Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 3

From etiquette and social distinction, from formalities of conversation and correspondence, of greeting and farewell, of condolence and congratulation to the most important "customs of the country," with respect to marriage, property, and the like, ways of acting are maintained by the mechanism of habit rather than by arbitrary law or equally arbitrary instinctive caprice.

DISSERVICEABLE HABITS IN THE INDIVIDUAL. Habitual behavior which can become so completely controlling in the lives of so many people is not without its dangers. The nervous system is originally neutral, and can be involved on the side either of good or evil. A human born with a plastic brain and nervous system must acquire habits, but that he will acquire good habits (that is, habits serviceable to his own happiness and to that of his fellows) is not guaranteed by nature. Habits are indeed more notorious than famous, and examples are more frequently chosen from evil ones than from good. Promptness in the performance of one's professional or domestic duties, care in speech, in dress and in demeanor, are, once they are acquired, permanent a.s.sets. But if these fail to be developed, dishonesty or superficiality, slovenliness in dress and speech, and surliness in manner, may and do become equally habitual. The significance of this has been eloquently stated at the close of James's famous discussion:

The h.e.l.l to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the h.e.l.l we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it, but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 127.]

SOCIAL INERTIA. If the acquisition of bad, that is, disserviceable habits, is disastrous to the individual, it is in some respects even worse in the group. The inertia of the nervous system, the tendency to go on repeating connections that have once been made is one of the strongest obstacles to change, however desirable. It is not only that habits of action have been established, but that with them go deep-seated habits of thought and feeling. The repression of people's accustomed ways of doing things may bring with it a sense of frustration almost as complete and painful as if these obstructed activities were instinctive. This is not true merely in the melodramatic instances of drug addicts and drunkards.

It is true in the case of social habits which have become established in a large group. Any Utopian that dreams of revolutionizing society overnight fails to take into account the enormous control of habits over groups which have acquired them, and the powerful emotions, amounting sometimes to pa.s.sion, which are aroused by their frustration.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEARNING HABIT. That habit is at once the conserver and the petrifier of society has long been recognized by social philosophers. There is one habit, however, the acquisition of which is itself a preventive of the complete domination of the individual or the group by hard and fast routine. This is the habit of learning, which is necessary to the acquisition of any habits at all. Man in learning new habits, "learns to learn." This ability to learn is, of course, correlated with a plasticity of brain and nerve fiber which is most present in early youth. The disappearance of this capacity is hastened by the pressure which forces individuals in their business and professional life to cling fast to certain habits which are prized and rewarded by the group. A sedulous cultivation on the part of the individual of the habit of open-minded inquiry, of the habit of learning, and the encouragement of this tendency by the group are the only antidotes that can be provided against this marked physiological tendency to fossilization and the frequent social tendencies in the same direction.

Whether habits shall master us, or whether we shall be their masters, depends also on the method by which they were acquired. If they were learned merely through mechanical drill, they will be fixed and rigid. If they were learned deliberately to meet new situations, they will not be retained when the conditions they were acquired to meet are utterly changed.

THE SPECIFICITY OF HABITS. One important consideration, finally, that must be brought to consideration is that habits are, like instincts, specific. They are not general "open sesames"

which, learned in one situation, will apply with indiscriminate miraculousness to a variety of others. Just as an instinct is a definite response to a definite stimulus, so is a habit. The chief and almost only observable difference is that the former is unlearned, while the latter is learned or acquired.

But while habits are specific, they are within limits transferable.

Such is the case when a situation which calls out a certain habitual response is paralleled in significant points by another. Thus the situation, one's-room-at-home-cluttered-up-with-a-miscellany-of-books-papers-tennis-apparatus-and-clothing, has sufficiently similar significant points to the situation, one's-office-littered-with-doc.u.ments-old-letters-ma.n.u.scripts-blueprints-and-proofs, to call forth, if the habit has been established in one case, the identical response of "tidying up" in the other. But unless there are marked points of similarity between two different sets of circ.u.mstances, specific habits remain specific and non-transferable. There is in the laws of habit no guarantee that an industrious application to the batting averages of the major league on the part of an alert twelve-year-old will provoke the same a.s.siduous a.s.similation of the facts of the American Revolution; that a boy who works hard at his chemistry will work equally hard at his English, or that one who is careful about his manners and p.r.o.nunciation in school will display the slightest heed to them among his companions on the ball-field. One of the most cogent arguments against the stereotyped teaching of Latin and Greek has been the serious doubt psychologists have held as to whether four years' training in Latin syntax will develop in the student general mental habits which will be applicable or useful outside the Latin cla.s.sroom.

The older "faculty" psychologists presumed that different subjects trained various so-called "faculties" of "memory,"

"imagination," and "intellect." It has now become clear on experimental evidence that in education we are training no isolated faculties, but are training the individual to certain specific habits. The more widely applicable the habits are, obviously the more valuable or dangerous will they be in the conduct of life. But when habits do become general, such as a habit of promptness, honesty, and regularity, not in one situation but "in general," it is because they are something more than habits in the strict physiological sense. They are intellectual as well as merely motor in character; they are deliberate and conscious methods rather than mechanical rules of thumb. Habits that have been drilled into an individual will appear only when the situation very closely approximates the one in which the drill has been performed.

The cat that has learned to get out of a certain type of cage by pressing a b.u.t.ton will be utterly at a loss if the familiar features of the cage are changed. The intelligent human will detect and take pains to detect among the minor differences of the situation some significant fact which he has met in another setting, and he will apply a habit useful in this new situation despite the slightly changed accompanying circ.u.mstances.

The man who can drive an automobile with reflective appreciation of the processes involved, who knows, as we say, what he is doing, will not long be baffled by a car with a slightly different arrangement of levers and steering-gear, nor be completely frustrated when the car for some reason fails to move. As happened in many notable instances during the World War, trained executives were not long at a loss when they shifted from the management of a steel plant to a shipyard, or from large-scale mining operations in Montana to large-scale relief work in Belgium.

THE CONSCIOUS TRANSFERENCE OF HABITS. When habits are consciously acquired, they may be consciously transferred with modifications to situations slightly different from those in which they were first learned. Merely mechanical habits are a hindrance in any save the most mechanical work. An alert and conscious method of learning, which means the development of habits _as_ methods of control, will enable the individual to modify habits acquired in slightly different circ.u.mstances to new situations where the major conditions remain the same. To be merely habitual is to be at best an efficient machine, utterly unable to do anything except to run along certain grooves, to respond like an animal trained to certain tricks. It means, moreover, a loss of richness in experience. When a profession becomes routinated it becomes meaningless; a mere making of the wheels go round.

The spirit of alert and conscious inquiry must be maintained if life is not to become a mere repeated monotony.

An alert and conscious adjustment of habits to a changing environment const.i.tutes intelligence. The technique of this adjustment is the technique of thinking or of reflective behavior, which we shall examine in more detail in the following chapter.

EMOTION. All human action, whether on the plane of instinct, habit, or reflection, is, to a lesser or greater degree, accompanied by emotion. While there is considerable controversy among psychologists as to the precise nature of emotion, and the precise conditions of its causation, its general features and significance are fairly clear. Emotion may be most generally defined as an awareness or consciousness on the part of the individual of his experiences, both those in which he is the actor and those in which he is being pa.s.sively acted upon. This awareness or consciousness is not detached intellectual perception, but is accompanied by, as it is by some held to be merely the consciousness of, certain specific bodily disturbances. Thus the emotions of fear and grief are not cold and abstract perceptions of situations that belong in the cla.s.ses dangerous or deplorable, respectively. The awareness of these situations by the individual is intimately and invariably connected with certain outward bodily manifestations and certain inner organic disturbances. Fear, rage, pity, and the like are not unimpa.s.sioned judgments, but highly charged physical changes. So close, indeed, is the connection between specific bodily conditions and the subjective or inner consciousness that we call emotion, that James and Lange simultaneously came to the conclusion that emotions are nothing more nor less than the blending of the complex organic changes that occur in any given emotional state.

Thus James:

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is impossible for me to think. Can anyone fancy the state of rage, and picture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensations of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold blooded and dispa.s.sionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastis.e.m.e.nt for their sins. In like manner of grief; what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?

A feelingless cognition that certain circ.u.mstances are deplorable, and nothing more.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 452.]

Indeed, so completely did James think the emotions were explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations which go to make up each of them that he did not think it misleading to say "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be."

Whether or not emotions are completely to be explained as the inner or subjective aspect of the complex of organic disturbances which accompany fear, rage, and the like, and which are caused immediately by the perception of the appropriate objects of these emotions, it is certainly true that emotional awareness and bodily disturbances are very closely connected.[1]

[Footnote 1: Recent experiments by Dr. Cannon at Harvard have shown the specific bodily disturbances which accompany anger, fear, etc. In particular, Dr.

Cannon, and others, have noted that in the emotional conditions of fear and anger the glands, located near the kidneys, discharge a fluid into the blood stream, which fluid stimulates the heart to activity, constricts the blood vessels of the internal organs, causes the liver to pour out into the blood its stores of sugar, and affects in one way or another all the organs of the body.

The general effect is to put the body into a state of preparedness for the activities connected with the emotion, whether flight in the case of fear, attack as in the case of anger. This has led Professor Woodworth to define emotion as, at least in part, "the way the body feels when it is prepared for a certain reaction." See the latter's _Dynamic Psychology_, pp. 51-59.]

Various attempts have been made to cla.s.sify the emotions which are, in ordinary experience, infinitely subtle and complex.

The subtlety and variety of emotion James explains as the result of the subtle and imperceptible differences in the complex of sensations which occur in any given situation. In general, it has been recognized that the emotions are very closely connected with the primary tendencies of man.

McDougall, for example, says that each of the great primary impulses is accompanied by an emotion. Indeed, McDougall considers, as earlier noted, that the emotion is the affective or conscious aspect of an instinct which, at the same time, has a perceptual and impulsive aspect; that, in the case of fear, the perceptual aspect is the instinctive mechanism for recognizing objects of danger, the impulsive aspect is the tendency toward flight, and the affective aspect is the inner feeling or awareness of fear. Thus, for McDougall, the tender emotion is the emotional aspect of the instinct of pity, anger of the instinct of pugnacity, which is, as an impulse, the tendency to strike and destroy.

As a matter of fact, as McDougall himself admits, emotions are seldom experienced in unmixed forms, and it is very difficult to reduce the infinite variety of emotional experiences to any primary forms. One may well agree with James that "subdivisions [in the psychological demarcation of the emotions]

are to a great extent either fict.i.tious or unimportant, and ... pretenses to accuracy, a sham." In general, one may say that emotions are closely connected with the native tendencies of human beings and are aroused by both their fulfillment, their conflict, and their frustration. The variety of emotions results from the fact that no single one of our instincts is stimulated at a time, and that the peculiar specific quality of each emotional experience is due to the specific point of conflict, fulfillment, or frustration in each particular case. It may be further noted that those emotions are, in general, pleasantly toned which accompany the fulfillment or the approach to the fulfillment of a native disposition; and those are unpleasantly toned which accompany their frustration or conflict. The depth and intensity of the emotional disturbance seem to depend on the degree and extent to which strong instinctive or habitual impulses have become involved.

For as habits of action may be acquired, so also may emotions become a.s.sociated habitually with them. The emotional disturbances connected with the fulfillment, frustration, and conflict of habits may be just as intense as those connected with similar phenomena in the case of instincts.

In one sense these emotional disturbances impede action, certainly action on the reflective level. It is the capacity and function of reflection to solve and adjust precisely those conflicts of competing impulses during which emotional disturbances occur. But the reflective process is confused and distorted in conflicts of native or habitual desires by these emotional disturbances which accompany them. It is proverbially difficult to think straight when angry; the surgeon in performing an operation must not be moved by pity or fear; and love is notoriously blind. The facts with which reflection must deal are presented in distorted and exaggerated form under the stress of competing impulses. Stimuli become loaded with emotional a.s.sociations. They are glaring and conspicuous on the basis of their emotional urgency rather than on the ground of their logical significance. The paralysis or complete disorganization of action which occurs in extreme cases of hysteria takes place to some extent in all less extreme instances of emotional disturbances.

Emotions, on the other hand, serve to sustain, and, in their less violent form, to facilitate action. It has already been noted that the organic disturbances which are so conspicuous a feature of emotion are extremely important in preparing the body for the overt actions in which these emotions always tend to issue. And it is unquestionable that emotions, though in more or less obscure ways, call up reserves of energy in the service of the activity in connection with which the emotion has been aroused. While very violent emotions, as in the case of extreme anger or fear or pity, confuse, disorganize, and even paralyze action, in more moderate form they rather serve to stimulate and reinforce it. Emotions are, in many cases, merely the inner or subjective awareness of one of these great driving forces, or a complex of them.

Anger, pity, and fear, in their less extreme forms, pour floods of energy into the activities in which they take overt expression.

It needs no special knowledge to recognize the fact that the normal interests and enterprises of life are quickened and sustained when some great emotional drive can be roused in their support. Ambition, loyalty, love, or hate may stir men to and sustain them in long and difficult enterprises which they would neither undertake nor continue were these motive forces removed. The soldier does not fight persistently and well wholly, or often even in part, because he has thought out the situation and found the cause of his country to be just. He is stirred and sustained by the energies which the emotional complex called "patriotism" has roused and concentrated toward action. A scientist performing long and difficult researches, a father sacrificing rest and comfort that his children may be well provided for, a boy working to pay his way through college, are all persisting in courses of action, because of the driving power which the emotions, more or less mixed, of curiosity, or tenderness, or self-a.s.sertion have released.

But just as the original nature with which man is born is modifiable, so are his emotional reactions. Each individual's emotional reactions are peculiar and specific, because of the particular contacts to which they have been exposed, and the organization of instincts and habits which have come to be their more or less fixed character. Any emotional experience consists of an intermingling of many and diverse feelings.

And these particular complexes of emotions become for each individual organized about particular persons or objects or situations. The emotional reactions of an individual are, indeed, accurately symptomatic of the character of the individual and the culture of his time. They are aroused, it goes without saying, on very different occasions and by very different objects, among different men and different groups.

In the sixteenth century pious persons could watch heretics being burned in oil with a sense of deep religious exaltation.

Certain Fijian tribes slaughter their aged parents with the most tender filial devotion. In certain savage communities, to eat in public arouses on the part of the individual a sense of acute shame.

Since those emotions are, on the whole, pleasantly toned which accompany the fulfillment of instinctive and habitual impulses, and those unpleasantly toned which accompany their frustration, it becomes, as Aristotle pointed out, of the most "serious importance" early to habituate men to the performance of socially useful actions. If good or useful actions are early made habitual, their performance will bring pleasure, and will thereby be better insured than by any amount of preaching or punishment. If the actions which the group approves are not early made habitual in the younger members of the group, they will not be enforced either through logic or electrocution. It is not enough to give people reasons for doing good, they will only do it consistently if the opposite arouses in them more or less abhorrence. People learn to modify their actions on the basis of the pleasure or pain they find in their performance, and the pleasure or pain they will experience depends on the actions to which they are habituated and the emotions which have come to be their characteristic accompaniments.

CHAPTER III

REFLECTION.

INSTINCT AND HABIT _VERSUS_ REFLECTION. In the two types of behavior already discussed, man is, as it were, "pushed from behind." In the case of instinct he performs an action simply because he _must_ perform it. w.i.l.l.y-nilly he withdraws his hand from fire, eats when hungry, and sleeps when tired. In the case of habits, once they are acquired, he is also largely dominated by circ.u.mstances beyond his own control. The bottle is to the confirmed drunkard almost an irresistible command to drink, the alarm clock to one accustomed to it an equally imperative and not-to-be-disregarded order to arise.

The story of the old veteran who was carrying home his dinner and who dropped his hands to his side and his dinner to the gutter when a practical joker called "Attention"; the pathetic plight of the superannuated business man who is totally at a loss away from his familiar duties, are often quoted ill.u.s.trations of how completely habit may determine a man's actions.

But while in a large portion of our daily duties we are thus at the beck and call of the instincts which are our inheritance and the habits which we have acquired, we may also _control_ our actions. Instead of performing actions as immediate and automatic responses to accustomed stimuli, we may determine our actions, single or consecutive, in the light of absent and future results. To act thus is to act reflectively, and to act reflectively is the only escape from random acts prompted by instinct and routine ones prompted by habit.

To act reflectively is to delay response to an instinctive or habitual stimulus until the various possibilities of action and the results a.s.sociated with each have been considered. An action performed instinctively or habitually is automatic; it is performed not on the basis of what will be the result, but simply as an immediate response to a present stimulus. But an act (or a series of acts) reflectively performed is performed in the light of the results that are prophetically a.s.sociated with them. In the case of instinct and habit, the individual almost literally does not know what he is about. In reflective activity he does know, and the more thorough the reflective process, the more thorough and precise is his knowledge. He performs actions _because_ they will achieve certain results, and he is conscious of that causal connection, both before the action is performed when he perceives the results imaginatively, and after it is performed when he sees them in fact.

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF REFLECTION. Reflection, it must be noted in the first place, is not a thing, but a process. It is a process whereby human beings adjust themselves to a continuously changing environment. Our instincts and habits suffice to adapt us to that large number of recurrent similar situations of which our experience in no small measure exists.

In such cases the habitual response will bring the usual satisfaction.

Walking, dressing, getting to familiar places, finding the electric b.u.t.ton in well-known rooms, opening often-opened combinations--these operations are all adequately accomplished by the fixed mechanisms of habit. But we meet as frequently with novel situations where the accustomed or instinctive reactions will not bring the desired satisfaction.

One response or a number of responses will not adjust the individual satisfactorily to external conditions; or there may be a conflict between a number of impulses all clamoring for satisfaction at once. Reflection thus begins either in a maladjustment between the individual and his environment or in a conflict of impulses within the same person.

Where such a maladjustment occurs, the uneasiness, discomfort, and frustration of action may be removed in one of two ways. Adjustment may be achieved, as we have already seen, through physical trial and error, through a hit-and-miss experimentation with every possible response until the appropriate one is made. This is the only way in which animals can learn to modify their instinctive tendencies into habits more adequate to their conditions. The more economical and effective process, one peculiar to human beings, is that of reflection. To think or to reflect means to postpone response to a given problematic situation until the possible consequences of the possible responses have been mentally traced out. Instead of _actually_ making every response that occurs to us, we make all of them _imaginatively_. Instead of consuming time and energy in physical trial and error, we go through the process of mental trial and error. We make no response at all in action until we have surveyed all the possibilities of action and their possible consequences. And when we do make a response we make it on the basis of those foreseen consequences.[1]

[Footnote 1: The possibilities of response that do occur to us are, on the whole, determined by past training and native differences in temperament. But part of the process of reflection is, as we shall see in the chapter on "Science and Scientific Method," concerned with deliberately enlarging the field of possible responses in the solution of a given problem.]

In other words, the situation is a.n.a.lyzed. What is the end or adjustment sought, what are the possible responses, and how far is each of them suited as a means to achieving the satisfaction sought? Instead of going through every random course of action that suggests itself, each one is "dramatically rehea.r.s.ed." Finally, that response is made which gives most promise in terms of its prophesied consequences of adjusting us to our situation.

ILl.u.s.tRATION OF THE REFLECTIVE PROCESS. A student may, for example, be seated at his study, preparing for an examination.

A friend enters and suggests going for a walk or to the theater. If the student were to follow this first immediate impulse he would, before he realized it, be off for an evening's entertainment. But instead of responding immediately, dropping his books, reaching for his hat, opening the door, and ringing for the elevator (a series of habitual acts initiated by the instinctive desire for rest, variety, and companionship), he may rehea.r.s.e in imagination the various possibilities of action. In general terms, what happens is simply this:[1]