The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

is a contractor, for every accelerator of action there is

inhibition. Nature drives by two reins, and one is a checkrein.

This function of inhibition, then, delays, retards or prevents an

action and is in one sense a higher function than the response to

stimulation. Its main seat is the cerebrum, the “highest” nervous

tissue, whereas reflex and instinctive actions usually are in the

vegetative nervous system, the spinal cord, the bulbar regions

and the mid-brain, all of which are lower centers. Choice, which

is intimately associated with inhibition, is par excellence a

cerebral function and in general is associated with intense

consciousness. The act of choosing brings to the circumstances

the whole past history of the individual; it marshals his

resources of judgment, intelligence, will, purposes and desires.

In choice lies the fate of the personality, for it is basically

related to habit formation. Further, in the dynamics of life a

right, proper choice, an appropriate choice, opens wide the door

of opportunity, whereas an unfortunate choice may commit one to

the mercies of wrecking forces. Education should aim to teach

proper choosing and then proper action.

The capacity for perceiving and responding to stimuli, for

inhibiting or delaying action and for choosing, are of cardinal

importance in our study. But there is another phase of life and

character without which everything else lacks unity and is

unintelligible. From the beginning of life to the end there is

choice. Who and what chooses? From infancy one sees the war of

purposes and desires and the gradual rise of one purpose or set

of purposes into dominance,—in short, the growth of unity, the

growth of personality. The common man calls this unity his soul,

the philosopher speaks of the ego and implies some such thing as

this organizing energy of character.

But a naturalistic view of character must reject such a

metaphysical entity, for one sees the organizing energy increase

and diminish with the rest of character through health, age,

environment, etc. Further, there is at work in all living things

a similar something that organizes the action of the humblest bit

of protoplasm. This organizing energy of character will be, for

us, that something inherent in all life which tends to

individualize each living thing. It is as if all life were

originally of one piece and then, spreading itself throughout the

world, it tended to differentiate and develop (according to the

Spencerian formula) into genera, species, groups and individuals.

This organizing energy works up the experiences of the individual

so that new formulae for action develop, so that what is

experienced becomes the basis of future reaction.

It must be remembered that the world we live in has its great

habits. Night follows day in a cycle that never fails, the

seasons are repeated each year, and there is a periodicity in the

lives of plants and animals that is manifested in growth,

nutrition, mating and resting. Things happen again and again,

though in slightly altered form, and our desires, satisfied now,

soon repeat their urge. The great organic needs and sensations

repeat themselves and with the periodic world of outer experience

must be dealt with according to a more or less settled policy. It

is the organizing energy that works out the policy, that learns,

inhibits, chooses and acts,—and it is the essential

character-developing principle. For like our bodily organs which

are whipped into line by the nervous system, our impulses,

instincts, and reflexes[1] have their own policy of action and

therefore need, for the good of the entire organism, discipline

and coordination. It may sound as if the body were made up of

warring entities and states and that there gradually arose a

centralized good, and though the analogy may lead to error, it

offers a convenient method of thinking.

[1] Roux, the great French biologist, has shown that each tissue

and each cell competes with the other tissues and the other

cells. The organism, though it reaches a practical working unity

as viewed by consciousness, is nevertheless no entity; it is a

collection, an aggregate of living cells which are organized on a

cooperation basis just as men are, but maintain individuality and

competition nevertheless.

Moreover, the organizing energy seems often to be at work when

consciousness itself is at rest, as in sleep. Often enough a man

debates and debates on lines of conduct and wakes up with his

problem solved. Or he works hard to learn and goes to bed

discouraged, because the matter is a jumble, and wakes up in the

morning with an orderly and useful arrangement of the facts. A

writer seeks to find the proper opening,—and gives up in a

frenzy of despair. He is perhaps walking or driving when suddenly

he lifts his head as one does who is listening to a longed-for

voice, and in himself he finds the phrases that he longs for.

Something within has set itself, so it seems, the task of

bringing the right associations into consciousness. What we call

quickness of mind, energy of mind, is largely this function.

It is this which adapts us to different situations, different

groups, by calling into play organized modes of talking or

acting. We pass from a group of ladies in whose presence we have

been friendly but decorous, perhaps unconventionally formal, to a

group of business intimates, men of long acquaintance. Without

even being conscious of it we lounge around, feet on the table,

carelessly dropping cigarette ash to the floor, using language

chosen for force rather than elegance; we discuss sports, women,

business and a whole group of different emotions, habits and

purposes come to the surface, though we were not at all conscious

of having repressed them while in the presence of the ladies. A

faux pas is where the organizer has “slipped” on his job; lack of

tact implies in part a rigid organizing energy, neither plastic

nor versatile enough.

We are now ready to face certain developments of these three main

factors, viz., the response to stimuli; choice and inhibition,

and the organizing energy. Largely we might classify people

according to the type of vigor of their reactions to stimuli, the

quality and vigor of choice and of inhibition, and the quality

and vigor of the organizing energy. We note that there are people

who have, as it were, exquisitely sensitive feelers for the

stimuli of one kind or another and who react vigorously, perhaps

excessively; that there are others of a duller, less reactive

nature, largely because they are stimuli-proof. Others are

under-inhibited, follow desire or outer stimulus without heed,

without a brake; others are over-inhibited, too cautious, too

full of doubt, unable to choose the reaction that seems

appropriate. The organizing energy of some is low; they never

seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living;

they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with

disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy

is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the

metaphor) they weld life’s happenings, their memories, their

emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I,

harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end

and striving bravely towards it. Or there is over-unification and

fanaticism, with narrow aim and little sympathy for other aims.

Sketched in this very broad way we see masses of people, rather

than individuals, and we are not finely adjusted to our subject.

Psychologists rarely concern themselves to any extent with these

matters; they deal mainly with their outgrowths,—emotions,

instinct, intelligence and will. We are at once beset with

difficulties which are resolved mainly by ignoring them. In such

a book as this we are not concerned with the fundamental nature

of these divisions of the mental life, we must omit such

questions as the relation of instinct to racial habit, or the

evolution of instinct from habit, if that is really its origin.

Again I must repeat that we shall deal with these as organic, as

arising in the sensitized individual as a result of environmental

forces, as manifestations of a life which is as yet—and perhaps

always will be—mysterious to us. We shall best consider these

manifestations of mental activity as an interplay of the

reactions of stimulation, inhibition, choice, organizing energy,

and not as separate and totally different matters. We shall see

that probably emotion is one aspect of reaction to the world,

while instinct is merely another aspect; that intelligence is a

cerebral shift of instinct, and that will is no unity but the

energy of instincts and purposes.

Before we go farther we must squarely face a problem of human

thought. Man, since he started reflecting about himself, has been

puzzled about his consciousness. How can a person be aware of

himself, and what identifies and links together each phase of

consciousness? There is an enormous range of thought on this

subject: from those who identified consciousness as the only

reality and considered what the average person holds as

realities—things and people—as only phases of consciousness, to

those who, like Huxley, regard consciousness as an

“epi-pbenomenon,” a sort of overture to brain activity and having

nothing whatever to do with action, nothing to do with choice and

plan, so that, as Lloyd Morgan points out, “An unconscious

Shakespeare writes plays acted by an unconscious troupe of actors

to an unconscious audience.” The first extreme view, that of

Berkeley and the idealists, nullifies all other realities save

that of the individual thinker and reduces one to the absurdities

of Solipsism where a man writes books to convince persons

conjured up by himself and having no existence outside of

himself; the other view nullifies that which seems to each of us

the very essence of himself.

I shall take a very simple view of consciousness,[1] simply

because I shall deliberately dodge the great difficulties.

Consciousness is the result of the activities of a group of more

or less permanently excited areas of the brain—areas having to

do with positions of the head, eyes and shoulders; areas having

to do with vision, hearing and smell; areas having to do with

speech,—these constituting extremely mobile, extremely active

parts of the organism. From these consciousness may irradiate to

the activities of almost every part of the organism, in different

degrees. We are often extremely conscious of the activities of

the hands, in less degree of the legs; we may become wrapped up

almost completely in a sensation emanating from the sex organs,

and under fear or excitement the heart may pound so that we feel

and are conscious of it as ordinarily we can never be. The state

of consciousness called interest may shift our feeling of self to

any part of our body (as in pain, when a part usually out of

consciousness swings into it, or when the hand of a lover grips

our own so that the great reality of our life at the moment seems

to be the consciousness of the hand) or it may fasten us to an

outside object until our world narrows to that object, nothing

else having any conscious value. This latter phenomenon is very

striking in children; they become fascinated by something they

hear or see and project themselves, as it were, into that object;

they become the “soapiness of soap, or the wetness of water” (to

use Chesterton’s phrase), and when they listen to a story they

hold nothing in reserve. Consciousness may busy itself with its

past phases, with the preceding thought, emotion, sensation

—how, I do not know—or it may occupy itself mainly with the

world of things which are hereby declared to have a reality in

our theory. In the first instances we have introspection and

subjectiveness, and in the second we have extroversion and

objectivity.

[1] For discussion of consciousness read Berkeley, Locke, Hume,

Spencer, Lotze, Moyan,