Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 18

But in this utilization of original interests and capacities lies the only possibility of genuinely effective education.[1]

In the first place to try in education to give individuals habits for which they have no special innate tendencies to begin with, is costly. Secondly, to train individuals for types of life or work for which their gifts and desires are ill adapted is to promote at once inefficiency and unhappiness. One reason why the chance to identify one's life with one's work (as is the case with the artist and the scholar) is so universally recognized as good fortune, is because it is so rare. A general and indiscriminate training of men, as if they were all fitted with the same talents and the same longings, does as much as underpayment or overwork to impair the quality of the work done and the satisfaction derived from it.

[Footnote 1: A beginning in the application of this principle has been made by the vocational guidance and employment management work which is being done with increasing scientific accuracy throughout the United States. Individual differences and interests are studied with a view to putting "the right man in the right place." This slogan is borrowed from the Committee on Cla.s.sification and Personnel, which during the Great War, through its trade tests and other machinery of differentiation, utilized for the national welfare the specific abilities of thousands of drafted men.]

It has latterly been recognized that industry offers the crucial opportunity to utilize to the fullest individual differences.

By "getting the right man in the right place," we at once get the work done better and make the man better satisfied.

If adequate attention is given to "placement," to the specific demands put upon men by specific types of work, and to the specific capacities of individuals for fulfilling those demands, we will be capitalizing variations among men instead of being handicapped by them. As it is, specific differences do exist, and men enter occupations and professions ignoring them. As a result both the job and the man suffer; the former is done poorly, and the latter is unsuccessful and unhappy.

It must be noted that the existence of specific differences between individuals does not altogether, or often even in part, imply superiority or inferiority. It implies in each case inferiority or superiority with respect to the performance of a particular type of work. Whether scientific insight and accuracy is better than musical skill, whether a gift for salesmanship surpa.s.ses a gift for mathematics, depends on the social situation and the standards that happen to be current among the group. An intensely disagreeable person may be the best man for a particular job. All scientific observation can do is to note individual differences, to note what work makes demands upon what capacities, and try to bring the man and the job together.

It must be emphasized that, while individual capacities determine what an individual can do, social ideals and traditions determine what he will do, because they determine what he will be rewarded and encouraged to do. There is no question but that in our industrial civilization certain types of ability, that of the organizer, for example, have a high social value. There is no question but that there are other abilities, which under our present customs and ideals we reward possibly beyond their merit, as, to take an extreme case, that of a championship prize fighter. We can through education and vocational guidance utilize all native capacities.

To make provision for the utilization of all native capacities is to have an efficient social life. But to what end our efficient human machinery shall be used depends on the ideals and customs and purposes that happen to be current in the social order at any given time.

In the words of Professor Thorndike, "we can invest in profitable enterprises the capital nature provides." But what profiteth a man or a society, is a matter for reflective determination; it is not settled for us, as are our limitations, at birth.

The net result of scientific observation in this field is the discovery, in increasingly precise and specific form, that men are most diverse and unequal in interest and capacity. The ideal of equality comes to mean, under scientific a.n.a.lysis, equality of opportunity, leveling all social inequalities; the fact of natural inequalities and divergences remains incontestable.

There may even be, as recent psychological tests seem to indicate, a certain proportion of individuals who are not competent to take an intelligent part in democratic government, who, having too little intellectual ability to follow the simplest problem needing cooperative and collective decision, must eternally be governed by others. If these facts come to be authenticated by further data, it merely emphasizes the fact that in a country professedly democratic it is essential to devise an education that will, in the case of each individual, educate up to the highest point of native ability.

Where a country is ostensibly democratic, a few informed citizens will govern the many uninformed, unless the latter are educated to an intelligent knowledge and appreciation of their political duties and obligations. Furthermore, the citizens of a community who are prevented from using their native gifts will be both useless and unhappy. Certainly this is an undesirable condition in a society where all individuals are expected, so far as possible, to be ends in themselves and not merely means for the ends of others.

CHAPTER X

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION[1]

[Footnote 1: Much of the technical material for this chapter is drawn from Leonard Bloomfield's _The Study of Language_, and W. D. Whitney's _The Life and Growth of Language_.]

It was earlier pointed out that human beings alone possess language. They alone can make written symbols and heard sounds stand for other things, for objects, actions, qualities, and ideas. In this chapter the consideration of language may best be approached from the spoken tongue, under the influence of which, except in the simplest type of pictorial writing, the written form develops.[2]

[Footnote 2: Bloomfield: _loc. cit._, pp. 7-8.]

From the point of view of the student of behavior, language, spoken language especially, is a habit, acquired like walking or swimming. It is made possible primarily by the fact that human beings possess a variety and flexibility of vocal reflexes possessed by no other animal. All the higher animals have a number of vocal reflexes, which are called out primarily in the expression of emotion or desire. Cries of pain, hunger, rage, s.e.x desire or desire for companionship, are common to a great number of the animal species. But these cries and vocal utterances are limited, and comparatively unmodifiable.

They are moreover expressed, so far as experimental observation can reveal, with no consciousness of the specific significance of particular sounds and are used as the involuntary expression of emotion rather than as a specific means of communication.

... The primates have a much larger number of such vocal instincts than the other mammals, and a much larger number of stimuli can call them out, _e.g._, injury to bodily tissue calls out one group; hunger calls out a certain group; s.e.x stimuli (mate, etc.) another; and similarly cold, swiftly moving objects, tones, strange animals call out others. When attachments are formed between the female and her offspring another large group is called into action. There is no evidence to show in the case of mammals that these vocal instincts are modified by the sounds of other animals.... These throat habits may be cultivated to such an extent in birds that we may get an approximation, more or less complete, to a few such habits possessed by the human being. Such throat habits, however, are not language habits.[1]

[Footnote 1: Watson: _Behavior_, p. 323.]

In human beings language, it is clear, may attain extraordinary refinement and complexity, and may convey extremely fine shades and subtleties of emotion or idea. This results from the fact that man is born with a vocal apparatus far superior in development to that of any of the animals.

It is pretty clear that the mutant man, when thrown off from the primate stock, sprang forth with a vocal apparatus different from that of the parent stock, and possessing abundant richness in reflexes, even far surpa.s.sing that found in the bird. It is interesting to observe, too, in this connection, that within the narrow s.p.a.ce occupied by the vocal apparatus we have a system of muscular mechanisms which has within it, looking at it now as a whole, the same possibilities of habit formation that we find in the remaining portion of bodily musculature.... It is probable that in a few years we shall undertake the study of such habits from exactly the same standpoint that we now employ in studies upon the acquisition of skill in the human being.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 323-24.]

The human baby starts its expressive habits by emitting with wide-open mouth an undifferentiated shriek of pain. A little later it yells in the same way at any kind of discomfort.

It begins before the end of the first year to croon when it is contented. As it grows older it begins to make different sounds when it experiences different emotions. And with remarkable rapidity its repertoire of articulatory movements has greatly increased.

Speech that begins in the child as a mere vague vocal expression of emotion soon begins to exhibit a marked element of mimicry. The child begins to a.s.sociate the words uttered by his nurse or parents with the specific objects they point to.

He comes to connect "milk," "sleep," "mother" with the experiences to which they correspond. The child thus learns to react to certain sounds as significant of certain experiences.

Unlike Adam, he does not have to give names to animals, or for that matter to anything else on earth. They all have specific names in the particular language in which he happens to be brought up. In the case of other habits, largely through trial and error, he learns to a.s.sociate given sounds expressed by other people about him with given experiences, pleasant or unpleasant. He learns further to imitate, so far as possible, these sounds, as a means of more precisely communicating his wants or securing their fulfillment.

In this connection students of language frequently have raised the question of how man first came to a.s.sociate a given sound-sequence with a given experience. Like fire, language was once conceived to be a divine gift. Another theory postulated a genius who took it into his head to give the things of earth their present inevitable names. One other theory equally dubious held that language started in onomatopoetic expressions like "Bow-wow," for dog. Still another hypothesis once highly credited held that the sounds first uttered were the immediate and appropriate expressions called out by particular types of emotional experience. The validity of the last two theories has been rendered particularly dubious. The very instances of imitative words cited, words like "cuckoo," "crash," "flash," were, in their original forms, quite other than they are now. And that words are not immediately apposite expressions of the emotions which they represent, has been generally recognized. In gesture language, the gesture has to remain fairly imitative or expressive to be intelligible. But an examination of half a dozen casual words in contemporary languages shows how arbitrary are the signs used, and how little appositeness or relevance they bear in their sound to the sense which they represent.

The detailed study of the perfectly regular changes that so largely characterize the evolution of language, have revealed the inadequacy of any of these views. There seems to be, in fact, no explanation of the origin of the language any more than there is of the origin of life. All that linguistic science can do is to reveal the history of language. And in this history, human language stands revealed as a highly refined development of the crude and undifferentiated expressions which, under emotional stress, are uttered by all the animals.

LANGUAGE AS A SOCIAL HABIT. Language, as has repeatedly been pointed out, is essentially social in character. It is, in the first place, primarily an instrument of communication between individuals, and is cultivated as such. In human speech, interjections like "Oh!" or "Ah!" are still involuntary escapes of emotion, but language develops as a vehicle of communication to others rather than as a mere emotional outlet for the individual. Even if it were possible for the mythical man brought up in solitude on a desert island to have a language, it is questionable whether he would use it. Since language is a way of making our wants, desires, information known to others, it is stimulated by the presence of and contact with others. Excess vitality may go into shouting or song,[1] but language as an instrument of specific utterance comes to have a more definite use and provocation. Man, as already pointed out, is a highly gregarious animal, and language is his incomparable instrument for sharing his emotions and ideas and experience with others. The whole process of education, of the transmission of culture from the mature to the younger members of a society, is made possible through this instrument, whereby achievements and traditions are preserved and transmitted in precise and public terms.

[Footnote 1: Human song is by some linguistic experts, including Bloomfield, held to have originated in the chant of rhythmic labor, as in rowing or threshing.]

Secondly, language is social in that, for the individual at least, it is socially acquired. The child first imitates sounds without any consciousness of their meaning, just as he imitates other actions in sheer "physiological sympathy." But he learns soon, by watching the actions of other people, that given sounds are always performed when these others do given actions. He learns that some sounds are portents of anger and punishment; still others of satisfaction and pleasure. He learns soon to specify his utterances, to use sounds as specific stimuli, to attain through other people specific satisfactions.

The child is born with a flexible set of reflexes. In which way they shall be developed depends entirely on the accident of the child's environment. Whether he shall call it "bread" or "pain" or "brod," depends on the particular social environment in which he from the first hears that particular item of experience referred to. A child of American missionaries in Turkey picks up the language of that country as well as that of his own. An English child brought up under a French nurse may learn with perfect ease the foreign tongue, and to the exclusion of that of his native country. Indeed, so completely subject is one in this regard to one's early environment, that it is not only difficult in later life to acquire a new p.r.o.nunciation, but one finds it impossible to breathe freely, as it were, in the whole psychological atmosphere of a foreign language. Its grammatical categories, its spelling, its logic seem hopelessly irrational. It was perfectly natural of the Englishman in the story, when he was told that the French called it "pain," to insist, "Well, it's bread, anyhow." Many a reader of a foreign language which has become habitual can still not refrain from translating, as he reads, what seem to him irrational idioms into the familiar, facile, and sensible modes of his native tongue.

LANGUAGE AND MENTAL LIFE. The connection of language with thought has repeatedly been noted. It has even been questioned whether thought in any effective sense is possible without words. In general it may be said that thinking demands clean-cut and definite symbols to work with, and that language offers these in incomparable form. A word enables one to isolate in thought the dominant elements of an experience and prevents them from "slipping through one's fingers."

The importance of having words by which concepts may be distinguished and isolated from one another will become clearer by a brief reminder of the nature of reflection. Thinking is in large part (as will be discussed in detail in chapter XIII) concerned with the breaking-up of an experience into its significant elements. But experience begins with objects, and so far as perceptual experience is concerned, ends there.

We perceive objects, not qualities, actions, or ideas apart from objects. And the elements into which thinking a.n.a.lyzes an experience are never present, save in connection with, as parts of, a sensibly perceived object. Thus we never perceive whiteness save in white objects; warmth save in warm objects; red save in red objects. We never, for that matter, perceive so abstract a thing as an "object." We experience red houses or red flags; white flowers, white shoes, white paper; warm stoves, warm soup, and warm plates. Even houses and stoves and shoes are, in a sense, abstractions. No two of these are ever alike. But it is of the highest importance for us to have some means of identifying and preserving in memory the significant resemblances between our experiences.

Else we should be, as it were, utterly astounded every time we saw a chair or a table or a fork. Though they may, in each case in which we experience them, differ in detail, chairs, tables, forks have certain common features which we can "abstract" from the gross total experience, and by a word or "term," define, record, communicate, and recall. The advantage of a precise technical vocabulary over a loose "popular" one is that we can by means of the former more accurately single out the specific and important elements of an experience and distinguish them from one another. The common nouns, or "general names" in a language indicate to what extent and in what manner that language, through some or other of its users, cla.s.sifies its experiences. Highly developed languages make it possible to cla.s.sify similarities not easily detected in crude experience. They make it possible to identify other things than merely directly sensed objects.

In primitive languages experience is described and cla.s.sified only in so far as it is perceptual. In other words, primitive languages have names for objects only, not for ideas, qualities, or relations. Thus it is impossible in some Indian languages to express the concept of a "brother" by the same word, unless the "brother" is in every case in the same identical circ.u.mstances. One cannot use the same word for "man" in different relations: "man-eating," "man-sleeping,"

"man-standing-here," and "man-running-there" would all be separate compound words. Among the Fuegians there is one word which means "to look at one another, hoping that each will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do."[1] Marett writes in this connection:

[Footnote 1: Marett: _Anthropology_, p. 140.]

Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he" or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and two more for the full moon, each of the last named containing four syllables and having no elements in common.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 138-39.]

It is easy to see how very little refinement or abstraction from experience could be made with such a c.u.mbersome and inflexible vocabulary. The thirty thousand word vocabulary expressed a poverty of linguistic technique rather than a richness of ideas.

At the other extreme stands a language like English, which is, to an extraordinary degree, an "a.n.a.lytic" language. It has comparatively no inflections. This means that words can be used and moved about freely in different situations and relations.

Thus the dominant elements of an experience can be freely isolated. A noun standing for a certain object or relation is not chained to a particular set of accompanying circ.u.mstances.

"Man" stands as a definite concept, whether it be used with reference to an ancient Greek, a wounded man, a brave, a wretched, a competent, or a tall man. We can give the accompanying circ.u.mstances by additional adjectives, which are again freely movable verbally and intellectually.

Thus we can speak of a brave child and a tall tower as well as a brave man and a tall man. In Marett's words:

The evolution of language then, on this view, may be regarded as a movement away from the holophrastic [compound] in the direction of the a.n.a.lytic. When every piece in your playbox of verbal bricks can be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building.

Ideally, words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of language.... On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain a high degree of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that tends toward wordlessness--that is to say, one that is relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their ident.i.ty in all contexts.[1]

[Footnote 1: Marett: _loc. cit._, pp. 141-42.]

Languages differ not only in being more or less a.n.a.lytic, but in their general modes of cla.s.sification. That is, not only do they have more or less adequate vocabularies, but in their syntax, their sentence structure, their word forms, they variously organize experience. It is important to note that in these divergent cla.s.sifications no one of them is more final than another. We are tempted, despite this fact, to think that the grammar, spelling, and phonetics of our own language const.i.tute the last word in the rational conveyance of thought.

THE INSTABILITY OF LANGUAGE. Language being a social habit, it is to be expected that it should not stay fixed and changeless.

The simpler physiological actions are not performed in the same way by any two individuals, and no social practice is ever performed in the same way by two members of a group, or by two different generations. In this connection writes Professor Bloomfield:

The speech of former times, wherever history has given us records of it, differs from that of the present. When we read Shakspere, for example, we are disturbed by subtle deviations from our own habits in the use of words and in construction; if our actors p.r.o.nounced their lines as Shakspere and his contemporaries did we should say that they had an Irish or German brogue. Chaucer we cannot read without some grammatical explanation or a glossary; correctly p.r.o.nounced his language would sound to us more like Low German than like our English. If we go back only about forty generations from our time to that of Alfred the Great, we come to English as strange to us as modern German, and quite unintelligible, unless we study carefully both grammar and lexicon.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bloomfield: _loc. cit._, p. 195.]