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

every age we hear of the “simple life,” the happy, contented

life, where needs are few and things are “natural.” The ascetic

ideal of renunciation is the dominant note in Buddhism and

Christianity; fly from the pleasures of this world, give up and

renounce, for all is vanity and folly. To every struggler this

seems true when the battle is hardest, when achievement seems

futile and empty, and when he whispers to himself, “What is it

all about, anyway?” To stop struggling, to desire only the

plainest food, the plainest clothes, to live without the needless

multiplication of refinements, to work at something essential for

daily bread, to stop competing with one’s neighbor in clothes,

houses, ornaments, tastes,—it seems so pleasant and restful. But

the competition gets keener, the struggle harder, tastes

multiply, yesterday’s luxury is to-day’s need—to what end?

Will mankind ever accept a modified asceticism as its goal? I

think it will be forced to, but it may be that the wish is father

to the thought. Sometimes it seems as if the real crucifixion for

every one of us is in our contending desires and tastes, in the

artificial competing standards that are mislabeled refinement. To

be finicky is to court anhedonia, and the joy of life is in

robust tastes not easily offended and easily gratified.

Perhaps this is irrelevant in a chapter on play and recreation,

but it is easily seen that much of play is a revolt against

refinement and taste, just as much as humor is directed against

them. In play we allow ourselves to shout, laugh aloud and to be

unrefined; we welcome dirt and disorder; we forget clothes and

manners; we are “natural,” i. e., unrefined. The higher we build

our tastes the more we need play. If such a thing as a “state of

nature” could be reached, play and recreation in the adult sense

would hardly more than exist.

CHAPTER XVI. RELIGIOUS CHARACTERS. DISHARMONY IN CHARACTER

I find in William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”, the

following definition of religion: “Religion, therefore, as I

shall ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the

feelings, acts and experiences of individuals in their solitude

so far as they comprehend themselves to stand in relation to

whatever they may consider the divine.”

It seems to me the common man would as soon understand Einstein

as this definition. In fact, the religious trends of the men and

women in this world have many sources and are no more unified

than their humor is. Whether all peoples, no matter how low in

culture, have had religion cannot be settled by a study of the

present inhabitants of the world, for every one of these, though

savage, has tradition and some culture. Theoretically, for the

one who accepts some form of evolution as true, at some time in

man’s history he has first asked himself some of the questions

answered by religion.

For my part, as I read the anthropologists (whose answers to the

question of the origin of religion I regard as the only valid

ones, since they are the only ones without prejudice and with

some regard for scientific method), it is the practical needs of

man, his curiosity and his tendency to explain by human force,

which are the first sources of the religions. How to get good

crops, how to catch fish and game, how to win over enemies, how

and whom to marry, what to do to be strong and successful as

individual and group, found various answers in the taboo, the

prayer, the ceremony and the priest, magician and scientist.

Curiosity as to what was behind each phenomenon of nature and the

tendency of man to personalize all force, as well as the awe and

admiration aroused by the strong, wise and crafty contemporary

and ancestor brought into the world the “old man-cult,” ancestor-worship, gods and goddesses of ranging degrees and power, but

very much like men and women except for power and longevity.

Certain natural phenomena—death, sleep, trance, epileptic

attack—all played their part, bringing about ideas of the soul,

immortality, possession, etc. With culture and the growth of

inhibition and knowledge and the use of art and symbols, the

primitive beliefs modified their nature; the gods became one God,

who was gradually stripped of his human desires, wishes,

partialities and attributes until for the majority of the

cultivated he becomes Nature, which in the end is a collection of

laws in which one HOPES there is a unifying purpose. But the vast

majority of the world, even in the so-called civilized countries,

worship taboos, symbols, have a modified polytheistic belief or a

personalized God, still attempt to persuade the Power in their

own behalf, to act favorably to their own purposes and follow

those who claim knowledge of the divine and inscrutable,—the

priest, minister, rabbi, the man of God, in a phrase.

A part of religious feeling arises in civilized man, at least,

from the feeling of awe in the presence of the vast forces of

nature. Here science has contributed to religious feeling, for as

one looks at the stars, his soul bows in worship mainly because

the astronomer, the scientist, has told him that every twinkling

point is a great sun surrounded by planets, and that the light

from them must travel unimaginable millions of miles to reach

him. As the world forces become impersonal they become more

majestic, and a deeper feeling is evoked in their presence.

Science aids true religion by increasing awe, by increasing

knowledge.

A great factor in religion is the longing to compensate for death

and suffering. Religion represents a reaction against fear,

horror and humiliation. It is a cry of triumph in the face of

what otherwise is disaster “I am not man, the worm, sick, old,

doomed to die; I am the heir of the divine and will live forever,

happy and blessed.” Whether religious teaching is true or not,

its great value lies in the happiness and surety of those who

believe.

In its very highest sense the religious life is an effort to

identify oneself with the largest purpose in the world. All

cooperative purposes are thus religious, all competitive

nonreligious. The selfish is therefore opposed to the altruistic

purpose, the narrow to the broad. Good is the symbol for the

purposes that seek the welfare of all: evil is the symbol of

those who seek the welfare of a person or a group, regardless of

the rest.

If this definition is correct, then every reformer is religious

and every self-seeker, though he wear all the symbols of a

religion and pray three times a day, is irreligious. I admit no

man or woman to the fellowship of the religious unless in his

heart he seeks some purpose that will lift the world out of

discord and into harmony.

The power of the human being to believe in the face of opposed

fact, inconsistency and unfavorable result is nowhere so well

exemplified as in religion. I do not speak of the untold crimes

and inhumanities done in the name of religion, of human

sacrifice, persecution, religious war,—these are parts of a

chapter in human history outside of the province of this book and

almost too horrible to be contemplated. But men have believed

(and do believe) that some among them knew what God wanted, that

certain procedures, tricks and ceremonies conveyed sanctity and

surety; that cosmic events like storms, droughts, eclipses and

epidemics had personal human meanings, that Infinite Wisdom would

be guided in action by the prayers of ignorance, self-seeking and

hatred, etc., etc. The savage who believes that his medicine

man’s antics, paint and feathers will bring rain and fertile soil

has his counterpart in the civilized man who believes that this

or that ceremonial and professed belief insures salvation. Faith

is beautiful in the abstract, but in the concrete it is often the

origin of superstition and amazing folly.[1] However crudely

intelligence and honest scientific effort may work, they soar in

a heaven far above the abyss of credulity.

[1] It would be amusing were it not sad to see how remarkably

well some philosophers use their intelligence and logic to prove

the invalidity of intelligence and logic. They praise emotion,

instinct and “intuition” and such modes of knowing and acting,

yet their works are closely argued, reasoned and appeal

throughout to the intelligence of their readers for acceptance.

True religion in the sense I have used the word has faith in it,

the faith that there is a purpose in the universe, though it

seems impossible for us to discover it. In the personal character

it seeks to establish altruistic feeling and conduct, though it

does not rule out as unworthy self-feeling or seeking. It merely

subordinates them. It does not deny the validity of pleasure, of

the sensuous pleasures; it does not set its face against

drinking, eating, sexual love, play and entertainment, but it

urges a valid purpose as necessary for happiness and morality. It

does not glorify faith as against reason, emotion as against

intelligence; on the contrary, it holds that reason and

intelligence are the governing factors in human life and only by

use of them do we rise from the beast.

So the religious life of those we study will be of great

importance to us. In the majority of cases we shall find that

social heredity, tradition and backing will play the dominant

role, in that most, in name at least, live and die in the faith

in which they were born. We find those who identify form and

ceremonial with religion (the majority), others who identify it

with ethics and morality, and who can conceive no righteousness

out of it. Then there is the strictly modern type of person to

whom right conduct is held to have nothing to do with religious

belief and who measures Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and agnostic

by their acts and not at all by their dogma, and who thus

relegates religion, in the ordinary use of the word, to a rather

useless place in human life. Orthodoxy, piety, tolerance and

skepticism represent attitudes towards organized religion:

altruism, sympathy, good will, and fellowship are the

measurements of the unorganized religion whose mission it is to

find the purpose of life.

We have spoken throughout of man as a mosaic of character, and we

must modify this statement. A mosaic is a static collection,

whereas a man has character struggles, balance and overbalance.

Really to know a man is to get at the proportionate power of his

various trends, to understand his harmonies and disharmonies.

Character development is the story of the unification of the

traits or characters. Disharmony, disproportion of traits and

characters may be progressive and lead to disaster and mental

disease, or a balance may be reached after a struggle and what we

call reform takes place. Though our social life tends to narrow

and repress character, it also tends to harmonize it by the

preventing of excess development of certain traits. The social

person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre.

On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to

unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric.

What are the chief disharmonies? I mean, of course, glaring

disharmonies, for no one is of harmonious development, with

intelligence, emotions, instincts, desires, purposes in

cooperation with each other. This I propose to consider in more

detail in the next chapter, on some character types, but it will

be of use to sketch the great disharmonies.

Character is dynamic, and a fundamental disharmony, even if not

noticeable early in life, may progress to the point of disruption

of the personality. Thus an individual who is strongly egoistic

in his purposes and