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

existence, with its precarious financial state, its drudgery and

most of all the gradual disappearance of his ideals. He is frank

to himself alone, wishes he had made money, but is apt to sneer

at the world of the “fat and successful” as less than his

intellectual equal. He compares his own rewards with that of the

successful man knowing less and with a narrower outlook.

Thus, through success, A. is broadening and becoming something of

an idealist. B. is narrowing and through failure is losing his

ideals. This is not an uncommon effect of success and failure.

Where success leads to arrogance and conceit it narrows, but

where the character withstands this result the increased

experience and opportunity is of great value to character.

Failure may embitter and thus narrow through envy and lost

energy, but also it may strip away conceit and overestimation and

thus lead to a richer insight into life.

3. The hyperkinetic, uncontrolled or shallow. This type, although

quick and apparently energetic, is deficient in a fundamental of

the personality, in the organizing energy. This deficiency may

extend into all phases of the mental life or in only a few

phases. Thus we see people whose thinking is rapid, energetic,

but they cannot “stick” to one line of thought long enough to

reach a goal. Others are similarly situated in regard to

purposes; they are enthusiastic, easily stirred into activity,

but rarely do their purposes remain fixed long enough for

success. As a rule this class is inconstant in affections, though

warm and sympathetic. They gush but never organize their

philanthropic efforts, so that they rarely do any real good.

Often the most lovable of people, they are at the same time the

despair of those who know them best.

M. is a woman who makes a fine first impression, is very pretty,

with nice manners and a quick, flattering interest in every one

she meets. She is usually classed as intelligent because she is

vivacious, that is, her mind follows the trend of things quickly,

and she marshals whatever she knows very readily. As one who

knows her well says, “She shows all her goods the first time. You

really do not know how slender her stock in trade is until you

see the same goods and tricks every time you meet her.” Needless

to say her critic is a woman.

M. is interested in something new each week. The “new” usually

fascinates her, and she becomes so extraordinarily busy that she

hardly has time to eat or sleep. She is always put on committees

if the organization heads do not know her, but if they do, she is

carefully slated for something of no importance. After a short

time her interest has shifted to something else. Thus she passes

from work in behalf of blind babies to raising funds for a home

for indigent actors; from energy spent in philanthropy to energy

spent in learning the latest dances. Her enthusiasm never cools

off, though its goal always changes.

Fortunately she is married to a rich man who views her with

affection and a shrug of his shoulders. Her children know her;

now and then, she becomes extraordinarily interested in their

welfare, much to their disgust and rebellion, for they have long

since sized her up.

She has often been on the verge of a love affair with some man

who is professionally interested in something into which she has

leaped for a short time. She raves about him, follows him,

flatters and adores him, and then, before the poor fellow knows

where he is at, she is out of love and off somewhere else. This

mutability of affection has undoubtedly saved her from disaster.

Were she not rich, M. would be one of the social problems that

the social workers cannot understand or handle, e. g., there is a

type who never sticks to anything, not because he is bored

quickly, or is inefficient, but because he is at the mercy of the

new and irrelevant. Without sufficient means he throws up his job

and tries to get the new work he longs to do. Sometimes he fails

to get it, and then he becomes an unemployed problem.

This type of uncontrolled energy reaches its height in the

manical or manic phase of the disease already described as manic

depressive insanity. The “manic personality,” which need not

become insane, is characterized by high energy, vivacious

emotions, rapid flow of thought and irrelevant associations.

4. The mesokinetic—medium or average in their energy (feeling

and power)—run the range of the vast groups we call the average.

This type is spurred on by necessity, custom and habit to steady

work and steady living. Possessed of practical wisdom, their

world is narrow, their affections only called out for their

kindred and immediate friends. Their interests are largely away

from their work and as a rule do not include the past or future

of the race. Usually conservative, they accept the moral

standards as absolute and are quick to resent changes in custom.

They follow leaders cheerfully, are capable of intense loyalty to

that cause which they believe to stand for their interests. Yet

each individual of the mass of men, though he never rises above

mediocrity, presents to his intimates a grouping of qualities and

peculiarities that gives him a distinct personality.

C. is one of those individuals whose mediocre energy has stood

between him and so-called success. At present he is forty and

occupies about the same position that he did at twenty. As a boy

he was fond of play but never excelled in any sport and never

occupied a place of leadership. He had the usual pugnacious code

of boys, but because he was friendly and good-natured rarely got

into a fight. He liked to read and was rather above the average

in intelligence, but he never tackled the difficult reading,

confining himself to the “interesting” novel and easy

information. He left high school when he was sixteen and

immediately on leaving he dropped all study. He entered an office

as errand boy and was recognized as faithful and industrious, but

he showed no especial initiative or energy. In the course of time

he was promoted from one position to another until he became a

shipper at the age of twenty. Since this time he has remained at

this post without change, except that when he got married and on

a few occasions afterward, when the cost of living rose, his

salary was raised.

C. is married, and his wife often “nags” him because he does not

get ahead. She tells him that he has no energy and fight in him,

that if he would he could do better. Sometimes he takes refuge in

the statement that he has no pull, that those who have been

promoted over his head are favorites for some reason or another,

and he rarely recognizes the superiority of his immediate

superiors, though he is loyal enough to the boss. He lives in

that “quiet despair” that Thoreau so aptly describes as the life

of the average man, and he seeks escape from it in smoking, in

belonging to a variety of fraternal organizations, in the movies

and the detective story. He is a “good” father and husband, which

means that he turns over all his earnings, is faithful and kind.

Except that he admonishes and punishes his children when they are

“bad,” he takes no constructive share in their training and

leaves that to the mother, the church and the school. He and his

wife are attached to one another through habit and mutual need,

but they have some time since outlived passion and intense

affection. She has sized him up as a failure and knows herself

doomed to struggle against poverty, and he knows that she

understands him. This mutual “understanding” keeps them at arm’s

length except in the face of danger or disaster, when they cling

to each other for comfort and support. This is the history of

many a marriage that on its surface is quiet and peaceful.

The hypokinetic types. We cannot separate energy display from

enthusiasm, courage, intelligence, persistent purpose, etc. If I

have made myself clear in the preceding pages of this book, you

will realize that no character of man works alone, but all

feeling, thought and action is a resultant of forces.

Nevertheless, there are those in whom the fire of life burns high

and others in whom it burns low, and either group may be of

totally different qualities otherwise.

There are people of low energy discharge, and these it seems to

me are of two main kinds,—the one where nothing seems to arouse

or create powerful motives and purposes, and the other in whom

the main defect is a rapidly arising exhaustion. The first I call

the simple hypokinetic group and the other the irritable

hypokinetic group.

The simple hypokinetic person may be one of any grade of

intelligence but more commonly is of low intelligence. In any

school for the feebleminded one finds the apathetic imbecile,

who can be kept at work by goading and stimulation of one kind or

another, who does not tire especially, but who never works beyond

a low level of speed and enthusiasm.

5. A more interesting type is T. He may be called the intelligent

hypokinetic, the high-grade failure. As a baby he learned to walk

late, though he talked early and well. He played in a leisurely

sort of way, running only when he had to and content as a rule to

be in the house. He was not seclusive, seeming to enjoy the

company of other children, but rarely made any efforts to seek

them out. He was quick to learn but showed only a moderate

curiosity, and he rarely made any investigations on his own

account. It was noticed that he seldom asked “why” in the usual

manner of intelligent children.

He did fairly well in school; he had a wonderful memory and

seemed to see very quickly into intricate problems. It was always

a great surprise of his teachers that he was so bright, as one

said, in comparison to his standing. Once or twice a zealous

teacher sought to stimulate him into more effort and study, but

though he responded for a short time, gradually he slipped back

into his own easy pace. He went through high school, and on the

basis of a splendid memory and a keen intelligence, which by this

time were easily recognized, he was sent to college. He took no

part in athletics and little part in the communal college

activities. He had so good a command of facts and with this so

cynical a point of view that he became quite a college character

and was pointed out as a fellow who could lead his class if he

would. As a matter of fact, nothing could spur him to real

competitive effort.

We may pass briefly over his life. After he left college, he

drifted from one position to another. Usually in some hack

literary line. Were it not for a small income he would have

starved. After a few years he become very fat and gross looking,

and then came a kindly pneumonia which carried him off.

We must not mistake the stolid for the hypokinetic. There was a

classmate of mine in the medical school, a large, quiet fellow,

D. M., who got by everything, as the boys said, by the skin of

his teeth. He worked without enthusiasm or zeal, studied

infrequently and managed to pass along to his second year, at

about the bottom of the class. In that year we took up

bacteriology, the “bug-bear” as one punster put it, of the

school. Just what it was about