The Foundations of Personality, Abraham Myerson [books to read to be successful txt] 📗
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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coincidence. Faith curists report in detail their successes, but
we have no statistics whatever of their failures.
If thought is a product of the brain activated by the rest of the
organism, it would be perfectly natural to expect that thought
would influence the organism. That thought is intimately
associated with impulses to action is well known. This action
largely takes place in the speech muscles but also it irradiates
into the rest of the organism. Especially is this true if the
thought is associated with some emotion. Emotion, as we shall
discuss it later, is at least in large part a bodily reaction, a
disturbance in heart, lungs, abdominal organs, blood vessels,
sympathetic nervous system, endocrines, etc. The effect of
thought and emotion upon the body, whether to heighten its
activity or to lower its activity, is, from my point of view,
merely the effect of one function of the organism upon others. We
are not surprised if digestion affects thinking and mood, and we
need not be surprised if thought and mood disturb or improve
digestion. And we may substitute for digestion any other organic
function.
As a working basis, substantiated by the kind of proof we use in
our daily lives in laboratories and machine shops, we may state
that mind, character and personality are organic in their origin
and are functions of the entire organism. What a man thinks, does
and feels (or perhaps we should reverse this order) is the result
of environmental forces playing upon a marvelously intricate
organism in which every part reacts on every other part, in which
nervous energy influences digestion and digestion influences
nervous energy, in which enzymes, hormones, and endocrines engage
in an extraordinary game of checks and balance, which in the
normal course of events make for the individual’s welfare. What a
man thinks, does, and feels influences the fate of his organism
from one end of life to the other.
We have not adduced in favor of the organic nature of mind,
character and personality the facts of heredity. This is a most
important set of facts, for if the egg and the sperm carry
mentality and personality, they may be presumed to carry them in
some organic form, as organic potentialities, just as they carry
size,[1] color, sex, etc. That abnormal mind is inherited is
shown in family insanity in the second, third and fourth
generation cases of mental disease. Certain types of
feeblemindedness surely are transmitted from generation to
generation, as witness the case of the famous (or infamous) Jukes
family. In this group vagabondage, crime, immorality and other
character abnormalities appeared linked with the
feeblemindedness. But there is plenty of evidence to show that
normal character qualities are inherited as well as the
abnormal.[2] Galton, the father of eugenics, collected facts from
the history of successful families to prove this. It is true that
he failed to take into account the facts of SOCIAL heredity, in
that a gifted man establishes a place for himself and a tradition
for his family that is of great help to his son. Nevertheless,
musical ability runs in families and races, as does athletic
ability, high temper, passion, etc. In short, at least the
potentialities, the capacities for character, are transmitted
together with other qualities as part of the capital of heredity.
[1] I have collected and published from the records and wards of
the State Hospital at Taunton, Mass., many such cases. The whole
subject is to be reviewed in a following book on the transmission
of mental disease, but no one seriously doubts that there is a
transference of “insane” character from generation to generation.
In fact, I believe that a little too much stress hag been laid on
this aspect of mental disease and not enough on the fact that
sickness may injure a family stock and cause the descendants to
be insane. Any one who has seen a single case of congenital
General Paresis, where a child has a mental disease due to the
syphilis of a parent, and can doubt that character and mind are
organic, simply is blinded by theological or metaphysical
prejudice.
[2] See his book “Genius.”
This means that in studying character and personality, we must
start with an analysis of the physical make-up of the individual.
We are not yet at the point in science where we can easily get at
the activities of the endocrinal glands in normal mentality. We
are able to recognize certain fundamental types, but more we
cannot do; nor are we able to measure nervous energy except in
relatively crude ways, but these crude ways have great value
under certain conditions.
When there has been a change in personality, the question of
bodily disease is always paramount. The first questions to be
asked under such circumstances are, “Is this person sick?” “Is
the brain involved?” “Are endocrinal glands involved?” “Is there
disease of some organ of the body, acting to lower the feeling of
well-being, acting to slacken the purposes and the will or to
obscure the intelligence?”
There are other important questions of this type to answer, some
of which may be deferred for the time. Meanwhile, the next
equally fundamental thesis is on the effect of the environment
upon mind, character and personality.
CHAPTER II. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS OF CHARACTER
From the time any one of us is born into the world he is subject
to the influences of forces that reach backwards to the earliest
days of the race. The “dead hand” rules,—yes, and the dead
thought, belief and custom continue to shape the lives and
character of the living. The invention and development of speech
and writing have brought into every man’s career the mental life
and character of all his own ancestors and the ancestors of every
other man.
A child is not born merely to a father and a mother. He is born
to a group, fiercely and definitely prejudiced in custom, belief
and ideal, with ways of doing, feeling and thinking which it
seeks to impose on each of its new members. Family, tribe, race
and nation all demand of each accession that he accept their
ideals, habits and beliefs on peril of disapproval and even of
punishment. And man is so constituted that the approval and
disapproval of his group mean more to him even than his life.
The social setting into which each one is born is his social
heredity. “The heredity with which civilization is most
supremely concerned,” says Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, “is not that
which is inborn in the individual. It is the SOCIAL inheritance
which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress.”[1] It
is this social inheritance which shapes our characters,
rough-hewn by nature. It is by the light of each person’s social
inheritance that we must also judge his character.
[1] The Eugenists fiercely contest this statement, and rightly,
for it is extreme. Society is threatened at its roots by the
present high birth rate of the low grade and the low birth rate
of the high grade. Environment, culture, can do much, but they
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Neither can heredity
make a silk purse out of silk; without culture and the
environmental influences, without social heredity, the silk
remains crude and with no special value. The aims of a rational
society, which we are born a thousand years too soon to see would
be twofold: to control marriage and birth so that the number of
the unfit would be kept as low as possible, and then to bring
fostering influences to bear on the fit.
“Education,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is only second to
nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places!” And education is merely social
inheritance organized by parents and teachers for the sake of
molding the scholar into usefulness and conformity to the group
into which he is born. There may be in each individual an innate
capacity for this ability or that, for expressing and controlling
this or that emotion, for developing this or that purpose. Which
ability will be developed, which emotion or purpose will be
expressed, is a matter of the age in which a man is born, the
country in which he lives, the family which claims him as its
own. In a warrior age the fighting spirit chooses war as its
vocation and develops a warlike character; in a peaceful time
that same fighting spirit may seek to bring about such reforms as
will do away with war.[1] When the world said that a man might
and really ought now and then to beat his wife and rule her by
force, the really conformable man did so, while his descendant,
living in a time and country where woman is the domestic “boss,”
submits, humorously and otherwise, to a good-natured henpecking.
And in the times where a woman had no vocation but that of
housewife, the wife of larger ability merely became a
discontented, futile woman; whereas in an age which opens up
politics to her, the same type of person expands into a vigorous,
dominating political leader. Though the force of the water remain
the same, the nature of the land determines whether the water
shall collect as a river, carrying the produce of the land to the
sea, or as a stagnant lake in which idlers fish. Time, social
circumstances, education and a thousand and one factors determine
whether one shall be a “Village Hampden,” quarreling in a petty
way with a petty autocrat over some petty thing, or a national
Hampden, whose defiance of a tyrannical king stirs a nation into
revolt.
[1] Indeed, a reformer is to-day called a crusader, though the
knight of the twelfth century armed cap-a-pie for a joust with
the Saracen would hardly recognize as his spiritual descendant a
sedentary person preaching against rum. Yet to the student of
character there is nothing anomalous in the transformation.
How conceptions of right and wrong, of proper and improper
conduct, ideals and thoughts arise, it is not my function to
treat in detail. That intelligence primarily uses the method of
trial and error to learn is as true of groups as of individuals;
and established methods of doing things—customs—are often
enough temporary conclusions, though they last a thousand years.
The feeling that such group customs are right and that to depart
from them is wrong, is perhaps based on a specific instinct, the
moral instinct; but much more likely, in my opinion, is it
obedience to leadership, fear of social disapproval and
punishment, conscience, imitation, suggestibility and sympathy,
all of which are parts of that social cement substance, the
social instinct. No child ever learns “what is right and wrong”
except through teaching, but no child would ever conform, except
through gross fear, unless he found himself urged by deep-seated
instincts to be in conformity, in harmony and in sympathy with
his group,—to be one with that group. Perhaps it is true, as
Bergson suggests, as Galton[1] hints and as Samuel Butler boldly
states, that there are no real individuals in life but we are
merely different aspects of reality or, to phrase it
materialistically, corpuscles in the blood stream of an organism
too vast and complicated to be encompassed by our imagination.
Just as a white blood cell obeys laws of which it can have no
conception, fulfills purposes whose meaning transcends its own
welfare, so we, with all our self-consciousness and all the
paraphernalia of individuality, are perhaps parts of a life we
cannot understand.
[1] For example, read what the hard-headed Galton says
(“Hereditary Genius,” p. 376):
“There is decidedly a solidarity as well as a separateness in all
human and probably in all lives whatsoever,
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