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

coincidence. Faith curists report in detail their successes, but

we have no statistics whatever of their failures.

If thought is a product of the brain activated by the rest of the

organism, it would be perfectly natural to expect that thought

would influence the organism. That thought is intimately

associated with impulses to action is well known. This action

largely takes place in the speech muscles but also it irradiates

into the rest of the organism. Especially is this true if the

thought is associated with some emotion. Emotion, as we shall

discuss it later, is at least in large part a bodily reaction, a

disturbance in heart, lungs, abdominal organs, blood vessels,

sympathetic nervous system, endocrines, etc. The effect of

thought and emotion upon the body, whether to heighten its

activity or to lower its activity, is, from my point of view,

merely the effect of one function of the organism upon others. We

are not surprised if digestion affects thinking and mood, and we

need not be surprised if thought and mood disturb or improve

digestion. And we may substitute for digestion any other organic

function.

As a working basis, substantiated by the kind of proof we use in

our daily lives in laboratories and machine shops, we may state

that mind, character and personality are organic in their origin

and are functions of the entire organism. What a man thinks, does

and feels (or perhaps we should reverse this order) is the result

of environmental forces playing upon a marvelously intricate

organism in which every part reacts on every other part, in which

nervous energy influences digestion and digestion influences

nervous energy, in which enzymes, hormones, and endocrines engage

in an extraordinary game of checks and balance, which in the

normal course of events make for the individual’s welfare. What a

man thinks, does, and feels influences the fate of his organism

from one end of life to the other.

We have not adduced in favor of the organic nature of mind,

character and personality the facts of heredity. This is a most

important set of facts, for if the egg and the sperm carry

mentality and personality, they may be presumed to carry them in

some organic form, as organic potentialities, just as they carry

size,[1] color, sex, etc. That abnormal mind is inherited is

shown in family insanity in the second, third and fourth

generation cases of mental disease. Certain types of

feeblemindedness surely are transmitted from generation to

generation, as witness the case of the famous (or infamous) Jukes

family. In this group vagabondage, crime, immorality and other

character abnormalities appeared linked with the

feeblemindedness. But there is plenty of evidence to show that

normal character qualities are inherited as well as the

abnormal.[2] Galton, the father of eugenics, collected facts from

the history of successful families to prove this. It is true that

he failed to take into account the facts of SOCIAL heredity, in

that a gifted man establishes a place for himself and a tradition

for his family that is of great help to his son. Nevertheless,

musical ability runs in families and races, as does athletic

ability, high temper, passion, etc. In short, at least the

potentialities, the capacities for character, are transmitted

together with other qualities as part of the capital of heredity.

[1] I have collected and published from the records and wards of

the State Hospital at Taunton, Mass., many such cases. The whole

subject is to be reviewed in a following book on the transmission

of mental disease, but no one seriously doubts that there is a

transference of “insane” character from generation to generation.

In fact, I believe that a little too much stress hag been laid on

this aspect of mental disease and not enough on the fact that

sickness may injure a family stock and cause the descendants to

be insane. Any one who has seen a single case of congenital

General Paresis, where a child has a mental disease due to the

syphilis of a parent, and can doubt that character and mind are

organic, simply is blinded by theological or metaphysical

prejudice.

[2] See his book “Genius.”

This means that in studying character and personality, we must

start with an analysis of the physical make-up of the individual.

We are not yet at the point in science where we can easily get at

the activities of the endocrinal glands in normal mentality. We

are able to recognize certain fundamental types, but more we

cannot do; nor are we able to measure nervous energy except in

relatively crude ways, but these crude ways have great value

under certain conditions.

When there has been a change in personality, the question of

bodily disease is always paramount. The first questions to be

asked under such circumstances are, “Is this person sick?” “Is

the brain involved?” “Are endocrinal glands involved?” “Is there

disease of some organ of the body, acting to lower the feeling of

well-being, acting to slacken the purposes and the will or to

obscure the intelligence?”

There are other important questions of this type to answer, some

of which may be deferred for the time. Meanwhile, the next

equally fundamental thesis is on the effect of the environment

upon mind, character and personality.

CHAPTER II. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS OF CHARACTER

From the time any one of us is born into the world he is subject

to the influences of forces that reach backwards to the earliest

days of the race. The “dead hand” rules,—yes, and the dead

thought, belief and custom continue to shape the lives and

character of the living. The invention and development of speech

and writing have brought into every man’s career the mental life

and character of all his own ancestors and the ancestors of every

other man.

A child is not born merely to a father and a mother. He is born

to a group, fiercely and definitely prejudiced in custom, belief

and ideal, with ways of doing, feeling and thinking which it

seeks to impose on each of its new members. Family, tribe, race

and nation all demand of each accession that he accept their

ideals, habits and beliefs on peril of disapproval and even of

punishment. And man is so constituted that the approval and

disapproval of his group mean more to him even than his life.

The social setting into which each one is born is his social

heredity. “The heredity with which civilization is most

supremely concerned,” says Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, “is not that

which is inborn in the individual. It is the SOCIAL inheritance

which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress.”[1] It

is this social inheritance which shapes our characters,

rough-hewn by nature. It is by the light of each person’s social

inheritance that we must also judge his character.

[1] The Eugenists fiercely contest this statement, and rightly,

for it is extreme. Society is threatened at its roots by the

present high birth rate of the low grade and the low birth rate

of the high grade. Environment, culture, can do much, but they

cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Neither can heredity

make a silk purse out of silk; without culture and the

environmental influences, without social heredity, the silk

remains crude and with no special value. The aims of a rational

society, which we are born a thousand years too soon to see would

be twofold: to control marriage and birth so that the number of

the unfit would be kept as low as possible, and then to bring

fostering influences to bear on the fit.

“Education,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is only second to

nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and

Timbuctoo to change places!” And education is merely social

inheritance organized by parents and teachers for the sake of

molding the scholar into usefulness and conformity to the group

into which he is born. There may be in each individual an innate

capacity for this ability or that, for expressing and controlling

this or that emotion, for developing this or that purpose. Which

ability will be developed, which emotion or purpose will be

expressed, is a matter of the age in which a man is born, the

country in which he lives, the family which claims him as its

own. In a warrior age the fighting spirit chooses war as its

vocation and develops a warlike character; in a peaceful time

that same fighting spirit may seek to bring about such reforms as

will do away with war.[1] When the world said that a man might

and really ought now and then to beat his wife and rule her by

force, the really conformable man did so, while his descendant,

living in a time and country where woman is the domestic “boss,”

submits, humorously and otherwise, to a good-natured henpecking.

And in the times where a woman had no vocation but that of

housewife, the wife of larger ability merely became a

discontented, futile woman; whereas in an age which opens up

politics to her, the same type of person expands into a vigorous,

dominating political leader. Though the force of the water remain

the same, the nature of the land determines whether the water

shall collect as a river, carrying the produce of the land to the

sea, or as a stagnant lake in which idlers fish. Time, social

circumstances, education and a thousand and one factors determine

whether one shall be a “Village Hampden,” quarreling in a petty

way with a petty autocrat over some petty thing, or a national

Hampden, whose defiance of a tyrannical king stirs a nation into

revolt.

[1] Indeed, a reformer is to-day called a crusader, though the

knight of the twelfth century armed cap-a-pie for a joust with

the Saracen would hardly recognize as his spiritual descendant a

sedentary person preaching against rum. Yet to the student of

character there is nothing anomalous in the transformation.

How conceptions of right and wrong, of proper and improper

conduct, ideals and thoughts arise, it is not my function to

treat in detail. That intelligence primarily uses the method of

trial and error to learn is as true of groups as of individuals;

and established methods of doing things—customs—are often

enough temporary conclusions, though they last a thousand years.

The feeling that such group customs are right and that to depart

from them is wrong, is perhaps based on a specific instinct, the

moral instinct; but much more likely, in my opinion, is it

obedience to leadership, fear of social disapproval and

punishment, conscience, imitation, suggestibility and sympathy,

all of which are parts of that social cement substance, the

social instinct. No child ever learns “what is right and wrong”

except through teaching, but no child would ever conform, except

through gross fear, unless he found himself urged by deep-seated

instincts to be in conformity, in harmony and in sympathy with

his group,—to be one with that group. Perhaps it is true, as

Bergson suggests, as Galton[1] hints and as Samuel Butler boldly

states, that there are no real individuals in life but we are

merely different aspects of reality or, to phrase it

materialistically, corpuscles in the blood stream of an organism

too vast and complicated to be encompassed by our imagination.

Just as a white blood cell obeys laws of which it can have no

conception, fulfills purposes whose meaning transcends its own

welfare, so we, with all our self-consciousness and all the

paraphernalia of individuality, are perhaps parts of a life we

cannot understand.

[1] For example, read what the hard-headed Galton says

(“Hereditary Genius,” p. 376):

“There is decidedly a solidarity as well as a separateness in all

human and probably in all lives whatsoever,