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

a plea and a summons. Anticipation of good to come appears and

with it the germ of hope and forward looking, and there is

realization or disappointment, joy or anger or sorrow. Thus

desire is linked up with satisfaction in a definite way, ideas

and feelings of demand and supply begin to appear and perhaps

power itself, in the vague notion, “I can get milk,” commences to

be felt. Social life starts when the child associates the mother

with the milk, with the desire and the satisfaction. In the

relationship established between mother and baby is the first

great social contact; love, friendship, discipline, teaching and

belief have their origin when, at the mother’s breast, the child

separates its mother from the rest of the things of the world.

And not only in the relief of hunger is the mother active, but

she gets to be associated with the relief from wet and irritating

clothes, the pleasant bath, and the pleasure of the change of

position that babies cry for. Her bosom and her arms become

sources of pleasure, and the race has immortalized them as

symbolic of motherhood, in song, in story and in myth.

Not only does he associate the mother with the milk but her very

presence brings him comfort, even when he is not hungry. It is

within the first few months of life that the child shows that he

is a gregarious[1] animal,—gregarious in the sense that he is

unhappy away from others. To be alone is thus felt to be

essentially an evil, to be with others is in itself a good. This

gregarious feeling is the sine qua non of social life: when we

punish any one we draw away from him; when we reward we get

closer to him. All his life the child is to find pleasure in

being with people and unhappiness when away from them, unless he

be one of those in whom the gregarious instinct is lacking. For

instincts may be absent, just as eye pigment is; there are mental

albinos, lacking the color of ordinary human feeling. Or else

some experience may make others hateful to him, or he may have so

intellectualized his life that this instinct has atrophied. This

gregarious feeling will heighten his emotions, he will gather

strength from the feeling that “others are with him,” he will

join societies, clubs, organizations in response to the same

feeling that makes sheep graze on a hillside in a group, that

makes the monkeys in a cage squat together, rubbing sides and

elbows. The home in which our child finds himself, though a

social institution, is not gregarious; it gives him only a

limited contact, and as soon as he is able and self-reliant he

seeks out a little herd, and on the streets, in the schoolroom

and playground, he really becomes a happy little herd animal.

[1] One of my children would stop crying if some one merely

entered his room when he was three weeks old. He was, and is, an

intensely gregarious boy.

Let us turn back to the desire for activity. As the power to

direct the eyes develops, as hands become a little more sure,

because certain pathways in brain and cord “myelinize,”[1] become

functional, the outside world attracts in a definite manner and

movements become organized by desires, by purpose. It’s a

red-letter day in the calendar of a human being when he first

successfully “reaches” something; then and there is the birth of

power and of successful effort. All our ideas of cause and effect

originate when we cause changes in the world, when we move a

thing from thither to yon. No philosopher, though he becomes so

intellectualized that he cannot understand how one thing or event

causes another, ever escapes from the feeling that HE causes

effects. Purpose, resistance, success, failure, cause, effect,

these become inextricably wound up with our thoughts and beliefs

from the early days when, looking at a dangling string, we

reached for it once, twice, a dozen times and brought it in

triumph to our mouth. And our idea that there were forbidden

things came when the watchful mother took it out of our mouth,

saying, “No, no, baby mustn’t!”

[1] At birth, though most of the great nervous pathways are laid

down, they are non-functional largely because the fibers that

compose them are unclothed, non-myelinated. The various kinds of

tracts have different times for becoming “myelinated” as was the

discovery of the great analogist, Flechsig.

At any rate, the organization of activity for definite purposes

starts. The little investigator is apparently obsessed with the

idea that everything it can reach, including its fingers and

toes, are good to eat, for everything reached is at once brought

to the mouth, the primitive curiosity thus being gustatory. In

this research the baby finds that some few things are pleasant,

many indifferent and quite a few disgusting and even painful,

which may remain as a result not far different from that obtained

by investigation in later years. The desire for pleasant things

commences to guide its activities. Every new thing is at once an

object for investigation, perhaps because its possibilities for

pleasure are unknown. That curiosity may have some such origin is

at least a plausible statement. At any rate, desire of a definite

type steps in to organize the mere desire for activity; and

impulse is controlled by purpose.

The child learns to creep, and the delight in progression lies in

the fact that far more things are accessible for investigation,

for rearrangement, for tasting. It is no accident that we speak

of our “tastes” that we say, “I want to taste of experience.”

That is exactly what the child creeping on the floor seeks,—to

taste of experience and to anticipate, to realize, to learn. Out

of the desire for activity grows a desire for experience born of

the pleasure of excitement that we spoke of previously. This

desire for experience becomes built up into strange forms under

teaching and through the results of experience. It is very strong

in some who become explorers, roues, vagabonds, scientists as a

result, and it is very weak in others who stay at home and seek

only the safe and limited experience. You see two children in one

room,—and one sits in the middle of the floor, perhaps playing

with a toy or looking around, and the other has investigated the

stove and found it hotter than he supposed, has been under the

table and bumped his head, has found an unusually sweet white

lump which in later life he will call sugar. The good child is

often without sufficient curiosity to be bad, whereas the bad

child may be an overzealous seeker of experience.

So our child reaching out for things develops ideas of cause,

effect and power, commences to have an idea of himself as a cause

and likes the feeling of power. As he learns to walk, the world

widens, his sense of power grows, and his feeling of personality

increases. Meanwhile another side of his nature has been

developing and one fully as important.

The persons in his world have become quite individual; mother is

now not alone, for father is recognized with pleasure as one who

likewise is desirable. He carries one on his shoulder so that a

pleasurable excitement results; he plays with one, holds out

strings and toys and other instruments for the obtaining of

experience. Usually both of these great personages are friendly,

their faces wear a smile or a tender look, and our little one is

so organized that smiles and tender looks awaken comfortable

feelings and he smiles in return. The smile is perhaps the first

great message one human being sends to another; it says, “See, I

am friendly, I wish you well.” Later on in the history of the

child, he will learn much about smiles of other kinds, but at

this stage they are all pleasant. Though his parents are usually

friendly and give, now and then they deprive, and they look

different; they say, “No, no!” This “no, no” is social

inhibition, it is backed up by the power of deprivation,

punishment, disapproval; it has its power in a something in our

nature that gives society its power over us. From now there steps

in a factor in the development of character of which we have

already spoken, a group of desires that have their source in the

emotional response of the child to the parent, in the emotional

response of an individual to his group. Out of the social

pressure arises the desire to please, to win approval, to get

justification, and these struggle in the mind of the child with

other desires.

We said the child seeks experience,—but not only on his own

initiative. The father stands against the wall, perhaps with one

foot crossing the other. Soon he feels a pressure and looks down;

there is the little one standing in his imitation of the same

position. Imitation, in my belief, is secondary to a desire for

experience. The child does not imitate everything; he is equipped

to notice only simple things, and these he imitates. Why? The

desire to experience what others are experiencing is a basic

desire; it expresses both a feeling of fellowship and a

competitive feeling. We do not feel a strong tendency to imitate

those we dislike or despise, or do not respect, we tend to

imitate those we love and respect, those for whom we have a

fellow feeling. Part of the fellow feeling is an impulse to

imitate and to receive in a positive way the suggestion offered

by their conduct and manners.

Analogous to imitation, and part of the social instinct, is a

credulity, a willingness to accept as if personally experienced

things stated. Part of the seeking of experience is the asking of

questions, because the mind seeks a cause for every effect, a

something to work from. Indeed, one of the main mental activities

lies in the explaining of things; an unrest is felt in the

presence of the “not understood” which is not stilled until the

unknown is referred back to a thing understood or accepted

without question. The child finds himself in a world with

laid-down beliefs and with explanations of one kind or another

for everything. His group differs from other groups in its

explanations and beliefs; his family even may be peculiar in

these matters. He asks, he is answered and enjoined to believe.

Without credulity there could be no organization of society, no

rituals, no ceremonials, no religions and customs,—but without

the questioning spirit there could be no progress. Most of the

men and women of this world have much credulity and only a feeble

questioning tendency, but there are a few who from the start

subject the answers given them to a rigid scrutiny and who test

belief by results. Let any one read the beliefs of savages, let

him study the beliefs of the civilized in the spirit in which he

would test the statement of the performance of an automobile, and

he can but marvel at man’s credulity. Belief and the acceptance

of authority are the conservative forces of society, and they

have their origin in the nursery when the child asks, “Why does

the moon get smaller?” and the mother answers, “Because, dear,

God cuts a piece off every day to make the stars with.” The

authorities, recognizing that their power lay in unquestioning

belief, have always sanctified it and made the pious,

non-skeptical type the ideal and punished the non-believer with

death or ostracism. Fortunately for the race, the skeptic, if

silenced, modifies the strength of the belief he attacks and in

the course of time even they who have defended begin to shift

from it and it becomes refuted. Beliefs, as Lecky[1] so