We said the child seeks experience,—but not only on his own
initiative. The father stands against the wall, perhaps with one
foot crossing the other. Soon he feels a pressure and looks down;
there is the little one standing in his imitation of the same
position. Imitation, in my belief, is secondary to a desire for
experience. The child does not imitate everything; he is equipped
to notice only simple things, and these he imitates. Why? The
desire to experience what others are experiencing is a basic
desire; it expresses both a feeling of fellowship and a
competitive feeling. We do not feel a strong tendency to imitate
those we dislike or despise, or do not respect, we tend to
imitate those we love and respect, those for whom we have a
fellow feeling. Part of the fellow feeling is an impulse to
imitate and to receive in a positive way the suggestion offered
by their conduct and manners.
Analogous to imitation, and part of the social instinct, is a
credulity, a willingness to accept as if personally experienced
things stated. Part of the seeking of experience is the asking of
questions, because the mind seeks a cause for every effect, a
something to work from. Indeed, one of the main mental activities
lies in the explaining of things; an unrest is felt in the
presence of the “not understood” which is not stilled until the
unknown is referred back to a thing understood or accepted
without question. The child finds himself in a world with
laid-down beliefs and with explanations of one kind or another
for everything. His group differs from other groups in its
explanations and beliefs; his family even may be peculiar in
these matters. He asks, he is answered and enjoined to believe.
Without credulity there could be no organization of society, no
rituals, no ceremonials, no religions and customs,—but without
the questioning spirit there could be no progress. Most of the
men and women of this world have much credulity and only a feeble
questioning tendency, but there are a few who from the start
subject the answers given them to a rigid scrutiny and who test
belief by results. Let any one read the beliefs of savages, let
him study the beliefs of the civilized in the spirit in which he
would test the statement of the performance of an automobile, and
he can but marvel at man’s credulity. Belief and the acceptance
of authority are the conservative forces of society, and they
have their origin in the nursery when the child asks, “Why does
the moon get smaller?” and the mother answers, “Because, dear,
God cuts a piece off every day to make the stars with.” The
authorities, recognizing that their power lay in unquestioning
belief, have always sanctified it and made the pious,
non-skeptical type the ideal and punished the non-believer with
death or ostracism. Fortunately for the race, the skeptic, if
silenced, modifies the strength of the belief he attacks and in
the course of time even they who have defended begin to shift
from it and it becomes refuted. Beliefs, as Lecky[1] so
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