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

semi-diabolical personality need be postulated, any more than it

need be postulated for the automatic mechanism that regulates

heartbeat or digestion. The organic tensions and depressions that

constitute instinct are not conscious or subconscious; they

affect our conscious personalities so that we desire something,

we fit that desire in with the rest of our desires, we seek the

means of gratifying that desire first in accordance with means

that Nature has given us and second in accordance with social

teaching and our intelligence. If the desire brings us sharply in

contact with obstacles imposed either by circumstances or more

precious desire, we inhibit that desire,—and thus the instinct.

Because organic tensions and depressions are periodic and are

dependent upon the activities of glands and tissues not within

our control, the desires may never be completely squelched and

may arise as often as some outer stimulus brings them into

activity, to plague and disorder the life of the conscious

personality.

3. With this preliminary consideration of instinct, we pass on to

certain of the phases of intelligence. How to define intelligence

is a difficulty best met by ignoring definition. But this much is

true: that the prime function of intelligence is to store up the

past and present experiences so that they can be used in the

future, and that it adds to the rigid mechanism of instinct a

plastic force which by inhibiting and exciting activity according

to need steers the organism through intricate channels.

Instinct, guided by a plan, conveniently called Nature’s plan, is

not itself a planner. The discharge of one mechanism discharges

another and so on through a series until an end is reached,—an

end apparently not foreseen by the organism but acting for the

good of the race to which the organism belongs. Intelligence,

often enough not conscious of the plans of Nature,[1] indeed,

decidedly ignorant of these plans, works for some good

established by itself out of stimuli set up by the instincts. It

plans, looks backward and forward, reaches the height of

reflecting on itself, gets to recognize the existence of instinct

and sets itself the task of controlling instinct. Often enough it

fails, instinct breaks through, takes possession of the means of

achievement, accomplishes its purpose—but the failure of

intelligence to control and the misguided control it attempts and

assumes are merely part of the general imperfections of the

organism. A perfect intelligence would be clearly able to

understand its instincts, to give each of them satisfaction by a

perfect compromise, would pick the methods for accomplishment

without error, and storing up the past experiences without loss,

would meet the future according to a plan.

[1] We are at this stage in a very dark place in human thought.

We say that instincts seek the good of the race, or have some

racial purpose, as the sexual instinct has procreation as its

end. But the lover wooing his sweetheart has no procreation plan

in his mind; he is urged on by a desire to win this particular

girl, a desire which is in part sexual, in part admiration of her

beauty, grace, and charm; again it is the pride of possession and

achievement; and further is the result of the social and romantic

ideals taught in books, theaters, etc. He may not have the

slightest desire for a child; as individual he plans one

thing,—but we who watch him see in his approach the racial urge

for procreation and even disregard his purposes as unimportant.

Who and what is the Race, where does it reside, how can it have

purposes? Call it Nature, and we are no better off. We must fall

back on an ancient personalization of forces, and our minds rest

easier when we think of a Planner operating in all of us and

perhaps smiling as He witnesses our strivings.

As we study the nervous systems of animals, we find that with the

apparent growth of intelligence there is a development of that

part of the brain called the cerebrum. In so far as certain other

parts of the brain are concerned—medulla, pons, mid-brain, basal

ganglia cerebellum—we who are human are not essentially superior

to the dog, the cow, the elephant or the monkey. But when the

neopallium, or the cerebrum, is considered, the enormous

superiority of man (and the superiority of the higher over the

lower animals) becomes striking. Anatomically the cerebrum is a

complex elaboration of cells and fibers that have these main

purposes: First, to record in perfect and detailed fashion the

EXPERIENCES of the organism, so that here are memory centers for

visual and auditory experiences, for skin, joint and bone

experiences of all kinds, speech memories, action memories, and

undoubtedly for the recording in some way not understood of the

pleasure-pain feelings. Second, it has a hold, a grip on the

motor mechanism of the body, on the muscles that produce action,

so that the intelligence can nicely adapt movement to the

circumstances, to purpose, and can inhibit the movements that

arise reflexly. Thus in certain diseases, where the part of the

brain involved in movement is injured, voluntary movement

disappears but reflex action is increased. Third, the neopallium,

or cerebrum, is characterized by what are known as association

tracts, i.e., connections of intricate kinds which link together

areas of the brain having different functions and thus allow for

combinations of activity of all kinds. The brain thus acts to

increase the memories of the past, and, as we all know, man is

probably the only animal to whom the past is a controlling force,

sometimes even an overpowering force. It acts to control the

conduct of the individual, to delay or to inhibit it, and it acts

to increase in an astonishing manner the number of reactions

possible. One stimulus arousing cerebral excitement may set going

mechanisms of the brain through associated tracts that will

produce conduct of one kind or another for years to come.

We spoke in a previous chapter of choice as an integral function

of the organism. While choice, when two competing stimuli awake

competing mechanisms, may be non-cerebral in its nature, largely

speaking it is a function of the cerebrum, of the intelligence.

To choose is a constant work of the intelligence, just as to

doubt is an unavailing effort to find a choice. Choice blocked is

doubt, one of the unhappiest of mental states. I shall not

pretend to solve the mystery of WHO chooses,—WHAT chooses;

perhaps there is a constant immortal ego; perhaps there is built

up a series of permanently excited areas which give rise to ego

feeling and predominate in choice; perhaps competing mechanisms,

as they struggle (in Sherrington’s sense) for motor pathways,

give origin to the feeling of choice. At any rate, because we

choose is the reason that the concept of will has arisen in the

minds of both philosopher and the man in the street, and much of

our feeling of worth, individuality and power—mental factors of

huge importance in character—arises from the power to choose.

Choice is influenced by—or it is a net result of—the praise and

blame of others, conscience, memory, knowledge of the past, plans

for the future. It is the fulcrum point of conduct!

That animals have intelligence in the sense in which I have used

the term is without doubt. No one who reads the work of Morgan,

the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse and other recent investigators of

the instincts can doubt it. Whether animals think in anything

like the form our thought takes is another matter. We are so

largely verbal in thought that speech and the capacity to speak

seem intimately related to thought. For the mechanics of thought,

for the laws of the association of ideas, the reader is referred

to the psychologists. That minds differ according to whether they

habitually follow one type of associations or another is an old

story. The most annoying individual in the world is the one whose

associations are unguided by a controlling purpose, who rambles

along misdirected by sound associations or by accidental

resemblances in structure of words, or by remote meanings,—who

starts off to tell you that she (the garrulous old lady) went to

the store to get some eggs, that she has a friend in the country

whose boy is in the army (aren’t the Germans dreadful, she’s glad

she’s born in this country), city life is very hard, it isn’t so

healthy as the country, thank God her health is good, etc.,

etc.,” and she never arrives at the grocery store to buy the

eggs. The organizing of the associations through a goal idea is

part of that organizing energy of the mind and character

previously spoken of. The mind tends automatically to follow the

stimuli that reach it, but the organizing energy has as one of

its functions the preventing of this, and controlled thinking

follows associations that are, as it were, laid down by the goal.

In fatigue, in illness, in certain of the mental diseases, the

failure of the organizing energy brings about failure “to

concentrate” and the tyranny of casual associations annoys and

angers. The stock complaint of the neurasthenic that everything

distracts his attention is a reversion back to the unorganized

conditions of childhood, with this essential difference: that the

neurasthenic rebels against his difficulty in thinking, whereas

the child has no rebellion against that which is his normal

state. Minds differ primarily and hugely in their power of

organizing experience, in so studying and recording the past that

it becomes a guide for the, future. Basic in this is the power of

resisting the irrelevant association, of checking those automatic

mental activities that tend to be stirred up by each sound, each

sight, smell, taste and touch. The man whose task has no appeal

for him has to fight to keep his mind on it, and there are other

people, the so-called absent-minded, who are so overconcentrated, so wedded to a goal in thought, that lesser matters

are neither remembered nor noticed. In its excess

overconcentration is a handicap, since it robs one of that

alertness for new impressions, new sources of thought so

necessary for growth. The fine mind is that which can pursue

successfully a goal in thought but which picks en route to that

goal, out of the irrelevant associations, something that enriches

its conclusions.

Not often enough is mechanical skill, hand-mindedness, considered

as one of the prime phases of intelligence. Intelligence, en

route to the conquest of the world, made use of that marvelous

instrument, the human hand, which in its opposable thumb and

little finger sharply separates man from the rest of creation.

Studying causes and effects, experimenting to produce effect, the

hand became the principal instrument in investigation, and the

prime verifier of belief. “Seeing is believing” is not nearly so

accurate as “Handling is believing,” for there is in touch, and

especially in touch of the hands and in the arm movements, a

Reality component of the first magnitude. But not only in

touching and investigating, but in pushing and pulling and

striking, IN CAUSING CHANGE, does the hand become the symbol and

source of power and efficiency. Undoubtedly this phase of the

hands’ activities remained predominant for untold centuries,

during which man made but slow progress in his career toward the

leadership of the world. Then came the phase of tool-making and

using and with that a rush of events that built the cities,

bridged the waters, opened up the Little and the Big as sources

of knowledge and energy for man and gave him the power which he

has used,—but poorly. It is the skill of human hands upon which

the mind of man depends; though we fly through the air and speed

under water, some one has made the tools that made the machine we

use. Therefore, the mechanical skill of man, the capacity to

shape resisting material