Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 63

The first words, we may suppose, were onomatopoetic, that is to say, vocal imitations of the objects to which they referred. At any rate they arose spontaneously in connection with the situation that inspired them.

They were then imitated by others and thus became the common and permanent possession of the group. Language thus a.s.sumed for the group the role of perception in the individual. It became the sign and symbol of those meanings which were the common possession of the group.

As the number of such symbols was relatively small in comparison to the number of ideas, words inevitably came to have different meanings in different contexts. In the long run the effect of this was to detach the words from the particular contexts in which they arose and loosen their connections with the particular sentiments and att.i.tudes with which they were a.s.sociated. They came to have thus a more distinctively symbolic and formal character. It was thus possible to give them more precise definitions, to make of them abstractions and mental toys, which the individual could play with freely and disinterestedly. Like the child who builds houses with blocks, he was able to arrange them in orders and systems, create ideal structures, like the constructions of mathematics, which he was then able to employ as means of ordering and systematizing his more concrete experiences.

All this served to give the individual a more complete control over his own experience and that of the group. It made it possible to a.n.a.lyze and cla.s.sify his own experiences and compare them with those of his fellows and so, eventually, to erect the vast structure of formal and scientific knowledge on the basis of which men are able to live and work together in co-operation upon the structure of a common civilization.

The point is that the breadth of the experience over which man has control and the disinterestedness with which he is able to view it is the basis of the intellectual attainment of the individual, as of the race.

If human beings were thoroughly rational creatures, we may presume that they would act, at every instant, on the basis of all their experience and all the knowledge that they were able to obtain from the experience of others. The truth is, however, that we are never able, at any one time, to mobilize, control, and use all the experience and all the knowledge that we now possess and which, if we were less human than we are, might serve to guide and control our actions. It is precisely the function of science to collect, organize, and make available for our practical uses the fund of experience and of knowledge we do possess.

Not only do we already have more knowledge than we can use, but much of our personal and individual experience drops out and is lost in the course of a lifetime. Meanwhile, later experiences are constantly adding themselves to the earlier ones. In this way the meaning of the world is constantly changing for us, much as the surface of the earth is constantly under the influence of the weather.

The actual constellation of our memories and ideas is determined at any given moment not merely by processes of a.s.sociation but also by processes of dissociation. Practical interests, sentiments, and emotional outbursts--love, fear, and anger--are constantly interrupting the logical and constructive processes of the mind. These forces tend to dissolve established connections between ideas and disintegrate our memories so that they rarely function as a whole or as a unit, but rather as more or less dissociated systems.

The mere act of attention, for example, so far as it focuses the activities upon a single object, tends to narrow the range of a.s.sociations, check deliberation, and, by isolating one idea or system of ideas, prepares us to act in accordance with them without regard to the demands of other ideas in the wider but now suppressed context of our experience. The isolation of one group of ideas implies the suppression of other groups which are inconsistent with them or hinder the indicated action.

When the fundamental instinct-emotions are aroused, they invariably have the effect of isolating the ideas with which they are a.s.sociated and of inhibiting the contrary emotions. This is the explanation of war. When the fighting instincts are stirred, men lose the fear of death and the horror of killing.

When an idea, particularly one that is a.s.sociated with some original tendency of human nature, is thus isolated in consciousness, the tendency is to respond to it automatically, just as one would respond to a simple reflex. This explains the phenomena of suggestion. A state of suggestibility is always a pre-condition of suggestion, and suggestibility means just such an isolation and dissociation of the suggested idea as has been described. Hypnotic trance may be defined as a condition of abnormal suggestibility, in which the subject tends to carry out automatically the commands of the experimenter, "as if," as the familiar phrase puts it, "he had no will of his own," or rather, as if the will of the experimenter had been subst.i.tuted for that of the subject. In fact the phenomena of auto-suggestion, in which one obeys his own suggestion, seems to differ from other forms of the same phenomena only in the fact that the subject obeys his own commands instead of those of the experimenter. Not only suggestion and auto-suggestion, but imitation, which is nothing more than another form of suggestion, are made possible by the existence of mental mechanisms created by dissociation.

Hypnotism represents an extreme but temporary form of dissociation of the memories, artificially produced. Fascination and abstraction (absent-mindedness) are milder forms of the same phenomena with this difference, that they occur "in nature" and without artificial stimulation.

A more permanent dissociation is represented in moods. The memories which connect themselves with moods are invariably such as will support the dominant emotion. At the same time memories which tend in any way to modify the prevailing tone of the mood are spontaneously suppressed.

It is a familiar fact that persons whose occupations or whose mode of life brings them habitually into different worlds, so that the experiences in one have little or nothing in common with those of the other, inevitably develop something akin to a dual personality. The business man, for example, is one person in the city and another at his home in the suburbs.

The most striking and instructive instances of dissociation, however, are the cases of dual or multiple personality in which the same individual lives successively or simultaneously two separate lives, each of which is wholly oblivious of the other. The cla.s.sic instance of this kind is the case of the Rev. Ansel Bourne reported by William James in his _Principles of Psychology_. Ansel Bourne was an itinerant preacher living at Greene, Rhode Island. On January 19, 1887, he drew $551.00 from a bank in Providence and entered a Pawtucket horse car and disappeared. He was advertised as missing, foul play being suspected.

On the morning of March 24, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown awoke in a fright and called on the people of the house to tell him who he was. Later he said he was Ansel Bourne. Nothing was known of him in Norristown except that six weeks before he had rented a small shop, stocked it with stationery, confectionery, and other small articles, and was carrying on a quiet trade "without seeming to anyone unnatural or eccentric." At first it was thought he was insane, but his story was confirmed and he was returned to his home. It was then deemed that he had lost all memory of the period which had elapsed since he boarded the Pawtucket car. What he had done or where he had been between the time he left Providence and arrived in Norristown, no one had the slightest information.

In 1890 he was induced by William James to submit to hypnotism in order to see whether in his trance state his "Brown" memories would come back.

The experiment was so successful that, as James remarks, "it proved quite impossible to make him, while in hypnosis, remember any of the facts of his normal life." The report continues:

He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't know as he had ever met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he said that he had "never seen the woman before," etc. On the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight, and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself. He gave no motive for the wandering except that there was "trouble back there" and he "wanted rest."

During the trance he looks old, the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits screening his eyes and trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm all hedged in," he says, "I can't get out at either end. I don't know what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I ever left that store or what became of it." His eyes are practically normal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier response) about the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull today still covers two distinct personal selves.

An interesting circ.u.mstance with respect to this case and others is that the different personalities, although they inhabit the same body and divide between them the experiences of a single individual, not only regard themselves as distinct and independent persons but they exhibit marked differences in character, temperament, and tastes, and frequently profess for one another a decided antipathy. The contrasts in temperament and character displayed by these split-off personalities are ill.u.s.trated in the case of Miss Beauchamp, to whose strange and fantastic history Morton Prince has devoted a volume of nearly six hundred pages.

In this case, the source of whose morbidity was investigated by means of hypnotism, not less than three distinct personalities in addition to that of the original and real Miss Beauchamp were evolved. Each one of these was distinctly different and decidedly antipathetic to the others.

Pierre Janet's patient, Madam B, however, is the cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration of this dissociated personality. From the time she was sixteen years of age, Leonie, as she was called, had been so frequently hypnotized and subjected to so much clinical experimentation that a well-organized secondary personality was elaborated, which was designated as Leontine.

Leonie was a poor peasant woman, serious, timid, and melancholy.

Leontine was gay, noisy, restless, and ironical. Leontine did not recognize that she had any relationship with Leonie, whom she referred to as "that good woman," "the other," who "is not I, she is too stupid."

Eventually a third personality, known as Leonore, appeared who did not wish to be mistaken for either that "good but stupid woman" Leonie, nor for the "foolish babbler" Leontine.

Of these personalities Leonie possessed only her own memories, Leontine possessed the memories of Leonie and her own, while the memories of Leonore, who was superior to them both, included Madam B's whole life.

What is particularly interesting in connection with this phenomenon of multiple personality is the fact that it reveals in a striking way the relation of the subconscious to the conscious. The term subconscious, as it occurs in the literature of psychology, is a word of various meanings. In general, however, we mean by subconscious a region of consciousness in which the dissociated memories, the "suppressed complexes," as they are called, maintain some sort of conscious existence and exercise an indirect though very positive influence upon the ideas in the focus of consciousness, and so upon the behavior of the individual. The subconscious, in short, is the region of the suppressed memories. They are suppressed because they have come into conflict with the dominant complex in consciousness which represents the personality of the individual.

"Emotional conflicts" have long been the theme of literary a.n.a.lysis and discussion. In recent years they have become the subject of scientific investigation. In fact a new school of medical psychology with a vast literature has grown up around and out of the investigations of the effects of the suppression of a single instinct--the s.e.xual impulse. A whole cla.s.s of nervous disorders, what are known as psychoneuroses, are directly attributed by Dr. Sigmund Freud and the psychoa.n.a.lytic school, as it is called, to these suppressions, many of which consist of memories that go back to the period of early childhood before the s.e.xual instinct had attained the form that it has in adults.

The theory of Freud, stated briefly, amounts to this: As a result of emotional conflicts considerable portions of the memories of certain individuals, with the motor impulses connected with them, are thrust into the background of the mind, that is to say, the subconscious. Such suppressed memories, with the connected motor dispositions, he first named "suppressed complexes." Now it is found that these suppressed complexes, which no longer respond to stimulations as they would under normal conditions, may still exercise an indirect influence upon the ideas which are in the focus of consciousness. Under certain conditions they may not get into consciousness at all but manifest themselves, for example, in the form of hysterical tics, twitchings, and muscular convulsions.

Under other circ.u.mstances the ideas a.s.sociated with the suppressed complexes tend to have a dominating and controlling place in the life of the individual. All our ideas that have a sentimental setting are of this character. We are all of us a little wild and insane upon certain subjects or in regard to certain persons or objects. In such cases a very trivial remark or even a gesture will fire one of these loaded ideas. The result is an emotional explosion, a sudden burst of weeping, a gust of violent, angry, and irrelevant emotion, or, in case the feelings are more under control, merely a bitter remark or a chilling and ironical laugh. It is an interesting fact that a jest may serve as well to give expression to the "feelings" as an expletive or any other emotional expression. All forms of fanaticism, fixed ideas, phobias, ideals, and cherished illusions may be explained as the effects of mental mechanisms created by the suppressed complexes.

From what has been said we are not to a.s.sume that there is any necessary and inevitable conflict among ideas. In our dreams and day-dreams, as in fairyland, our memories come and go in the most disorderly and fantastic way, so that we may seem to be in two places at the same time, or we may even be two persons, ourselves and someone else. Everything trips lightly along, in a fantastic pageant without rhyme or reason. We discover something of the same freedom when we sit down to speculate about any subject. All sorts of ideas present themselves; we entertain them for a moment, then dismiss them and turn our attention to some other mental picture which suits our purpose better. At such times we do not observe any particular conflict between one set of ideas and another. The lion and the lamb lie down peacefully together, and even if the lamb happens to be inside we are not particularly disturbed.

Conflict arises between memories when our personal interests are affected, when our sentiments are touched, when some favorite opinion is challenged. Conflict arises between our memories when they are connected with some of our motor dispositions, that is to say, when we begin to act. Memories which are suppressed as a result of emotional conflicts, memories a.s.sociated with established motor dispositions, inevitably tend to find some sort of direct or symbolic expression. In this way they give rise to the symptoms which we meet in hysteria and psychasthenia--fears, phobias, obsessions, and tics, like stammering.

The suppressed complexes do not manifest themselves in the pathological forms only, but neither do the activities of the normal complexes give any clear and unequivocal evidence of themselves in ordinary consciousness. We are invariably moved to act by motives of which we are only partially conscious or wholly unaware. Not only is this true, but the accounts we give to ourselves and others of the motives upon which we acted are often wholly fict.i.tious, although they may be given in perfect good faith.

A simple ill.u.s.tration will serve, however, to indicate how this can be effected. In what is called post-hypnotic suggestion we have an ill.u.s.tration of the manner in which the waking mind may be influenced by impulses of whose origin and significance the subject is wholly unaware.

In a state of hypnotic slumber the suggestion is given that after awaking the subject will, upon a certain signal, rise and open the window or turn out the light. He is accordingly awakened and, at the signal agreed upon while he was in the hypnotic slumber but of which he is now wholly unconscious, he will immediately carry out the command as previously given. If the subject is then asked why he opened the window or turned out the light, he will, in evident good faith, make some ordinary explanation, as that "it seemed too hot in the room," or that he "thought the light in the room was disagreeable." In some cases, when the command given seems too absurd, the subject may not carry it out, but he will then show signs of restlessness and discomfort, just for instance as one feels when he is conscious that he has left something undone which he intended to do, although he can no longer recall what it was. Sometimes when the subject is not disposed to carry out the command actually given, he will perform some other related act as a subst.i.tute, just as persons who have an uneasy conscience, while still unwilling to make rest.i.tution or right the wrong which they have committed, will perform some other act by way of expiation.

Our moral sentiments and social att.i.tudes are very largely fixed and determined by our past experiences of which we are only vaguely conscious.

"This same principle," as Morton Prince suggests, "underlies what is called the 'social conscience,' the 'civic' and 'national conscience,'

'patriotism,' 'public opinion,' what the Germans call 'Sittlichkeit,'

the war att.i.tude of mind, etc. All these mental att.i.tudes may be reduced to common habits of thought and conduct derived from mental experiences common to a given community and conserved as complexes in the unconscious of the several individuals of the community."

Sentiments were first defined and distinguished from the emotions by Shand, who conceived of them as organizations of the emotions about some particular object or type of object. Maternal love, for example, includes the emotions of fear, anger, joy, or sorrow, all organized about the child. This maternal love is made up of innate tendencies but is not itself a part of original nature. It is the mother's fostering care of the child which develops her sentiments toward it, and the sentiment attaches to any object that is bound up with the life of the child. The cradle is dear to the mother because it is connected with her occupation in caring for the child. The material fears for its welfare, her joy in its achievements, her anger with those who injure or even disparage it, are all part of the maternal sentiment.

The mother's sentiment determines her att.i.tude toward her child, toward other children, and toward children in general. Just as back of every sensation, perception, or idea there is some sort of motor disposition, so our att.i.tudes are supported by our sentiments. Back of every political opinion there is a political sentiment and it is the sentiment which gives force and meaning to the opinion.

Thus we may think of opinions merely as representative of a psycho-physical mechanism, which we may call the sentiment-att.i.tude.

These sentiment-att.i.tudes are to be regarded in turn as organizations of the original tendencies, the instinct-emotions, about some memory, idea, or object which is, or once was, the focus and the end for which the original tendencies thus organized exist. In this way opinions turn out, in the long run, to rest on original nature, albeit original nature modified by experience and tradition.

C. THE FOUR WISHES: A CLa.s.sIFICATION OF SOCIAL FORCES

1. The Wish, the Social Atom[166]

The Freudian psychology is based on the doctrine of the "wish," just as physical science is based, today, on the concept of function. Both of these are what may be called dynamic concepts, rather than static; they envisage natural phenomena not as things but as processes and largely to this fact is due their pre-eminent explanatory value. Through the "wish"

the "thing" aspect of mental phenomena, the more substantive "content of consciousness," becomes somewhat modified and reinterpreted. This "wish," which as a concept Freud does not a.n.a.lyze, includes all that would commonly be so cla.s.sed, and also whatever would be called impulse, tendency, desire, purpose, att.i.tude, and the like, not including, however, any emotional components thereof. Freud also acknowledges the existence of what he calls "negative wishes," and these are not fears but negative purposes. An exact definition of the "wish" is that it is _a course of action_ which some mechanism of the body is _set_ to carry out, whether it actually does so or does not. All emotions, as well as the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, are separable from the "wishes," and this precludes any thought of a merely hedonistic psychology. The wish is any purpose of project for _a course of action_, whether it is being merely entertained by the mind or is being actually executed--a distinction which is really of little importance. We shall do well if we consider this to be, as in fact it is, dependent on a _motor att.i.tude_ of the physical body, which goes over into overt action and _conduct_ when the wish is carried into execution.

It is this "wish" which transforms the princ.i.p.al doctrines of psychology and recasts the science, much as the "atomic theory" and later the "ionic theory" have reshaped earlier conceptions of chemistry. This so-called "wish" becomes the unit of psychology, replacing the older unit commonly called "sensation," which latter, it is to be noted, was a _content_ of consciousness unit, whereas the "wish" is a more dynamic affair.

Unquestionably the mind is somehow "embodied" in the body. But how?

Well, if the unit of mind and character is a "wish," it is easy enough to perceive how it is incorporated. It is, this "wish," something which the body as a piece of mechanism can do--a course of action with regard to the environment which the machinery of the body is capable of carrying out. This capacity resides clearly in the parts of which the body consists and in the way in which these are put together, not so much in the matter of which the body is composed, as in the forms which this matter a.s.sumes when organized.

In order to look at this more closely we must go a bit down the evolutionary series to the fields of biology and physiology. Here we find much talk of nerves and muscles, sense-organs, reflex arcs, stimulation, and muscular response, and we feel that somehow these things do not reach the core of the matter, and that they never can; that spirit is not nerve or muscle; and that intelligent conduct, to say nothing of conscious thought, can never be reduced to reflex arcs and the like--just as a printing press is not merely wheels and rollers, and still less is it chunks of iron. The biologist has only himself to thank if he has overlooked a thing which lay directly under his nose. He has overlooked the _form of organization_ of these his reflex arcs, has left out of account that step which a.s.sembles wheels and rollers into a printing press, and that which organizes reflex arcs, as we shall presently see, into an intelligent, conscious creature. Evolution took this important little step of organization ages ago, and thereby produced the rudimentary "wish."

Now in the reflex arc a sense-organ is stimulated and the energy of stimulation is transformed into nervous energy, which then pa.s.ses along an afferent nerve to the central nervous system, pa.s.ses through this and out by an efferent or motor nerve to a muscle, where the energy is again transformed and the muscle contracts. Stimulation at one point of the animal organism produces contraction at another. The principles of irritability and of motility are involved, but all further study of _this_ process will lead us only to the physics and chemistry of the energy transformations--will lead us, that is, in the direction of _a.n.a.lysis_. If, however, we inquire in what way such reflexes are combined or "integrated" into more complicated processes, we shall be led in exactly the opposite direction, that of _synthesis_, and here we soon come, as is not surprising, to a synthetic novelty. This is _specific response_ or _behavior_.

In this single reflex something is done to a sense-organ and the process within the organ is comparable to the process in any unstable substance when the foreign energy strikes it; it is strictly a chemical process, and so for the conducting nerve, likewise for the contracting muscle. It happens, as a physiological fact, that in this process stored energy is released so that a reflex contraction is literally comparable to the firing of a pistol. But the reflex arc is not "aware" of anything, and indeed there is nothing more to say about the process unless we should begin to a.n.a.lyze it. But even two such processes going on together in one organism are a very different matter. Two such processes require two sense-organs, two conduction paths, and two muscles; and since we are considering the result of the two in combination, the relative anatomical location of these six members is of importance. For simplicity I will take a hypothetical but strictly possible case. A small water animal has an eyespot located on each side of its anterior end; each spot is connected by a nerve with a vibratory silium or fin on the side of the posterior end; the thrust exerted by each fin is toward the rear. If, now, light strikes one eye, say the right, the left fin is set in motion and the animal's body is set rotating toward the right like a rowboat with one oar. This is all that one such reflex arc could do for the animal. Since, however, there are now two, when the animal comes to be turned far enough toward the right so that some of the light strikes the second eyespot (as will happen when the animal comes around facing the light), the second fin, on the right side, is set in motion, and the two together propel the animal forward in a straight line. The direction of this line will be that in which the animal lies when its two eyes receive equal amounts of light. In other words, by the combined operation of two reflexes the animal swims _toward the light_, while either reflex alone would only have set it spinning like a top. It now responds specifically in the direction of the light, whereas before it merely spun when lashed.

Suppose, now, that it possess a _third_ reflex arc--a "heat spot" so connected with the same or other fins that when stimulated by a certain intensity of heat it initiates a nervous impulse which stops the forward propulsion. The animal is still "lashed," but nevertheless no light can force it to swim "blindly to its death" by scalding. It has the rudiments of "intelligence." But so it had before. For as soon as two reflex arcs capacitate it mechanically to swim _toward light_, it was no longer exactly like a pinwheel; it could respond specifically toward at least one thing in its environment.