The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
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Absolute Good, or absolute right and wrong, with which a man must
align himself. I believe it is the strength of the ego feeling
which gives to some the vigor and unyieldingness of their
conscience. “I am right,” says such a person, “and the rest of
the world is wrong. God is with me, my conscience and future
times will agree,” thus appealing to the distant tribunal as
James pointed out. All the insane hospitals have their sufferers
for conscience’s sake, paranoid personalities whose egos have
expanded to infallibility and whose consciences are
correspondingly developed.
Conscience thus represents the power of the permanent purposes
and ideals of the individuals, and it wars on the less permanent
desires and impulses, because there is in memory the uneasiness
and anxiety that resulted from indulgence and the pain of the
feeling of inferiority that results when one is hiding a secret
weakness or undergoing reproof or punishment. This group of
permanent purposes, ideals and aspirations corresponds closely to
the censor of the Freudian concept and here is an example where a
new name successfully disguises an age-old thought.
In other words, conscience is social in its origin, developing
differently in different people according to their teaching,
intelligence, will, ego-feeling, instincts, etc. From the
standpoint of character analysis there are many types of people
in regard to conscience development.
In respect to the reactions to praise and blame the following
types are conspicuous:
1. A “weak” group in whom these act as apparently the sole
motives.
2. A group energized by love of praise.
3. A group energized mainly by fear of blame.
4. A type that scorns anything but material reward.
5. Another, that “takes advantage” of reward; likes praise but is
merely made conceited by it, hates blame but is merely made angry
by it, fears punishment and finds its main goad to good conduct
in this fear.
6. Then there are those in whom all these motives operate in
greater or lesser degree,—the so-called normal person. In
reality he has his special inclinations and dreads.
7. The majority of people are influenced mainly by the group with
which they have cast their positions, the blame of others being
relatively unimportant or arousing anger. For there is this great
difference between our reactions to praise and blame: that while
the praise of almost any one and for almost any quality is
welcome, the blame of only a few is taken “well,” and for the
rest there is anger, contempt or defiance. The influence of blame
varies with the respect, love and especially acknowledged
superiority of the blamer. The “boss” has a right to blame and so
has father or mother while we are children, but we resent
bitterly the blame of a fellow employee; “he has no right to
blame,” and we rebel against the blame of our parents when we
grow up. In fact, the war of the old and new generations starts
with the criticism of the elder folk and the resentment of the
younger folk.
It will be seen that reaction to praise and blame, etc., will
depend upon the irritability of ego feeling, the love of
superiority and the dislike for inferiority. This basic situation
we must defer discussing, but what is of importance is that the
primitive disciplinary weapons we have discussed never lose their
cardinal value and remain throughout life and in all societies
the prime modes of thought and conduct.
In similar fashion the conscience types might be depicted. From
the over-conscientious who rigidly hold themselves to an ideal,
who watch every departure from perfection with agony and
self-reproach, and who may either reach the highest level or
“break down” and become inefficient to the almost conscienceless
group, doing only what seems more profitable, are many
intermediate types merging one with the other.
There are people whose conscience is localized, as the
self-sacrificing father who is a pirate in business, or as the
policeman who holds rigidly to conscience in courage and loyalty
to his fellows, but who finds no internal reproach when he takes
a bribe or perjures himself about a criminal. What we call a code
is really a localized conscience, and there are many men whose
consciences do not permit seduction of the virgin but who are
quite easy in mind about an intrigue with a married woman. So,
too, you may be as wily as you please in business but find
cheating at cards base and unthinkable. Conscience in the
abstract may be a divine entity, but in the realities of everyday
life it is a medley of motives, purposes and teachings, varying
from the grotesque and mischief-working to the sublime and
splendid.
CHAPTER III. MEMORY AND HABIT
There are two qualities of nervous tissues (possibly of all
living tissue) that are basic in all nervous and mental
processes. They are dependent upon the modificability of nerve
cells and fibers by stimuli, e. g., a light flashing through the
pupil and passing along the optical tracts to the occipital
cortex produces changes which constitute the basis of visual
memory. Experience modifies nervous tissue in definite manner,
and SOMETHING remembers. Who remembers? Who is conscious? Believe
what you please about that, call it ego, soul, call it
consciousness dipped out of a cosmic consciousness; and I have no
quarrel with you.
Memory has its mechanics, in the association of ideas, which
preoccupied the early English psychologists and philosophers; it
is the basis of thought and also of action, and it is a prime
mystery. We know its pathology, we think that memories for speech
have loci in the brain, the so-called motor memories in Broca’s
area.[1] We know that a hemorrhage in these areas or in the
fibers passing from them, or a tumor pressing on them may destroy
or temporarily abolish these memories, so that a man may KNOW
what he wishes to say, understand speech and be unable to say it,
though he may write it (motor aphasia). In sensory aphasia the
defect is a loss of the capacity to understand spoken speech,
though the patient may be able to say what he himself wishes. (It
is fair to say that the definite location of these capacities in
definite areas has been challenged by Marie, Moutier and others,
but this denial does not deny the organic brain location of
speech memories; it merely affirms that they are scattered rather
than concentrated in one area.)
[1] Foot of the left or right third frontal convolutions,
auditory speech in the supramarginal, etc.
In its widest phases memory alters with the state of the brain.
In childhood impressibility is high, but until the age or four or
five the duration of impression is low, and likewise the power of
voluntary recall. In youth (eighteen-twenty) all these capacities
are perhaps at their highest. As time goes on impressibility
seems first of all to be lost, so that it becomes harder and
harder to learn new things, to remember new faces, new names.
The typical difficulty of middle age is to remember names,
because these have no real relationship or logical value and must
be arbitrarily remembered. The typical senile defect is the
dropping out of the recent memories, though the past may be
preserved in its entirety. With any disease of the brain,
temporary or permanent, amnesia or memory loss may and usually is
present (e. g., general paresis, tumor, cerebral
arteriosclerosis, etc.). As the result of Carbon monoxide
poisoning, as after accidental or attempted suicidal gas
inhalation, the memory, especially for the most recent events, is
impaired and the patient cannot remember the events as they
occur; he passes from moment to moment unconnected to the recent
past, though his remote past is clear. Since memory is the basis
of certainty, of the feeling of reality, these unfortunates are
afflicted with an uncertainty, a sense of unreality, that is
almost agonizing. As the effects of the poison wear off, which
even in favorable cases takes months, the impressibility returns
but never reaches normality again.
Unquestionably there is an inherent congenital difference in
memory capacity. There are people who are prodigies of memory as
there are those who are prodigies of physical strength,—and
without training. The IMPRESSIBILITY for memories can in no way
be increased except through the stimulation of interest and a
certain heightening of attention through emotion. For the man or
woman concerned with memory the first point of importance is to
find some value in the fact or thing to be learned. Before a
subject is broached to students the teacher should make clear its
practical and theoretic value to the students. Too often that is
the last thing done and it is only when the course is finished
that its practical meaning is stressed or even indicated. In
fact, throughout, teaching the value of the subject should
constantly be emphasized, if possible, by illustrations from
life. There are only a few who love knowledge for its own sake,
but there are many who become eager for learning when it is made
practical.
The number of associations given to a fact determines to a large
extent its permanence in memory and the power of recalling it. In
my own teaching I always instruct my students in the technique of
memorizing, as follows:
1. Listen attentively, making only as many notes as necessary to
recall the leading facts. The auditory memories are thus given
the first place.
2. Go home and read up the subject in your textbooks, again
making notes. Thus is added the visual associations.
3. Write out in brief form the substance of the lecture, deriving
your knowledge from both the lecture and the book. You thus add
another set of associations to your memories of the subject.
4. Teach the subject to or discuss it with a fellow student. By
this you vitalize the memories you have, you link them firmly
together, you lend to them the ardor of usefulness and of
victory. You are forced to realize where the gaps, the lacunae of
your knowledge come, and are made to fill them in.
Thus the best way to remember a fact is to find a use for it and
to link it to your interests and your purposes. Unrelated it has
no value; related it becomes in fact a part of you. After that
the mechanics of memory necessitate the making of as many
pathways to that fact as possible, and this means deliberately to
associate the fact by sound, by speech and by action. The
advertised schemes of memory training are simply association
schemes, old as the hills, and having value indeed, but too much
is claimed for them. A splendid memory is born, not made; but any
memory, except where disease has entered, can be improved by
training.
It is because lectures on the whole do not supply enough
associations or arouse enough interest that the lecture is the
poorest method of teaching or learning. Man’s mind sticks easily
to things, but with difficulty to words about things. To maintain
attention for an hour or so, while sitting, is a task, and there
develops a tendency either to a hypnoidal state in which the mind
follows uncritically, or to a restless uneasiness with wandering
mind and fatigue of body. A demonstration, on the other hand, a
laboratory experiment with short, personal instruction, a bodily
contact with the problem calls into play interest, enthusiasm,
curiosity, motor images, the use of the hands, and is THE method
of teaching.
There are at present excellent psychological methods of testing
out the memory capacity. Every one engaged in any responsible
work, or troubled about his memory, should be so tested. While
there are other qualities of mind of great
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