6. Then there are those in whom all these motives operate in greater or lesser degree,—the so-called normal person. In reality he has his special inclinations and dreads.

7. The majority of people are influenced mainly by the group with which they have cast their positions, the blame of others being relatively unimportant or arousing anger. For there is this great difference between our reactions to praise and blame: that while the praise of almost any one and for almost any quality is welcome, the blame of only a few is taken "well," and for the rest there is anger, contempt or defiance. The influence of blame varies with the respect, love and especially acknowledged superiority of the blamer. The "boss" has a right to blame and so has father or mother while we are children, but we resent bitterly the blame of a fellow employee; "he has no right to blame," and we rebel against the blame of our parents when we grow up. In fact, the war of the old and new generations starts with the criticism of the elder folk and the resentment of the younger folk.

It will be seen that reaction to praise and blame, etc., will depend upon the irritability of ego feeling, the love of superiority and the dislike for inferiority. This basic situation we must defer discussing, but what is of importance is that the primitive disciplinary weapons we have discussed never lose their cardinal value and remain throughout life and in all societies the prime modes of thought and conduct.

In similar fashion the conscience types might be depicted. From the over-conscientious who rigidly hold themselves to an ideal, who watch every departure from perfection with agony and self-reproach, and who may either reach the highest level or "break down" and become inefficient to the almost conscienceless group, doing only what seems more profitable, are many intermediate types merging one with the other.

There are people whose conscience is localized, as the self-sacrificing father who is a pirate in business, or as the policeman who holds rigidly to conscience in courage and loyalty to his fellows, but who finds no internal reproach when he takes a bribe or perjures himself about a criminal. What we call a code is really a localized conscience, and there are many men whose consciences do not permit seduction of the virgin but who are quite easy in mind about an intrigue with a married woman. So, too, you may be as wily as you please in business but find cheating at cards base and unthinkable. Conscience in the abstract may be a divine entity, but in the realities of everyday life it is a medley of motives, purposes and teachings, varying from the grotesque and mischief-working to the sublime and splendid.



CHAPTER III. MEMORY AND HABIT

There are two qualities of nervous tissues (possibly of all living tissue) that are basic in all nervous and mental processes. They are dependent upon the modificability of nerve cells and fibers by stimuli, e. g., a light flashing through the pupil and passing along the optical tracts to the occipital cortex produces changes which constitute the basis of visual memory. Experience modifies nervous tissue in definite manner, and SOMETHING remembers. Who remembers? Who is conscious? Believe what you please about that, call it ego, soul, call it consciousness dipped out of a cosmic consciousness; and I have no quarrel with you.

Memory has its mechanics, in the association of ideas, which preoccupied the early English psychologists and philosophers; it is the basis of thought and also of action, and it is a prime mystery. We know its pathology, we think that memories for speech have loci in the brain, the so-called motor memories in Broca's area.[1] We know that a hemorrhage in these areas or in the fibers passing from them, or a tumor pressing on them may destroy or temporarily abolish these memories, so that a man may KNOW what he wishes to say, understand speech and be unable to say it, though he may write it (motor aphasia). In sensory aphasia the defect is a loss of the capacity to understand spoken speech, though the patient may be able to say what he himself wishes. (It is fair to say that the definite location of these capacities in definite areas has been challenged by Marie, Moutier and others, but this denial does not deny the organic brain location of speech memories; it merely affirms that they are scattered rather than concentrated in one area.)

[1] Foot of the left or right third frontal convolutions, auditory speech in the supramarginal, etc.

In its widest phases memory alters with the state of the brain. In childhood impressibility is high, but until the age or four or five the duration of impression is low, and likewise the power of voluntary recall. In youth (eighteen-twenty) all these capacities are perhaps at their highest. As time goes on impressibility seems first of all to be lost, so that it becomes harder and harder to learn new things, to remember new faces, new names.

The typical difficulty of middle age is to remember names, because these have no real relationship or logical value and must be arbitrarily remembered. The typical senile defect is the dropping out of the recent memories, though the past may be preserved in its entirety. With any disease of the brain, temporary or permanent, amnesia or memory loss may and usually is present (e. g., general paresis, tumor, cerebral arteriosclerosis, etc.). As the result of Carbon monoxide poisoning, as after accidental or attempted suicidal gas inhalation, the memory, especially for the most recent events, is impaired and the patient cannot remember the events as they occur; he passes from moment to moment unconnected to the recent past, though his remote past is clear. Since memory is the basis of certainty, of the feeling of reality, these unfortunates are afflicted with an uncertainty, a sense of unreality, that is almost agonizing. As the effects of the poison wear off, which even in favorable cases takes months, the impressibility returns but never reaches normality again.

Unquestionably there is an inherent congenital difference in memory capacity. There are people who are prodigies of memory as there are those who are prodigies of physical strength,—and without training. The IMPRESSIBILITY for memories can in no way be increased except through the stimulation of interest and a certain heightening of attention through emotion. For the man or woman concerned with memory the first point of importance is to find some value in the fact or thing to be learned. Before a subject is broached to students the teacher should make clear its practical and theoretic value to the students. Too often that is the last thing done and it is only when the course is finished that its practical meaning is stressed or even indicated. In fact, throughout, teaching the value of the subject should constantly be emphasized, if possible, by illustrations from life. There are only a few who love knowledge for its own sake, but there are many who become eager for learning when it is made practical.

The number of associations given to a fact determines to a large extent its permanence in memory and the power of recalling it. In my own teaching I always instruct my students in the technique of memorizing, as follows:

1. Listen attentively, making only as many notes as necessary to recall the leading facts. The auditory memories are thus given the first place.

2. Go home and read up the subject in your textbooks, again making notes. Thus is added the visual associations.

3. Write out in brief form the substance of the lecture, deriving your knowledge from both the lecture and the book. You thus add another set of associations to your memories of the subject.

4. Teach the subject to or discuss it with a fellow student. By this you vitalize the memories you have, you link them firmly together, you lend to them the ardor of usefulness and of victory. You are forced to realize where the gaps, the lacunae of your knowledge come, and are made to fill them in.

Thus the best way to remember a fact is to find a use for it and to link it to your interests and your purposes. Unrelated it has no value; related it becomes in fact a part of you. After that the mechanics of memory necessitate the making of as many pathways to that fact as possible, and this means deliberately to associate the fact by sound, by speech and by action. The advertised schemes of memory training are simply association schemes, old as the hills, and having value indeed, but too much is claimed for them. A splendid memory is born, not made; but any memory, except where disease has entered, can be improved by training.

It is because lectures on the whole do not supply enough associations or arouse enough interest that the lecture is the poorest method of teaching or learning. Man's mind sticks easily to things, but with difficulty to words about things. To maintain attention for an hour or so, while sitting, is a task, and there develops a tendency either to a hypnoidal state in which the mind follows uncritically, or to a restless uneasiness with wandering mind and fatigue of body. A demonstration, on the other hand, a laboratory experiment with short, personal instruction, a bodily contact with the problem calls into play interest, enthusiasm, curiosity, motor images, the use of the hands, and is THE method of teaching.

There are at present excellent psychological methods of testing out the memory capacity. Every one engaged in any responsible work, or troubled about his memory, should be so tested. While there are other qualities of mind of great importance, memory is basic, and no one can really understand himself who is in doubt about his memory. In such diseases as neurasthenia one of the commonest complaints is the "loss of memory," which greatly troubles the patient. As a matter of fact, what is impaired is interest and attention, and when the patient realizes this he is usually quite relieved. The man who has a poor memory may become very successful if he develops systems of recording, filing, indexing, but his possibilities of knowledge are greatly reduced by his defect.[1]

[1] It is the growth of the subject matter of knowledge that makes necessary the elaborate systems of indexing, etc., now so important. It is as much as man can do to follow the places where the men work, let alone what they are doing. This growth of knowledge is getting to be an extra-human phenomenon. Of this Graham Wallas has written entertainingly.

A second fundamental ability of living tissue, and of particular importance in character, is habit formation. Habit resides in the fact that once living tissue has been traversed by a stimulus and has responded by an act, three things result:

1. The pathway for that stimulus becomes more permeable; becomes, as it were, grooved or like a track laid across the living structure of the nervous system.

2. The responding element is more easily stirred into activity, responds with more vigor and with less effort.

3. Consciousness, at first invoked, recedes more and more, until the habit-action of whatever type tends to become automatic. There is in this last peculiarity a tendency for the habit to establish itself as independent of the personality, and if an injurious or undesired habit, to set up the worst of the conflicts of life,—a conflict between one's intention and an automaton in the shape of a powerfully entrenched habit.

Habits are economical of thought and energy, generally speaking; that is their main recommendation. A dozen examples present themselves at once as illustrative: piano playing, with its intense concentration on each note, with consciousness attending to the action of each muscle, and then practice, habit formation, and the ease and power of execution with the mind free to wander off in the moods suggested by the music, or to busy itself with improvisations, flourishes and the artistic touches. Before true artistry can come, technique must be relegated to habit. So with typewriting, driving an automobile, etc.

More fundamental than these, which are largely skill habits, are the organic habits. One of the triumphs of pediatrics depends upon the realization that the baby's welfare hangs on regular habits of feeding, that he is not to be fed except at stated intervals; as a result processes of digestion are set going in a regular, harmonious manner. In other words, these processes may be said to "get to know" what is expected of them and act accordingly. The mother's time is economized and the strain of nursing is lessened. In adults, regular hours of eating make it possible for the juices of digestion to be secreted as the food is ingested; in other words, an habitual adjustment takes place.

If there were one single health habit that I would have inculcated above all others, it would be the habit of regularly evacuating the bowels. While constipation is not the worst ill in the world, it causes much trouble, annoyance and a considerable degree of ill health, and, in my opinion, a considerable degree of unhappiness. A physician may be pardoned for frank advice: all the matters concerning the bowels, such as coarse foods, plenty of water and exercise, are secondary compared to the habit of going to the stool at the same time each day, whether there be desire or not. A child should be trained in this matter as definitely as he is trained to brush his teeth. In fact, I think that the former habit is more important than the latter. The mood of man is remarkably related to the condition of his gastro-intestinal tract and the involuntary muscle of that tract is indirectly under the control of the will through habit formation.

Sleep[1] the mysterious, the death in life which we all seek each night, is likewise regulated by habit. Arising from the need of relief from consciousness and bodily exertion, the mechanism of sleep is still not well understood. Is there a toxic influence at work? is the body poisoned by itself, as it were, as has been postulated; is there a toxin of fatigue, or is there a "vaso-motor" reaction, a shift of the blood supply causing a cerebral anaemia and thus creating the "sleepy" feeling? The capacity to sleep is a factor of great importance and we shall deal with it later under a separate heading as part of the mechanism of success and failure. At present we shall simply point out that each person builds up a set of habits regarding sleep,—as to hour, kind of place, warmth, companionship, ventilation and even the side of the body he shall lie on, and that a change in these preliminary matters is often attended by insomnia. Moreover, a change from the habitual in the general conduct of life—a new city or town, a strange bed, a disturbance in the moods and emotions—may upset the sleep capacity. Those in whom excitement persists, or whose emotions are persistent, become easily burdened with the dreaded insomnia. Sleep is dependent on an exclusion of excitement and exciting influences. If, however, exciting influences become habitual they lose their power over the organism and then the individual can sleep on a battle field, in a boiler factory, or almost anywhere. Conversely, many a New Yorker is lulled to sleep by the roar of the great city who, finds that the quiet of the country keeps him awake.

[1] As good a book as any on the subject of sleep is Boris Sidis's little monograph.

Sleeplessness often enough is a habit. Something happens to a man that deeply stirs him, as an insult, or a falling out with a friend, or the loss of money,—something which disturbs what we call his poise or peace of mind. He becomes sleepless because, when he goes to bed and the shock-absorbing objects of daily interest are removed, his thoughts revert back to his difficulty; he becomes again humiliated or grieved or thrown into an emotional turmoil that prevents sleep. After the first night of insomnia a new factor enters,—the fear of sleeplessness and the conviction that one will not sleep. After a time the insult has lost its sting, or the difficulty has been adjusted, there is no more emotional distress, but there is the established sleeplessness, based on habitual emotional reaction to sleep. I know one lady whose fear reached the stage where she could not even bear the thought of night and darkness. It is in these cases that a powerful drug used two or three nights in succession breaks up the sleepless habit and reestablishes the power to sleep.

People differ in their capacity to form habits and in their love of habits. The normal habits, thoroughness, neatness and method come easily to some and are never really acquired by others. People of an impetuous, explosive or reckless character, keenly alive to every shade of difference in things, find it hard to be methodical, to carry on routine. The impatient person has similar difficulties. Whereas others take readily to the same methods of doing things day by day; and these are usually non-explosive, well inhibited, patient persons, to whom the way a thing is done is as important as the goal itself.

Here comes a very entertaining problem, the question of the value of habits. Good habits save time and energy, tend to eliminate useless labor and make for peace and quiet. But there is a large body of persons who come to value habits for themselves and, indeed, this is true to a certain extent of all of us. Once an accustomed way of doing things is established it becomes not only a path of least resistance, but a sort of fixed point of view, and, if one may mix metaphors a trifle, a sort of trunk for the ego to twine itself around. There is uneasiness in the thought of breaking up habits, an uneasiness that grows the more as we become older and is deepened into agony if the habit is tinged with our status in life, if it has become a sort of measure of our respectability. Thus a good housekeeper falls into the habits of doing things which were originally a mark of her ability, which she holds as sacred and values above her health and energy. There are people who fiercely resent a new way of doing things; they have woven their most minor habits into their ego feeling and thus make a personal issue of innovations. These are the upholders of the established; they hate change as such; they are efficient but not progressive. In its pathological form this type becomes the "health fiends" who never vary in their diet or in their clothing, who arise at a certain time, take their "plunge" regardless, take their exercise and their breakfasts alike as a health measure without real enjoyment, etc., who grow weary if they stay up half an hour or so beyond their ordinary bedtime; they are the individuals who fall into health cults, become vegetarians, raw food exponents, etc.

Opposed to the group that falls into habits very readily is the group that finds it difficult to acquire habitual ways of working and living. All of us seek change and variety, as well as stability. Some cannot easily form habits because they are quickly bored by the habitual. These restless folk are the failures or the great successes, according to their intelligence and good fortune. There is a low-grade intelligence type, without purpose and energy, and there is a high-grade intelligence type, seeking the ideal, restless under imperfection and restraint, disdaining the commonplace and the habits that go with it. Is their disdain of habit-forming and customs the result of their unconventional ways, or do their unconventional ways result because they cannot easily form habits? It is very probable that the true wanderer and Bohemian finds it difficult, at least in youth, to form habits, and that the pseudo-Bohemian is merely an imitation.

Habit is so intimately a part of all traits and abilities that we would be anticipating several chapters of this book did we go into all the habit types. Social conditions, desire, fatigue, monotony, purpose, intelligence, inhibition, all enter into habit and habit formation. Youth experiments with habit; old age clings to it. Efficiency is the result of good habits but originality is the reward of some who discard habits. A nation forms habits which seem to be part of its nature, until emigration to another land shows the falsity of this belief. So with individuals: a man feels he must eat or drink so much, gratify his sex appetite so often, sleep so many hours, exercise this or that amount, seek his entertainment in this or that fashion,—until something happens to make the habit impossible and he finds that what he thought a deeply rooted mode of living was a superficial routine. Though good habits may lead to success they may also bar the way to the pleasures of experience; that is their danger. A man who finds that he must do this or that in such a way had better beware; he is getting old, no matter what his age.[1] For we grow older as we lose mobility,—in joints, muscles, skin and our ways of doing, feeling and thinking! It is a transitory stage of the final immobility of Death.

[1] Says the talkative Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: "There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical ones; I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clock work."

We have not considered the pathological habits, such as alcoholism, excessive smoking and eating, perverse sex habits. The latter, the perverse sex habits, will be studied when discussing the sex feelings and purposes in their entirety. Alcoholism is not yet a dead issue in this country though those who are sincere in wishing their fellows well hope it soon will be. It stands, however, as a sort of paradigm of bad habit- forming and presents a problem in treatment that is typical of such habits.

Not all persons have a liability to the alcoholic habit. For most people lack of real desire or pleasure prevented alcoholism. The majority of those who drank little or not at all were not in the least tempted by the drug. "Will power" rarely had anything to do with their abstinence and the complacency with which they held themselves up as an example to the drunken had all the flavor of Phariseeism. To some the taste is not pleasing, to others the immediate effects are so terrifying as automatically to shut off excess. Many people become dizzy or nauseated almost at once and even lose the power of locomotion or speech.

In many countries and during many centuries most of those who became alcoholic were such largely through the social setting given to alcohol. Because of the psychological effects of this drug in removing restraint, inhibition and formality, in its various forms it became the symbol of good-fellowship; and because it has an apparent stimulation and heat-producing effect there grew up the notion that it aided hard labor and helped resist hardship. As the symbol of good-fellowship it grew into a tradition of the most binding kind, so that no good time, no coming together was complete without it, and its power is celebrated in picturesque songs and picturesque sayings the world over. Hospitality, tolerance, good humor, kindliness and the pleasant breaking down of the barriers between man and man, and also between man and woman, all these lured generation after generation into the alcoholic habit.

There are relatively normal types of the heavy drinker,—the socially minded and the hard manual worker. But there is a large group of those who find in alcohol a relief from the burden of their moods, who find in its real effect, the release from inhibitions, a reason for drinking beyond the reach of reason. Do you feel that the endless monotony of your existence can no longer be borne,—drink deep and you color your life to suit yourself. Do disappointment and despair gnaw at your love of life so that nothing seems worth while,—some bottled "essence of sunshine" will give new, fresh value to existence. Are you a victim of strange, uncaused fluctuations of mood so that periodically you descend to a bottomless pit of melancholy, —well, then, why suffer, when over the bar a man will furnish you a release from agony? And so men of certain types of temperament, or with unhappy experiences, form the alcoholic habit because it gives them surcease from pain; it deals out to them, temporarily, a new world with happier mood, lessened tension and greater success.

Seeking relief[1] from distressing thoughts or moods is perhaps one of the main causes of the narcotic habit. The feeling of inferiority, one of the most painful of mental conditions, is responsible for the use not only of alcohol but also of other drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, morphine, etc. One of the most typical cases of this I have known is of a young man of twenty-five, a tall fellow with a very unattractive face who had this feeling of inferiority almost to the point of agony, especially in the presence of young women, but also in any situation where he would be noticed. He was fast becoming a hermit when he discovered that a few drinks completely removed this feeling. From that time on he became a steady drinker, with now and then a short period when he would try to stop drinking, only to resume when he found himself obsessed again by the dreaded inferiority complex.

[1] This is the main theme of De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater."

Similarly a shameful position, such as that of the prostitute or the chronic criminal, is "relieved" by alcohol and drugs, so that the majority of these types of unfortunates are either drunkards or "dopes." Too often have reformers reversed the relationship, believing that alcohol caused prostitution and crime. Of course that relationship exists, but more often, in my experience, the alcohol is used to keep up the "ego" feeling, without which few can bear life.

Curiously enough, one of the sex perversions, masturbation, has in a few cases a similar genesis. I have known patients who, when under the influence of depression, or humiliated in some way or other, found a compensating pleasure in the act. Here we come to a cardinal truth in the understanding of ourselves and our fellows and one we shall pursue in detail later,—that face to face with mental pain, men seek relief or pleasure or both by alcohol, drugs, sensual pleasures of all kinds, and that the secret explanation of all such habits is that they offer compensation for some pain and are turned to at such times. What one man seeks in work, another man seeks in religion, another finds in self-flagellation, and still others seek in alcohol, morphine, sexual excesses, etc.

With the increasing excitement and tension of our times there is a constant search for relief, and here is the origin of much of the smoking. Most men find in the deliberate puff, in the slow inhalation and in the prolonged exhalation with the formation of the white cloud of smoke, a shifting of consciousness from the major businesses of their mind, from a constant tension to a minor business not requiring concentration and thereby breaking up in a pleasurable, rhythmic fashion the sense of effort. When one is alone the fatigue and even the pain of one's thinking is relieved by shifting the attention to the smoking. Keeping one's attention at a high and constant pitch is apt to produce a restless fatigue and this is often offset to the smoker by his habit. Excessive smoking may cause "nervousness" but as a matter of fact it is more often a means by which the excessively nervous try to relieve themselves. Of course it is not good therapeutics under such conditions, but I believe that in moderation smoking does no harm and is an innocent pleasure.

Some of the pathological motor habits, such as the tics, often have a curious background. The most common tics are snuffing, blinking, shaking of the head, facial contortions of one kind or another. These arise usually under exciting conditions or in the excitable, sometimes in the acutely self-conscious. Frequently they represent a motor outlet for this excitement; they are the motor analogues of crying, shouting, laughing, etc. (Indeed, a common habit is the one so frequently heard,—a little laugh when there is no feeling of merriment and no occasion for it.) Motor activity discharges tension and is pleasurable and these tics furnish a momentary pleasure; they relieve a feeling that some of the victims compare to an itch and the habit thus is based on a seeking of relief, even though that relief is obtained in a way that distresses the more settled purposes of the individual.

In the establishment of good habits, those desirable from the point of view of the important issues of life, training is of course essential. But in the training of children, certain things must be kept in mind: the usefulness, the practical value must be presented to the child's mind in a way he can understand, or else various ways of energizing him to help in the formation of the habit must be used—praise and blame, reward and punishment. Further, these habits are not to be held holy; cleanliness and method are desirable acquisitions but not so desirable as a feeling of freedom to play and experiment with life and things. If the child is constantly worried lest he get too dirty, or fears to play in his room because he may disorder it, he is forming the good habits of cleanliness and method but also the worse one of worry.

In the breaking of a bad habit, its root in desire and difficulty must be discovered. Often enough a man does not face the source of his trouble, preferring not to. I am not at all sure that it is best in all cases for a man to know his own weakness; in fact, I feel convinced to the contrary in some cases. But in the majority of difficulties, self-revelation is salutary and makes an intelligent coping with the situation possible. Here is the value of the good friend, the respected pastor, the wise doctor. The human being will always need a confessor and a confidante, and he who is struggling with a habit is in utmost need of such help.

Shall the struggler with a bad habit break it with its thralldom? Shall he say to his chains, "From this time, nevermore!" To some men it is given to win the victory this way, to rise to the heights of a stubborn resolution and to be free. But not to many is this possible. To others there is a long history of repeated effort and repeated failures and then—one day there comes a feeling of power, perhaps through a great love, a great cause, a sermon heard, a chance sentence, or a bitter experience, and then, like a religious conversion, the tracks of the old habit are obliterated, never to be used again.

I have in mind two men, both heavy drinkers but differing in everything else. One was a philosopher who saw the world in that dreadful, clear white light of which Jack London[1] spoke, that light which leaves no cozy, pleasant obscurities, in which Truth, the naked, is horrible to look at, when life seems too unreal, when purposes seem most futile. At such times he would get drunk and be happy for the time being, and afterwards find himself bitterly repentant, though even that was a pleasure compared to the hollow world in which his sober self dwelt. Then one day, when all his friends had given him up as hopeless, as destined for disaster, he read a book. "The Varieties of Religious Experience," by William James, came to him as a clear light comes to a man lost in the darkness; he saw himself as a "sick soul," obsessed with the idea that he saw life relentlessly and clearly. There came to him the conviction that he had been arrogant, a conceited ass, bent on ruin, "a sickly soul," he said. Out of that realization grew resolutions that needed no vowing or pledging, for as simply as a man turns from one road to another he turned from his habit into healthy-minded work.

[1] Jack London's "John Barleycorn."

The other was an essentially healthy-minded man but he loved joviality, freedom and good fellowship. Without ever knowing how he came to it, he found himself a confirmed drinker, holding an inferior place, passed by men of lesser caliber. He struggled fitfully but always slipped when the next "good fellow" slapped him on the back and invited him to have a drink. One day he stepped out of a barroom with a group of his cronies, and though he walked straight there was a reckless, happy feeling in him that pushed him on to his folly. A young lady standing on a street corner waiting for a car caught his eye. Signaling to his companions, he walked up to her, put his arms around her and kissed her. The girl stood as if petrified, then she pushed him off and looked him up and down deliberately with cold scorn in her eyes. Then she took off her glove and slapped him across the face with it, as if disdaining to use her hand. With that she walked away.

The man was a gentleman, and he stood there stricken. The laugh of his companions aroused him. He saw them as if they were himself, with a horror and disgust that made him suddenly run away from them.

"From that moment I never again had the slightest desire for drink. The slap sobered me for good."

While these conversions occur now and then there are certain practical points in the breaking of a habit that need attention in each case.

In the first place it is best in the majority of instances to avoid the particular stimuli and associations that set off the habit. The stimulus is a kind of trigger; pull it and the habit can hardly be checked. Whatever the situation is that acts as the temptation, avoid it. Not for nothing do men pray, "Lead us not into temptation." The will needs no such exercise and rarely stands up well against such strain. This may mean a removal for the time being from the source of temptation, a flying away to gain strength.

Further, a substitution of habit, of purpose, is necessary. Some line of activities must be selected to fill in the vacuum. A hobby is needed, a devotion to some larger purpose, whether it be in work or social activity. "Nature abhors a vacuum"; boredom must be avoided, for that is a pain, awakening desire. The gymnasium, golf, sports of all kinds are substitute pleasures of great value.

Third, harness a friend, a superior or a respected equal to the yoke with you. Pull double harness; let him lend his strength to yours. Throw away pride; confess and receive new energy from his sympathy and wisdom. If you are lucky enough to have such a friend, or some wise counselor, thank God for him. For here is where the true friend finds his highest value.

In the analysis of any character the question of the kind of habits formed demands attention. Since almost all traits become matters of habit, such an inquiry would sooner or later lead to a catalogue of qualities. What is here pertinent is this,—that one might inquire into the kind of habits that are easily formed by the individual and the kind that are not. Habits fall into groups such as these:

1. Relating to care of the body: cleanliness, diet, exercise, bowel function, sleep. Here we learn about personal tidiness or the reverse, foppery, dandyism, gluttony, asceticism, etc.

2. Relating to method, efficiency, neatness in work: some people find it almost impossible to become methodical or neat; others become obsessed by these qualities to the exclusion of mobility.

3. Relating to the pursuit of pleasure: type of pleasure sought, time given to it, hobbies.

4. Relating to special habits: alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex perversions.

5. Relating to study and advancement: love of books, attendance at lectures.

Especially in the study of children is some such scheme essential, for then one gets a definite idea of their defects and takes definite efforts to make habitual the desired practice, or else one sees the special trend, and, if it is good, fosters it. This, of course, is the long and short of character development.



CHAPTER IV. STIMULATION, INHIBITION, ORGANIZING ENERGY, CHOICE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

There are three fundamental factors in the relation of any organism to the environment and in the relation of the various parts of an organism to each other which we must now consider. To consider a living thing of any kind as something separate from the stimuli the world streams in on it, or to consider it as a real unit, is a mistake that falsifies most of the thinking of the world.

On us, as living things, the universe pours in stimuli of a few kinds. Or rather there are few kinds of stimuli we are specialized to receive and react to; there may be innumerable other kinds to which we cannot react because they do not reach us. The world for us is a collection of things that we see, hear, smell, taste and feel, but there may be vast reaches of things for which we have no avenues of approach,—completely unimaginable things because our images are built upon our senses.

To some of the stimuli the world pours in on us we must react properly or die. Certain "mechanisms" with which we are equipped must respond to these stimuli or the forces of the world destroy us. A lion on the horizon must awaken flight, or concealment, or the modified fight reaction of using weapons; extreme cold or heat must start up impulses and reflexes leading away from their disintegrating effects. Food must, when smelled or seen, lead us to conduct whereby we supply ourselves or we die from hunger. Dangers and needs awaken reactions, both through instinctive responses and through intelligence. The main activities of life are to be classed as "averting" and "acquiring," for if life showers us with the things we would or need to have, it also pelts us with the things we fear, hate or despise. It would be interesting to know which activities are the most numerous; presumably the lucky or successful man is busy acquiring while the unlucky or unsuccessful finds himself busiest averting. The averting activities are directed largely against the disagreeable, disgusting, dangerous and the undesired; the acquiring activities are directed toward the pleasant, the necessary, the desired. The problems of life are to know what is really good or bad for us and how to acquire the one and avert the other. While there are certain things that "naturally"[1] are deemed good or bad, there are more that are so regarded through training and education. Morality and Taste are alike concerned with bringing about attitudes that will determine the "right" response to the stimuli of the world.

[1] I place in quotations NATURALLY because it is difficult to know what is "natural" and what is cultural. In the widest sense everything is natural; in the narrowest very few things are natural. Cooked food, clothing, houses, marriages, education, etc., are not found in a state of nature, any more than clocks and plays by Ibsen are. Our judgment as to what is good and bad is mainly instinctive leaning directed or smothered by education.

The stimuli that thus pour in upon the individual, and to which he must react, must find an organism ready to respond in some way or other. A sleeping man naturally does not adjust himself to danger, nor does a paralyzed man fly. The most attractive female in the world causes no response in the very young male child and perhaps stirs only reminiscences in the aged. Food, which causes the saliva to flow in the mouth of the hungry, may disgust the full. Throughout life there are factors in the internal life of the organism instantly changing one's reaction to things of physical, mental and moral significance. He talks loudest of restraint and control who has no desire; and in satiation even the sinner sees the beauty of asceticism. There must be a coincidence of stimulus, readiness and opportunity for the full, successful response to take place.[1]

[1] A slang epigram puts it better: The time, the place, and the girl.

The simplest response to any stimulus from the outer world is the reflex act. Theoretically a reflex act is dependent upon the interaction of a sensory surface, a sensory nerve cell, a motor nerve cell and a muscle, i. e., a receptive apparatus and a motor apparatus in such close union that the will and intelligence play no part. Thus if one puts his finger on a hot stove he withdraws it immediately, and such responses are present even in the decapitated frog and human for a short time. So if light streams in on the wide-open pupil of the eye, it contracts, grows smaller, without any effort of the will, and in fact entirely without the consciousness of the individual. Swallowing is a series of reflexes in a row, so that food in the back part of the mouth sets a reflex going that carries it beyond the epiglottis; another reflex carries it to the esophagus and then one reflex after the other transports the food the rest of the way. Except for the first effort of swallowing, the rest is entirely involuntary and even unconscious. Those readers who are interested would do well to read the work of Pavlow on the conditioned reflex, in which the great Russian physiologist builds up all action on a basis of a modification of the primitive reflex which he calls the "conditioned reflex."[1]

[1] Pavlow is one of the scientists who regard all mental life as built up out of reflexes. The immediate reflex is only one variety; thought, emotion, etc., are merely reflexes placed end to end. Pavlow divides action into two trends, one due to an unconditioned reflex, of innate structure, and the other a modified or conditioned reflex which arises because some stimulus has become associated with the reflex act. Thus saliva dripping from a dog's mouth at the smell of food is an unconditioned reflex; if a bell is heard at the same time the food is smelled then in the course of time the saliva flows at the sound of the bell alone,—a conditioned reflex. A very complex system has been built up of this kind of facts, which I have criticized elsewhere.

The simple reflex, immediate response to a stimulus, has only a limited field in human life or adult life. Sherrington points out in his notable book, "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System," that there is a play of the entire organism on each responding element, and there is also a competition throughout each pathway to action. Let us examine this a little closer.

A man is hungry, let us say; i. e., there arise from his gastro-intestinal tract and from the tissues stimuli which arouse motor mechanisms to action and the man seeks food. The need of the body arouses desire in the form of an organic sensation and this arouses mechanisms whose function is to satisfy that desire. Let us assume that he finds something that looks good and he is about to seize it when an odor, called disagreeable, assails his nostrils from the food, which stops him. Then there arises a competition for action between the desire for food and the visual stimulus, associated memories, etc., on the one hand, and the odor, the awakened fear, memories, disgust, etc., on the other hand. This struggle for action, for use of the mechanisms of action, is the struggling of choosing, one of the fundamental phenomena of life. In order for a choice to become manifest, what is known as inhibition must come into play; an impulse to action must be checked in order that an opposing action can be effective. The movement of rejection uses muscles that oppose the movement of acquirement; e. g., one uses the triceps and the other the biceps, muscles situated in opposite sides of the upper arm and having antagonistic action. In order for triceps to act, biceps must be inhibited from action, and in that inhibition is a fundamental function of the organism. In every function of the body there are opposing groups of forces; for every dilator there is a contractor, for every accelerator of action there is inhibition. Nature drives by two reins, and one is a checkrein.

This function of inhibition, then, delays, retards or prevents an action and is in one sense a higher function than the response to stimulation. Its main seat is the cerebrum, the "highest" nervous tissue, whereas reflex and instinctive actions usually are in the vegetative nervous system, the spinal cord, the bulbar regions and the mid-brain, all of which are lower centers. Choice, which is intimately associated with inhibition, is par excellence a cerebral function and in general is associated with intense consciousness. The act of choosing brings to the circumstances the whole past history of the individual; it marshals his resources of judgment, intelligence, will, purposes and desires. In choice lies the fate of the personality, for it is basically related to habit formation. Further, in the dynamics of life a right, proper choice, an appropriate choice, opens wide the door of opportunity, whereas an unfortunate choice may commit one to the mercies of wrecking forces. Education should aim to teach proper choosing and then proper action.

The capacity for perceiving and responding to stimuli, for inhibiting or delaying action and for choosing, are of cardinal importance in our study. But there is another phase of life and character without which everything else lacks unity and is unintelligible. From the beginning of life to the end there is choice. Who and what chooses? From infancy one sees the war of purposes and desires and the gradual rise of one purpose or set of purposes into dominance,—in short, the growth of unity, the growth of personality. The common man calls this unity his soul, the philosopher speaks of the ego and implies some such thing as this organizing energy of character.

But a naturalistic view of character must reject such a metaphysical entity, for one sees the organizing energy increase and diminish with the rest of character through health, age, environment, etc. Further, there is at work in all living things a similar something that organizes the action of the humblest bit of protoplasm. This organizing energy of character will be, for us, that something inherent in all life which tends to individualize each living thing. It is as if all life were originally of one piece and then, spreading itself throughout the world, it tended to differentiate and develop (according to the Spencerian formula) into genera, species, groups and individuals. This organizing energy works up the experiences of the individual so that new formulae for action develop, so that what is experienced becomes the basis of future reaction.

It must be remembered that the world we live in has its great habits. Night follows day in a cycle that never fails, the seasons are repeated each year, and there is a periodicity in the lives of plants and animals that is manifested in growth, nutrition, mating and resting. Things happen again and again, though in slightly altered form, and our desires, satisfied now, soon repeat their urge. The great organic needs and sensations repeat themselves and with the periodic world of outer experience must be dealt with according to a more or less settled policy. It is the organizing energy that works out the policy, that learns, inhibits, chooses and acts,—and it is the essential character-developing principle. For like our bodily organs which are whipped into line by the nervous system, our impulses, instincts, and reflexes[1] have their own policy of action and therefore need, for the good of the entire organism, discipline and coordination. It may sound as if the body were made up of warring entities and states and that there gradually arose a centralized good, and though the analogy may lead to error, it offers a convenient method of thinking.

[1] Roux, the great French biologist, has shown that each tissue and each cell competes with the other tissues and the other cells. The organism, though it reaches a practical working unity as viewed by consciousness, is nevertheless no entity; it is a collection, an aggregate of living cells which are organized on a cooperation basis just as men are, but maintain individuality and competition nevertheless.

Moreover, the organizing energy seems often to be at work when consciousness itself is at rest, as in sleep. Often enough a man debates and debates on lines of conduct and wakes up with his problem solved. Or he works hard to learn and goes to bed discouraged, because the matter is a jumble, and wakes up in the morning with an orderly and useful arrangement of the facts. A writer seeks to find the proper opening,—and gives up in a frenzy of despair. He is perhaps walking or driving when suddenly he lifts his head as one does who is listening to a longed-for voice, and in himself he finds the phrases that he longs for. Something within has set itself, so it seems, the task of bringing the right associations into consciousness. What we call quickness of mind, energy of mind, is largely this function.

It is this which adapts us to different situations, different groups, by calling into play organized modes of talking or acting. We pass from a group of ladies in whose presence we have been friendly but decorous, perhaps unconventionally formal, to a group of business intimates, men of long acquaintance. Without even being conscious of it we lounge around, feet on the table, carelessly dropping cigarette ash to the floor, using language chosen for force rather than elegance; we discuss sports, women, business and a whole group of different emotions, habits and purposes come to the surface, though we were not at all conscious of having repressed them while in the presence of the ladies. A faux pas is where the organizer has "slipped" on his job; lack of tact implies in part a rigid organizing energy, neither plastic nor versatile enough.

We are now ready to face certain developments of these three main factors, viz., the response to stimuli; choice and inhibition, and the organizing energy. Largely we might classify people according to the type of vigor of their reactions to stimuli, the quality and vigor of choice and of inhibition, and the quality and vigor of the organizing energy. We note that there are people who have, as it were, exquisitely sensitive feelers for the stimuli of one kind or another and who react vigorously, perhaps excessively; that there are others of a duller, less reactive nature, largely because they are stimuli-proof. Others are under-inhibited, follow desire or outer stimulus without heed, without a brake; others are over-inhibited, too cautious, too full of doubt, unable to choose the reaction that seems appropriate. The organizing energy of some is low; they never seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living; they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the metaphor) they weld life's happenings, their memories, their emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I, harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end and striving bravely towards it. Or there is over-unification and fanaticism, with narrow aim and little sympathy for other aims. Sketched in this very broad way we see masses of people, rather than individuals, and we are not finely adjusted to our subject.

Psychologists rarely concern themselves to any extent with these matters; they deal mainly with their outgrowths,—emotions, instinct, intelligence and will. We are at once beset with difficulties which are resolved mainly by ignoring them. In such a book as this we are not concerned with the fundamental nature of these divisions of the mental life, we must omit such questions as the relation of instinct to racial habit, or the evolution of instinct from habit, if that is really its origin. Again I must repeat that we shall deal with these as organic, as arising in the sensitized individual as a result of environmental forces, as manifestations of a life which is as yet—and perhaps always will be—mysterious to us. We shall best consider these manifestations of mental activity as an interplay of the reactions of stimulation, inhibition, choice, organizing energy, and not as separate and totally different matters. We shall see that probably emotion is one aspect of reaction to the world, while instinct is merely another aspect; that intelligence is a cerebral shift of instinct, and that will is no unity but the energy of instincts and purposes.

Before we go farther we must squarely face a problem of human thought. Man, since he started reflecting about himself, has been puzzled about his consciousness. How can a person be aware of himself, and what identifies and links together each phase of consciousness? There is an enormous range of thought on this subject: from those who identified consciousness as the only reality and considered what the average person holds as realities—things and people—as only phases of consciousness, to those who, like Huxley, regard consciousness as an "epi-pbenomenon," a sort of overture to brain activity and having nothing whatever to do with action, nothing to do with choice and plan, so that, as Lloyd Morgan points out, "An unconscious Shakespeare writes plays acted by an unconscious troupe of actors to an unconscious audience." The first extreme view, that of Berkeley and the idealists, nullifies all other realities save that of the individual thinker and reduces one to the absurdities of Solipsism where a man writes books to convince persons conjured up by himself and having no existence outside of himself; the other view nullifies that which seems to each of us the very essence of himself.

I shall take a very simple view of consciousness,[1] simply because I shall deliberately dodge the great difficulties. Consciousness is the result of the activities of a group of more or less permanently excited areas of the brain—areas having to do with positions of the head, eyes and shoulders; areas having to do with vision, hearing and smell; areas having to do with speech,—these constituting extremely mobile, extremely active parts of the organism. From these consciousness may irradiate to the activities of almost every part of the organism, in different degrees. We are often extremely conscious of the activities of the hands, in less degree of the legs; we may become wrapped up almost completely in a sensation emanating from the sex organs, and under fear or excitement the heart may pound so that we feel and are conscious of it as ordinarily we can never be. The state of consciousness called interest may shift our feeling of self to any part of our body (as in pain, when a part usually out of consciousness swings into it, or when the hand of a lover grips our own so that the great reality of our life at the moment seems to be the consciousness of the hand) or it may fasten us to an outside object until our world narrows to that object, nothing else having any conscious value. This latter phenomenon is very striking in children; they become fascinated by something they hear or see and project themselves, as it were, into that object; they become the "soapiness of soap, or the wetness of water" (to use Chesterton's phrase), and when they listen to a story they hold nothing in reserve. Consciousness may busy itself with its past phases, with the preceding thought, emotion, sensation —how, I do not know—or it may occupy itself mainly with the world of things which are hereby declared to have a reality in our theory. In the first instances we have introspection and subjectiveness, and in the second we have extroversion and objectivity.

[1] For discussion of consciousness read Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Spencer, Lotze, Moyan, James, Wundt, Munsterberg and every other philosopher and psychologist. I have not attempted to discuss the matter from the philosopher's point of view for the very obvious reason that I am no philosopher.

Since consciousness is most intense when the new or unfamiliar is seen, heard, felt or attempted, we may assume it has a chief function in acquainting the individual with the new and unfamiliar and in the establishment of habitual reactions, We are extraordinarily conscious of a queer, unexplainable thing on the horizon, we bring into the limelight (or IT brings into the limelight) all our possible reactions,—fear, flight, anger, fight, circumvention, curiosity and the movements of investigation; we are thrown into the maelstrom of choice. Choice and consciousness, doubt and consciousness, are directly related; it is only when conduct becomes established as habit, with choosing relegated to the background, that consciousness, in so far as the act is concerned, becomes diminished.

A moderate constant sensation tends to disappear from consciousness, as when we keep our hand in warm water. It then takes a certain increase of the stimulus to keep the sensation from lapsing out of consciousness. This lapsing out of consciousness of the steady stimulus, in its ramifications, is responsible for a good deal of the activity of man, since sensation is a goal of effort.[1] Under emotion we become aware of two sets of things,—the reaction of our body in its sum total of pleasure or the reverse, and second the object that sets up this reaction. Consciousness fastens itself on the body and on the world, and the bodily reaction becomes a guide for future action. Extreme bodily reactions are painful and may result in the abolishing of consciousness.

[1] The physiologists speak of this phenomenon under the heading of the Weber-Fechner law, after the two physiologists who gave it prominence. James pokes a good deal of fun at the "law," which is expressed mathematically. Perhaps the mathematics should have been eliminated as too "scientific" for our present attainment, but it does remain true that it is not the ACTUAL stimulus increase that is important in sensation or perception, but the RELATIVE stimulus increase. This is behind all of "getting used to things"; it removes the pain from humiliation and also the novelty from joy. It is the reason behind all of the searching for novelty and excitement.

We assume that consciousness is organic, though we concede that it may be true that it is borrowed from a great pool of consciousness[1] out of which we all come. Consciousness IS organic because a blow on the head may abolish it as may drugs and disease, or a shifting of the blood supply as in emotion or fatigue in the form of sleep, etc. Where does it go to and how does it come back? The savage answered that question by building up the idea of a soul, a thing that might migrate, had an independent existence, took journeys in the form of dreams and lived and flourished after death. Most of these ideas still persist, perhaps as much through the fear of annihilation as anything else, but as to whether or not they are true this book does not concern itself. We have no proof of these matters, but we can prove that we can play on consciousness as we play on a piano, through the body and brain. A blow injures groups of nerve cells and consciousness disappears; when they recover, it returns. Where does any function go when structure is injured? We have practically the same kind of proof for the position of consciousness as a function of the brain and body that we have for gastric juice as a secretion of gastric cells.

[1] Even if it were true that consciousness is the only reality, nobody really believes it in that nobody acts as if it were true. Conversely, everybody acts as if trees, rocks, and people were realities; as if fatigue, sickness, age, etc., affected consciousness. That is why, in this book, we are discarding as irrelevant the "ultimate" truth concerning consciousness. My humble belief is that the ultimate truth in this matter will never concern us because we shall never know it.

However widely we spread the function of consciousness and its domain, we still leave a large field of activities untouched. And so we come to the conception of the subconsciousness. There are two prevailing sets of opinions concerning the subconscious.

The first is quite matter-of-fact. It states that the movements and activities of a large part of the body are outside of the realm of consciousness, such as the activities of the great viscera—heart, lungs, intestines, liver, blood vessels, sex glands—and are largely operated by the vegetative nervous system.[1] There are influences pouring into the brain from these organs, together with influences from muscles, joints, tendons, and these influences, though not consciously itemized, are the subconsciously received stimuli which give us feelings of vigor, energy, courage, hopefulness, or the reverse, according to the state of the organism. In health the ordinary result of these stimuli is good, though people may have health in that no definite disease is present, and yet there is some deficiency in the energy-arousing viscera which brings a lowered coenesthesia, a lessened vigor and lowered mood. In youth the state of the organs brings a state of well feeling; in old age there is a constant feeling of a low balance of energy and mood, and the person is always on the verge of unpleasant feeling. In the great change periods of life—at puberty and the climacteric (or the menopause)—the sudden change in the activity of the sex organs may produce great alterations[2] in the coenaesthesia and therefore in the energy and mood of the individual.

[1] This is not the place to describe the vegetative nervous system. (It was formerly called the sympathetic nervous system, but this term is now limited to one part of this system, and the term autonomic to another part, although some writers still use the term sympathetic for the whole, and others [the English] the term autonomic for the whole.) This system is the nervous mechanism of organic life, regulating heart, lungs, blood vessels, intestines, sex organs, acting together with endocrines, etc. A huge amount of work has been done of late years on this system and we know definitely that it stimulates, inhibits and regulates these organs, and also that it records their activities. We are commencing to believe that this system is fully as important, in mental life, as the brain. See Langley, Schaeffer, Higier, etc.

[2] This is especially true of the menopause in women, and often enough of each menstrual period. That there is a climacteric in men is not so clear, but something corresponding to it occurs, at least in the case of some men.

In addition, these activities, which are so all-important, determine the basic conduct by arousing the basic appetites and desires of the individual. It is the change in the gastro-intestinal tract and in the tissues of the body that starts up the hunger feeling and the impulses which prompt men to seek food; in other words, this type of coenaesthesia has set going all the physical and mental activities relating to food; it is the basic impulse behind agriculture and stock raising, as well as energizing work activities of all kinds. It is the tension in the seminal vessels of the male that wakes up his passion, if it is not the sole source of that passion. Sex desire in the adult male has many elements in it, not pertinent at present, but the coenaesthetic influence of the physical structures is its starting point. In men as well as women there is a cycle of desire, with height due to physical tension and abyss following the discharge or disappearance of tension, that profoundly influences life and conduct. Here the sympathetic nervous system and the internal secretion of the genital glands awaken into sexual activity brain, spinal cord and muscles, so that the individual seeks a mate, plunges into marriage and directs his conduct, conscious of taste and desire, but largely unconscious of the physical condition that is impelling him on. In this sense the subconscious activities dominate in life, because the functions of nutrition and reproduction are largely unconscious in their origin, but there is no organized, plotting subconsciousness at work.

Once a thing is experienced, it is stored in memory. What is the basis and position of a memory when we are not conscious of it, when our conscious minds are busy with other matters? What happens when a desire is repressed, inhibited into inaction; when consciousness revolts against part of its own content? Is a "forgotten" memory ever really lost, or a desire that is squelched and thrust out of "mind" really made inactive? Do our inhibitions really inhibit, or do we build up another self or set of selves that rise to the surface under strange forms, under the guise of disease manifestations?

Sigmund Freud and his followers have made definite answers to the foregoing, answers that are incorporated in a doctrine called Freudianism. Freud is an Austrian Jew, a physician, and one that soon specialized in nervous and mental diseases. Early in his career he did some excellent work in the study of the paralysis of childhood (infantile hemiplegia), but his attention and that of an older colleague, Breuer, were soon drawn (as has occurred to almost every neurologist) to the manifestations of that extraordinary disease, hysteria. Hysteria has played so important a role in human history, and Freud's ideas are permeating so deeply into modern thought that I deem it advisable to devote a chapter to them.



CHAPTER V. HYSTERIA, SUBCONSCIOUSNESS AND FREUDIANISM

Hysteria was known to the ancients and in fact is as old as the written history of mankind. Considered essentially a disease of women, it was given its present name which is derived from "hysteron," the Greek name for the womb. We know to-day that men also are victims of this malady, though it arises under somewhat different circumstances than is the case with the other sex. Men and women, living in the same world and side by side, are placed in greatly different positions in that world, are governed by different traditions and are placed under the influences of differing ambitions, expectations, hopes and fears. Hysteria arises largely out of the emotional and volitional reactions of life, and these reactions differ in the sexes.

It was a group of French neurologists, headed by Charcot—and including very illustrious men, such as Janet and Marie, who paid the first scientific attention to the disease. Under their analyses hysteria was defined as a mental disease in which certain symptoms appeared prominently.

1. Charcot especially paid attention to what are known as the attacks. The hysteric patient (usually a woman, and so we shall speak of the patient as "she") under emotional stress and strain, following a quarrel or a disagreement or perhaps some disagreeable, humiliating situation, shows alarming symptoms. Perhaps she falls (never in a way to injure herself) to the floor and apparently loses consciousness, closes her eyes, rolls her head from side to side, moans, clenches her fists, lifts her body from the floor so that it rests on head and heels (opisthotonic hysteria), shrieks now and then and altogether presents a terrifying spectacle. Or else she twitches all over, weeps, moans, laughs and shouts, and rushes around the room, beating her head on the walls; or she may lie or stand in a very dramatic pose, perhaps indicating passion or fear or anger. The attacks are characterized by a few main peculiarities, which are that the patient usually has had an emotional upset or is in some disagreeable situation, that she does not hurt herself by her falls, that consciousness is never completely abolished and fluctuates so that now she seems almost "awake" and then she seems almost in a complete stupor, and that the expression of emotion in the attack is often very prominent. These symptoms are readily differentiated from what is seen in epilepsy.[1]

[1] The French writers of the school of Babinski deny that the above symptom and even the majority of the following have a real existence in hysteria. The English, American and German neurologists and the rest of the French school describe hysteria substantially as I am here describing it.

2. The hysteric paralyses which are featured in all the literatures of the world are curious manifestations and often very stubborn. Following an accident (especially in industry and in war) and after some emotional difficulty there is a paralysis of some part of the body. The arm or some particular part of the arm cannot be moved by the will, is paralyzed; or else the difficulty involves one or both legs. Sometimes speech is gone, or the power of moving the head; occasionally the difficulty is with one side of the face, etc. Usually the paralysis comes on suddenly, but often it comes on gradually. Modern neurology soon discovered that these paralyses were quite unlike those seen when there is "real" injury to the brain, spinal cord or the peripheral nerves. They corresponded to the layman's idea of a part. Thus a paralysis of the arm ends at the shoulder, a paralysis of the feet at the ankle, and in ways not necessary to detail here differ from what occurs when the organic structure of the nervous system is involved. For example, the reflexes in hysteria are unaltered, and stiffness when it occurs is not the stiffness of organic disease. If a neurologist were to have a hysteric paralysis a very interesting problem in diagnosis would be presented.

Further, the paralysis yields in spectacular fashion to various procedures or else disappears spontaneously in remarkable fashion overnight. Paralyses of this type have disappeared under hypnosis, violent electric shocks, "magical" liniments, threats, prayers, the healer's, the fakir's, the doctor's personal influence; under circumstances of danger (a fire, a row, etc.); by pilgrimages to Lourdes, St. Anne de Beaupre, the Temple of Diana, the relic of a saint; by the influence of sudden joy, fear, anger; by the work of the psychoanalyst and by that of the osteopath! Every great religious leader and every savage medicine man beating a tom-tom has had to, prove his pretensions to greatness by healing the sick—so intensely practical is man—and he has proved his divinity by curing the hysterics, so that they threw away their crutches, or jumped blithely out of bed, or used their arms, perhaps for the first time in years. Hysteria has caused more talk of the influence of mind over body than all other manifestations of mental peculiarity put together. Wherever there is anything to be gained by hysteric paralyses, these appear in much greater frequency than under ordinary circumstances. Thus the possibility of recovering damages seems to play a role in bringing about a paralysis that defies treatment until the litigation is settled; similarly the possibility of being removed from the fighting line played a large part in the causation of war hysteric paralysis.

3. A group of sensory phenomena is conspicuous in hysteria, sometimes combined with the paralyses and attacks but often existing alone. A part of the body will become curiously insensitive to stimulation. Thus one may thrust a pin into any part without evoking any pain and APPARENTLY without being felt; one may rub the cornea of the eye, that exquisitely sensitive part, without arousing a reaction; one may push a throat stick against the uvula as it hangs from the palate without arousing the normal and very lively reflex of "gagging." These insensitive areas, known as stigmata, played a very important role in the epidemic of witchcraft hunting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch was so diagnosed if she felt no pain when a needle was thrust into her. Mankind has often enough worshiped the insane and mentally aberrant and has as often been diabolically cruel to them.

What has been stated of the paralyses is true of the insensitive areas; they correspond to an idea of a part and not to an anatomical unit. Thus a loss of sensation will reach up to the wrist (glove type) all around, front and back, or to the elbow or the shoulder, etc. No organically caused anaesthetic area ever does this, and so the neurologist is able, usually, to separate the two conditions. And the anaesthesias yield as do the hysteric paralyses to a variety of agents, from prayer and persuasion to a bitter tonic or a blow. I confess to a weird feeling in the presence of a hysteric whose arm can be thrust through and through with a needle without apparently suffering any pain, and it seems to me that this may be the explanation of the fortitude of those martyrs who have astonished and sometimes converted their persecutors by their sublime resistance to torture.

There has been described as part of hysteria the hysteric temperament. The characteristics of this temperament are the emotional instability, the strong desire for sympathy, the effort to obtain one's desire through weakness, through the appeal to the sympathy of others, an irritable egoism never satisfied and without firm purpose. It is true that the majority of peace-time hysterics show this peculiar temperament, but it is also true that the war-time hysterics often enough were of "normal" character, without prior evidence of weakness.

As I before mentioned, Freud became greatly interested in this group of patients and especially in the female patients, since in ordinary neurological practice the male hysteric is not common. Out of his experience and effort he built up a system of beliefs and treatment, the evolution of which is interesting, but which is not here important.

At the present time the Freudian doctrine hangs on the following beliefs:

1. That from the beginning to the end of life everything in the mental activities of man has a cause and a meaning, and that these causes and meanings may be traced back to infancy. No slip of the tongue is accidental; it has purpose and this purpose can be traced by psychoanalysis. So with hysteric phenomena: the paralyses, the sensory changes, all the queer and startling things represent something of importance and of value to the subconscious.

2. There is in man a subconscious mentality, having wills, purposes, strivings, desires, passions. These trends are the raw, native, uninhibited desires of man; they are our lusts, our crude unsocialized desires, arising out of a metaphysical, undifferentiated yearning called libido. In the Freudian "psychology" the libido is mainly sex desire and takes the form of homosexual feelings, incest feelings (desire for the father or for the mother—the oedipus complex), desire for the sister or brother.[1] (The human being, according to Freud, goes through three stages in his sex life: first, a sex attachment to himself marked by thumb sucking, masturbation, etc., second, an attachment to the same sex—homosexuality—and, finally, the attachment or desire for the opposite sex.) In the practical application of the Freudian psychology to the patients the sex conflicts (of which we shall speak shortly) are all important; the subconsciousness is largely taken up with sex and with efforts to obtain gratification for these sex desires.

[1] The Freudians would protest against this. Libido is the life energy,—but all the Freudian analyses of actual cases published make libido sex, and usually "perverse." (I put the perverse in quotations because I fear to be called prudish by Freudians.)

3. But, the theory continues, the conscious personality is the socialized personality, having aims and ends not consistent with desire for mother, homosexual cravings, lust for a married man or woman. So there ensues a battle between desire and inhibition. The inhibiting agent is a something called the censor, who pushes back into the subconsciousness the socially tabooed, the socially abhorrent desires; represses emotions and instincts that are socially out of order. But there is no real victory for the consciousness, for the complex (the name given to a desire or wish with its attendant ideas, emotions and motor manifestations) is still active, subconsciously changing the life of the person, causing him to make slips in his speech, expressing itself in his dreams and his work, and if sufficiently powerful, giving rise to nervous or mental disease of one type or another. Nothing is ever forgotten, according to Freud, and the reason our childhood is not voluntarily remembered is because it is full of forbidden desires and curiosities and the developing censor thrusts it all into the subconsciousness, where it continues to make trouble all the rest of the individual's life. In fact, a cardinal part of Freudianism (which he and his followers are lately modifying) is that it is the results of the "psychic traumata" (psychical injuries) of infancy and childhood that cause the hysteria of the adult; and these psychical traumata are largely (about ninety- nine per cent.) sexual.

4. Freudianism has borrowed the time-honored dictum that every sensation has a natural result in action and has elaborated it into the statement that every affective state, every desire and craving of whatever sort, needs a motor discharge, an avenue of outlet. If the desire or emotion is inhibited, its excitement is transferred with it into the subconscious and that excitement may attach itself to other excitements and break into consciousness as a mental disturbance of one type or another. If you can get at the complex by psychoanalysis, by dragging it to the light, by making it conscious, you discharge the excitement and health is restored. This originally was very important in the Freudian work and was called by the crude term of catharsis.

5. How can one get at these subterranean cravings and strivings, at the fact that originally one desired one's mother and was jealous of one's father, or vice versa? Here Freud developed an elaborate technique based on the following:

Though the censor sits on the lid of the subconsciousness, that wily self has ways and means of expression. In dreams, in humor, in the slip of the tongue, in forgetfulness, in myths of the race, in the symptoms of the hysteric patient, in the creations of writers and artists, the subconsciousness seeks to symbolize in innocent (or acceptable) form its crude wishes. By taking a dream, for example, and analyzing it by what is known as the free association method, one discovers the real meaning of the terms used, the meaning behind the symbol; and behind the apparent dream-content one sees revealed the wishes and disorganizing desires of the subconscious or the real person. For throughout Freud's work, though not so definitely expressed, there is the idea that the subconscious is by far the most important part of the personality, and that the social purposes, the moral injunctions and feelings are not the real purposes and real desires of the real personality.

In analyzing dreams, the symbols become quite standardized. The horses, dogs, beards, queer situations of the dream (falling, walking without clothes, picking up money, etc.), the demons, ghosts, flying, relate definitely to sex situations, sex organs, sex desires. (The Freudians are apt to deny this theoretically, but practically every dream of the thousands they publish is a sex dream of crude content.) Naturally a "pure" girl is quite shocked when told that because she dreamed she was riding a gray horse in a green meadow that she really has bad (and still is troubled by) incestuous desires for her father, but that is the way to cure her of her neurasthenia or fatigue or obsession of one kind or other.

I have not attempted a detailed account of the technique of free association, nor the Freudian account of humor, etc. There are plenty of books on the market written by Freud himself and his followers. Frankly I advise the average person not to read them. I am opposed to the Freudian account of life and character, though recognizing that he has caused the psychologist to examine life with more realism, to strip away pretense, to be familiar with the crude and to examine conduct with the microscope.

I do not believe there is an ORGANIZED subconsciousness, having a PERSONALITY. Most of the work which proves this has been done on hysterics. Hysterics are usually proficient liars, are very suggestible and quite apt to give the examiner what he looks for, because they seek his friendly interest and eager study. Wherever I have checked up the "subconscious" facts as revealed by the patient as a result of his psychoanalysis or through hypnosis, I have found but little truth. On the other hand, the Freudians practically never check up the statements of their patients; if a woman tells all sorts of tales of her husband's attitude toward her, or of the attitude of her parents, it is taken for granted that she tells the truth. My belief is that had the statements of Freud's patients been carefully investigated he would probably never have evolved his theories.

The Freudians have made no consecutive study of normal childhood, though they lay great stress on this period of life and in fact trace the symptoms of their patients back to "infantile trauma." Most of Freud's ideas on sex development can be traced to, the one four-and-a-half-years-old child he analyzed, who was as representative of normal childhood as the little chess champion of nine years now astounding the world is representative of the chess ability of the average child. Moreover, the basis of the technique is the free association, an association released from inhibitions of all kinds. There isn't any such thing, as Professor Woodworth has pointed out. All associations are conditioned by the physical condition of the patient, by his mood, by the nature of the environment he finds himself in, by the personality of the examiner and his powers of suggesting, his purposes and (very important) by the patient's purposes, which he cannot bid "Disappear!" As for the results of treatment, every neurologist meets patients again and again who have been "psychoanalyzed" without results. Moreover, psychoneurotic patients get well without treatment, as do all other classes of the sick, and the Christian Scientist, the osteopath and the chiropractic also have records of "cures."

This is not the place to discuss in further detail the Freudian ideas (the wish, the symbol, the jargon of transference, etc). The leading follower of Freud, Jung, has already broken away from the parent church, and there is an amusing cry of heresy raised. Soon the eminent Austrian will have the pleasure of seeing a half-dozen schools that have split off from his own,—followers of Bleuler, Jung, Adler and others.

There IS a subconsciousness in that much of the nervous activity of the organism has but little or no relation to consciousness. There are mechanisms laid down by heredity and by the racial structure that accomplish great functions without any but the most indirect effect on consciousness and without any control by the conscious personality. We are spurred on to sex life, to marriage, to the care of our children by instinct; but the instinct is not a personality any more than the automatic heartbeat is. We repress a forbidden desire; if we are successful and really overcome the desire by setting up new desires or in some other way, the inhibited desire is not locked up in a subterranean limbo. There is nothing pathological about inhibition, for inhibition is as normal a part of character as desire, and the social instinct which bids us inhibit is as fundamental as the sex instinct. Most conflicts are on a conscious plane, but most people will not admit to any one else their deeply abhorrent desires. To all of us, or nearly all, come desires and temptations that we would not acknowledge for the world. If a wise examiner succeeds in getting us to admit them, it is very agreeable to find a scapegoat in the form of the subconsciousness. I have often said this to students: if all our thoughts and conscious desires could be exposed, the most of us would almost die of shame. True, we do not clearly understand ourselves and our conflicts and explanation is often necessary, but that is not equivalent to the subconsciousness; it merely means that introspection is not sagacious.

Nor is it true, in my belief, that dreams are important psychical events, nor that the subconsciousness evades a censor in elaborating them. To what end would that be done? What would be the use of it? Suppose that Freud and his school had never been; then dreams would always be useless, for they would have no interpreter. Men have dreamed in the countless ages before Freud was born,—in vain. Think how the poor, misguided subconsciousness has labored for nothing,—and how grateful it should be to Freud! Dreams are results and have the same kind of function that a stomach-ache has.

Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with surprising ease.

The conflicts of life are generally conscious conflicts, in my experience. Desires and lusts that one does not know of do no harm; it is the conflict which we cannot settle, the choice we cannot make, the doubt we cannot resolve, that injures. It is not those who find it easy to inhibit a desire or any impulse that are troubled, though they may and do grow narrow. It is those whose unlawful or discordant desires are not easily inhibited who find themselves the theater of a constant struggle that breaks them down. The uneasiness of a desire that arises from the activity of the sex organs is not a manifestation of a subconscious personality, unless we include in our personality our livers, spleen and internal organs of all kinds. Such an uneasiness may not be clearly understood by the individual merely because the uneasiness is diffuse and not localized. But there is no personality, Do will, wish or desire in that uneasiness; it may and does cause to arise in the conscious personality wills and wishes and desires against which there is rebellion and because of which there is conflict.

Upon the issue of the conflicts within the personality hangs the fate of the individual. Race-old lines of conduct are inhibited by custom, tradition, teaching, conformity and the social instinct and its allies. Here is a subject worthy of extended consideration.

Freud has done the thought of our times a great service in emphasizing conflict. From the earliest restriction laid by men on his own conduct, wrestling with desire and temptation has been the greatest of man's struggles. Internal warfare between opposing purposes and desires may proceed to a disruption of the personality, to failure and unhappiness, or else to a solidified personality, efficient, single-minded and successful. Freud's work has directed our attention to the thousand and one aberrant desires that we will hardly acknowledge to ourselves, and he has forced the professional worker in abnormal and normal mental life to disregard his own prejudices, to strip away the camouflage that we put over our motives and our struggles. Together with Jung and Bleuler, he has helped our science of character a great deal through no other method than by arousing it to action against him. In order to fight him, our thought has been forced to arm itself with the weapons that he has used.



CHAPTER VI. EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL

In a preceding chapter we discussed man as an organism reacting against an outside world and spurred on by internal activities and needs. We discussed stimulation, reflexes, inhibition, choice and the organizing activity, memory and habit, consciousness and subconsciousness, all of which are primary activities of the organism. But these are mere theories of function, for the activities we are interested in reside in more definite reactions, of which the foregoing are parts.

We see a dreaded object on the horizon or foresee a calamity,—and we fear. That state of the organism (note I do not say that STATE OF MIND) resulting from the vision is an emotion. We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run, hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if cornered. "What shall I do—what shall I do? finds no conscious answer if the emotion is overwhelming or the instinctive flight a pell-mell affair; but ordinarily memories of other experiences or of teaching come into the mind and some effort is made to meet the situation in an "intelligent" manner.

Here, then, is a response in which three cardinal reactions have occurred and are blended,—the emotion, the instinctive action, and the intelligent action; or to make abstractions, emotion, instinct and intelligence. (Personally, I think half the trouble with our thought is that, we abstract from our experiences a common group of associations and believe that the abstraction has some existence outside our thoughts.) Thus there arise in us, as a result of things experienced, curious feelings and we speak of the feelings as emotions; we make a race-old response to a situation,—an instinctive reaction; our memories, past experiences and present purposes are stirred into activity, and we plan and scheme, and this is an intelligent reaction, but there is in reality no metaphysical entity Emotion, Instinct, Intelligence. I believe that here the philosophers whose mental activities are essentially in the direction of forming abstract ideas have misled us.

What I wish to point out is this: that to any situation all three reactions may take place and modify one another. We are insulted—some one slaps our face—the fierce emotion of anger arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing, perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. But no,—the situation has aroused certain memories and certain inhibitions: the one who struck us has been our friend and we can see that he is acting under a mistaken impression, or else we perceive that he is right, that we have done him a wrong for which his blow is a sort of just reaction. We are checked by these cerebral activities, we choose some other reaction than fight; perhaps we prevent him from further assault, or we turn and walk away, or we start to explain, to mollify and console, or to remonstrate and reprove. In other words, "intelligence" steps in to inhibit, to bring to the surface the possibilities, to choose, and thus overrides the emotional instinctive reaction. It may not succeed in the overriding; we may hesitate, inhibit, etc., for only a second or so, before hot anger overcomes us, and the instinctive response of fight and retaliation takes place.

These examples might be multiplied a thousandfold. Every day of our lives situations come up in which there is a blending or an antagonism between emotional, instinctive and intelligent responses. In fact, very few acts of the organized human being are anything else. For every emotion awakens memories of past emotions and the consequences; every instinct is hampered by other instincts or by the inhibitions aroused by obstacles; and intelligence continually struggles against emotion and blind instinct. Teaching, experience, knowledge, all modify emotional and instinctive responses so that sometimes they are hardly recognizable as such. On the other hand, though intelligence normally occupies the seat of power, it is easily ousted and in reality only steers and directs the vehicle of life, choosing not the goal but the road by which the goal can safely be reached.

In general terms we shall define emotions, instincts and intelligence as follows:

1. For emotions we shall accept a modified James-Lange theory, supplementing it by the developments of science since their day. When a thing is seen or heard (or smelled or tasted or thought), it arouses an emotion; that emotion consists of at least three parts. First, the arousal of memories and experiences that give it a value to the individual, make it a desired object or a dreaded, distasteful object. Second, at the same time, or shortly preceding or succeeding this, a great variety of changes takes place in the organism, changes that we shall call the vaso-visceral-motor changes. This means merely that there is a series of reactions set up in the sympathetic nervous system, in the blood vessels and bodily structures they control and in the glands of internal secretion,—changes which include the blush or the pallor, the rapid heartbeat, the quickened or labored breathing, the changes in the digestive tract which include the vomiting of disgust and the diarrhoea of fear; the changes that passion brings in the male and the female and many other alterations to be discussed again. Third, there is then the feeling of these coenaesthetic changes,—a feeling of pleasantness, unpleasantness mingled with the basic feeling of excitement, and from then on that situation is linked in memory with the feeling that we usually call the emotion but which is only a part of it. Nevertheless, it becomes the part longed for or thereafter avoided; it is the value of the emotion to us, as conscious personalities, although it may be a false, disastrous, dangerous value. Excitement is the generalized mood change that results in consciousness in consequence of the vaso-visceral-motor changes of emotion; it is therefore based on bodily changes as is the feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, that also occurs. William James said that we laugh and are therefore happy; we weep and are therefore sad; the bodily changes are primary and the feeling secondary. We do not accept this dictum entirely, but we say that the organism reacts in a complicated way and that the feeling—sadness, disgust, anger, joy—springs from the memories and past experiences aroused by a situation as well as from the widespread bodily excitement also so aroused. For the neurologist both the cerebral and the sympathetic- endocrinal components of emotion are important.

For the moment we turn to instinct and instinctive reactions.

2. Man has always wondered that things can be known without teaching. So slow and painful is the process of mastering a technique, whether of handicraftsmanship or of art, so imbued are we with the need of education for the acquirement of knowledge, that we are taken aback by the realization that all around us are creatures carrying on the most elaborate technique, going through the most complicated procedures and apparently possessed of the surest knowledge without the possibility of teaching. The flight of birds, the obstetric and nursing procedures of all animals, and especially the complicated and systematized labors of bees, ants and other insects, have aroused the wonder, admiration and awe of scientists. A chick pecks its way out of its egg and shakes itself,—then immediately starts on the trail of food and usually needs no instruction as to diet. The female insect lays its eggs, the male insect fertilizes them, the progeny go through the states of evolution leading to adult life without teaching and without the possibility of previous experience. Since the parent never sees the progeny, and the progeny assume various shapes and have very varied capacities at these times, there can be no possible teaching of what is remarkably skillful and marvelously adapted conduct.[1]

[1] The nature of instinct has been a subject of discussion for centuries, but it is only within the last fifty years or thereabouts that instinctive actions have really been studied. I refer the reader to the works of Darwin, Romanes, Lloyd Morgan, the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse, and McDougall for details as to the controversies and the facts obtained.

Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in putrid meat in order that the larvae may have appropriate food, although she never sees the larvae or cannot know through experience their needs. "The smell of putrid meat attracts the gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell, and the contact combined stimulate the functions of oviposition."[1] But as all the critics have pointed out, the theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so inevitably.