satisfaction in following, partly submitting to, or completely
surrendering to a person or cause more dominating than the
individual. Thorndike describes this instinct in its simplest
form:

There is an original tendency to respond to the situation, "the
presence of a human being larger than one's self, of angry or mastering
aspect," and to blows and restraint by submissive behavior.
When weak from wounds, sickness, or fatigue, the tendency is
stronger. The man who is bigger, who can outyell and outstare us,
who can hit us without our hitting him, and who can keep us from
moving, does originally extort a crestfallen, abashed physique and
mind. Women in general are thus by original nature submissive to
men in general. Every human being thus tends by original nature
to arrive at a status of mastery or submission toward every other
human being, and even under the more intelligent customs of civilized
life somewhat of the tendency persists in many men.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, briefer course, p. 34.]

The impulse to follow and submit to something not ourselves
and more dominating than ourselves is very strong in
most men, and is called out by stimuli much less violent than
those physical manifestations of power mentioned in the
above quotation. Men instinctively long to be led, especially
if, as happens in the case of most individuals, there is in them
a marked absence of definite interest, conviction, or skill.
This instinct is aroused by any sign of exceptional power, or,
more generally still, by any exceptional conspicuousness,
whether socially useful or not. Men follow leaders partly
because men live in groups with common interests and in any
large-scale organization leadership is necessary. But the
power of demagogues, the faithfulness with which men will
follow a bad leader as well as a good, are evidence that men find
an instinctive satisfaction in submission. Self-dependence
stands out as a virtue or an accomplishment precisely because
most men feel so utterly at sea without any loyalty, allegiance,
or devotion. Any one who has spent a summer at a
boy's camp will recall the helplessness of youngsters to mark
out a program for themselves and to keep themselves happy
on the one afternoon when there was no official program of
play. Half the mischief performed on such occasions is initiated
by some boy with just a little more independence and
persuasiveness than the others. And it is not only among
children that there is evinced an almost pathetic bewilderment
and unrest in the absence of a leader. There is an
equally pathetic and sometimes dangerous attachment among
adults to the first sign of leadership that makes its appearance.
The demoralizing authority of the ward heeler is sometimes
dependent on no more trustworthy an index of real power
than a booming voice, a rough _camaraderie_, and a physically
"big" personality. And there are, on the other hand,
instances where lack of leadership seemed to be the chief reason
why certain classes of labor were unable to make their
demands effective at a much earlier date than they did. In the
first really big strike in the telephone industry in Boston
during the autumn of 1918 success seems to have been chiefly due
to the remarkable leadership of one of the young women
operators, a type of leadership which seems to have appeared
nowhere else in the telephone industry.[1]

[Footnote 1: See the article by Wm. Hard in the _New Republic_, May 3, 1919.]

The instinct of submissiveness, as has been pointed out in
connection with the discussion of all the other of man's original
tendencies, is not only strong, but may find its outlets in
attachment, both to desirable and to undesirable persons or
objects. Once aroused, attachment and submission may become
as stanch as they are blind. The signs which arouse our
loyalty may be and most frequently are glaring rather than
important. As Trotter phrases it:

The rational basis of the relation [following a leader] is, however,
seen to be at any rate open to discussion when we consider the
qualities in a leader upon which his authority so often rests, for there can
be little doubt that their appeal is more generally to instinct than
to reason. In ordinary politics it must be admitted that the gift of
public speaking is of more decisive value than anything else. If a
man is fluent, dextrous, and ready on the platform, he possesses the
one indispensable requisite for statesmanship; if in addition he has
the gift of moving deeply the emotions of his hearers, his capacity
for guiding the infinite complexities of national life becomes undeniable.
Experience has shown that no exceptional degree of any other
capacity is necessary to make a successful leader. There need be no
specially arduous training, no great weight of knowledge, either of
affairs or the human heart, no receptiveness to new ideas, no outlook
into reality.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter, p. 116.]

Though these be picturesquely exaggerated statements, they
do indicate the fact that the outward signs of leadership, of a
conspicuously emotional sort, may be more significant in determining
the attachments and loyalties of human beings,
than are genuine marks of capacity in the direction of political
and social affairs.

This pronounced tendency on the part of human beings to
follow a lead, and anybody's lead, as it were, has the most
serious dangers. It means that a man with qualities that
sway men's emotions and stir their imaginations can attach
to himself the profoundest loyalties for personal or class ends.
The gifts of personal magnetism, of a kindly voice, an air of
confidence and calmness, exuberant vitality, and a sensitivity
to other people's feelings, along with some of the genuine
qualities of effective and expert control of men and affairs,
may be used by a demagogue as well as by a really devoted
servant of the popular good, by an Alcibiades as well as by a
Garibaldi, by a conquering Napoleon as well as by a Lincoln.

Our instincts of following and submission, apart from education,
are as easily aroused by specious signs of social power
and conspicuousness as by signs of mental effectiveness and
genuine altruistic interest. The exploitation of these tendencies
by selfish leaders is therefore particularly easy. The
large circulation of the "yellow press," the power in politics
of the unscrupulous, the selfish, and the second-rate, are
symptoms of how men's natural tendency to follow has been
played upon in support of plans and ambitions which would
not be sanctioned by their reason. The genius for leadership
has been exhibited in criminal gangs, in conquests and in
fanaticism, as well as in the promotion of good government,
of better labor conditions and better education.

But progress in these last-named is dependent on the utilization
of men's submissiveness by leaders interested in the
promotion of desirable social enterprises. While men may be
so easily led, they are responsive to leadership in good
directions as well as bad. No great social movements, the freeing
of slaves, the gaining of universal suffrage, the bettering of
factory conditions, freedom of thought and action, could have
gained headway if men had been born unwilling to follow.
There are (see chapter IX) ineradicable differences in capacity
between men, and if the uninformed and the socially helpless
could not be aroused to follow those great both in mind and
magnanimity, it is difficult to see how the lot of mankind ever
could have, or ever can improve. A good leader may make
men support, out of instinctive loyalty, purposes and plans
which, if they completely understood them, they would support
out of reason. Up to the present most people have been,
and will probably remain for a long time to come, too ill-educated
or too poorly endowed by nature to understand the
bearings of the great social movements in which they are
involved. In consequence, it is a matter of congratulation that
their instinct of submission can be utilized in the interests of
their welfare which they frequently not only do not know how
to obtain, but do not understand. The Roman populace, enchanted
by Augustus, follow him to greatness, without comprehending
the imperial destiny which they are helping to
build. The barbarian hordes affectionately following the
lead of Charlemagne incidentally help to build the whole
edifice of European civilization.

MEN DISPLAY QUALITIES OF LEADERSHIP. The obverse of man's
tendency to follow a lead is, of course, his tendency to take it.
Individuals tend to display persistently and conspicuously
just those qualities which will win them the allegiance of
others.

The instinct of self-display is manifested by many of the higher
social or gregarious animals.... Perhaps among mammals the horse
displays it most clearly. The muscles of all parts are strongly
innervated, the creature holds himself erect, his neck is arched, his
tail lifted, his motions become superfluously vigorous and extensive,
he lifts his hoofs high in air as he parades before the eyes of his fellows....
Many children clearly exhibit this instinct of self-display; before
they can walk or talk the impulse finds its satisfaction in the admiring
gaze or plaudits of the family circle as each new acquirement is
practiced; a little later it is still more clearly expressed by the
frequently repeated command, "See me do this," or "See how well I
can do so and so"; and for many a child more than half the delight
of riding on a pony, of wearing a new coat, consists in the satisfaction
of this instinct, and vanishes if there be no spectators.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall; _loc. cit._, pp. 62-64.]

Individuals thus instinctively love to stand out from their
fellows, to outdistance and outclass them. And the qualities
of leadership are not infrequently stimulated by this competition
with others, for place, power, distinction. To win the
allegiance and loyal affection of men means that one's own
personality is enhanced; one stands out as a man of affairs, a
social or political leader, a guide to others in action or thought.
As has already been pointed out, the qualities that will win
the submission and loyalty of others vary widely. In the case
of one man it may be a charming smile and a gift of saying
striking and stirring rather than significant things. In the
case of another it may be his air of immense confidence,
restraint, and reserve. It may be brute force or a terrible
earnestness; it may even be, as in the case of certain religious
reformers, extraordinary gentleness. Garibaldi "inspired
among men of the most various temperaments love that
nothing could shake, and devotion that fell little short of
idolatry." "He enjoyed the worship and cast the spell of
a legendary hero." Alcibiades charmed, despite the patent
evil he wrought, by his magical personal beauty and grace.
Vandamme said of Napoleon: "That devil of a man exercises
on me a fascination that I cannot explain to myself, and in
such a degree that, though I fear neither God nor devil, when
I am in his presence I am ready to tremble like a child, and he
could make me go through the eye of a needle to throw myself
into the fire." Augereau is stupefied at their first meeting,
and confesses afterwards that "this little devil of a general"
has inspired him with awe.[1]

[Footnote 1: See chapter XXI on "Personality" in Ross's _Social Control_.]

Men's qualities of leadership depend, however, not only on
their personal charm, but on certain seeming or genuine
symptoms of effectiveness. Evidences of strong determination,
of a sweeping imagination, of calm, of confidence, of
enthusiasm, of qualities possessed by the vast majority only in
minor degrees, win men's admiration and devotion because
they are associated with the ability to accomplish great ends,
to do the unusual, to succeed where most people fail. Most
men are so conscious of their limitations and the difficulties of
any enterprise which they undertake that at any sign of exceptional
talent, whether real or apparent, they will commit
their respect, their energies, and sometimes, as in the case of a
religious crusade, their lives.

For good or evil, the possession, the cultivation, and the
exhibition of the qualities of leadership give men enormous
power. There was in the nineteenth century a historical
fashion, brilliantly exemplified by Carlyle, to assume that
history was made by great men. Latterly, there has been
wide dissent from this simplification of the processes of
history, but it is clear that innovations must be started by
individuals, and that a powerful leader is a matchless instrument
for initiating, and getting wide and enthusiastic support for
changes, whether good or bad. To quote Carlyle's eloquent
exaggeration:

For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has
accomplished in this world, is at the bottom the History of the Great
Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, ... the
creators of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to
attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are
properly the outer material result, the practical realization and
embodiment, of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the
world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be
considered, was the history of these.... Could we see _them_ well, we
should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's
history.[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle: _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, Lecture I.]

Later Nietzsche made much of this same idea, of the Superman
striding through the world and changing its destiny,
although in Nietzsche the Superman was an end in himself
rather than the servant of the world in which he lived.

To most historical writers to-day the forces at work in history
are much too complex to be dismissed with any such
simple melodrama. But there remain striking testimonies
of the influence of leaders. The sweep of Mohammedanism
into Europe was initiated by the burning and contagious zeal
of one religious enthusiast. The campaign against slavery
in this country assumed large proportions through the strenuous
leadership of the Garrisons and the Wendell Phillipses.
In our own day we have seen the same phenomenon; the
great political and social changes of the last generation have
all had their special advocates and leaders who, if they were
merely expressing the "spirit of the times," yet did give that
spirit expression. Every reform or revolution has its leading
spirits. That leadership is not the one essential goes without
saying; there have been great guides of repeatedly lost causes.
But many great causes may have been lost through the want
of good leadership.

In contemporary life leadership is not always directly personal,
but is carried on through the medium of the newspapers
and periodicals. But this merely means that a leader
may reach a wider audience; he reaches thousands through
picture and print, instead of hundreds by word of mouth.

Qualities of leadership may be utilized in the support of
the customary or the established, as well as in initiation and
support of the novel. People ape the great, or those that pass
for great, in manners and morals. The words of a distinguished
public man have prestige in the maintenance of the
established. Men _will_ follow, and if the socially conspicuous
lead them along the ways of the established, they will follow
there as readily and, being creatures of habit, often more
readily than along new paths. The immense following among
the lower social classes that the Conservative Party had in
England all through the nineteenth century in the face of
proposed changes that would have bettered their own conditions,
is an interesting illustration of this. This is partly
because the influence of leaders is dependent on their social
status as well as their personal qualities. The opinions of
inventors and big business men are taken with eagerness and
credulity even when touching matters outside their own field.
A man is made, as it were, _ipso facto_, a leader, by being rich,
powerful, of a socially distinguished family, or the director of
a large industry, although he may have, besides, qualities of
leadership that do not depend on his social position.

MAN PITIES AND PROTECTS WEAK AND SUFFERING THINGS. Nearly
all human beings exhibit a tendency to protect weak and
suffering things. This impulse is closely related to, and
probably has its origin in the parental instinct, more common, of
course, in women than in men. The feeling of affectionate
pity and the impulse to rescue from pain are most intense
when the distressed thing is a child, and particularly one's
own. One of the most poignant instances extant is the speech
of Andromache, one of the Trojan women in Euripides's play
of that name, to her child who is about to be slain by the
Greeks:

  And none to pity thee!... Thou little thing,
  That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling
  All round thy neck! Beloved; can it be
  All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee
  And fostered; all the weary nights wherethrough
  I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew
  Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time;
  Not ever again. Put up thine arms and climb
  About my neck; now kiss me, lips to lips...
  O ye have found an anguish that outstrips
  All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks!
  Why will ye slay this innocent that seeks
  No wrong?...[1]

[Footnote 1: Euripides: ''Trojan Women'' (Gilbert Murray translation), p. 49.]

But the "tender emotion" as McDougall calls it, is aroused
by other children than one's own, and by others than children.
It is called out particularly by things that are by nature
helpless and delicate, but may be aroused by adults who are
placed in situations where they are suffering and powerless.
Samson, shorn of his strength, has been a traditional occasion
for pathos. The sick, the bereaved, the down-and-outers, the
failures, the forlorn and broken-hearted, call out in most men
an impulse to befriend and protect. Those who have been
dealt with unjustly or severely by their associates and society
and who have no redress, the poverty-stricken, the criminal
who has been punished and remains an exile, the maimed
and deformed, the widow and orphan, all these, arouse, apart
from the restraining force exercised by other instincts and
habits, such as anger and disgust, a natural tendency to pity
and aid.

The parental instinct in its direct and primitive form is
responsible for the closeness of family relations, a most important
consideration in the case of humans who have, as already
discussed, a long period of infancy during which they are
absolutely dependent on their elders. In the higher species,
writes McDougall, "The protection and cherishing of the
young is the constant and all-absorbing occupation of the
mother, to which she devotes all her energies, and in the
course of which she will at any time undergo privation, pain,
and death. The instinct becomes more powerful than any
other, and can override any other, even fear itself."[2] Wherever
the power of the parental instinct has waned, as in Greek
and Roman society, the civilization in which that degeneration
occurred was subjected to rapid decay.[3]

[Footnote 2: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 67.]

[Footnote 3: _Cf. Ibid._, p. 271.]

The parental instinct in its more general form of pity and
protectiveness toward all weak and suffering things is, in the
minds of many moralists, the origin of all altruistic sentiments
and actions, and at the same time the moral indignation
which insists on the punishment of wrong-doers. It is
clearly apparent in such movements as the Societies for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children or to Animals, the antivivisection
crusade, and the like. But according to such a
distinguished moralist as John Stuart Mill, the whole system
of justice and punishment has its origins in this tender feeling
for those who have been wronged.

FEAR. Fear is one of the least specialized of human traits,
being called out in a great variety of situations, and resulting
in a great variety of responses. The most obvious symptom
of fear is flight, but there may be a dozen other responses.
"Crouching, clinging, starting, trembling, remaining stock
still, covering the eyes, opening the mouth and eyes, a temporary
cessation followed by an acceleration of the heart-beat,
difficulty in breathing, paleness, sweating, and erection of the
hair are responses of which certain ones seem bound, apart
from training, to certain situations, such as sudden loud
noises or clutches, the sudden appearance of strange objects,
thunder and lightning, loneliness and the dark."[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _loc. cit._, p. 20.]

In general, the marked physical reactions and deep emotional
disturbance that we call fear are aroused by anything
loud or strange, or that has outward signs of possible danger
to ourselves, such as a large wild animal approaching us. In
civilized man, whose life is comparatively sheltered, there are
considerable individual differences in susceptibility to fear,
and in the intensity with which it controls the individual.
But there are certain typical situations that call it forth.
Among young children, and not much less so among adults,
fear is aroused by any sudden loud noise, by strange men and
strange animals, black things and dark places, "vermin," such
as spiders and snakes, among a great many adults fear of
high places, and, among a few agaraphobia or fear of open
spaces.[1] The deep-seatedness of fear has been explained by
the fact that most of the things which instinctively arouse
fear were, in primitive life, the source of very real danger and
that under those conditions, where it was absolutely essential
to beware of the unfamiliar and the strange, only those animals
survived who were equipped with such a protective
mechanism as fear provides.

[Footnote 1: For a discussion of these, see James: _Psychology_,
vol. II, p. 415 ff.]

The instinct of fear has important social consequences, especially
as its influence is not infrequently clothed over with
reasons. In savage life, as McDougall points out, "fear of
physical punishment inflicted by the anger of his fellows must
have been the great agent of discipline of primitive man;
through such fear he must first have learned to control and
regulate his impulses in conformity with the needs of social
life."[2] In contemporary society fear is not so explicitly
present, but it is still a deep-seated power over men's lives.
Fear of punishment may not be the only reason why citizens
remain law-abiding, but it is an important control over many
of the less intelligent and the less socially minded. In an
unideal society there are still many who will do as much evil as is
"within the law," and fear of the consequences of failing a
course is among some contemporary undergraduates still an
indispensable stimulus of study.

[Footnote 2: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 303.]

Fear plays a part, however, not only in preventing people
from breaking the law, but often from living their lives freely
and after their own convictions. As has been strikingly
pointed out by Hilaire Belloc and Hobson, one of the greatest
evils of our present hit-or-miss methods of employment is
the fear of "losing his job," the uncomfortable feeling of
insecurity often felt by the workingman who, having so
frequently nothing to store up against a rainy day, lives in
perpetual fear of sickness or discharge.

In earlier times fear of the consequences of expressing dissent
from established opinions and beliefs was one of the
chief sources of social inertia. Where excommunication, torture,
and death followed dissent, it is not surprising that men
feared to be dissenters. In contemporary society under
normal conditions men have much less to fear in the way of
punishment, but may accept the traditional and conventional
because they fear the consequences of being different,
even if those consequences are not anything more serious than
a personal snub.

While men fear to dissent because of the disapproval to
which they may be subjected, dissent, the novel and strange
in action and opinion are themselves feared by most men
because of the unknown and unpredictable consequences to
which they may lead. Men were at first afraid of the steam-engine
and the locomotive. Men still fear novel political and
social ideas before they can possibly understand what they
have to be afraid of. The fact that thought so continually
turns up the novel and the strange is, according to Bertrand
Russell, precisely the reason why most men are afraid to
think. And fear of the novel, the strange, the unaccustomed
is, as in the case of many other instincts, a perfectly natural
means of protection that would otherwise have to be sought
by elaborate processes of reason. In what we call prudence,
caution, and care, fear undoubtedly plays some part, and
Plato long ago pointed out it is only the fool, not the brave
man, who is utterly unafraid.[l]

[Footnote 1: _Protagoras_.]

Psychologists may be said to differ largely as to the utility
of fear. They are nearly all agreed that in the forest life
which was man's originally, fear had its specific marked
advantages. Open spaces, dark caverns, loud noises were
undoubtedly associated very frequently with danger to the
primitive savage, and an instinctive recoil from these centers
of disaster was undoubtedly of survival value. But there is
an increasing tendency to discount the utility of fear in civilized
life. "Many of the manifestations of fear must be
regarded as pathological, rather than useful.... A certain
amount of timidity obviously adapts us to the world we live
in, but the _fear paroxysm_ is surely altogether harmful to him
who is its prey."[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 419.]

Fear and worry, which is a continuous form of fear, in general
hinder action rather than promote it. In its extreme
form it brings about complete paralysis, as in the case of
terror-stricken hunted animals. When humans or animals are
utterly terrified even death may result. This fact that fear
hinders action, sometimes most seriously, seems to some
philosophic writers, especially Bertrand Russell, a key fact
for social life. "No institution," he writes, "inspired by
fear, can further life."[2] And in another connection: "In the
world as we have been imagining it, economic fear will be removed
out of life.... No one will be haunted by the dread of
poverty.... The unsuccessful professional man will not live
in terror lest his children should sink in the scale.... In such
a world, most of the terrors that lurk in the background of
men's minds will no longer exist."[3] "In the daily lives of most
men and women, fear plays a _greater part than hope. It is not
so that life should be lived_."[4]

[Footnote 2: Bertrand Russell: _Why Men Fight_, p. 180.]

[Footnote 3: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, p. 203.]

[Footnote 4: _Ibid._, p. 186. (Italics mine.)]

LOVE AND HATE. All human relations are qualified by the
presence, more or less intense, of emotion. Human beings
are not merely so many items that are coldly counted and
handled, as one counts and handles pounds of sugar and
pieces of machinery. A man may thus regard human beings
when he deals with them in mass, or thinks of them in statistical
tables or in the routine of a government office. But
human beings experience some emotional accompaniment in
their dealings with individuals, especially when face to face,
and experience more especially, in varying degrees, the emotions
of love or hate. These terms are here used in the general
sense of the receptive, positive, or expansive attitude and the
cold, negative, repellent, and contractual attitude toward
others. These may both be intense and consciously noted, as
in the case of long-cherished and deep affections or antipathies
to different individuals. They may appear as a half-realized
sense of pleasure in the mere presence and poise of a
person, or a curious sense of discomfort and irritation at his
appearance, his voice, or his gesture. These attitudes, even
when slight, color and qualify our relations with other
individuals. They may, in their larger manifestations, play so
large a part, that they must be considered separately, and in
detail.

LOVE. Love, used in this broad sense, varies in intensity.
It may be nothing more--it certainly frequently starts as
nothing more--than the feeling, so native as to be fairly
called instinctive, of common sympathy, fellow feeling,
immediate affinity with another. The psychological origins of
this disposition have already been noted in connection with
man's tendency to experience sympathetically immediately
the emotions of others. Every business man, lawyer, teacher,
any one who comes much into contact with a wide variety
of people, knows how, antecedent to any experience with an
individual's capacities or talents, or even before one had a
chance to draw any inferences from a person's walk, his bearing,
or his clothing, one may register an immediate like or dislike.
Every one has had the experience in crossing a college
campus or riding in a train or street car of noting, in passing
some one whom one has never seen before, an immediate
reaction of good-will and affection. This has been charmingly
expressed by a well-known English poet:

  "The street sounds to the soldiers' tread,
     And out we troop to see;
   A single redcoat turns his head,
     He turns and looks at me.

  "My man, from sky to sky's so far,
     We never crossed before;
   Such leagues apart the world's ends are,
     We're like to meet no more.

  "What thoughts at heart have you and I,
     We cannot stop to tell;
   But dead or living, drunk or dry,
     Soldier, I wish you well."[1]

[Footnote 1: A. E. Housman: _The Shropshire Lad_ (John Lane edition), p. 32.]

All affection for individuals probably starts in this immediate
instinctive liking. "The first note that gives sociability a
personal quality and raises the comrade into an incipient
friend is doubtless sensuous affinity. Whatever reaction we
may eventually make on an impression, after it has had time
to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectual
habit, its first assault is always on the senses; and no sense is
an indifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial
rate of vibration, and gives its stimuli a varying welcome.
Little as we may attend to these instinctive hospitalities of
sense, they betray themselves in unjustified likes and dislikes
felt for casual persons and things, in the _je ne sais quai_
that makes instinctive sympathy."[2] From this immediate
instinctive liking it may rise to deep personal attachments,
strikingly manifested in friendship and love between the
sexes, both immemorially celebrated by poets and novelists.
Love is aroused chiefly by persons, and among persons,
especially in the case of sexual love, most frequently by more or
less physical beauty and attractiveness. But affection may
be aroused and is certainly sustained by other than merely
physical qualities.

[Footnote 2: Santayana: _Reason in Society_, p. 151.]

It is provoked by what we call personal or social charm, a
genuine kindliness of manner, an open-handed sincerity and
frankness, considerateness, gentleness, whimsicality. Which
particular social graces will win our affections depends of
course on our own interests, equipment, and fund of instinctive
and acquired sympathies. Popular psychology has in
various proverbs hit at and not entirely missed some of the
obvious and contradictory elements: "Opposites attract,"
"Birds of a feather flock together," and so on. Intellectual
qualities, in persons of marked intellectual interests, will also
sustain friendship and deepen an instinctive liking. Friendships
thus begin in accident and are continued through community
of interest. It is to be questioned whether merely
striking intellectual qualities initiate a friendship. They may
command admiration and respect, but liking, friendship, and
love have a more emotional and personal basis.

This same warm affectionate appreciation that nearly all
people have for other persons, fewer people--great poets,
philosophers, and enthusiastic leaders of men--have for
causes, institutions, and ideas. One feels in the works of great
thinkers the same warmth and loyalty to ideas and causes
that ordinary people display toward their friends. Plato has
given for all time the progress of love from attachment to a
single individual through to institutions, ideas, and what he
called mystically the idea of beauty itself.

For he who would proceed rightly in this matter should begin in
youth to turn to beautiful forms; and first, if his instructor guide
him rightly, he should learn to love one such form only--out of that
he should create fair thoughts, and soon he will himself perceive that
the beauty of one form is truly related to the beauty of another,
and then if beauty in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be
not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same!
And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one,
which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover
of all beautiful forms; this will lead him on to consider that the
beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of the outward
form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will
be content to love and tend him... until his beloved is compelled
to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and
understand that all is of one kindred; and that personal beauty is
only a trifle; and after laws and institutions, he will lead him on to
the sciences, that he may see their beauty... until at length he
grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a
single science which is the science of beauty everywhere.[l]

[Footnote 1: Plato: _Symposium_ (Jowett translation), p. 502.]

There have been again great scientists who have had the
same warm affectionate devotion for their subject-matter
that most men display toward persons. There are scholars
almost literally in love with their subjects. There have been
a greater number whose capacity for affection has extended to
include the whole human race, and, indeed, all animate creation.
Such a type of character is beautifully exemplified in
Saint Francis of Assisi:

In Francis all living creatures may truly be said to have found a
friend and benefactor; his great heart embraced all the men and
women who sought his sympathy and advice, and his pity for the
dumb helplessness of suffering animals was deep and true. He would
lift the worm from his path lest a careless foot should crush it, and
would encourage his "little sister grasshopper" to perch upon his
hand, and chirp her song to his gentle ear. He tamed the fierce wolf
of Gubbio, and fed the robins with crumbs from his table.[1]

[Footnote 1: Goff and Kerr-Lawson: _Assisi of Saint Francis_, p. 121.]

And Christ stands, of course, in the Christian world, as the
supreme symbol of love for mankind.

In ordinary men it is this generalized affection which is at
the basis of any sustained interest in philanthropic or altruistic
enterprises. No less than a large and generous affection for
humanity is required to enable men to endure for long the
dreariness and disillusion so often incident to philanthropic
work, the conflicts and disappointments of public administration.
Certainly this is true of the first rank of statesmen; no
characterization of Lincoln fails to emphasize his essential
humanity and tenderness.

Disinterested love for humanity is normally most intense
in the adolescent.[2] The pressure of private concerns, of one's
narrowing interest in one's own career, one's own family, and
small circle of friends, the restriction of one's sympathies by
fixed habits and circumscribed experience, all tend to dampen
by middle age the ardor of the man who as an undergraduate
at eighteen set out to make the world "a better place to live
in." But more effective in dampening enthusiasm is the disillusion
and weariness that set in after a period of exuberant
and romantic benevolence to mankind in general. "We
call pessimists," writes a contemporary French philosopher,
"those who are in reality only disillusioned optimists."[1] So
the cynic may be fairly described as a disheartened lover of
men. It is only an unusual gift of affectionate good-will
that enables mature men, after rough and disillusioning experiences
in public life, to maintain without sentimentality a genuine
and persistent interest in the welfare of others. Those in
whom the fund of human kindness is slender will, and easily
do, become cynical and hard.

[Footnote 2: Simeon Strunsky has somewhere remarked: "At eighteen
a man is interested in causes; at twenty-eight in commutation
tickets."]

[Footnote 1: Georges Sorel: _Reflection on Violence_ (English
translation), p. 9.]

The attitude of affection for others is profoundly influential
in stimulating our interest in specific individuals, and modifying
our attitudes toward them. We cannot help being more
interested in those for whom we entertain affection than in
those to whom we are indifferent. In the same way our judgments
of our own friends, families, and children are qualified
by our affection for them. Parents and lovers are notoriously
partial, and a fair judgment of the work of our friends
demands unusual clarity, determination, and poise.

In a larger way the generally friendly attitude towards
others, genial expansive receptivity, is at the basis of what is
called "charity for human weakness." The gentle cynic can
see and tolerate other men's weaknesses:

 "He knows how much of what men paint themselves
  Would blister in the light of what they are;
  He sees how much of what was great now shares
  An eminence transformed and ordinary;
  He knows too much of what the world has hushed
  In others, to be loud now for himself."[2]

[Footnote 2: Edwin Arlington Robinson: "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man
from Stratford," in his _Man Against the Sky_.]

The devoutly religious have displayed keen psychological
insight when they made man's salvation dependent on God's
charity, and identified, as did Dante, charity with love.[3]

[Footnote 3: "Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing."
_The New Life_. XX (son XI) _Amore e cor gentile son una cosa._
To Dante the spontaneous impulse to love is the basis of all altruism.
To feel and to follow this impulse is to be truly noble, to have a
"_cor gentile_," a gentle heart.]

HATE. Hate may be described as an extreme form of disaffection
usually provoked by some marked interference with
our activities, desires, or ideals. But in less intense degree
the negative feeling towards others may be provoked immediately
and unmistakably by most casual evidence of voice,
manner, or bearing. Such immediate revulsions of feeling
contrast with the instances of "instinctive sympathy" previously
cited, and are as direct and uncontrollable. Even
kindly disposed persons cannot help experiencing in the presence
of some persons they have never seen before, a half-conscious
thrill of repulsion or a dislike colored with dread.
A shifting gaze, a noticeably pretentious manner, a marked
obsequiousness, a grating voice, a chillness of demeanor, a
physical deformity, these, however little they may have to do
with a person's genuine qualities, do affect our attitudes toward
them. As the familiar verse has it:

 "I do not like you, Dr. Fell,
  The reason why I cannot tell,
  But this I know, and know full well,
  I do not like you, Dr. Fell."

We may later revise our estimates, but the initial reaction
is made, and often remains as a subconscious qualification of
our general attitude toward another. People of worldly experience
learn to trust their first reactions, to "size a man up"
almost intuitively, and to be surprised if their first impressions
go astray.

From this merely instinctive revulsion the negative attitude
may rise to that terrible form of destructive antipathy
which is "hate," as popularly understood. In between lie
degrees of dislike depending partly on the strength of the
initial antipathy, but equally so on the degree to which others,
whether persons, institutions, or ideas, interfere with our
activities, desires, or ideals. The man who seriously obstructs
our love, our pleasure, or our ambition, or who tries to do so,
provokes hate, and its concomitants of jealousy, rage, and
pugnacity. It is not only that we dislike the mere presence
of the person (in the opposite case the mere presence of the
beloved object is a joy), but we dislike it for what it portends
in danger and threat to ourselves. The more serious the evil
or disaster for which a person comes to stand, the more violent
the hatred for him, despite his personal fascinations.
The villain is not infrequently a "damned smiling villain."

The provocation of hate is complicated by the fact that it
is closely associated with fear. We dislike those who threaten
our happiness partly because we fear them. And we fear, as
was pointed out in more detail in the discussion of that powerful
human trait, the unfamiliar, the strange, the startling, the
unexpected. The facility with which sensational newspapers
can work up in an ignorant population a hate for foreign
nations, especially those of a totally alien civilization, is made
possible by the fear which these uninformed readers can feel
at the dangerous possibilities of mysterious foreign hordes.
The fomenting of fear is in nearly all such cases a prerequisite
to the fomenting of hate. And the promotion of hate has
historically been one of the frequent ingredients of international
conflicts.

Like love, hate is profoundly influential in modifying our
interest in persons and situations. To dislike a person moderately
is, in his absence, to be indifferent to him. To dislike
him intensely, in a sense increases our interest in him, though
perversely. Just as we wish the beloved person to succeed, to
gain honor and reputation and wealth, so we long for and
rejoice in the downfall and discomfiture of our enemies. Thus
writes the Psalmist:

Arise, O Lord, save me, my God; for thou has smitten all mine
enemies upon the cheekbone; thou hast broken the teeth of the
ungodly....

Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies that I might
destroy those that hate me.

Hate may be directed against persons, and usually it is.
But hatred may be directed against institutions and ideas as
well. For many persons it will be impossible for a decade to
listen to German music or the German language, so closely
have these become associated in their minds with ideas and
practices which they detest. To a dogmatic Calvinist in the
sixteenth century, both an heretical creed and its practitioners,
were objects of abomination. Disappointed men may
take out in a spleen and hatred of mankind their personal
pique and balked desires.

Great hates may be present at the same time and in
the same persons as great loves. Indeed for some persons
strength in the one passion is impossible without a corresponding
strength in its opposite. We cannot help hating,
more or less, not only those who interfere with our own welfare,
but with the welfare of those who, being dear to us, have
become, as we say, a part of our lives. Thus writes Bertrand
Russell in the introduction to his treatment of some of the
radical social tendencies of our own day:

Whatever bitterness or hate may be found in the movements which
we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their
mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects
of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a
breadth of outlook, and a comprehensiveness of understanding which
are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest.[1]

[Footnote 1: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, pp. xvii-xviii.]

Hate may thus be, as great religious and social reformers
illustrate, invoked on the side of good as well as evil. The
prophets burned with a "righteous indignation." But hate
is a violent and consuming passion, bent on destroying
obstacles rather than solving problems. It consumes in hatred
for individuals such energy as might more expeditiously be
devoted to the improvement of the circumstances which
make people do the mean or small or blind actions which
arouse our wrath. The complete meekness and humility
preached by Christ have not been taken literally by the
natively pugnacious peoples of Europe. But as James says
suggestively:

"Love your enemies!" Mark you not simply those who do not
happen to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active
enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal
extravagance, meaning only that we should, in so far as we can,
abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of
certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been
taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in
general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences
between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant
circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused.
If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement,
those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman
beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the lives of other
men, and there is no saying... what the effects might be: they
might conceivably transform the world.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 283.]

Dislikes, disagreements, native antipathies are not to be
abolished, human differences being ineradicable and human
interests, even in an ideal society, being in conflict. But a
keener appreciation of other viewpoints, which is possible
through education, a less violent concern with one's own
personal interests to the exclusion of all others, may greatly reduce
the amount of hate current in the world, and free men's
energies in passions more positive in their fruits.

CHAPTER VII

THE DEMAND FOR PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALITY

PRIVACY AND SOLITUDE. Although one of man's most powerful
tendencies, as has already been pointed out, is his desire to
be with his fellows, this desire is not unqualified. Just as men
can be satiated with too much eating, and irritated by too
much inactivity, so men become "fed up" with companionship.
The demand for solitude and privacy is thus fundamentally
a physiological demand, like the demand for rest.
"The world is too much with us," especially the human world.
Companionship, even of the most desirable kind, exhausts
nervous energy, and may become positively fatiguing and
painful. To crave solitude is thus not a sign of man's
unsociability, but a sign merely that sociability, like any other human
tendency, becomes annoying, if too long or too strenuously
indulged. Much of the neurasthenia of city life has been
attributed to the continual contact with other people, and the
total inability of most city dwellers to secure privacy for any
considerable length of time. In some people a lifelong habit
of close contact with large numbers of people makes them
abnormally gregarious, so that solitude, the normal method of
recuperation from companionship, becomes unbearable. Few
city dwellers have not felt after a period of isolation in some
remote country place the need for the social stimulus of the
city. But a normal human life demands a certain proportion
of solitude just as much as it demands the companionship of
others.

With the spread of education and the general enhancement
of the sense of personal selfhood and individuality among
large numbers of people, the demand for privacy has increased.
The modern reader is shocked to discover in the
literature of the Elizabethan period the amazing lack of a
sense of privacy there exhibited. In contemporary society
this sense and the possibility of its satisfaction are variously
displayed on different economic and social levels. In the
congested life of the tenements it is almost impossible, and many
social evils are to be traced to the promiscuous mingling of
large families (and sometimes additional boarders) in
congested quarters.

The demand for privacy and solitude becomes acute among
people who do a great deal of mental work. "Man," says
Nietzsche, "cannot think in a herd," and the thinker has
traditionally been pictured as a solitary man. This is because
quiet seems to be, for most men, an essential condition of
really creative thought. There are some men who find it
impossible to write when there is another person, even one of
whom they are fond, in the same room. "No man," writes
Mr. Graham Wallas, "is likely to produce creative thoughts
(either consciously or subconsciously) if he is constantly
interrupted by irregular noises." Constant association with
other people means, moreover, continual distraction by
conversation which seriously interrupts a consecutive train of
thought. The insistence in public and college reading rooms
on absolute quiet is a device for securing as nearly as may
be privacy in intellectual work.

Privacy is again demanded as a matter of emotional protection
in individuals in whom there is a highly sensitive development
of personal selfhood. We like to keep our concerns to
ourselves, or to share them only with those with whom we
have a marked community of interest and feeling. Children
love to "have secrets they won't tell," and older people,
especially sensitive and intelligent ones, feel a peculiar sense of
irritation at having their personal affairs and feelings publicly
displayed. Nearly everyone must recall occasions where he
was vividly communicative and loquacious with a friend, only
to relapse into a clam-like silence on the entry of a third person.
This is primarily due to the fact that while men are by
nature gregarious, their gregariousness early becomes specialized
and aroused exclusively by people for whom they develop
a sense of personal affection and common sympathy. Any
intrusion from without this circle becomes an intrusion upon
privacy.

SATISFACTION IN PERSONAL POSSESSION: THE ACQUISITIVE INSTINCT.
An almost universal human trait of considerable social consequence
is the satisfaction men experience in having objects
that are their own. Both animals and humans, apart from
training, display a tendency to get and hold objects. This
tendency may take extreme forms, as in the case of miserliness
or kleptomania. It is evidenced in special ways in the
collections that children, and some grown-ups, make of
miscellaneous objects without any particular use, and with no
particular æsthetic value.

The objects which satisfy this instinct of possession may
include material goods, family, or larger groups. In primitive
tribes under the patriarchal system, the patriarch practically
owns the tribe. Our laws not so long ago recognized
the marriage relation as a state in which the wife is
possessed or owned by the husband.

Possession gives the owner various kinds of satisfaction.
The instinctive satisfaction in possession itself may be quite
irrespective of the values of the objects owned, and deprivation
may be fiercely resisted out of all proportion to the value
of the objects. Especially will this be the case if the object
possessed has become surrounded with other emotional
attachments, so that an individual may be as bitterly chagrined
and piqued by being deprived of some slight memoir or keepsake
as of a large sum of money. In the same way the fighting
spirit of a whole tribe or nation may be aroused by the
invasion or seizure of a small and unimportant bit of land, or by
the chance of its possession.

The instinctive sense of satisfaction, as in the last mentioned
case is enhanced by the sense of importance which
comes from possession, and which enhances one's own individuality
and personality. A man's vast holdings in wealth,
land, factories, machinery, or private estates is, in a sense,
regarded by him as an extension of his personality. He is
confirmed in this impression because it is so regarded by his
neighbors and the whole social group. A great landowner is
a celebrity throughout the countryside, and, as Mr. Veblen
points out, a large part of the luxurious display and expenditure
of the leisure classes is their way of publicly and conspicuously
indicating the amount of their possessions.

As in the case of any other strong native tendency, interference
with the instinct of acquisition, whether displayed by
the individual or the group, provokes often fierce anger and
bitter combat. The history of wars of aggrandizement
throughout the history of Europe are testimonies to the
efficacy of this instinct at least in the initiation of war.

The progress of civilization beyond its earliest states is
held, by some sociologists and economists, to be ascribed to
the power of the acquisitive instinct. The acquisition of
material wealth or capital, the development of the institution
of private property with its concomitant individual development
of land and natural resources is maintained by Lester
Ward to be of paramount importance in social advance:

... Objects of desire multiplied themselves and their possession
became an end of effort. Slowly the notion of property came into
being and in acquiring this, as history shows, the larger share of all
human energy has been absorbed. The ruling passion has for a
time long anterior to any recorded annals always been proprietary
acquisition.... Both the passion and the means of satisfying it were
conditions to the development of society itself, and rightly viewed
they have also been leading factors in civilization.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lester Ward: _The Psychic Factors of Civilization_, p. 156.]

There are many other motives to activity than acquisition,
but there are many evidences of its intense operation even in
modern society. Many men go on working long after they have
money enough to enable them to live in comfort, merely
for the further satisfaction of this impulse. "While in the
course of satisfaction of most other desires, the point of satiety
is soon reached, the demands of this one grow greater without
limit, so that it knows no satiety."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 323.]

The power of this tendency to personal acquisition and
possession seems an obstacle to all thoroughly communistic
forms of political and social organization. The conception of
a state where nobody owns anything, but where all is owned
in common--an idea which has been repeated in many modern
forms of socialism and communism, fails to note this powerful
human difficulty. Many socialist writers, it must be
noted, however, point out that they wish social ownership of
the means of production rather than of every item of personal
property, such as books, clothing, and the like.

INDIVIDUALITY IN OPINION AND BELIEF. Men frequently
display with regard to their opinions and beliefs the same passionate
attachment that they exhibit with regard to their
physical possessions. Like the latter, these come to be regarded
as an extension of the individual's personality, and
the same tenacious defense may be made of them as of a house,
land, or money.

Individual opinions and beliefs are not themselves possessions,
from a social point of view, so much as is the right to
express them. A man's private opinion may influence his
own conduct; his conduct itself may be an expression of
opinion. But unless an opinion is communicated, it cannot
influence any one else's conduct, and society has never been
much concerned about opinions that an individual harbored
strictly in his own bosom. Silence, socially, is as good as
assent. The insistence on the right to one's own opinions
becomes, therefore, an insistence on the right or the freedom to
express them.[2] This right is cherished in varying degrees by
different individuals in different ages. It becomes pronounced
in persons in whom there is marked development
of individuality, and, in general, where, as in Anglo-Saxon
countries, a social and political tradition of liberty and
individuality has become very powerful.

[Footnote 2: Beliefs and opinions may come to be regarded as
important personal possessions in themselves, as in the case
of rival claimants to some theory or idea, as in the case of
Leibnitz's and Newton's dispute over the calculus.]

Individuality in opinion and belief becomes critical chiefly
when the opinions and beliefs expressed are at variance with
those generally current among the group. For reasons already
discussed in connection with man's instinctive gregariousness
and the emotional sway which habits of thought have
over men, dissent is regarded with suspicion. Especially is
this the case where the dissenting opinions have to do with
new social organization and custom. The psychological
causes of this opposition are various, but include among other
things a positive feeling of fear.

It is only recently that men have been abandoning the belief that
the welfare of a state depends on rigid stability and on the
preservation of its traditions and institutions unchanged. Wherever that
belief prevails, novel opinions are felt to be dangerous as well as
annoying, and any one who asks inconvenient questions about the
why and the wherefore of accepted principles is considered a pestilent
person.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bury: _History of Freedom of Thought_, p. 9.]

Throughout history there has been a long struggle for
freedom of thought and discussion, and there have been great
landmarks in the degree with which freedom was attained,
and the fields wherein it was permitted. For a long time in
the history of Europe, dissent from the prevailing opinion on
religious matters was regarded both as abominable and socially
dangerous, and was severely punished. Since the middle
of the nineteenth century there has been no legal punishment
provided for dissent from established opinions in
religion, although penalties for heterodoxy in countries where
religious opinion is strong and fairly unanimous may be
exerted in other ways. In social matters also, there has
practically ceased to be legal coercion of opinion.[2] The argument
for the suppression of individual opinion has been tersely
summarized by the author above quoted:

[Footnote 2: Except in the recent period of excitement and stress
during the Great War, when suppression of opinion was, for better
or for worse, taken as a measure of national defense.]

Those who have the responsibility of governing a society can argue
that it is incumbent on them to prohibit the circulation of pernicious
opinions as to prohibit any anti-social actions. They can argue that
a man may do far more harm by propagating anti-social doctrines
than by stealing his neighbor's horse or making love to his neighbor's
wife. They are responsible for the welfare of the State, and if they
are convinced that an opinion is dangerous... it is their duty to
protect society against it as against any other danger.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bury: _loc. cit._, p. 13.]

THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALITY IN OPINION. There
have been many notable documents in support of the belief
that society is the gainer and not the loser by permitting and
encouraging individuality in thought and belief. The following,
taken from one of the most famous of these, John Stuart
Mill's _Essay on Liberty_, was written to illustrate the fatal
results of prohibiting dissenting opinions merely because most
people think or call them immoral:

Mankind can hardly be too often reminded that there was once a
man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and
public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision.
Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness, this
man has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him
and the age, as the most virtuous man in it.... This acknowledged
master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived--whose
fame, still growing after two thousand years, all but outweighs the
whole remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious--was
put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction,
for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognized
by the State.... Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and
instructions, a "corrupter of youth." Of these charges the tribunal,
there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and
condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best
of mankind to be put to death as a criminal.[2]

[Footnote 2: J. S. Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. II.]

Every important step in human progress has been a variation
from the normal or accustomed, something new. Most
advances in science have been departures from older and
accustomed ways of thinking. Through the permission and
encouragement of individual variation in opinion we may
discover in the first place that accepted beliefs are wrong.
Galileo thought differently from the accepted Ptolemaic
astronomy of his day, and the demonstration of his diverging
belief proved the Ptolemaic astronomy to be wrong. The
evolutionary theory, bitterly attacked in its day, replaced
Cuvier's doctrine of the forms of life upon earth coming about
through a series of successive catastrophes. Lyell, in the face
of the whole scientific world of his day, insisted on the gradual
and uniform development of the earth's surface. Half the
scientific doctrines now accepted as axiomatic were bitterly
denounced when they were first suggested by an inquiring
minority.

Milton in his famous _Areopagitica_, an address to Parliament
written in 1644, protesting against the censorship of
printing, stressed the importance of permitting liberty for the
securing and developing of new ideas:

What should ye do then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop
of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this
city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers [censors] over
it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing
but what is measured us by their bushel? ... That our hearts
are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and
expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own
virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that unless ye reënforce
an abrogated and merciless law.... Give me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.[1]

[Footnote 1: Milton: _Areopagitica_.]

Even if the currently accepted doctrines prove to be true,
there is, as Mill pointed out, a vast social utility in permitting
the expression of contrary opinion though it be an error.
New ideas, however extreme, "may and commonly do possess
some portion of truth"; they bring to light and emphasize
some aspect or point of view which prevailing theories fail to
note. Thus the possible over-emphasis of certain contemporary
writers on the socialization of man's life is a valuable
corrective to the equal over-emphasis on individualism which
was current among so many thinkers during the nineteenth
century. The insistence with which present-day psychologists
call our attention to the power of instinct, though it may
possibly be over-emphasized, counterbalances that tendency
exhibited by such earlier authors as Bentham to picture man
as a purely rational being, whose every action was determined
by sheer logic.

Finally, unless doctrines are subjected to criticism and
inquiry, no matter how beneficial they are to society, they
will become merely futile and empty formulæ with very little
beyond a mechanical influence on people's lives. The maxims
of conventional morality and religion which everybody
believes and few practice are solemnly bandied about with
little comprehension of their meaning and no tendency to act
upon them. A belief becomes, as Mill pointed out, living,
vital, and influential in the clash of controversy. Whether
novel and dissenting doctrines are true or false, therefore, the
encouragement of their expression provides vitality and
variation without which progress is not possible.

The social appreciation of persons who display marked individual
opinions varies in different ages toward the same
individual. The martyr stoned to death by one generation
becomes the hero and prophet of the next. One has but to
look back at the contemporary vilification and ridicule to
which Lincoln was subjected to find an illustration. Or, on
a more monumental scale:

The event which took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen
hundred years ago. The man who left on the memory of those who
witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his moral
grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to
him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as
what? As a blasphemer.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. II.]

One would suppose that men would have learned not only
to tolerate and be receptive to novelty in belief after these
repeatedly tardy recognitions of greatness. There are dozens
of instances in the history of religious, social, and political
belief, of men and women who, suppressed with the bitterest
cruelty in one generation, have been in effect, and sometimes
in fact, canonized by posterity. And a certain degree of tolerance
and receptiveness has come to be the result. But
while we no longer burn religious and social heretics,
condemnation is still meted out in some form of ostracism.
Prejudice, custom, and special interest frequently move men
to suppress in milder ways extremists, expression of whose
opinions seems to them, as unusual opinions have frequently
seemed, fraught only with the greatest of harm.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "SELF"

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF PERSONAL SELFHOOD.
The expression of individuality in opinion is only one way
men have of expressing their personality, individuality, or
self. From the beginnings of childhood, men experience an
increasing sense of "personal selfhood" which finds various
outlets in action or thought. So familiar, indeed, in the normal
man is his realization that he is a "self," that it seldom
occurs to him that this conception was an attainment gradually
accomplished through long years of experience with the
world about him. The very young baby does not distinguish
between Itself and the Not-Self which constitutes the
remainder of the universe. It is nothing but a stream of
experiences, of moment to moment pulsations of desire, of
hunger and satisfaction, of bodily comfort and bodily pain. As it
grows older, it begins dimly to distinguish between Itself and
Everything-Else; it finds itself to be something different,
more vivid, more personal and interesting than the chairs and
tables, the crib and bottle, the faces and hands, the smiles and
rattles that are its familiar setting. It discovers that "I am
I," and that everything else ministers to or frustrates or remains
indifferent to its desires. It becomes a person rather
than a bundle of reactions. It develops a consciousness of
"self."

In its simplest form this consciousness of self is nothing
more than a continuous stream of inner organic sensations,
and the constant process of the body and limbs "and the
special interest of these as the seat of various pleasures and
pains." This is what James calls the "bodily self." As it
grows older, the baby distinguishes between persons and
things. And as, in setting off his own body from other things,
it discovers its "bodily self," so in setting off its own opinions,
actions, and thoughts from other people, it discovers its "social
self." It is because Nature does in some degree the
"giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us," that we do
discover our "selves" at all. "The normal human being, if it
were possible for him to grow up from birth onward in a purely
physical environment, deprived, that is, to say, of both animal
and human companionship, would develop but a very
crude and rudimentary idea of the self."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 183.]

THE SOCIAL SELF. A man's social self, that is, his consciousness
of himself as set over against all the other individuals
with whom he comes in contact, develops as his relations
with other people grow more complex and various. A man's
self, apart from his mere physical body, consists in his peculiar
organization of instincts and habits. In common language
this constitutes his personality or character. We can infer
from it what he will, as we say, characteristically do in any
given situation. And a particular organization of instincts
and habits is dependent very largely on the individual's social
experience, on the types and varieties of contact with
other people that he has established. There will be differences,
it goes without saying, that depend on initial differences
in native capacity. But both the consciousness of self and
the overt organization of instinctive and habitual actions are
dependent primarily on the groups with which an individual
comes in contact. In the formation of habits, both of action
and thought, the individual is affected, as we have seen,
largely by praise and blame. He very early comes to detect
signs of approval and disapproval, and both his consciousness
of his individuality and the character of that individuality
are, in the case of most persons, largely determined by these
outward signs of the praise and blame of others. And since,
in normal experience, a man comes into contact with several
distinct groups, with varying codes of conduct, he will really
have a number of distinct personalities. The professor is a
different man in his class and at his club; the judge displays a
different character in the court and in the bosom of his family.

The self that comes to be most characteristic and distinctive
of a man, however, is determined by the group with
which he comes most habitually in contact, or to whose approvals
he has become most sensitive. Thus there develop
certain typical personalities or characters, such as those of
the typical lawyer or soldier or judge. Their bearing, action,
and consciousness of self are determined by the approvals
and disapprovals of the group to which they are most
completely and intimately exposed.

Both the consciousness of self which most men experience
and the overt expression of that selfhood in act are thus seen
to be a more or less direct reflex of the praise and blame of the
groups with which they are in contact. Men learn from
experience with the praise and blame of others to "place"
themselves socially, to discover in the mirror of other men's
opinions the status and locus of their own lives. As we shall
see in a succeeding section, the degree of satisfaction which
men experience in their consciousness of themselves is dependent
intimately on the praise and blame by which their
selfhood is, in the first place, largely determined. In the
chapter on the "Social Nature of Man," we examined in some
detail the way in which praise and blame modified a man's
habits. The total result of this process is to give a man a
certain fixed set of overt habits that constitute his character and
a more or less fixed consciousness of that character.

On the other hand, a man's character and self-consciousness
may develop more or less independently of the immediate
forces of the public opinion to which he is exposed. One
comes in contact in the course of his experience not merely
with his immediate contemporaries, but with a wide variety
of moral traditions. Except in the rigidly custom-bound life
of primitive societies, a man is, even in practical life, exposed
to a diversity of codes, standards, and expectations of behavior.
His family, his professional, his political, and his social
groups expose him to various kinds of emphases and accent
in behavior. And a man of some intelligence, education, and
culture may be determined in his action by standards whose
origin is remote in time, space, and intention from those operative
in the predominant public opinion of his day. He may
come to act habitually on the basis of ideal standards which
he has himself set up through reflection, or which he has
acquired from some moral system or tradition, far in advance of
those which are the staple determinants of character for most
of his contemporaries. He may be one of those rare moral
geniuses, singularly unsusceptible to praise and blame, who
create a new ideal of character by the dominant individuality
of their own. Or, as more frequently happens, he may follow
the ideals set up by such a one, instead of accepting the orthodoxies
which are generally observed. He may follow Christ
instead of the Pharisees, Socrates instead of the habit-crusted
citizens of Athens. We are, indeed, inclined to think of a
man as a peculiarly distinctive personality, when his sense of
selfhood, and the overt actions in which that selfhood finds
expression, are not determined by the current dogmas of his
day, but by ideal standards to which he has reflectively given
allegiance. But so much is the self, both in its consciousness
and expression, socially produced that men acting on purely
imagined ideal standards, current nowhere in their day and
generation, have imagined a group, no matter how small or
how remote, who would praise them or a God who noted and
approved their ways.

CHARACTER AND WILL. From the foregoing it would appear
that the self is an organization of habitual tendencies, developed
primarily through contact with other people and more
specifically through their praise and blame. And consciousness
of self is the awareness of the unique or specific character
of the habit-organization one has acquired. Individuals differ
natively in given capacities, and differences in fully developed
personalities depend, certainly in part, on innate
initial differences. But differences in the kinds of selfhood
displayed and experienced by different men are due to something
more than differences in native capacities and native
desires. The self that a man exhibits and of which he is conscious,
at any given period of his life, depends on the complex
system of habits he has in the course of his experience developed.
One individual may, as we have seen, develop a number
of sets of organized dispositions, a multiple character, as
it were, as a consequence of the multiplicity of groups with
which he has come in contact. But whether through deliberate
or habitual conformity to one group as a norm, or the
deliberate organization of habits of action and feeling and
thought, on the basis of ideal or reflective standards, a man
comes to develop a more or less "permanent self." That is,
while men start with somewhat similar native equipments,
each man's set of inborn tendencies comes to be fixed in a
fairly definite and specific system. While all men start within
limits equally responsive and similarly responsive to all stimuli,
certain stimuli come to have the "right of way." They
are more or less easily and more or less readily responded to,
according as they do or as they do not fit in with the habit-organization
which the individual has previously acquired.

When we say that a man has no character or individuality,
we mean that he has developed no stable organization of actions,
feelings, and thoughts, with reference to which and by
the predominant drive of which his actions are determined.
There is no particular system of behavior which he has come
consciously to identify as his person or self; no interweaving
of motives and stimuli by the persistent momentum of which
his conduct is controlled; no single group of stimuli rather
than another has, in his pulpy person, attained priority in
stimulating power. Such men are chameleons rather than
characters. Their actions do not flow from a selfhood or
individuality at all; they are merely the random results of the
accidental situations in which such men find themselves.

The self exists, then, as a well-defined, systematic trend of
behavior. Impulses to action attain a certain order of priority
in an individual's conduct, and it is by the momentum of
these primary drives to action that his life is controlled.
What is commonly known as "will" is simply another name
for the power and momentum of a man's "personal self."
Will exists not as a thing, but as a process. To will an action
means to identify it consciously with one's permanent self, to
weigh and support it with all the emotions and energies connected
with one's consciously realized habitual system of behavior.
A man may bring to bear on the accomplishment of
a given action the deepest and most powerful motive forces of
his developed personality. To pass a course or make a team
a student may marshal all the habits of loyalty, of self-assertion
(and the emotional energies associated with them) which
have become the leading ingredients of his character.

The "permanent self" becomes involved in the same way
in the case of willing _not_ to perform a certain action. Any
stimulus may, on occasion, be strong even if it has ceased to
be characteristic or habitual in a man's behavior. This is
particularly the case with some of the primary physical drives
to action. Even the ascetic feels the strong sting of sense-desire.
A man in resisting temptation, in denying the pressure
of an immediate stimulus, is setting up to block or inhibit
it all the contrary reactions and emotions which have
become part of the "permanent self." In more familiar language
he is setting will over against desire. The temporary
desire may be strong, but it is consciously regarded by the
individual as alien to his "real" or "better" self. And _will_
is this whole complex organization of the permanent self set
over against an alien intruding impulse.

The phenomenon of will contending against desire occurs
usually when a stimulus not characteristically powerful in a
man's conduct becomes so through special conditions of excitement
or fatigue. When a man is tired, or stirred by violent
emotion, his systematic organization of habits begins to
break down. The ideal permanent or inclusive self is then
brought into conflict with a temporary passion. Love conflicts
with duty, the lower with the higher self, flesh with
spirit, desire with will. Few men have so thoroughly integrated
a self that such conflicts altogether cease. Every one
carries about with him a more or less divided soul.

  Fire and ice within me fight
  Beneath the suffocating night.

There are, in the records of abnormal psychology, many cases
of really divided personalities, cases of two or more completely
separate habit-organizations inhabiting the same physical
body. Such a complete Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde dissociation
of a personality is clearly abnormal. But it is almost as
rare to find a completely integrated character. We are all of
us more or less multiple personalities. Our various personalities
usually keep their place and do not interfere with each
other. Our professional and family selves may be different;
they do not always collide. But the various characters that
we are in various situations not infrequently do clash. The
self whose keynote is ambition or learning may conflict with
the self whose focus is love.

  "Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he
   Who finds himself, loses his misery!"

wrote Matthew Arnold. And it does seem to be true that a
man whose will is never divided or confused by contending
currents of desire, whose character is unified and whose action
is consistent, is saved from the perturbations, the confusions,
the tossings of spirit which possess less organized souls. But
to find one's self, and to keep one's self whole and undivided,
is a difficult achievement and a rare one. Even men whose
interests and activities are fairly well defined find their
characters divided and their wills, consequently, confused. A
man's duties as a husband and father may conflict with his
professional ambitions; his love of adventure, with his desire
for wealth and social position; his artistic interests, with his
philanthropic activities; his business principles, with his
religious scruples. A man can achieve a selfhood by thrusting
out all interests save one, and achieving thereby unity at the
expense of breadth. There are men who choose to be, and
succeed in being, first and last, scholars or poets or musicians
or doctors. All activities, interests, and ideals that do not
contribute to that particular and exclusive self are practically
negligible in their conduct. Such men, although they have
attained a permanent self, have not achieved a broad, comprehensive,
or inclusive one. They are like instruments
which can sound only one note, however clear that may be;
or like singers with only a single song. All lives are necessarily
finite and exclusive; every choice of an interest or ideal
very possibly precludes some other. A man cannot be all
things at once; "the philosopher and the lady-killer," as
James merrily remarks, "could not very well keep house in
the same tenement of clay." But a strong character need
not necessarily mean a narrow one, nor need a determined will
be the will of a fanatic. The self may be--in the case of rare
geniuses it has been--diverse in its interests, activities, and
sympathies, yet unified and consistent in action. A character
may be various without being confused; versatility is not
synonymous with chaos. A man's interests and activities
may be given a certain order, rank, and proportion, so that
his life may exhibit at once the color, consistency, clarity, and
variety of a finished symphony.

The consciousness of "self" which starts as a mere continuum
of bodily sensations comes to be the net result of one's
social and intellectual as well as physical activities. The
"self" of which we are conscious ceases to be our merely physical
person, and comes to include our possessions. The house
we live in and the garden we tend, our children, our friends,
our opinions, creations, or inventions, these become extensions
and more or less inalienable parts of our personalities.
Our "selfhood" includes not simply us, but ours.

Our possessions, and especially such as are the fruits of our
own actions, are indications of what we are. We judge, and
within limits correctly, of a man by the company he keeps,
the clothes he wears, by the books he reads, the pictures with
which he decorates his home, the kind of home he builds or
has built. And a man may feel as provoked by insult or injury
to the person or things which have become an intimate
part of his life as if he were being attacked in his physical
person. Strip a man one by one of his physical acquisitions,
of his associates, of the indications and mementos of the
things he has thought and done, and there would be no "self"
left. To speak of a man as a nonentity is to imply that he is
no "self" worth speaking of; that he can be blown about
hither and thither; that neither his opinions nor desires, nor
possessions, nor associates make an iota of difference in the
world. A man who is a "somebody," a "person to be reckoned
with," is one who is a "self." He is one whose physical
possessions or personal abilities or standing in the community
make him one of the "powers that be." And it is the desire
to be a factor in the world, to increase the scope and
consequence of one's self that is the leading ingredient in what we
call ambition, and the desire for fame, and at least one ingredient
in the desire for wealth. Men may want wealth
merely for the sake of possession, or for bodily comfort, but
part of the desire consists in the ability thereby to spread one's
influence, to be "one of the happy sons of earth, who lord it
over land and sea, in the full-blown lustihood that wealth
and power can give, and before whom, stiffen ourselves as
we will ... we cannot escape an emotion, sneaking or open,
of dread."[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 293.]

THE ENHANCEMENT OF THE SELF. The building-up of a more or
less permanent self is natively satisfactory to most men, and
every means will be taken to increase its scope and influence.
Biologically we are so constituted as to perform many acts
making for our self-preservation. The ordinary reflexes and
instincts such as those which prompt us to eat, to defend ourselves
against blows and the threatening approach of animals,
to keep our equilibrium and recover our balance, are examples
of these.

The development and preservation of our social self is also
made possible as it is initially prompted by our specifically
social instincts. There is a native tendency, as already noted,
to get ourselves noticed by other people, to seek their praise
and avoid their blame. The instincts of self-display and
leadership, and many of the non-social instincts, such as
curiosity and acquisitiveness, are frequently called into play in
the service of the more directly social tendencies of the
individual. A large part of our activity, whatever be its other
motives, is determined to some degree by the desire to develop
the social self, to be a "somebody," to cut a figure in the
world.

In the enlargement of the social self, various people use
various means, and with varying degrees of vigor, intensity,
and persistency. There are a few who go through life with
almost no sense of selfhood, who go through their daily routine
with no more recognition of their acts as their own than
that displayed by an animal or a machine. In most men the
sense of their personality and their interest in it are high, and
the development of the self is sought in all possible or
legitimate ways. The ways in which the self is developed, and the
kind of self that is sought, help to determine whether a man is
self-seeking in the lowest sense of that epithet, or idealistic
and ambitious in the approved popular sense.

The kind of self we seek to build up depends, as we have
seen, largely on the type of praise and blame and the general
character of the moral tradition to which we have been exposed.
But whichever type of self a man does select as his
ideal or permanent self, all his activities will be more or less
consciously and more or less consistently controlled by it.
His habits of action, his habitual choices, his habitual feelings,
will be built up with this ideal self as a standard and control.
He will do those things which "carry on" toward the ideal
self, leave undone those things which do not. The man or
woman who wishes simply to cut a figure "socially" will cultivate
the wit, the gayety, the facility, the smartness, which are
the familiar ingredients of such a personality. The same
persons will be singularly blind to abysses of ignorance which
would be painfully in the consciousness of those who had
set up for themselves ideals of erudition and culture. A
laborer will live and move and have his being serenely in clothes
and in surroundings that "would never do" for a professional
man who had committed himself to live according to the
social standards of his class. Sometimes a man's actions will
be directed toward the construction of an ideal self, on standards
far in advance of those of his group. A man in developing
such a self is, indeed, in some cases practically committing
social suicide. The extreme dissenter from the
current standards of action is attempting to build up what
James has well called a "spiritual self," a self in the light
of his own ideals, rather than those current among his
contemporaries.

EGOISM _VERSUS_ ALTRUISM. The individual in developing his
own personality need not, necessarily, be selfish, nor is the
enhancement of one's personality incompatible with altruism.
One man may find his individuality sufficiently developed in a
large bank account, another in discovering a cure for cancer;
one man may seek nothing but gratification of his physical
appetites; another may find his fulfillment on the battlefield
in defense of the national honor. Since man is born with the
original tendencies to herd with and have common sympathies
with his fellows, and to pity those of them that are weak
and distressed, there is nothing more unnatural about altruism
than about egoism. It is true that in some men the so-called
altruistic impulses, the impulse to sympathize with
the emotions, feelings, aspirations and difficulties of others,
and to pity them in their distress, are comparatively weak;
that in some men the more obviously egoistic impulses, such
as the gratification of bodily desires, the acquisition of
physical possessions are strong and uncontrollable. But through
education the altruistic and social impulses of men may be
cultivated and strengthened, so that they may become more
powerful and dominant than even the urgency of physical
desire. "Man cannot live by bread alone," and a man in
whom a passion for reform or for religion, for a cause or for a
conquest has become strong, will sacrifice food, sleep, and
physical comfort, and may even find the satisfactory fulfillment
of self in self-sacrifice and obliteration.[1]

[Footnote 1: This is partly because man's sense of selfhood is
so largely socially conditioned and affected by praise and blame.
Many a man in whom impulses of an egoistic sort are strong cannot
resist the scorn of his gang, club, or clique. In this sense even
socially beneficial actions may be "selfish."]

The old distinction between egoism and altruism is thus an
artificial one. A genuinely altruistic individual derives
satisfaction from the beneficent things he does, though he does
not, as Jeremy Bentham supposed, calculate the benefits he
will derive from his beneficence. Altruism is just as natural
as egoism in its origins, though the impulses of self-preservation
and personal physical satisfaction are natively stronger
and more numerous. But human beings can be educated to
altruism, and find the same satisfaction in service to others as
individuals reared in less humane conditions find in satisfying
their immediate physical desires.

SELF-SATISFACTION AND DISSATISFACTION. Since the development
of selfhood plays so large a part in human action, it is
natural that powerful emotions should be associated with it.
Individuals become conscious of the kind of self they are and
measure it favorably or unfavorably with the kind of self they
would be. In so far as the actuality they conceive themselves
to be measures up to the ideal self, to the fulfillment of
which they have dedicated themselves, they have a feeling of
self-satisfaction, of elation. They are jubilant or crestfallen,
satisfied or dissatisfied with themselves, in so far as they are
in their own estimation making good. In normal individuals,
these estimates of triumph and frustration are, of course,
colored and qualified by signs of approval and disapproval
from other people. There are very few--and these insanely
conceited--in whom the opinions of others are not largely
influential in determining their own estimates of themselves.

The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of
a unique sort ... each has its own peculiar physiognomical
expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated, the
eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril
dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This complex of
symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which
always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit,
and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering
gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal
quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find the
strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who
think they have committed "the unpardonable sin" and are lost
forever, who crouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable
to speak aloud or look us in the eye.... We ourselves know how the
barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from
one day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and
organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no
corresponding variations in the esteem in which we are held by our
friends.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 307.]

Self-satisfaction depends, as has been said, on the kind of
self we are aiming at, and that in turn depends on the kind
of self we are. A professional bank-robber may take a craftsman's
pride in the skill with which he has rifled a safe and
made off with the booty, just as a surgeon may take pride in
a delicate operation, or a dramatist in a play. The ideal and
the measure of satisfaction will again be determined by the
group among whom we move. The bank-robber will not
boast of his exploits to a missionary conference; the surgeon
will prefer to explain the details of his achievement to medical
men who can critically appreciate its technique. The ideal
self we set ourselves may far outreach our achievements,
considerable and generally applauded though these be. A
man may know in his heart how futile are his triumphs, how
far from the goals he cherished as young ideals. Many a
brilliant comedian longs to play Hamlet; the gifted and scholarly
musician knows how easy it is to win an audience with
sentimental and specious music. The humility of genius has
again and again been noted. "The more one knows the less
one knows one knows."

Many men attain self-satisfaction through negation,
through a serene surrender of the unattainable. As the
Epicureans counseled, they increase their happiness by lessening
their desires. The content which middle-aged people exhibit
is not so frequently to be traced to the dazzling character of
their achievement as to their resignation to their station.
Young people are moody and unhappy not infrequently
because they cannot make a reconciliation between what they
would be and what they are. Others again attain satisfaction
vicariously in the achievements of others, as mediocre fathers
do in their brilliant children, or as sympathetic and interested
people do in the whole world about them.

The magnanimity of these expansive natures is often touching
indeed. Such persons can feel a sort of delicate rapture in thinking
that, however sick, ill-favored, mean-conditioned, and generally
forsaken they may be, they are yet integral parts of the whole of this
brave world, have a fellow's share in the strength of the dairy horses,
the happiness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones, and
are not altogether without part or lot in the good fortunes of the
Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 313 (written in 1890).]

In some men a modicum of success will give a disproportionate
sense of confidence and power. The man to whom success
has always come easily is not baffled by problems that
would appall those who, in middle life, "lie among the failures
at the foot of the hill." As Goethe, who had always been
miraculously successful, said to one who came to complain
to him about the difficulty of an undertaking: "You have
but to blow on your hands." In a crowd one can hardly fail
to note the easy air of competence and confidence that
distinguishes the successful man of affairs.

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE SELF AND OTHERS. The consciousness
of self increases with the expression of personal opinion
and power. The man whose books are translated into half a
dozen languages, to whose lectures people come from all parts
of the world, cannot help feeling an increased sense of
importance, although he may combine this consciousness with a
sense of personal humility. In the same way a man who
exerts great social power, who controls the economic lives of
thousands of employees, or whose benefactions in the way of
libraries and charitable institutions dot the land, develops
inevitably a sense of his own selfhood as over against that of the
group. He begins to realize that he does make a significant
difference in the world. This was curiously illustrated in a
speech delivered by Andrew Carnegie when, after a prolonged
absence in Europe, he came back to the opening of the Carnegie
Institute, the building of which had cost him six million
dollars:

He said he could not bring himself to a realization of what had
been done. He felt like Aladdin when he saw this building and was
aware that he had put it up, but he could not bring himself to
consciousness of having done it any more than if he had produced the
same effect by rubbing a lamp. He could not feel the ownership of
what he had given, and he could not feel that he had given it away.[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted from the obituary of Andrew Carnegie in the
_New York Times_ of August 12, 1919.]

This sense of incredulity at one's actions or achievements
is rarer than the consciousness of self which it promotes.
The intensity of this self-awareness is increased when opinion
is expressed or power exerted in the face of opposition. The
man who finds himself standing out against the community
in which he lives, who is a freethinker among those who are
intensely religious, an extremist among those who are custom-ridden,
spiritualistic among people who are controlled by
materialistic ideas, finds the sense of his own personality
heightened by contrast. When dissenting opinions are steadfastly
maintained in the face of the opposition of a powerful
majority, there develops a personality with edge and strength.
The man who can persist in his belief against the prevailing
winds of doctrine and of action may be wrong, but he is a
personality. He is intensely and persistently aware of himself.
Similarly, the exertion of power in the face of opposition
increases the sense of one's own power and helps to consolidate
it. One derives from it the same exhilaration that one
has in feeling a canoe under the impulsion of one's paddle
overcome the resistance of the water. In the same way, the
exertion of social power in the face of obstacles makes half the
exhilaration of politics and business for some types of men in
business and political life. One admires the ruthlessness of a
Napoleon at war or of a captain of industry in the sharp industrial
competition of the nineteenth century, not because it is
ruthless, but because it is power. Such men are at least not
neutral; they are positive forces.

The contrast between the "self" and the others may be
friendly, with a recognition of all other selves as equally
entitled to existence. One pursues the even tenor of one's way,
and is content to let others pursue theirs. Men of very powerful
personality have exhibited the utmost gentleness and
consideration of others. Lincoln, the typical strong, silent
man, displayed a tenderness for the suffering and distressed
that has already become proverbial.

The contrast between one's self and the world may be one of
bitter opposition, as when one's ideas or actions are subjected
to social censure. As Mill argued over half a century ago, the
forceful suppression of opinion produces a more violent manifestation
of it. Socrates was put to death, but the Socratic
philosophy rose like the sun in the heavens. A sense of injustice,
of unfairness, will not only intensify a man's opinions but
his consciousness of his own personality. To meet with opposition
is to feel acutely the outlines of one's own person; to
be forced to recognize the differences between ourselves and
others is to discover what sort of people we ourselves are.

The contrast is likewise one of opposition, sometimes to
bitterness, when the individual seeks to impose his own
opinions or his own personality forcibly on others. A Mohammed,
fired with the zeal of a religious enthusiasm, may
spread his doctrine by fire and sword and be resisted
by similar violence. Others than the Germans have betaken themselves
to arms to spread a specific and arbitrary type of life.
On a small scale it is seen wherever a fanatical parent tries to
force his own belief and type of life upon his children, reared
in a younger and freer generation. In contemporary society
most individuals are neither tempted nor permitted to coerce
people to their own way of thinking, although economic pressure
and social ostracism are still powerful instruments by
which strategically situated individuals can force their own
opinions or types of life upon others.

TYPES OF SELF. The consciousness of self varies in its
expression and intensity and at different times may display
different types or combinations of types. No one is ever
utterly consistent, and different situations, different groups,
provoke different selves in us. Nobody writes quite the same
kind of letter to his different friends, or is, as has been pointed
out, the same person in different situations. But, except for
those intellectual will-o'-the-wisps, or moral ne'er-do-wells
who take on the color of every new circumstance in which they
happen to be cast, men do develop predominantly one type of
self which constitutes, in familiar language, their character.

The manner of our consciousness of our personality may vary
in quality, even though it be intense in degree. One
may be aware even of one's importance, without being "self-important."
One may be quite conscious of one's significance
in the world and yet not be "self-conscious." It is indeed
usually the little man who has a great air about him. The
officiousness and pettiness of the small soul invested with
authority has often been commented on. Proverbial wisdom
has succinctly recorded the fact that empty barrels make the
most noise. Latterly, Freudian psychology has pointed out
the mechanisms by which insignificant people compensate for
the poverty of their person by bluster and brag.[1]

[Footnote 1: On this point see an illuminating brief discussion
by Hart in _The Psychology of Insanity_.]

SELF-DISPLAY OR BOLDNESS. The most obvious type of
consciousness of self is found in individuals who seek mere social
conspicuousness, who spend no inconsiderable part of their
energy in deliberate display. The child says with naïve
frankness, "See how high I can jump." Many adults find
more conspicuous or subtle ways of saying the same thing.
One need only to take a ride in a bus or street car to find the
certain symptoms of self-display. These may consist in
nothing more serious than a peculiarly conspicuous collar or
hatband, or particularly high heels. It may consist in a loud
voice full of pompous references to great banquets recently
attended or great sums recently spent. It may be in a raised
eyebrow or a disdainful smile. There are people among
every one's acquaintance whose conversation is largely made
up of reminiscences of more or less personal glory, of deliberate
allusions to large salaries and famous friends, to glorious
prospects and past laurels.[1]

[Footnote 1: Almost every college class has one or two members
who enter vociferously and continuously into discussions, less
for the contribution of ideas or information than for the
propagation of their own personalities.]

On a larger scale this is to be found in the almost universal
desire to see one's name in print:

There is a whole race of beings to-day whose passion is to keep
their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading,
"arrivals and departures," "personal paragraphs," "interviews"--gossip,
even scandal will suit them if nothing better is to be had.
Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which
this craving for notoriety may go in a pathological case. The
newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer
on the scaffold, one of the most heartfelt expressions was: "The
newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O
Lord!"[2]

[Footnote 2: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 308.]

As was pointed out in connection with praise and blame,
more of our actions than we should care to admit are determined
by this desire for recognition. The loud, the vulgar,
the notoriety seekers are merely extreme illustrations of a
type of self that most of us are some of the time.

SELF-SUFFICIENT MODESTY. The other extreme is exhibited
by the type of personality that is markedly averse to display
and shrinks from observation. In its intensest and possibly
least appealing form it is exhibited by people who become
awkwardly embarrassed in the presence of a stranger, however
fluent and vivacious they may be with their friends.
This type at its best may be described by the epithet of
self-sufficient modesty. To be such a person may be said to be an
achievement rather than a weakness. To be self-sufficient
and modest at the same time means that one is going about
one's business, that one is too absorbed in one's work to be
continually and anxiously noting what sort of figure one cuts
in the world. To quote Matthew Arnold's well-known lines:

  "Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
   Undistracted by the sights they see,
   These demand not that the things without them
   Yield them love, amusement, sympathy."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Self-Dependence._]

There are in every great university quiet great men who
steadily pursue vital and difficult researches without the
slightest reference or desire for cheap conspicuousness. In
every profession and business there are known to the
discriminating men who are experts, even geniuses in their own
field, but who shrink back from the loudness of publicity as
from a plague. There are a number of wealthy philanthropists
in all our large cities who consistently and steadily do
good works in almost complete anonymity. One finds in almost
every department of human activity these types of self-effacing
men who find their fulfillment in the work they do
rather than in moving in the aura of other people's admiration.

THE POSITIVE AND FLEXIBLE SELF. But in order to be effective
in affairs, some positive force must be displayed, and modesty
need not mean pusillanimity. A frequently observable
type of personality--and socially one of a highly desirable
sort--is the type of man who, himself standing for positive
convictions, ideas, and principles of action, and not casually
to be deflected from them, has sufficient flexibility and sensitivity
to the feelings of others, to accept modification. Such
a self not only has its initial force and momentum, but gains
as it goes by the experience of others. A personality must be
positive to contribute to the solution of difficulties and the
management of enterprises, but it must be receptive in order
to benefit by the ideas of others and coöperate with them.
To have power and humility at once is sometimes sufficient to
make a leader among men. Humility prevents us from rushing
headlong along the paths of our own dogmatic errors; it
enables us further to deal with other people who would be
simply antagonized by our flat-footed insistence on every
detail of our own initial position. The history of great
statesmanship is in part, at least, the history of wise compromise.
Nor does this mean sordid temporizing and opportunism. As
John Morley puts it:

It is the worst of political blunders to insist on carrying an ideal
set of principles into execution, where others have rights of dissent,
and those others persons whose assent is as indispensable to success
as it is difficult to attain. But to be afraid or ashamed of holding
such an ideal set of principles in one's mind in their highest and most
abstract expression, does more than any other one cause to stunt or
petrify those elements of character to which life should owe most of
its savor.[1]

[Footnote 1: Morley: _On Compromise_, p. 123.]

DOGMATISM AND SELF-ASSERTION. Too often, however, a
person of powerful and distinctive opinions is so moved by
the momentum of his own strong enthusiasms, so fixed by the
habitual definiteness of his own position that he cannot be
swayed. In its worst form this is rampant egoism and dogmatism.
All of us have met the loud-mouthed exponent of his
own opinions, who speaks whatever be the subject, as if _his_
position only were plausible or possible, and as if all who gain-said
him were either fools or knaves.

If we examine the mental furniture of the average man we shall
find it made up of a vast number of judgments of a very precise kind
upon subjects of very great variety, complexity, and difficulty. He
will have fairly settled views upon the origin and nature of the
universe, and upon what he will probably call its meaning; he will have
conclusions as to what is to happen to him at death and after, as to
what is and what should be the basis of conduct. He will know how
the country should be governed, and why it is going to the dogs, why
this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He will have strong
views upon military and naval strategy, the principles of taxation,
the use of alcohol and vaccination, the treatment of influenza, the
prevention of hydrophobia, upon municipal trading, the teaching of
Greek, upon what is permissible in art, satisfactory in literature, and
hopeful in science.

The bulk of such opinions must necessarily be without rational
basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by
the expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the
training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have
any opinion on them at all.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd_, p. 36.]

In action as well as opinion dogmatism and unbridled self-assertion
may be the dominant characteristics of a personality.
The man who has a strong will and little social sympathy
will be ruthlessly insistent on the attainment of his own
ends. This type of self has indeed been set up as an ideal by
such philosophers as Nietzsche and Max Stirner, who urged
that the really great man should express his own personality
irrespective of the weaklings whom he might crush in his
comet-like career. Thus writes Nietzsche in one of his
characteristic passages:

The _Superman_ I have at heart; _that_ is the first and only thing to
me--and _not_ man: not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the sorriest,
not the best....

In that ye have despised, ye higher men, that maketh me hope....
In that ye have despaired, there is much to honor. For ye have
not learned to submit yourselves, ye have not learned petty policy.

For to-day have the petty people become master; they all preach
submission, and humility, and policy, and diligence, and consideration,
and the long _et cetera_ of petty virtues.

These masters of to-day--surpass them, O my brethren--these
petty people: they are the Superman's greatest danger![2]

[Footnote 2: _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ (Macmillan edition), pp. 351-52.]

It need scarcely be noted that even if the genius or Superman
were justified, as this philosophy insists, on ruthlessly
asserting his priority, it is a dangerous procedure to identify
one's ambitions with one's desserts. As already noted, a
flamboyant assurance of one's own importance is sometimes a
ludicrous symptom of the reverse.

The more legitimate manifestation of strong individualism
in action or opinion is in the case of deeply conscientious
natures, who will not compromise by a hair's breadth from
what they conceive to be the right. The fanatic is seldom an
appealing character, but he is a type that enforces admiration.
Of such unflinching insistence are martyrs and great leaders
made. There are in every community men who will regard it
as treachery to their highest ideals to compromise at all from
the inviolable principles to which they feel themselves committed.
Such men are difficult to deal with in human situations
involving coöperation and compromise, and they exhibit
frequently a rigid austerity, bitterness, and hate that do not
readily win sympathy. But it is to such men as these that
many religious and social reforms owe their initiation. Bertrand
Russell, who, whether one agrees with him or not, exhibits
a puritanical devotion to his social beliefs, has finely
described the type:

The impatient idealist--and without some impatience a man will
hardly prove effective--is almost sure to be led into hatred by the
oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his
endeavors to bring happiness to the world. The more certain he is of
the purity of his motives and the truth of his gospel, the more
indignant will he become when his teaching is rejected.... The intense
faith which enables him to withstand persecution for the sake of his
beliefs makes him consider these beliefs so luminously obvious that
any thinking man who rejects them must be dishonest and must be
actuated by some sinister motive of treachery to the cause.[1]

[Footnote 1: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, pp. xiii-xiv.]

ENTHUSIASM. The enthusiast is another type of self that
plays an important part in social life and makes not the least
attractive of its figures. The exuberant exponent of ideas,
causes, persons, or institutions is an effective preacher,
teacher, or leader of men, and may be, apart from his utility,
intrinsically of the utmost charm. Emotions vividly displayed
are, as already pointed out in connection with sympathy,
readily duplicated in others, and the ardors of the
enthusiast are, when they have the earmarks of sincerity,
contagious. A genuinely enthusiastic personality kindles
his own fire in the hearts of others, and makes them
appreciate as no mere formal analysis could, the vital and moving
aspects of things. Good teaching has been defined as
communication by contagion, and the teachers whom students
usually testify to have influenced them most are not those
who doled out flat prescribed wisdom, but those whose own
informed ardor for their subject-matter communicated to the
student a warm sense of its significance. Leaders of great
movements who have been successful in controlling the energies
and loyalties of millions of men have been frequently
men of this high and contagious voltage. It certainly
constituted part of Theodore Roosevelt's political strength, and, in
more or less genuine form, is the asset of every successful
political speaker and leader.

Both for the one controlled by enthusiasm and for the
others to whom it spreads, experience becomes richer in
significance. Poets and the poetically-minded have to a singular
degree the power of clothing with imaginative enthusiasm
all the items of their experience.

Enthusiasm does not necessarily connote hysteria or sentimentalism.
The unstable enthusiast is a familiar type, the
man who has another object of eagerness and loyalty each
week. Mark Twain describes the type in the person of his
brother, who had a dozen different ambitions a year. But
enthusiasm may be a long-sustained devotion to a single ideal.
A curious instance of it was seen in the case of an Armenian
scholar who, so it is reported to the writer by a student of
Armenian culture, spent forty years in mastering cuneiform
script in order to prove that the Phrygians were descended
from the Armenians, and not _vice versa_.

Shelley could kindle the spirit of revolution in thousands
who would have been bored to death with the same fiery doctrines
in the abstract and cold pages of Godwin, from whom
Shelley derived his ideas of "political justice." The enthusiast,
since he instinctively likes to share his emotions, not
infrequently displays an intense desire for leadership, not so
much that he may be a leader as that he may win converts to
his own cause or creed. Such a personality finds its satisfaction
in some form of proselyting zeal, be it for a religion, for
a favorite charity, for good books, poetry, or social justice.
A well-known literary scholar who died recently was thus
described by one of his former students:

Dr. Gummere was not a teacher; he was a vital atmosphere and
his lectures, as one considered them from an intellectual or
emotional angle, were revelations or adventures. There never were
such classes as his, we believed. Who could equal him in readiness
of wit? Where was there such a raconteur? Who else could put the
feel of a poem into one's heart? ... His voice was very deep, and
exceedingly free and flexible. It always seemed to brim up as from
a spirit overflowing. Everything about him was individual and
spontaneous. He was perhaps most like a powerful river that braced
one's energies, and carried one along without the slightest desire to
resist.[1]

[Footnote 1: Charles Wharton Stork: "A Great Teacher," _The Nation_,
July 26, 1919.]

THE NEGATIVE SELF. All the types of personality or self that
have thus far been discussed are in some way positive or
assertive. But the self may be exhibited negatively, in a
shrinking, not only from observation, but from any positive
or pronounced action. This has already been noted in connection
with submissiveness. Most people in the presence of
their intellectual and social or even their physical superior,
experience a sense of, to use McDougall's term, "negative
self-feeling." In some people this negation or effacement of
the self is a predominant characteristic.

It may be mere social timidity, which, in the case of those
continually placed in servile positions, as in the case of the
proverbial "poor relation," may become chronic. In its most
disagreeable form it is exhibited as an obsequious flattering
and a pretentious humility. Of this the classic instance is
Uriah Heep in _David Copperfield_:

"I suppose you are quite a great lawyer," I [David Copperfield]
said, after looking at him for some time.

"Me, Master Copperfield?" said Uriah. "Oh, no! I'm a very
umble person."

It was no fancy of mine about his hands, I observed; for he
frequently ground the palms against each other, as if to squeeze them
dry and warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy way, on his
pocket-handkerchief.

"I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said Uriah
Heep modestly, "let the other be where he may. My mother is
likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master
Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father's former
calling was umble. He was a sexton."

"What is he now?" I asked.

"He is a partaker of glory, at present, Master Copperfield, but we
have much to be thankful for. How much have I to be thankful for,
in living with Mr. Wickfield."

Negative self-feeling may be provoked by a genuine sense
of unworthiness or modesty, and when this takes place among
religious people, it may become a complete and rapturous
submissiveness to God. The records of many mediæval and
of some modern mystics emphasize this complete yielding to
the will of God, and in His will finding peace. James quotes
in this connection Pascal's _Prière pour bien user les maladies_:

I ask you, neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death;
but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and
my death, for your glory.... You alone know what is expedient
for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your
will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to
yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and
bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad
in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or
sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That
discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden
among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not
seek to fathom.[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted in James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 286.]

Self-surrender, however, takes other forms than religious
absorption or devotion. "Saintliness" is not unknown in
secular forms of life, in the devotion of men to any ideal,
despite pain and privation of worldly goods and successes.
The doctor sacrificing his life in a leper colony is an extreme
example. But something of the same humility and submissiveness
is exhibited every time a man makes a choice which
places the welfare of other people before his own immediate
success. It is shown by the thousands of physicians and
settlement workers and teachers who spend their lives in
patient devotion to labors that bring little remuneration and
as little glory. Men of affairs and a large proportion of other
men generally measure worth by worldly success. But even
from the worldly, such signs of self-surrender elicit admiration.

ECCENTRICS. There is one type of self so various and
miscellaneous that it can only be subsumed under the general
epithet, "eccentric." These are the unexpectedly large number
of individuals in our civilization who do not come under any
of the usual categories, who display some small or great
abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men.
That some of these are accounted eccentric is to be explained
in the light of man's tendency, as a gregarious animal, to
think "queer" and "freakish" anything off the beaten track.
Some are clearly and unmistakably abnormal in some physiological
or psychological respect. From these are recruited
the inmates of our penitentiaries and insane asylums and the
candidates for them. But there are eccentricities of social
behavior, types of personality which though they cannot be
classed as either insane or criminal, yet definitely set an
individual apart.

These include what Trotter has called the "mentally unstable,"
as set over against "the great class of normal, sensible,
reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency
to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming
the backbone of the State." There are the large group of
slightly neurasthenic, made so, in part, by the high nervous
tension under which modern, especially modern urban, life is
lived. These include what are commonly called the hysterical
or over-emotional, or "temperamental" types. In a
civilization where most professions demand regularity,
restraint, punctuality, and directness, unstability and excess
emotionalism are necessarily at a discount. There are the
vagabond types who, like young Georges, Jean-qhristophe's
protégé, regard a profession as a prison house, in which most
of one's capacities are cruelly confined. There are again
those who, possessing singular and exclusive sensitivity to
æsthetic values, to music, art, and poetry, find the world
outside their own lyric enthusiasms flat, stale, and unprofitable.
If, as so frequently happens, these combine, along with their
peculiar temperaments, little genius and slender means, social
and economic life becomes for them a blind alley. Every year
at our great universities we see small groups of young men,
who, having spent three or four years on philosophy, literature,
and the liberal arts, and having no interest in academic
life, are put to it to find a profession in which they can find a
genuine interest or possible success.

Among these "eccentrics" a few have been reckoned geniuses
by their contemporaries or by posterity. In such cases
society hesitates to apply its usual formulæ. One cannot
condemn out of hand a Shelley. He is not of the run of men.

Shelley was one of those spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of those
nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly, a dogmatic, inspired,
perfect, and incorrigible creature.... Being a finished child of
nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history, and
society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was
obtuse to the droll miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The cannonade
of hard inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what little
wisdom we have, left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but uninstructed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Winds of Doctrine_; Shelley, p. 159.]

It is difficult to draw the line in some cases between genius
and insanity.[1] There have been time and again in society
Cassandras who have spoken true prophecies and have been
thought mad. There have been, on the other hand, those
who, having some of the external eccentricities of genius,
have given an illusive impression of greatness. The professional
Bohemian likes to make himself great by wearing
his hair long and living in a garret. But it is unquestionably
true that a highly sensitive and creative mind is often ill at
ease in the world of action, and remains a vagabond, an
_enfant terrible_ or an eccentric all through life. It remains
a fact that in contemporary society there are a small number
of people, some of them of considerable talents, who simply
cannot be made to fit into the social routine. For such
Bertrand Russell suggests a "vagabond's wage." This he
conceives as being just large enough to enable them to get
along, to give them a chance to wander and experiment, but
sufficiently small to penalize them for not settling down to
the accustomed social routines.[2]

[Footnote 1: Thus Plato: "But he who, not being inspired and
having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and
thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he,
I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere
at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman."
_Phoedrus_ (Jowett translation), p. 550.]

[Footnote 2: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, p. 177.
There was recently introduced to the writer a boy, aged nineteen,
for whom this would be an admirable solution. Brought up in a
tenement and working as a clerk, this youngster wrote what
competent judges pronounced to be really extraordinary lyrics.
He was at the same time utterly helpless in the world of affairs.
Even at college his casual habits and absorption would have
prevented him from getting through his freshman year.]

Mill has generalized the situation of the genius:

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a
small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve
the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an
_atmosphere_ of freedom. Persons of genius are, _ex vi termini_, more
individual than any other people--less capable, consequently, of
fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small
number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members
the trouble of forming their own character.... If they are of a
strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for
the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace,
to point at with solemn warning as "wild," "erratic," and the
like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara River for not
flowing smoothly between its banks, like a Dutch canal.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. III.]

THE ACTIVE AND THE CONTEMPLATIVE. One final distinction
must be made, one that cuts across all the types of self hitherto
discussed, namely, the distinction between the man of
action and the man of thought. One need not go far in literature
or in life to find the contrast made. In the Scriptures
Mary is set over against Martha, Rachel against Leah.
Hamlet and Ulysses are permanent representations of the
melancholy thinker and the exuberant adventurer. The
business man and the executive may be put over against the
poet and the scholar; the strenuous organizer and administrator
over against the quiet philosopher. Both have their
outstanding uses, and, in their extreme forms, their
outstanding defects. The active type, as we say, "gets things
done." He builds bridges and industries; he manages markets
and men. His eye is on the practical; he is dependable,
rapid, and efficient. In an industrial civilization he is the
great heroic type. The statesman and the railroad builder,
the newspaper editors and the political leaders captivate the
imaginations as they control the destinies of mankind.

On the other hand, there are those who stand aside (either
from incapacity or disinclination or both) from the management