utterances, but no one would ever be inclined to do So, for his thinking would never escape triviality. It has been said that the mistakes of a wise man are more valuable than the truths of a fool, for where the wise man errs, he is likely significantly; his very stumblings help other men to keep their footing. Good thinking, then, is consequential; in itself it is significant, and it also involves or leads to other things that are significant.

Good thinking, in other words, is never sterile. Let it not be supposed, however, that it need be portentous, or fraught with all solemnity and seriousness. It may merely help to create an evanescent and transitory pleasure a pleasure which may even be connected with thinking itself. Nor need it be useful in the narrow, bread-and-butter meaning of that word. Always in some way something flows from satisfactory thinking which justifies its existence; it is not entirely gratuitous and uncalled for in the scheme of life-satisfactions. It need not be novel or "constructive," for it may merely indicate how to remove some slight hindrance to thought or action, point the way to some minor gratification, or carry in its own unfolding a modest pleasure of its own. Of course, everything good or bad has consequences, but some consequences are inconsequential, while others are of consequence. When thought is good, it falls into the latter class.

The possibilities and limitations of thought

Thinking has its times and its seasons like all other functions, and it would perhaps be safer to tell a man never to think at all than to tell him never to fail to think. Of course no human being would ever be able to follow either of these counsels, since thinking is an inevitable though recurrent human activity. The old lady was right who said that she was thinking about something or other nearly all the time; but there must have been occasions in her life when she would have preferred to "jest set" rather than to "set and think." It is common to read praises of thinking, since most books are written by people who pride themselves on being intellectuals, but such works usually commend "good" thinking-surely an eminently praiseworthy

article-rather than the ordinary cognitive operations of everyday life.

Thought does have its values, however, in spite of the looseness with which it has been lauded. It is an important, though not the only, source of knowledge. Much that we know was first impressed upon us by the naked and insistent impact of natural objects on the organism, by the vigor and reiteration of our contacts with obstinate and unyielding things, but thinking greatly broadens the horizon of our lives by revealing the connections and significances of things and of ideas. Thinking helps us to combine the isolated items of experience into systems, and this not seldom leads to the uncovering of not previously realized connections between the materials at hand.

It is by thought, also, that we are enabled to understand and control the future and the absent. Francis Bacon has made it a commonplace that knowledge is power, and, as we have seen, much knowledge is gained as a result of thinking. Understanding and control are by no means identical, for it is possible for men to understand the fury of the elements before which they bow in helpless submission, but men rightly place merit in knowing why they must meet their doom. Spinoza in the fifth book of his Ethics very beautifully shows how the clear and distinct knowledge of the necessity of all things-a knowledge to be reached only through highly complex operations of thought-may minister to perfect joy and peace.

Perhaps the chief function of thinking, however, is to convince us that our actions and feelings are rational. Few human beings are satisfied merely to act or to feel; they must have reasons for everything they do. This process of finding reasons for doing something that you are going to do anyway is called rationalization, and a good part of all thinking is given over to the task of erecting logical barriers for the defense of the ego against internal and external attack. Thinking itself no doubt affords some people great pleasure, quite apart from any of its effects in the way of knowledge, consolation, control, or the feeling of rationality, but in most of us the impulse to think is not strong enough

to be very effective in action without the coöperation of other feelings, by which thought is used somewhat as one might employ a tool to accomplish an end. And perhaps this is well, for thought appears to lack appreciative vision except as it is warmed and supported by other feelings more strongly motivated by the needs and possibilities of human beings.

REFERENCES

1 Cf. C. M. Childs, Physiological Foundations of Behavior (N. Y., Holt, 1924),

esp. 10-11.

2 E. B. Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (N. Y., Holt, 1915)— see index under title "stimulus, Recession of "; cf. L. L. Thurstone, The Nature of Intelligence (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1924).

G. M. Stratton, An experience during danger and the wider functions of emotion; in Problems of Personality; Studies presented to Dr. Morton Prince, pioneer in American psychopathology (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1925).

Quoted in J. G. Huneker, Overtones, A book of temperaments (N. Y., Scribner, 1904), 33-34.

5

John Tyndall, Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science (2 ed., London, 1870), 54.

Norbert Wiener, On the nature of mathematical thinking, Australasian Journ. of Psych. and Philos., Vol. 1 (1923), 269.

7 F. L. Wells, Mental Adjustments (N. Y., Appleton, 1917).

8 On this point the dramas of L. Pirandello are especially interesting. See also H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As if," A system of the theoretical, practical, and religious fictions of mankind, trans. by C. K. Ogden (N. Y. Harcourt, Brace, 1924).

See A. E. Taylor, St. Thomas Aquinas as a Philosopher (Oxford, Blackwell, 1924).

10 John Dewey, How We Think (Boston, Heath, 1910), 6.

11 A. D. Ritchie, Scientific Method, An inquiry into the character and validity of natural laws (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1923), 200-201.

Chapter VIII

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER

Meaning of the term "personality"

In an earlier chapter a summary inventory of the baby's equipment at birth was presented, and the whole range of his powers was rapidly surveyed. In this chapter, the repertoire of traits exhibited by the developed individual will be similarly catalogued, attention being directed primarily to the various ways in which men are found to differ from each other. Personality is not a mysterious something over and above the total reactive life of the individual. It includes, of course, much more than goes on within the narrow field of consciousness, and it is but inadequately indicated by a mere listing of separate traits, since the complex interfunctioning of traits gives much of the detail determining personal idiosyncracy, but it is not necessary to look outside of experience for an understanding of what we are. Nor does personality reveal itself in experience as an unmitigated unity, but rather as an aggregate of loosely associated unities and disunities held together by virtue of the fact that they pertain to a single organic structure. Taken largely, a man is all of the things that happen in and to a certain organism.*

Individual differences

The important fact of individual differences may be summed up in the statement that the members of a species always vary among themselves with respect to the exact degree to which they possess individual traits, as likewise with respect to the precise manner in which these traits are associated to constitute the total individual. Individuals differ from each other because the determiners (environmen

* This is true even of the not infrequently reported instances of "multiple personality," in which a certain number of fairly distinct unities are actually noted within a single body, for these "personalities" are dependent on each other in a manner different from the dependence of one organism on another.1

tal and hereditary) of any given trait are always both numerous and small, so that the probability of any particular number of them being present in a given instance is in accord with the laws of chance. Suppose, for example, that a man's height were determined by the coöperation of twenty elements, each of equal importance, and that the probability of any single element being present were just as great as the probability of it being absent. In that event, it is clear that on the average ten of the elements would be present and ten absent, while the probability of any other assigned number being present in a given instance could be calculated according to the law which states the frequency with which a given number of heads will appear when twenty coins are tossed into the air. The situation with respect to height, and many other traits, is apparently not unlike the situation we imagined, except that the number of distinct elements involved is many times twenty, and that the different elements need not necessarily be of exactly the same importance.

The following features, then, will characterize practically all instances where individual differences are found to occur:

(1) These differences will nearly always cluster around a type or mode, and large variations from the mode will be less common than small, becoming rarer and rarer as the size of the variations increases. The largest deviations, whether of excess or of defect of the quality, will therefore be extremely uncommon. Statisticians have devised a number of measures for summarizing the known numerical facts about such distributions. Thus one may report: the total number of cases measured, with the measurement for each; the range, or numerical difference between the lowest record and the highest for the group; the average or central tendency of the group (calculated in several different ways); the degree of scatter or deviation from the average; and sometimes also the skewness, or degree to which the data depart from such a chance distribution as one would obtain by tossing pennies (this distribution being taken as typical or normal).

(2) Variations are usually continuous; that is to say, if