HUMAN TRAITS AND THEIR SOCIAL

SIGNIFICANCE

INTRODUCTION

Human Traits and Civilization

Throughout the long enterprise of civilization in which mankind has more or less consciously changed the world it found into one more in conformity with its desires, two factors have remained constant: (1) the physical order of the universe, which we commonly call Nature, and (2) the native biological equipment of man, commonly known as human nature. Both of these, we are almost unanimously assured by modern science, have remained essentially the same from the dawn of history to the present. They are the raw material out of which is built up the vast complex of government, industry, science, art all that we call civilization. In a very genuine sense, ́there is nothing new under the sun. Matter and men remain the same.

But while this fundamental material is constant, it may be given various forms; and both nature itself and the nature of man may, with increasing knowledge, be increasingly controlled in man's own interests. The railroad, the wireless and the aeroplane are striking and familiar testimonies to the efficacy of man's informed mastery of the world into which he is born. In the field of physical science, man has in the short period of the three centuries since Francis Bacon sounded the trumpet call to the study of Nature and Newton discovered the laws of motion, magnificently attained and appreciated the power to know exactly what the facts of Nature are, what consequences follow from them, and how they may be applied to enlarge the boundaries of the ‘empire of man'.

In his control of human nature, which is in its outlines as fixed and constant as the laws that govern the movements of the stars, man has been much less conscious and deliberate, and

more frequently moved by passion and ignorance than by reason and knowledge. Nevertheless, custom and law, the court, the school, and the market have similarly been man's ways of utilizing the original equipment of impulse and desire which Nature has given him. It is hard to believe, but as certain as it is incredible, that the modern professional and business man, moving freely amid the diverse contacts and complexities pictured in any casual newspaper, in a world of factories and aeroplanes and filing cabinets, is by nature no different from the superstitious savage hunting precarious food, living in caves, and finding every stranger an enemy. The difference between the civilization of an American city, and that of the barbarian tribes of Western Europe thousands of years ago is an accurate index of the extent to which man has succeeded in redirecting and controlling that fundamental human nature which has in its essential structure remained the same through history.

Man's ways of association and cooperation, for the most part, have not been deliberately developed, since men lived and had to live together long before a science of human relations could have been dreamed of. Only today are we beginning to have an inkling, of the fundamental facts of human nature. But it has become increasingly plain that progress depends not merely on increasing our knowledge and application of the laws which govern man's physical environment. Machinery, factories, and automatic reapers are, after all, only instruments for man's welfare. If man is ever to attain the happiness and rationality of which philosophers and reformers have continually been dreaming, there must also be an understanding, of the laws which govern man himself, laws quite as constant as those of physics and chemistry.

Education and political organization, the college and the legislature, however remote they may seem from the random impulses to cry and clutch at random objects with which a baby comes into the world, must start from just such materials as these. The same impulse which prompts a five-yearold to put blocks into a symmetrical arrangement is the stuff out of which architects or great executives are made. Patriot

ism and public spirit find their roots back in the same unlearned impulses which make a baby smile back when smiled at, and makes it, when a little older, cry if left too long alone or in a strange place. All the native biological impulses, which are almost literally our birthright, may, when understood, be modified through education, public opinion, and law, and directed in the interests of human ideals.

It is the aim of this book to indicate some of these more outstanding human traits, and the factors which must be taken into account if they are to be controlled in the interests of human welfare. It is too often forgotten that the problems which are to be dealt with in the world of politics, of business, of law, and education, are much complicated by the fact that human beings are so constituted that given certain situations, they will do certain things in certain inevitable ways. These problems are much clarified by knowing what these fundamental ways of men are.

PART I

CHAPTER I

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

The Human Animal

Any attempt to understand what the nature of man is, apart from its training and education during the life of the individual, must start with the realization that man is a human animal. As a human being he is strikingly set off by his upright posture and his large and flexible hand. But chiefly he is distinguished by his plastic brain, upon which depends his capacity to perform the complex mental activities-from administering a railroad to solving problems in calculuswhich constitute man's outstanding and exclusive characteristic.1

But in his structure and functions man bears, as is now well known, a marked resemblance to the lower animals. His respiratory and digestive organs, for example, may be duplicated as far down in the animal scale as birds and chickens.? Man's whole physical apparatus and mode of life, save in complexity and refinement of operations, are the same as those of any of the higher mammals. But more important for the student of human behavior, man's mental life, that is, his ways of responding to and dealing with his environment, is in large part identical with that of the lower animals, especially of the most highly developed vertebrates, such as the monkey. They have, up to a certain point, precisely the same equipment for adjusting themselves to the conditions of life. Apart from education, both man and animal are endowed with a set of more or less fixed tendencies to respond in specific ways to specific stimuli. These inborn or congenital tendencies are generally known as reflexes or instincts.3

1 The thinking process is discussed in detail in Chapters III and XV.

2 With certain modifications accounted for in their historical 'descent' with modification from a common ancestor. See Scott: Theory of Evolution.

The difference between the two is largely one of complexity. By a reflex is meant a very simple and comparatively rigid response; by an instinct a series of reflexes such that when the first is set off, the remainder are set off in a regularly determinate succession.