Part 7

Assuming the validity of the proposition that there are two primary factors in the development of the mind in each individual—the egoistic impulses of the child and his specific sensitiveness to environing influences—it may well be asked why it is that the product, the “normal” adult mind, is so uniform in its characters. It is true that this uniformity may very easily be exaggerated, for in a very considerable number of cases gross “abnormalities” are the result of the process of development, but, as I pointed out in an earlier essay, the result on the whole is to produce two broadly distinguishable types of mind—the unstable and the stable—the latter on account of its numerical superiority being also dignified as normal. A considerable uniformity in the final products must therefore be accepted. If, however, environmental influences are an essential factor in the production of this result, there seems no little difficulty in accounting for the uniformity seeing that environments vary so much from class to class, nation to nation, and race to race. Where, we may ask, is the constant in the environmental factors which the uniformity of the outcome leads us to expect? Assuming with Freud that of the egoistic impulses of the child, the sexual alone seriously counts in the formation of character, can it be shown that the influences which surround the child are uniform {84} in their general direction against this? At first sight it would seem certainly not. Even in the same country the variations in taste, reticence, modesty, and morality towards matters of sex interest vary greatly from class to class, and presumably are accompanied by corresponding variations in the type of influence exercised by the environment of the child.

Adequately to deal with this difficulty would involve examining in detail the actual mental attitude of the adult towards the young, especially in regard to matters directly or indirectly touching upon interests of sex. The subject is a difficult one, and if we limit ourselves to the purely human standpoint, ugly and depressing. The biologist, however, need not confine himself to so cramped an outlook, and by means of collecting his observations over a much larger field is able to some extent to escape the distorting effects of natural human prejudice. Viewed in a broad way, it is neither surprising nor portentous that there should naturally exist a strong and persistent jealousy between the adult and the young. Indeed, many of the superficial consequences of this fact are mere commonplaces. Throughout most of the lower animals the relation is obvious and frankly manifested. Indeed, it may be regarded as a more or less inevitable consequence of any form of social life among animals. As such, therefore, it may be expected to appear in some form or other in the human mind. The manifestations of it, however, will by no means necessarily take easily recognizable forms. The social pressure to which the mind is subject will tend to exclude such a feeling from at any rate full consciousness, and such manifestations as are allowed it will be in disguised and distorted forms.

It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that some dim and unrealized offshoot of such a jealousy {85} between adult and young is responsible for the unanimity with which man combines to suppress and delay the development of any evidence of sexual interest by the young. The intensity of the dislike which is felt for admitting the young to share any part of the knowledge of the adult about the physiology of sex is well illustrated by the difficulty parents feel in communicating to their children some of the elementary facts which they may feel very strongly it is their duty to impart. A parent may find himself under these circumstances trying to quiet his conscience with all sorts of excuses and subterfuges while he postpones making the explanations which duty and affection urge upon him as necessary for the health and happiness of his child. An unwillingness so strong and irrational as this must have its root in subconscious processes charged with strong feeling.

The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste. Amongst primitive savages the principle has not acquired the altruistic signification which civilized man has given it, but operates as a definite exclusion to be overcome only by solemn ceremonies of initiation and at the price of submission to painful and sometimes mutilating rites.

The constancy of attitude of the adult towards the young, which is thus seen to be so general, evidently gives to the environmental influences which surround the child a fundamental uniformity, and as we have seen, the theory of the development of the individual mind demands that such a uniformity of environmental influence should be shown to be in action.

This is no place to follow out the practical consequences of the fact that every adult necessarily {86} possesses a primary bias in his attitude towards the young, and a bias which is connected with instinctive impulses of great mental energy. However much this tendency is overlaid by moral principles, by altruism, by natural affection, as long as its true nature is unrecognized and excluded from full consciousness its influence upon conduct must be excessive and full of dangerous possibilities. To it must ultimately be traced the scarcely veiled distrust and dislike with which comparative youth is always apt to be met where matters of importance are concerned. The attitude of the adult and elderly towards the enthusiasms of youth is stereotyped in a way which can scarcely fail to strike the psychologist as remarkable and illuminating in its commonplaceness. The youthful revolutionary, who after all is no more essentially absurd than the elderly conservative, is commonly told by the latter that he too at the same age felt the same aspirations, burnt with the same zeal, and yearned with the same hope until he learnt wisdom with experience—“as you will have, my boy, by the time you are my age.” To the psychologist the kindly contempt of such pronouncements cannot conceal the pathetic jealousy of declining power. Herd instinct, inevitably siding with the majority and the ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history, proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and enterprise and in favour of age and caution, the immemorial wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumblings of senile decay.

Any comprehensive survey of modern civilized life cannot fail to yield abundant instances of the disproportionate influence in the conduct of affairs which has been acquired by mere age. When we remember how little in actual practice man proves himself capable of the use of reason, how very little {87} he actually does profit by experience though the phrase is always in his mouth, it must be obvious that there is some strong psychological reason for the predominance of age, something which must be determinative in its favour quite apart from its merits and capacity when competing with youth. The “monstrous regiment” of old men—and to the biologist it is almost as “monstrous” as the regiment of Mary Stuart was to poor indignant Knox—extends into every branch of man’s activity. We prefer old judges, old lawyers, old politicians, old doctors, old generals, and when their functions involve any immediacy of cause and effect and are not merely concerned with abstractions, we contentedly pay the price which the inelasticity of these ripe minds is sometimes apt to incur.

IV

If the propositions already laid down prove to be sound, we must regard the personality of the adult as the resultant of three groups of forces to which the mind from infancy onwards is subject; _first_ the egoistic instincts of the individual pressing for gratification and possessing the intense mental energy characteristic of instinctive processes, _secondly_ the specific sensitiveness to environmental influences which the mind as that of a gregarious animal necessarily possesses, a quality capable of endowing outside influences with the energy of instinct and, _thirdly_ the environmental influences which act upon the growing mind and are also essentially determined in their intensity and uniformity by instinctive mechanisms.

The work of Freud has been directed mainly to the elucidation of the processes included in the first group—that is to say, to the study of the primarily egoistic impulses and the modifications {88} they develop under restraint. He has worked out, in fact, a veritable embryology of the mind.

The embryology of the body is to those who have had no biological training far from being a gratifying subject of contemplation. The stages through which the body passes before reaching its familiar form have a superficial aspect of ugly and repulsive caricature with which only a knowledge of the great compressed pageant of nature they represent can reconcile the mind. The stages through which, according to the doctrines of Freud, the developing mind passes are not less repulsive when judged from the purely human point of view than are the phases of the body, which betray its cousinship with the fish and the frog, the lemur and the ape. The works of Nature give no support to the social convention that to be truly respectable one must always have been respectable. All her most elaborate creations have “risen in the world” and are descended in the direct line from creatures of the mud and dust. It is characteristic of her method to work with the humblest materials and to patch and compromise at every step. Any given structure of her making is thus not by any means necessarily the best that could conceivably be contrived, but a workable modification of something else, always more or less conditioned in its functioning by the limitations of the thing from which it was made.

To the biologist, therefore, the fact that Freud’s investigations of the development of the mind have shown it passing through stages anything but gratifying to self-esteem will not be either surprising or a ground for disbelief. That Freud’s conclusions are decidedly unpalatable when judged by a narrowly human standard is very obvious to any one who is at all familiar with the kind of criticism they have received. It must be acknowledged, moreover, that his methods of exposition have not always tended {89} to disguise the nauseousness of the dose he attempts to administer. Such matters, however, lie altogether apart from the question whether his conclusions are or are not just, though it is perhaps justifiable to say that had these conclusions been immediately acceptable, the fact would be presumptive evidence that they were either not new or were false.

The work of Freud embodies the most determined, thorough, and scientific attempt which has been made to penetrate the mysteries of the mind by the direct human method of approach, making use of introspection—guided and guarded, it is true, by an elaborate technique—as its essential instrument. To have shaped so awkward and fallacious an instrument into an apparatus for which accuracy and fruitfulness can be claimed is in itself a notable triumph of psychological skill.

The doctrines of Freud seem to be regarded by his school as covering all the activities of the mind and making a complete, though of course not necessarily exhaustive, survey of the whole field. I have already pointed out directions in which it appears to me that inquiries by other methods than those of the psycho-analytic school can be pursued with success. Regarded in a broad way, the Freudian body of doctrine which I have already ventured to describe as essentially an embryology of the mind gives one the impression of being mainly descriptive and systematic rather than dynamic, if one may with due caution use such words. It is able to tell us how such and such a state of affairs has arisen, what is its true significance, and to describe in minute detail the factors into which it can be analysed. When the question of acting upon the mind is raised its resources seem less striking. In this direction its chief activities have been in the treatment of abnormal mental states, and these are dealt with by a laborious process of analysis {90} in which the subject’s whole mental development is retraced, and the numerous significant experiences which have become excluded from the conscious field are brought back into it.

When the unconscious processes which underlie the symptoms have been assimilated to the conscious life of the patient, the symptoms necessarily disappear, and the patient’s mind gains or regains the “normal” condition. However precious such a cure may be to the patient, and however interesting to the physician, its value to the species has to be judged in relation to the value of the “normal” to which the patient has been restored—that is, in relation to the question as to whether any move, however small, in the direction of an enlargement of the human mind has been made. Until some clearer evidence has been furnished of a capacity for development in this direction the Freudian system should, perhaps, be regarded as more notably a psychology of knowledge than a psychology of power.

It is interesting to notice that in discussing the mechanism of psycho-analysis in liberating the “abnormal” patient from his symptoms, Freud repeatedly lays stress on the fact that the efficient factor in the process is not the actual introduction of the suppressed experiences into the conscious field, but the overcoming of the resistances to such an endeavour. I have attempted to show that these resistances or counter-impulses are of environmental origin, and owe their strength to the specific sensitiveness of the gregarious mind. Resistances of similar type and identical origin are responsible for the formation of the so-called normal type of mind. It is a principal thesis of an earlier essay in this book that this normal type is far from being psychologically healthy, is far from rendering available the full capacity of the mind for foresight and {91} progress, and being in exclusive command of directing power in the world, is a danger to civilization. An investigation of the resistant forces that are encountered by the developing mind is clearly, then, a matter of the utmost importance. They are now allowed to come into being haphazard, and while they undoubtedly contain elements of social value and necessary restraints, they are the products, not of a courageous recognition of facts but of fears, prejudices, and repressed instinctive impulses, and are consolidated by ignorance, indolence, and tribal custom.

The interest of the psycho-analytic school has been turned remarkably little into this field. The speculation may be hazarded that in this direction it might find the sources of a directer power over the human mind, and at least some attenuation of that atmosphere of the consulting-room and the mad-house which does so much to detract from its pretensions to be a psychological system of universal validity.

SOME PRINCIPLES OF A BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY.

The third method by which it has been attempted to attack the problems of psychology is that which I have called the comparative. Its characteristic note is a distrust of that attitude towards phenomena which I have called the human point of view. Man’s description and interpretation of his own mental experience being so liable to distortion by prejudice, by self-esteem, by his views as to his own nature and powers, as well as so incomplete by reason of his incapacity to reach by ordinary introspection the deeper strata of his mind, it becomes necessary to make action as far as possible the subject of observation rather than speech, and to regard it as a touchstone of motive more important than the actor’s own views. The principle {92} may be exemplified in a simple and concrete form. If a given piece of human behaviour bears the closest resemblance to behaviour which is characteristic of the ape, the sheep, or the wolf, the biologist in attempting to arrive at the actual cause will ascribe an importance to this resemblance at least no less than that he will give to any explanation of the action as rational and deliberate which may be furnished by the actor or by his own intelligence.

A second principle of the method will be by a study of the whole range of animal life, and especially of forms whose conduct presents obvious resemblances to that of man, to discover what instinctive impulses may be expected to operate in him.

A third principle will be to search for criteria, whereby instinctive impulses or their derivatives arising in the mind can be distinguished from rational motives, or at any rate motives in which the instinctive factor is minimal. Thus will be furnished for the method the objective standard for the judgment of mental observations which is the one indispensable requirement in all psychological inquiries.

When it is known what types of instinctive mechanisms are to be expected, and under what aspects they will appear in the mind, it is possible to press inquiry into many of the obscurer regions of human behaviour and thought, and to arrive at conclusions which, while they are in harmony with the general body of biological science, have the additional value of being immediately useful in the conduct of affairs.

At the very outset of such researches we are met by an objection which illustrates how different the biological conception of the mind is from that current amongst those whose training has been {93} literary and philosophic. The objection I am thinking of is that of the ordinary intellectualist view of man. According to this we must regard him as essentially a rational creature, subject, it is true, to certain feeble relics of instinctive impulsion, but able to control such without any great expense of will power, irrational at times in an amiable and rather “nice” way, but fundamentally always independent, responsible, and captain of his soul. Most holders of this opinion will of course admit that in a distant and vague enough past man must have been much more definitely an instinctive being, but they regard attempts to trace in modern man any considerable residue of instinctive activities as a tissue of fallacious and superficial analogies, based upon a shallow materialism and an ignorance of the great principles of philosophy or a crudeness which cannot assimilate them.

This objection is an expression of the very characteristic way in which mankind over-estimates the practical functioning of reason in his mind and the influence of civilization on his development. In an earlier essay I have tried to show to how great an extent the average educated man is willing to pronounce decided judgments, all of which he believes himself to have arrived at by the exercise of pure reason, upon the innumerable complex questions of the day. Almost all of them concern highly technical matters upon none of which has he the slightest qualification to pronounce. This characteristic, always obvious enough, has naturally during the war shown the exaggeration so apt to occur in all non-rational processes at a time of general stress. It is not necessary to catalogue the various public functions in regard to which the common citizen finds himself in these days moved to advise and exhort. They are numerous, and for the most part highly technical. Generally the {94} more technical a given matter is, the more vehement and dogmatic is the counsel of the utterly uninstructed counsellor. Even when the questions involved are not especially such as can be dealt with only by the expert, the fact that the essential data are withheld from the public by the authorities renders all this amateur statecraft and generalship more than usually ridiculous. Nevertheless, those who find the materials insufficient for dogmatism and feel compelled to a suspense of judgment are apt to fall under suspicion of the crime of failing to “realize” the seriousness of the war. When it is remembered that the duty of the civilian is in no way concerned with these matters of high technique, while he has very important functions to carry out in maintaining the nation’s strength if he could be brought to take an interest in them, it seems scarcely possible to argue that such conduct is that of a very highly rational being. In reality the objective examination of man’s behaviour, if attention is directed to the facts and not to what the actors think of them, yields at once in every field example after example of similar irrational features.

When the influence of civilization is looked upon as having rendered man’s instincts of altogether secondary importance in modern life, it is plain that such a conclusion involves a misconception of the nature of instinct. This well-worn term has come to have so vague a connotation that some definition of it is necessary. The word “instinct” is used here to denote inherited modes of reaction to bodily need or external stimulus. It is difficult to draw a sharp distinction between instinct and mere reflex action, and an attempt to do so with exact precision is of no particular value. In general we may say that the reactions which should be classed under the head of instinct are delayed (that is, not necessarily carried out with fatal promptitude {95} immediately upon the stimulus), complex (that is, consist of acts rather than mere movements), and may be accompanied by quite elaborate mental processes. In a broad way also it may be said that the mental accompaniments of an instinctive process are for the most part matters of feeling. During the growth of the need or stimulus there will be a desire or inclination which may be quite intense, and yet not definitely focused on any object that is consciously realized; the act itself will be distinguished to the actor by its rightness, obviousness, necessity, or inevitableness, and the sequel of the act will be satisfaction. This mere hint of the psychical manifestations of instinctive activity leaves quite out of account the complex effects which may ensue when two instinctive impulses that have come to be antagonistic reach the mind at the same time. The actual amount of mental activity which accompanies an instinctive process is very variable; it may be quite small, and then the subject of it is reduced to a mere automaton, possessed, as we say, by an ungovernable passion such as panic, lust, or rage; it may be quite large, and sometimes the subject, deceived by his own rationalizations and suppressions, may suppose himself to be a fully rational being in undisputed possession of free will and the mastery of his fate at the very moment when he is showing himself to be a mere puppet dancing to the strings which Nature, unimpressed by his valiant airs, relentlessly and impassively pulls.