Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

philosophers have often been surprisingly autistic (as Kant, Spinoza, Archimedes), and much literary work has had an epileptic origin (as Flaubert, Dostoievsky). Nor have the great of this world been entirely free from antisocial tendencies. The whole man in action

In this chapter an effort has been made to view the whole man from enough different points of view to gain a reasonable idea of the great complexity of a developed life. No bodily processes are simple, and the complexities involved in thought and concerted organic action are astounding. No person ever quite succeeds in defining or distinguishing the body, the me, the mine, and the not-me. We flow out into the things that surround us and incorporate into our selves our clothes, our family, our home, the climate and scenery of the place where we have long lived, and countless other "environmental" processes. At the same time we reject and disown many of the processes that indubitably do go on within the organism. Our personalities can even be shown to contain elements derived from other minds than our own, as when a man is made by his friends, who insist so strongly that he is something that he is forced to become that thing in order to save his self-respect.

Finally, the sphere of the self is almost constantly changing. We lay claim to things at one moment, and ignore them during the next, and in addition to these short-term fluctuations there can often be plotted long-time secular trends or tendencies in a man's personality. In fact a man's life usually exhibits a considerable number of partly unified movements in varying directions, centering around a few somewhat more fixed points. Essentially the proper idea can be gained by a study of a series of photographs of the same individual taken at different times under varying circumstances. It is perhaps not difficult to see that they are all of the same person, and yet the differences are also very apparent and often extremely interesting. They reveal the influence of the various life-periods, of the growth and decline of fashions and fads, of the slow development of mannerisms and tastes, and of the various social affiliations that

have been formed, either to decay or to increase in strength with the passage of time. A man's self is formed in all these and in many other similar ways.

REFERENCES

1 For an important and typical case see Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, A biographical study in abnormal psychology (2 ed., Longmans, Green, 1913).

2 G. Udny Yule, in Brit. Journ. of Psych., Vol. 12 (1921–1922), 106.

Valuable discussions of various phases of personality are to be found in F. H. Allport, Social Psychology (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 99-125, and in J. B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (2 ed., Phila., Lippincott, 1924), 412-440.

Alfred Adler, Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation (N. Y., Nervous and Mental Disease Pub. Co., 1917).

'Alfred Binet, L'intelligence des imbéciles, L'année Psych., 1909, 128 f.

L. L. Thurstone, The Nature of Intelligence (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1924), XV. 7 See Carl Jung, Psychological Types, or The psychology of individuation, trans. by H. G. Baynes (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1923). Cf. also William James on the tender-minded and the tough-minded, in his Pragmatism (N. Y., Longmans, Green, 1907), Lecture 1.

See the summary and bibliography in Carl Kelsey, The Physical Basis of Society (N. Y., Appleton, 1916), 233–275.

'Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe, A study in genius (N. Y., Knopf, 1926.) Equally valuable is H. I'A. Fausset, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, n.d.).

10 See, e.g., Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (N. Y., Boni and Liveright, 1924), esp. Chapter 11; Paul Radin, The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (Berkeley, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1920); and the attractive stories and reconstructions of the Indian scene in Elsie Clews Parsons (ed.), American Indian Life (N. Y., Huebsch, 1922).

11 This has been shown by Rhys Carpenter, The Ethics of Euripides (N. Y., Columbia Univ. Press, 1916). Aristotle himself conceived it to be the essential duty of ethics to establish the accepted views regarding conduct (cf. Ethics, Book 7, Chapter 1). For other data on peculiarities in Greek conceptions, see the writings of F. M. Cornford, esp. From Religion to Philosophy, A study in the origins of western speculation (London, Arnold, 1912).

12 For a sympathetic yet objective description of one contemporary group by a member of another, see Robert Dell, My Second Country (France) (London, Lane, 1920).

13 Bernard Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom, and other studies (London, Sonnenschein, 1893), 185–186.

14 The interested reader may consult Benjamin Harrow, Glands in Health and Disease (N. Y., Dutton, 1922); L. Berman, The Glands Regulating Personality (N. Y., Macmillan, 1921)—to be used with caution; J. B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (2 ed., Phila., Lippincott), 190-213; or E. SharpeySchafer, The Endocrine Organs, An introduction to the study of internal secretion (2 ed., Part I, London, Longmans, Green, 1924).

15 Watson, 209.

16 A. J. Rosanoff, A theory of personality, Psych. Bull., Vol. 17 (1920), 281–299.

PART III

HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIAL COMPLEXES

Chapter IX
ROUTINES

Just as certain features of contemporary life can best be grasped through a study of the processes of individual development, so other aspects yield more easily when they are attacked through a consideration of one or another of the great social complexes that enter so deeply into human living. Here again the approach can be broadly synthetic, as it will be in this part, where the discussion centers in order about routines, tools, language, values, common sense, and innovation, or it can be analytic, as in the part that follows, where such topics as the family, economic institutions, art, science, and religion will be considered. The division of the discussion into parts in which the direction of attention shifts somewhat is dictated by convenience, and is more closely connected with the form of the available data than with intrinsic differences in subject matter.

The round of life activities

Every group on inspection will be found to be engaged in running through a fairly regular cycle of life activities in which essentially the same situations are faced again and again after varying periods of time. Many features of this rhythm of reactions are based upon purely physical recurrences, for we live in a world in which the days, months, seasons, years, follow each other with great regularity, bringing before us, not the same things over and over again, it is true, but things very similar to those that the same stage of the cycle brought in times past. Likewise, the plants and animals upon which man depends for his food have each its peculiar rhythm to which he must adjust himself throughout all his days. In countless ways life becomes adapted to this somewhat intricate yet ordered interweaving of natural recurrences. With the rising of the sun we

« AnteriorContinuar »