PART II INDIVIDUAL TRAITS WHICH ARE SOCIALLY SIGNIFICANT CHAPTER IV ACTIVITY AND QUIESCENSE The difference between sticks and stones and living beings consists primarily in the fact that the latter are positively active; the former are passively acted upon. The stone will stay put, unless moved by some external agent, even but the amoeba will do something to its environment. It will stretch out pseudopodia to reach solid objects to which to cling; it will attempt to return to these objects when dislodged; it will actively absorb food. Higher up in the animal scale, "Rats run about, smell, dig, gnaw, without real reference to the business in hand. In the same way Jack (a dog) scrabbles and jumps, the kitten wanders and picks, the otter slips about everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant fumbles ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about." "The most casual display of the activities of a young child reveals a ceaseless display of exploring and testing activity. Objects are sucked, fingered and thumped; drawn and pushed, handled and thrown." 2 When vitality is at its height in the waking period of a young child, its environment is a succession of stimulations to activity. Man's 'innate tendency to fool' is notorious, a tendency particularly noticeable in children. Objects are responded to not as means to ends, not with reference to their use, but simply for the sheer satisfaction of manipulation. Facial expressions, sounds, gestures, are made almost on any provocation; they are the expressions of an abundant 'physiological uneasiness'. The two-year-old is a mechanism that 1 Hobhouse: Mind in Evolution, p. 195. 2 Dewey: How We Think, pp. 31-32. simply must and will move about, make all kinds of superfluous gestures and facial expressions, and random sounds, as it were, just to get rid of its stored-up energy. Man's laziness and inertia is not infrequently commented on by moralists, but it is not laziness and inertia per se; certainly in normal individuals in the temperate zone to do something most of their waking time, is a natural tendency and one intrinsically pleasant to practise. That the tendency to be active should vary in different individuals and at different times is of course as important a fact as it is a familiar one. Some of the causes of this variation will be noted in the succeeding. In adult life for casual and random activity is substituted activity directed by some end or purpose which determines the responses called into play. Professional and business, domestic and social enterprises and obligations take up most of the adult's energy. The contrast usually made between the play of the child and the work of the adult is that in the case of the former actions are done for their own sake; and in the latter for some end. The child, we say, plays 'for the fun of the thing', the adult works for pay, for professional success, for power, reputation, etc. But even in the adult the desire for play powerfully persists. Not all the grown-up's energy is absorbed in his work, and even some types of work, like that of the poet or painter, as will be discussed more in detail in the section on Art, or the building up of a great business organization, may be intrinsically delightful and self-sufficient activity. Under the conditions of modern industry, however, especially of machine production, much, in many cases, most, of the activity by which an individual earns his living, utilizes only some of his native tendencies to act, and the working day does not, under normal conditions, absorb all his energy. Whatever vitality is not, therefore, absorbed in necessary work goes into forms of purely gratuitous activity. Which form 'play' shall take in the adult depends on the degree to which certain impulses are in him stronger than others either by native endowment or cultivation, and which impulses have not been sufficiently utilized in him during the day's work. A man musically gifted will find his recreation in some performance on a musical instrument, let us say; on the other hand, if his work is music, those impulses, strong though they be that make him a musician, will have been sufficiently exhausted in the day's work to make some other activity a more satisfactory recreation. The relations between play and work can be better understood by a consideration of the physiological importance of variety in activity. A certain regular recurrence of response may be pleasant, as in rowing or canoeing, or in listening to the rhythms of poetry or music, but a prolonged repetition of precisely the same stimulus or the same set of stimuli may make responses dissatisfying to the degree of pain. Ideal activity, biologically, would be one where every impulse was just sufficiently frequently called upon to make response easy, fluent and satisfactory. The reason 'work' has traditionally come to be regarded as unpleasant and 'play' as pleasant is not because the former is activity and the second is torpor. Leisure does not necessarily mean laziness. Many a vacation, a camping party, a walking expedition is literally more strenuous than the work an individual normally does. But work means human energy expended for the sole purpose of accomplishing some end. And an end involves the deliberate shutting out of every impulse which does not contribute to its fulfillment. A man weeding a garden may tire of the weeding long before he is really physically exhausted. One response is being repeatedly made, while at the same time a dozen other impulses are being stimulated. When Tom Sawyer, under the compulsion of his aunt, is whitewashing a fence, it is shortly no fun for him. But he can make other boys pay him apple cores and jackknives for the fun of wielding the brush. What we call the feeling of boredom depends principally upon the too repeated stimulation of one set of activities to the exclusion of all others, the continuous presence of a kind of stimulation to which we have been rendered unsusceptible, as, for example, bad popular music to a cultivated musical taste, or intricate chamber music to an uncultivated one. The feeling of boredom may become physiologically acute, as in the case, so frequent in machine production of literally monotonous or one-operation jobs. Long hours of labor at acts calling out only one very simple response may have very serious effects. In the first place, in the work itself, since repetitions of one or one simple set of response may impair speed and accuracy. On the part of the worker, it promotes varying degrees of stupefaction or irritation. Excesses of drink, gambling, and dissipation among factory populations are often traceable to this continual frustration of normal instincts during working hours followed by a violent search for stimulation and relaxation after work is over. Under conditions of machine production, where the responses which the worker must make are becomingly increasingly simple and automatic, the problem of bringing variety into work and bringing something of the same vitality and spontaneity into industry that goes into play and art is becoming serious and urgent.3 Mental Activity Just as physical activity is a characteristic of all living beings, so, from almost earliest infancy of human beings is mental activity. This does not mean that individuals from their babyhood are continually solving problems. Deliberation and reflection are simply the mature and disciplined control of what goes on during all of our waking hoursrandom play of the fancy, imagination. We are not always controlling our thought, but so long as we are awake, something is, as we say, passing through our heads. Everything that happens about us provokes some suggestion or idea. "Day-dreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and disconnected material that floats through our minds in relaxed moments, are, in this sense, thinking. More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with ideal fancy and unsubstantial hope.3 See Helen Marot: Creative Impulse in Industry. Dewey: How We Think, p. 2. This play of the imagination is most uncontrolled and spontaneous in childhood, which is often characteristically defined as the period of make-believe or fancy. It is this capacity which enables the child to use chairs as locomotives, sticks as rifles, and wheelbarrows as automobiles. As we grow older we tend to discipline this vagrant dreaming, and to draw only those suggestions from objects which tally with the workaday world we live in. We stop playing with our imagination and put our minds to work. But in adult life desire for the play of the mind, like the desire for the play of the body persists. The endeavor of education should be not to crush but to control it. Imagination, used here in the sense of random mental activity, may be controlled in two ways, both significant for human behavior. When it is controlled with reference to some emotional theme, as in fiction, drama and poetry, it has no reference necessarily to actual objects or events; it is concerned only with producing the effect of emotional congruity between incidents, objects, forms, or sounds. A great novel does not pretend to be a literal transcript of experience, nor a portrait of an actual person. When random mental activity is thus controlled, it is 'imagination', in the popular sense, the sense in which poets, painters, and dramatists are called imaginative artists. Imagination controlled with reference to facts produces genuine reflection and science. To put it in a reverse way, no matter how complicated thinking becomes, no matter how suggestions are examined and regulated with reference to the facts at hand, new ideas, theories, and hypotheses occur to the thinker precisely by this upshoot of irresponsible fancies and suggestions. This free and fertile play of the imagination is what characterizes the original thinker more than any other single fact. Suggestions arise, as it were, willy-nilly, depending on an individual's inheritance, his past experience, his social position, all at the moment, uncontrollable features of his situation. We can, through scientific method, examine and regulate suggestions once they arise, but their appearance is in a sense, casual and unpredictable like the fancies in a day |