Chapter 18

THE NORMAL MIND (Continued)

INSTINCT

We have found that the mind's chief end is action, of itself, or of its body. But what are its incentives to action?

We see the very young baby giving evidences of an emotional life, living in an affective, or feeling environment, leading a pleasure-pain existence, from the first. He acts as desire indicates. But from the very moment of his birth he performs actions with which he cannot as yet have a sense-memory connection, because he is doing them for the first time. How can he know how to respond to stimuli from the very beginning?

No other possible explanation offers itself than that he is born with certain tendencies to definite action. These we call instincts--man's provision to keep him going, as it were, till reason develops. Instincts are handed down from all the past. Definite tendencies, they are, to certain specific reflex actions in response to certain sensations. These responses, from the very beginning of animal life, have been toward avoiding pain, and toward receiving pleasure. It is as though the stimulus presses the trigger--instinct--and the muscle responds instantly with reflex action. This mechanism is the means of protection and advancement, and takes largely the place of intelligence in all animal life. It is what makes the baby suck and cry, clutch and pull, until a sense memory is established. So instinct is really race memory. We call instinctive those immediate, unthought reactions which are the same with all mankind.

The pugnacious instinct--the desire to fight--is the natural reaction of every human being of sane mind to attack. The inner necessity of avenging is so strong in the child or man of untrained mind or soul that he acts before he thinks. He strikes back, or shoots, or plots against his enemies. Only rare development of spirit or the cautious warning of reason which foresees ill consequences, or a will trained to force control, can later make the instinct inactive.

Where instinct ends and sense memory, imitation, and desire step in is difficult to determine. Later in life probably most of what we consider instinctive action is simply so-called reflex action, depending on sense memory, action learned so young that it is difficult to distinguish it from the true reflex action, which is due only to race memory.

James, in his _Talk to Teachers_, gives us a partial list of the instincts. Thus:

Fear Ownership Shyness Love Constructiveness Secretiveness Curiosity Love of approbation The ambitious impulses: Imitation, Emulation, Pride, Ambition, Pugnacity

To this partial list we would add self-preservation, reproduction, etc.

But instincts conflict with each other, and man carries about with him in babyhood many of them which may have been very useful to his prehistoric ancestors, but which only complicate things for him. Fear and curiosity urge opposite lines of conduct. Love of approbation and shyness are opposed. Love and pugnacity are apt to be at odds. So, gradually, as intelligence increases, the child refuses to allow such impulses to lead him to action. When fear-instinct and love-instinct are at war, reason is provided to come to the rescue.

_Instincts_ are racial tendencies of sensational or emotional states to determine action.

Instincts are the germs of habit, and when instinct would give rise to a reaction no longer useful, reason, abetted by new habit formation, in the normal mind, weakens instinct's force; and the habit is discarded and the instinct gradually declines.

In prehistoric times when food was scarce, and man had not learned the art of tilling the soil, hunger forced him to fight for what he got to eat. As there was often not enough to go around, he maimed or killed his fellow-man that he might have all he wanted, obeying the instinct to survive. So, now, the baby instinctively clutches for all that appeals to him. But an abundance of food for all, or the intelligent realization that co-operation brings more to the individual than does fighting, and a developed sense of responsibility toward others; or merely the fear of the scorn of fellow beings, or the desire to be protected by the love of his kind; perhaps a genuine love of people, acquired by spiritual development, puts the primitive habit of food-grabbing into the discard. Finally, the very instinct of self-preservation may be transformed into desire to serve others. No better illustration of this can ever be offered than the sacrifices of the World War.

MEMORY

No mind retains consciously everything that has ever impressed it. It is necessary that it put aside what ceases to be of importance or value and make way for new impressions. We found early in our study that the subconscious never forgets, but harbors the apparently forgotten throughout the years, allowing it to modify our thinking, our reactions. But the conscious mind cannot be cluttered with the things of little importance when the more essential is clamoring. So there is a forgetting that is very normal. We forget numberless incidents of our childhood and youth; we may forget the details of much that we have learned to do automatically; but the subconscious mind is attending to them for us.

Do you know how to skate? and if so, do you remember just how you did it the first time? Probably all you recall is that you fell again and again because your feet would slip away from where you meant them to be. When you glide over the ice now it is as natural as walking, and as easy. You cannot remember in detail at all how you first "struck out," nor the position of your feet and arms and legs, which you felt forced to assume. At the time there was very real difficulty with every stroke--each one was an accomplishment to be attempted circumspectly, in a certain definite way. All you remember now is, vaguely, a tumble or two, soreness, and lots of fun.

We forget details we have intrusted to others as not a part of our responsibility. We forget the things which in no way concern us, in which we have no interest and about which we have no curiosity. And it is well that we do so. If it were not for the ability to forget, our minds would be like a room in which we have lived a lifetime, where we have left everything that has been brought into it since our birth. It would be piled ceiling high, with no room for us, and with difficulty only could we find what we want. As we grow from babyhood to childhood, from childhood to youth, from youth to maturity the room changes with us. We put off childish things. They are stored away somewhere, in an attic or basement, or destroyed. And day after day something new is added, displacing something else. In the case of the mind all these things are stored and cataloged in the subconscious, and forgotten, until some need causes us to look into our catalog-index and see the experience again, or some association calls it back, relating it to something new. So our discussion of the subconscious involved also a discussion of memory.

But what of the things we must use frequently and cannot find in our minds? What of absent-mindedness and faulty memory? In such cases our minds might be compared to a cluttered room full of things we need and want to use every day, but in confusion. We know where many of them are, the ones we care most about; but we have to rummage wildly to find the rest. We have no proper system of arrangement of our belongings. You laid down that book somewhere, absent-mindedly, and now you cannot tell where. You were thinking of something else at the time, and inattention proves a most common cause of poor memory. Perhaps you simply have more books than the room can hold in an orderly way, and so you crowded that one in some corner, and now have no recollection of where you put it.

Poor memory is the result of lack of attention, or divided attention at the time the particular attention-stimulus knocked. You asked me to buy a ribbon of a certain shade and a certain width when I went to town. I was thinking of my dentist appointment. However, I heard your request, answered it graciously, took the money you offered, still wondering if the dentist would have to draw that tooth. And the chances are that I forgot your ribbon. I was giving you only a passive and divided attention.

Or I have more to do than I can possibly accomplish in the next six hours. You ask me to buy the ribbon. I attend accurately for the moment, think distractedly, "How can I do it all?--but I will"--and crowd the intention into an already overburdened corner of my mind, fail to associate it with the other thoughts already there, and return six hours later without the ribbon. My sense of hurry, of stress, of the more important thing to be done, or a reaction of impatience at the request, forced back the ribbon thought and allowed it to be hidden by others. I was really giving you only partial attention, or an emotion interfered with attention; and I forgot.

Hence we find that a faulty memory may exist in an otherwise normal mind when poor attention, or divided attention due to emotional stress or to an overcrowded mind, which makes it impossible to properly assort its material, interferes.

Again, we forget many things because they are unpleasant to remember. We have no desire, no emotional stimulus to make us remember; or because some of the associations with the forgotten incident are undesirable. We forget many things because if we remembered them we would feel called upon to do some unpleasant duty. You forgot your tennis engagement with B, perhaps, because you were so engrossed in a pleasure at hand, or in your work, that anything which interrupted was, under the circumstances, undesirable. You may have wanted very much to play with him, but some more pressing desire--to care well for your patient, or to continue the present amusement--was stronger. Or you forgot because you did not want to play with him and had no excuse to offer at the time. You wished to forget. Perhaps he does not play a good game, or you do not like him, or at least you like some one else much more, and he happened along; so you forgot B. The unconscious mind saw to it that something else was kept so prominently before your attention that it could not return to the less desired.

Thus a forgetting may be purely the result of an emotional interference which makes it, all in all, more pleasant to forget than to remember. If we would help ourselves or our patients whose memories are faulty, and who make them worse by their continual fretting over their disability, we must train ourselves to be willing to forget all that does not in the least concern our interests or those of the people about us, and does not add anything desirable to our knowledge. Thus we may avoid overcrowding the mind. But when we would remember let us give our whole active attention at the moment of presentation of the new stimulus, and immediately tie it up with something in past experience; let us recognize what it is that we should remember, and call the reinforcement of will, which demands that we remember whether we want to or not. Sincere desire to remember will inspire early and frequent recalling, with various associations, or hooks, until the impression becomes permanent. The average patient's poor memory is made worse by his agitation and attention to it, and his conviction that he cannot remember. The fear of forgetting often wastes mental energy which might otherwise provide keenness of memory. If the nurse ties up some pleasant association with the things she wants the sick man to remember, and disregards his painful effort to recall other things, then--unless the mind is disordered--he will often find normal memory reasserting itself.

We shall consider this question of memory in more detail in a later chapter of practical suggestions for the nurse.

THE PLACE OF EMOTION

_Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Thinking._--Emotion we found the constant accompaniment of every other mental activity. It is first on the stage of consciousness and, in the normal mind, last to withdraw.

When I am working at a problem in doses or solutions, trying to learn my _materia medica_, or wrestling with the causes of disease in my _medical nursing_, or thinking how I can eke out my last ten dollars till I get some more, I am pursued with some vague or well-defined feeling of annoyance or satisfaction, of displeasure or pleasure. If all goes well, the latter; if not, the former.

_Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Will._--I cannot _will_ without a feeling accompaniment, pleasant or unpleasant. I may be using my will only in carrying out what intellect advises. But we found that intellect's operations are always affective, _i. e._, have some feeling of pleasure or pain. And the very act of will itself is a pleasant one and much easier if it is making me do what I want to do; it is a vaguely or actively unpleasant one if it is making me act against desire. In the end, however, if I act against desire in pursuance of reason or a sense of duty, the feeling of pleasure in the victory of my better self is asserted. And feeling cannot be separated from will.

_Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Action._--I cannot do anything without a feeling of comfort or discomfort, happiness or unhappiness. Try it for yourself when you are feeding a patient, making a bed, giving a bath or massage, preparing a hypodermic. Other things being normal, if you are performing the task perfectly, the feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure, of the very ability to work effectively, with speed and accuracy and nicety, comes with the doing. If you are bungling, there is a pervading sense of dissatisfaction, of unpleasantness. In the automatic or semi-automatic action a great economy of nature has conservatively put feeling at the absolute minimum; but it has not eradicated it. As you walk across the ward, though your predominating thought and feeling may be elsewhere, there is a sense of pleasure or displeasure in the very movement. If your body is fresh and you are of an energetic type and in happy frame of mind, a pervasive feeling of satisfaction is experienced. If tired or discouraged or sore from unaccustomed exercise, every step registers protest.

Thus we find by experiment that there is no thought we have, no single conscious movement or action, nor any expression of the will, but is accompanied with what the psychologist broadly terms _pleasure_ or _pain_. So _emotion_, the first expression of mentality, is never absent from any mental or physical act. It permeates all we do, as well as all we think and will, with the partial exception of automatic action, above indicated.

THE BEGINNING OF REASON

We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion's bidding. But very early the baby's experience operates as a partial check to feeling's exclusive sway. It keeps him from touching the fire, no matter how its brightness attracts. It may be merely the sense memory of _hurt_ when fingers and that bright thing came together; and one such impression will probably prevent him from ever again touching it. Or it may be the brain-cell's retention of the painful feeling of slapped hands when the fingers reaching out to the flame had not yet quite touched. These punishment experiences are only effective in many children after more or less repetition has set up an automatic prohibition from brain to motor nerves; but right here intellect begins to assert itself in the form of sense memory. The baby does not reason about the matter. His nerve-cells simply remember pain, and that particular brightness and glow, and finger touch--or that reaching out to the glow--and slapped hands, as occurring together. In the same way he early connects pleasure with the taste of certain forbidden things. He does not know they are sweet. He only knows "I want." Even here his desire to taste may be checked in action by a vivid memory of what happened when he tasted that other time, and was spanked or put in his little room all alone with only milk and bread to eat for a long time.

Later on the child may think, from cause to effect, thus: "Sweet, good, want, taste, spank, hurt (or no dinner, all by self, lonely), spank hurt more than sweets good. Not taste." But long before he can work this out, consciously, two distinct memories, one of pleasure and one of pain, are aroused by the sight of the sweet. And what he will do with it depends upon which memory is stronger. In other words, his action is governed altogether by his feeling, though memory, which is an intellectual factor, supplies the material for feeling.

DEVELOPMENT OF REASON AND WILL

Later still, when the child is older, we may have somewhat the following mechanism: "Sweets, good, want, taste; spank, hurt; don't care, spank not hurt much, maybe never found put, sweets very good."

Now the child is reasoning and choosing between two courses of action, _don't_ and _do_. His decision will depend upon whether immediate satisfaction of desire is stronger than the deferred satisfaction of being good, and the fear of punishment. He probably prefers to take a chance, and even if the worst comes, weighs it with the other worst, not having the sweet--and takes the "bird in the hand." He has reasoned, and has chosen between two emotions the one which his judgment says is the more desirable; and his will carries out the decision of his reasoning. His chief end in life is still to get the most immediate pleasure. Still later in child-life, much later, perhaps, his decision about the jam is based on neither love of it nor fear of punishment, but--despite his still sweet tooth--on a reasoned conclusion that if he eats jam now he may be sick, or he may spoil his appetite for dinner; or on a consideration that sweets between meals are not best on dietetic principles; and _will_ very readily backs up the result of his reasoning. Though his determination is largely based upon feeling, reason has chosen between feelings, between immediate desire to have, and desire to avoid future discomfort. Reason is triumphant over present desire.

JUDGMENT

The conclusion or decision that reason has reached we call a judgment. The youth who decides against the sweet between meals, we say, has good judgment. And we base our commendation on the proved fact that sweets are real fuel, giving abundantly of heat and energy, and are not to be eaten as mere pastime when the body is already fully supplied with high calorie food not yet burned up; that if sweets are eaten at irregular intervals and at the call of appetite, and not earned by an adequate output of physical work, the digestive apparatus may become clogged, and an overacid condition of the entire intestinal tract threaten. We call judgment good, then, when it is the result of reasoning with correct or logical premises which correspond with the facts of life. We call it bad when it is the conclusion of incorrect or partial or illogic premises.

A _premise_ "is a proposition laid down, proved, supposed, or assumed, that serves as a ground for argument or for a conclusion; a judgment leading to another judgment as a conclusion" (Standard Dictionary).

Let us illustrate good and bad judgment by following out two lines of reasoning, each quite accurate as such.

I want sweets. Sweets are good for people. They give heat and energy, and I need that, for I am chilly and tired. People say "Don't eat sweets between meals." But why? They contain just what I need and the sooner I get them the better.

So I have sweets when I want them. The judgment to take the sweets as desire indicates is entirely logical if we accept all the premises as correct. And they are, so far as they go; but they are partial; and so cannot altogether correspond with the facts of life. Sweets are good for people who expend much physical energy. They prove injurious in more than limited amounts to the bed-ridden, the inactive, or the sluggish. Hence this premise is partial and so far incorrect. Sweets do give heat and energy, true. I am chilly and tired, also true. But why? Because I am already toxic from the sweets and meats I have had throughout my sedentary years. The question is, Do I need any more energy-producing food when I am not burning up what I have? So again the premise is partial. I do need heat and energy, but I already have the material for it, and my mode of life has disorganized my system's capacity to utilize these foods normally. So now sweets have become a detriment to my well-being. The judgment which determines me to the habit of eating sweets between meals is the result of logic, but of logic spent on tying up premises which do not fit the facts of the case.

One of the most prevalent defects of judgment is illustrated in this common disability to select premises which fit the facts. Ignorance, emotional reasoning, and a defective critical sense probably explain most poor judgments.

The other judgment illustrates the logic of correct, provable premises.

"No, I shall wait until dinner-time. I have no need of so rich a food, for I had an adequate meal at the usual time and have not worked hard enough to justify adding this burden to my digestive apparatus; besides only hard workers with their muscles can afford to eat many sweets. They cause an overacid condition when taken in excess; and any except at mealtimes would be excess for me, with my moderate physical exercise."

This judgment we call good. Its premises correspond to scientific facts.

But much reasoning must always be done with probable premises, ones which seem to correspond to the facts, but which have yet to be proved. And our judgment from such suppositions cannot be final until we see if it works.

Some few centuries ago supposedly wise men called Christopher Columbus a fool. Of course the world was flat. If it were round man would fall off. It was all spread out and the oceans were its limits. If it should be round, like a ball, as that mad man claimed, then the waters must reach from Europe 'round the sphere and touch Asia; or there might be land out there beyond the ocean's curve. But it wasn't round, and the idea of finding a new way to Asia by sailing in the opposite direction was a fool's delusion.

Their logic was perfect. If the earth was flat, and Asia lay east of Europe, it was madness to sail west to reach it. But they argued from a wrong premise, so their judgment was imperfect--for they did not yet know the facts.

The result of all reasoning is judgment. And judgment is good as the materials of the reasoning process correspond to facts, or are in line with the most probable of the yet unknown. It is poor as the reasoning material fails to meet the facts, or is out of harmony with the most probable of the yet unproved.

It is of no avail, then, to attempt to improve our final judgments as such. We must examine the materials we reason with, then learn to group and compare them logically. And in the very separating of true premises from false, we use and train the judgment we would improve. And this the normal mind can do.

REACTION PROPORTIONED TO STIMULI

In the normal mind the emotional or feeling accompaniment of thought and action is proportionate and adequate to the circumstances, _i. e._, there is a certain feeling, of a certain strength, natural to every thought and act; and when only that strength, not more or less, accompanies the thought or the act, we say, "That man is emotionally stable. His mind is normally balanced."

Joy naturally follows some stimuli; sorrow others. Disappointment or loss, shock, failure, death of loved ones, illness in ourselves or others, do not normally bring joy. A keen sense of suffering, temporarily, perhaps, of numbness; the inability to grasp the calamity; or flowing tears, an aching heart, or the stress of willed endurance, are natural, and normal reactions to such stimuli.

A developed will may refuse indulgence in the outward expression of the normal feeling of shock, grief, and loss; and this may be normal. But normal volition does not force us to laugh and dance and be wildly merry in the face of grief and loss and pain. It only suggests the adequate, reasonable acceptance of the facts that cannot be changed--the acceptance of love, faith, and hope that sees in present suffering a means of consecration to service; it does not convert the emotion of sorrow and loss into a pleasurable one. Normal reason does not suggest that _will_ force the reactions to loss and suffering that belong by nature to attainment and success.

Nor does reason suggest the long face, the bitter tears, a storm of anger, in response to comedy and farce, in the face of a good joke, or to meet success; and normal will puts reason's counsel into effect.

NORMAL EMOTIONAL REACTIONS

Some emotions, that seem exaggerated at first thought, may be normal under the circumstances. For no one can know the whole background for emotional response in the life of another. After being long shut up in a darkened room, with bandaged eyes and aching head and sick body, the first visit to the bit of woods back of the house--when all the pains have gone--may bring almost delirious joy. The green of the foliage, the blue of the sky, the arousing tang of the air, the birds, the sense of freedom--all go to the head like new wine. The abandon of joy is a normal response under the circumstances, now. It would hardly be normal to one whose habit it is to visit this same bit of woods every day, to one who loved it, but for whom it had lost the force of newness.

To the child, who has never in all his little life had a wish not gratified, the denial of a desired stick of candy is as great a calamity as is the loss of a fortune to the grown man. And the child reacts to feeling equally intense. These are normal reactions to stimuli--normal, under the circumstances.

THE NORMAL MIND

The normal mind reasons clearly with the best data at hand to results that will stand the test of conformity to reality; the normal mind uses reason and feeling, guided by reasonable attitude; in the normal mind _reason_ advises action and _will_ brings it about; in the normal mind _feeling_ proportionate to the circumstances accompanies every thought and every action. And in the well-balanced man or woman every function of the mind leads to action as its final end.

But man only approximates the normal. The perfectly balanced man or woman is so rare as to be a marked person. The average intelligent individual only in general approximates this standard. He goes beyond it in spurts of untrammeled genius, to wrench lightning from the heavens, and to send his trains through the air; or he allows his feelings to dictate to his reason, and much of the time so exaggerates or depreciates the simple facts of life that the results of his reasoning no longer conform sufficiently to reality as to be thoroughly dependable.