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

antagonism between emotional, instinctive and intelligent

responses. In fact, very few acts of the organized human being

are anything else. For every emotion awakens memories of past

emotions and the consequences; every instinct is hampered by

other instincts or by the inhibitions aroused by obstacles; and

intelligence continually struggles against emotion and blind

instinct. Teaching, experience, knowledge, all modify emotional

and instinctive responses so that sometimes they are hardly

recognizable as such. On the other hand, though intelligence

normally occupies the seat of power, it is easily ousted and in

reality only steers and directs the vehicle of life, choosing not

the goal but the road by which the goal can safely be reached.

In general terms we shall define emotions, instincts and

intelligence as follows:

1. For emotions we shall accept a modified James-Lange theory,

supplementing it by the developments of science since their day.

When a thing is seen or heard (or smelled or tasted or thought),

it arouses an emotion; that emotion consists of at least three

parts. First, the arousal of memories and experiences that give

it a value to the individual, make it a desired object or a

dreaded, distasteful object. Second, at the same time, or shortly

preceding or succeeding this, a great variety of changes takes

place in the organism, changes that we shall call the

vaso-visceral-motor changes. This means merely that there is a

series of reactions set up in the sympathetic nervous system, in

the blood vessels and bodily structures they control and in the

glands of internal secretion,—changes which include the blush or

the pallor, the rapid heartbeat, the quickened or labored

breathing, the changes in the digestive tract which include the

vomiting of disgust and the diarrhoea of fear; the changes that

passion brings in the male and the female and many other

alterations to be discussed again. Third, there is then the

feeling of these coenaesthetic changes,—a feeling of

pleasantness, unpleasantness mingled with the basic feeling of

excitement, and from then on that situation is linked in memory

with the feeling that we usually call the emotion but which is

only a part of it. Nevertheless, it becomes the part longed for

or thereafter avoided; it is the value of the emotion to us, as

conscious personalities, although it may be a false, disastrous,

dangerous value. Excitement is the generalized mood change that

results in consciousness in consequence of the

vaso-visceral-motor changes of emotion; it is therefore based on

bodily changes as is the feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, that

also occurs. William James said that we laugh and are therefore

happy; we weep and are therefore sad; the bodily changes are

primary and the feeling secondary. We do not accept this dictum

entirely, but we say that the organism reacts in a complicated

way and that the feeling—sadness, disgust, anger, joy—springs

from the memories and past experiences aroused by a situation as

well as from the widespread bodily excitement also so aroused.

For the neurologist both the cerebral and the sympathetic-endocrinal components of emotion are important.

For the moment we turn to instinct and instinctive reactions.

2. Man has always wondered that things can be known without

teaching. So slow and painful is the process of mastering a

technique, whether of handicraftsmanship or of art, so imbued are

we with the need of education for the acquirement of knowledge,

that we are taken aback by the realization that all around us are

creatures carrying on the most elaborate technique, going through

the most complicated procedures and apparently possessed of the

surest knowledge without the possibility of teaching. The flight

of birds, the obstetric and nursing procedures of all animals,

and especially the complicated and systematized labors of bees,

ants and other insects, have aroused the wonder, admiration and

awe of scientists. A chick pecks its way out of its egg and

shakes itself,—then immediately starts on the trail of food and

usually needs no instruction as to diet. The female insect lays

its eggs, the male insect fertilizes them, the progeny go through

the states of evolution leading to adult life without teaching

and without the possibility of previous experience. Since the

parent never sees the progeny, and the progeny assume various

shapes and have very varied capacities at these times, there can

be no possible teaching of what is remarkably skillful and

marvelously adapted conduct.[1]

[1] The nature of instinct has been a subject of discussion for

centuries, but it is only within the last fifty years or

thereabouts that instinctive actions have really been studied. I

refer the reader to the works of Darwin, Romanes, Lloyd Morgan,

the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse, and McDougall for details as to

the controversies and the facts obtained.

Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable

reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in

putrid meat in order that the larvae may have appropriate food,

although she never sees the larvae or cannot know through

experience their needs. “The smell of putrid meat attracts the

gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings

which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell,

and the contact combined stimulate the functions of

oviposition.”[1] But as all the critics have pointed out, the

theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there

are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the

same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in

that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so

inevitably.

[1] Hobhouse.

In fact, it is this internal condition in the living creature

that is the most important single link in instinct. In the

non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the

male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with

procreative cells; these change his coenaesthesia; that starts

desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search,

courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is

gravid. All instinctive acts have back of them either a tension

or a deficit of some kind or other, brought about by the

awakening of function of some glandular structure, so that the

organism becomes ready to respond to some appropriate outside

stimulus and inaccessible to others. During the mating season,

with certain animals, the stimulus of food has no effect until

there is effected the purposes of the sexual hunger. Changes in

the body due to the activity of sex glands or gastric juices or

any other organic product have two effects. They increase the

stimulation that comes from the thing sought and decrease the

stimulation that comes from other things. In physiological

language, the threshold for the first is lowered and for the

other it is raised.

But this does not explain HOW the changes in glands MAKE the

animal seek this or that, except by saying that the animal has

hereditary structures all primed to explode in the right way. We

may fall back on Bergson’s mystical idea that all life is a

unity, and that instinct, which makes one living thing know what

to do with another—to kill it in a scientific way for the good

of the posterity of the killer—is merely the knowledge,

unconscious, that life has of life. That pleasant explanation

projects us back to a darker problem than ever: how life knows

life and why one part of life so obviously seeks to circumvent

the purpose of another part of life.

For us it is best to say that instinct arises out of the racial

and individual needs; that physically there occur changes in the

glands and tissues; that these set up desires which arouse into

action simple or elaborate mechanisms which finally satisfy the

need of the organs and tissues.[1]

[1] Kempf in his book on the vegetative nervous system goes into

great detail the way the visceral needs force the animal or human

to satisfy them. Life is a sort of war between the vegetative and

the central nervous system. There is just enough truth in this

point of view to make it very entertaining.

Even in the low forms of life instincts are not perfect at the

start, or perfect in details, and almost every member of a

species will show individuality in dealing with an obstacle to an

instinctive action. In other words, though there is instinct and

this furnishes the basis for action in the lowest forms of life,

there is also the capacity for learning by experience,—and this

is Intelligence. “The basis of instinct is heredity and we can

impute an action to pure instinct only if it is hereditary. The

other class of actions are those devised by the individual animal

for himself on the basis of his own experience and these are

called generally intelligent. Of intelligence operating within

the sphere of instinct there is ample evidence. There are

modifications of instinctive action directly traceable to

experience which cannot be explained by the interaction of purely

hereditary tendencies and there are cases in which the whole

structure of the instinct is profoundly modified by the

experience of the individual.” Hobhouse, whom I quote, goes on to

give many examples of instinctive action modified by experience

and intelligence in the insect and lower animal world.

What I wish especially to point out is that man has many

instinctive bases for conduct, but instincts as such are not

often seen in pure form in man. They are constantly modified by

other instincts and through them runs the influence of

intelligence. The function of intelligence is to control

instincts, to choose ways and means for the fulfillment of

instincts that are blocked, etc. Moreover, the effects of

teachings, ethics, social organization and tradition, operating

through the social instincts, are to repress, inhibit and whip

into conformity every mode of instinctive conduct. The main

instincts are those relating to nutrition and reproduction, the

care of the young, to averting danger or destroying it, to play

and organized activity, to acquiring, perhaps to teaching and

learning and to the social relations generally. But manners creep

in to regulate our methods of eating and the things we shall eat;

and we may not eat at all unless we agree to get the things to

eat a certain way. We may not cohabit except under tremendous

restriction, and marriage with its aims and purposes is sexual in

origin but modified largely and almost beyond recognition by

social consideration, taste, esthetic matters, taboos and

economic conditions. We may not treat our enemy as instinct bids

us do,—for only in war may one kill and here one kills without

any personal purpose or anger, almost without instinct. We may be

compelled through social exigencies to treat our enemy politely,

eat with him, sleep with him and help him out of difficulties and

thus completely thwart one instinctive set of reactions. Play

becomes regulated by rules and customs, becomes motivated by the

desire for superiority, or the desire for gain, and may even

leave the physical field entirely and become purely mental. And

so on. It does no special practical good to discuss instincts as

if they operated in man as such. They become purposes. Therefore

we shall defer the consideration of instincts and purposes in

detail until later chapters of this book.

Since instincts are too rigid to meet the needs of the social and

traditional life of man, they become intellectualized and

socialized into purposes and ambitions, sometimes almost beyond

recognition. Nevertheless, the driving force of instinct is

behind every purpose, every ambition, even though the individual

himself has not the slightest idea of the force that is at work.

This does not mean that instinct acts as a sort of cellar-plotter, roving around in a subconsciousness, or at