biochemistry, sociology must depend upon psychology. Just at present
the study of human behavior is in an interesting but somewhat uncertain
state. The psychoanalysts, Freud especially, have brought in about as
much new matter as was previously contained in the science. Much of it
is immediately useful, some of it is worthless or even harmful, a great
deal will be found useful when it is digested. In a somewhat different
direction, the experimental behaviorists (not all of whom have
called themselves by this name) have contributed much to psychology.
They, too, have made some assumptions which at present seem to be
unwarranted, but they appear to be working in the right direction.
The new contributions came just when psychology seemed to be in a
hopeless state. The teachers had nothing to offer but definitions, and
originality meant either the invention of new words or the use of the
old ones in new senses.
Right now we perhaps stand too close to the recent developments
to understand their full purport. Yet we are justified in feeling
a certain amount of optimism about the future of psychology and
consequently about the formation of a genuine science of sociology.
Only we must take an open-minded attitude, we must not try to draw
conclusions which will justify our prejudices. That amounts to the
stupid destruction of unborn knowledge, perhaps also of unborn wisdom.
Intellectual abortion is never justified and--at least one would like
to suppose so--never permanently successful. It is healthier to think
freely, to pursue truth without fear.
After all, we need make no special effort to woo stupidity. It will
be only too much with us, despite our best efforts to be intelligent.
Those four “idols” or types of error of which Bacon wrote long ago in
the _Novum Organum_ still beset the human mind.
The “idols of the tribe” arise out of sensory deficiencies common to
all men and women. “The human mind,” according to Bacon, “resembles
those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different
objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.”
We may notice in passing that Bacon here takes up definitely the
scientific point of view. According to some philosophers, objects have
no existence except as the senses bring them to the minds of men. If we
were to agree with them, we might not speak of “uneven mirrors” except
in the case of those individuals who have sensory deficiencies peculiar
to themselves.
These are, to use Bacon’s fanciful term, “idols of the den.” More
particularly he applies the term of predilections and prejudices caused
by the special trend of an individual’s education or by the emotions
under whose sway he at the moment stands. These warping influences are
such that we may with Bacon approve the thought of Heraclitus: “that
men search for knowledge in lesser worlds, and not in the greater or
common world.”
The “idols of the market” are the errors arising in social intercourse,
largely through failure to use words in the same precise sense. Even
in spite of the careful definitions set up by men of science, this
condition exists. Sometimes, in fact, the scientific definitions
aggravate the idols of the market; as in those cases where a word used
in ordinary language is also employed for a somewhat different meaning
in a field of science.
The “idols of the theater” depend upon the peculiarities of various
systems of philosophy. It seems to me that these are largely “idols of
the market,” although the errors described by Bacon under the first two
heads are also among them.
Of course not all differences in opinion are based upon the varying
uses of words. If, in a group of one hundred intelligent men, fifty men
say that they believe in God and fifty that they do not, there may be
five in each group who really do not disagree. These ten people may all
believe in some sort of life force which can be called either a vital
impulse or God. Of course the necessity to answer either “Yes” or “No”
deprives some of the chance to say, “What way have I of telling?”
In our imaginary gathering, we may suppose that there are Catholics,
believing in the Holy Trinity and certain that the details of dogma
are definitely settled by the Church. There are also Protestants of
various denominations, differing somewhat as to the conception of the
deity. There are Unitarians, with a still different notion. There is
a Mussulman, who has no doubt that Allah revealed himself to an Arab
named Mohammed. There are deists and pantheists and spiritualists and
agnostics and atheists. Also there are people who seldom think about
religion, but who call themselves “Baptists” or “Jews” or “Unitarians”
when an inquiry is made.
Certainly it is not possible to grade people’s intelligence by the
answers they make in a religious census. There is some evidence that
the average believer in revealed religion is more stupid than the
average doubter or unbeliever. Yet the most enthusiastic atheist must
admit that some who share his opinions are decidedly less wise than
some who subscribe to, let us say, the tenets of the Roman Catholic
Church.
Whence arise the differences in belief? The beginning of the answer is
easy, the rest difficult. Most people belong to a certain religious
denomination because of the place where they were born and the
confession of their parents. John Smith is a Methodist because he was
begotten by James Smith upon Adeline Smith, who was then and who had
always lived in Atlanta, Georgia. Samuel Cohen is an orthodox Jew
because he was begotten by Saul ben Isaac Cohen upon Deborah Cohen
in Cracow. And so with the Buddhist, the Hindu, the American Indian
believing in a Great Spirit and various little spirits, or the
Catholic born in Dublin and going faithfully to mass.
Do the countries which are predominatingly Mohammedan have other
religious needs than those of the predominatingly Christian countries?
Or is there a peculiar religious instinct inherited among the Turks
other than that which is inherited among the Irish? Lessing’s wise
Nathan expresses the view that since we can learn little about God
through direct experience, we should believe our parents and our
ancestors. Yet this is but a form of egotism, and a dangerous form,
too. Why should we consider our ancestors wiser than the ancestors of
our neighbors who belong to other ecclesiastical organizations?
Robinson’s _The Mind in the Making_ is little more than an attack upon
this sort of ancestor-worship, although it does not particularly deal
with religion. But we can hardly help returning again and again to the
theologians when we discuss the stupidities which are honored chiefly
because of their antiquity.
Of course, a change in faith, although it represents a revolt
against meaningless stereotypy, does not always indicate any special
intelligence. People sometimes change their religions merely as a
matter of convenience. (Here, of course, we are dealing with words
more than with genuine beliefs.) Samuel Cohen of Cracow may become
a convert to the Roman Catholic Church because it will admit him to
certain political or social advantages or because he cannot marry
Michalina Riboczech, whom he much loves, on any other terms. Or he
may come to America and find that he is unable to earn his living
except by becoming a Methodist minister. Perhaps he does not possess
enough knowledge of the Talmud to be acceptable as a rabbi, but finds
ignorance no barrier in a church where he can serve as a living example
of conversion to the true faith.
What shall we say of the thousands of Japanese and Chinese who
become Christians without any ulterior motive? They find some sort
of emotional satisfaction in the new faith which they have not been
able to find in their ancestral religions. Why? I do not think the
question can be answered satisfactorily with our present knowledge of
psychology. Nor can we tell why one brother is a bishop and the other a
skeptic, except when there is an element of hypocrisy in one case.
The religious attitude is one of belief based upon little or no
evidence. Beyond the field which we consider religious, we regard such
an attitude as stupid. As a matter of fact, though, we are influenced
everywhere by “such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and
passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste
and set.” William James, whose words I have thus employed, argues that
because these elements are universal, they are therefore justifiable.
Because we have been considering absolute truth and because the
argument is ingenious, I will here quote some sentences from James’s
_The Will to Believe_:
Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth,
and that our minds and it are made for each other--what is it
but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social
system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe
that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us
in a continually better and better position towards it; and on
this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a
pyrrhonistic skeptic asks us _how we know_ all this, can our logic
find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition
against another--we are willing to go in for life upon a trust or
assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.
But if this be unanswerable, then it destroys the system which James
is trying to erect. If _truth_ has any meaning at all, it must not be
applied to that which is unproved and seemingly unprovable. If we are
to think with any accuracy, of course we must recognize that _truth_
and _proof_ are not absolutes. This recognition gives us no cause for
returning to the physiology and astrology of the Middle Ages or for
postulating God and immortality and free will, when these conceptions
seem to be unnecessary for modern scientific thought.
James wrote _The Will to Believe_ as an attack upon the attitude
represented in _The Ethics of Belief_ by William Kingdon Clifford. Of
Clifford’s viewpoint there is a brief summary in his own words:
We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is
inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not
know is like what we know.
We may believe the statement of another person when there is
reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which
he speaks and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and
where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, then it is
worse than presumption to believe.
These seem to be principles which we can apply. Certainly there
exists no general need to believe whenever intellectual options
present themselves. Often, as we have seen, we are expected to act
on insufficient information. Thus, the man who declares that he does
not know whether there is or is not a God who wishes to be worshipped
must either attend church--as though he believed in this sort of
divinity--or stay away--as though he did not. Or, though he conceives
the possibility that Jehovah wishes to be praised, he may refrain from
church attendance and prayer because he has no way of knowing what may
be the proper manner in which to go about the matter.
It is not what one believes that matters, except as this is shown in
what one does. Therefore a deficiency in will power is at the bottom of
much stupidity. Our worldly hells are paved with good intentions. “It
is in human nature,” according to Anatole France, “to think wisely and
to act in an absurd fashion.”
The shrewdest of business men are caught unaware and imposed upon
by swindlers. Many of the tricks commonly employed depend upon the
victim’s readiness to share in a doubtful deal. He is made to feel a
great joy at the thought of his own acuteness, which joy occupies him
to such an extent that his intellectual powers are impaired. Moreover,
the victim is given to suppose that great haste is required. At last,
when he discovers that he has been beswindled, his vanity usually makes
him keep silent. He would be loath to have people know that he is
neither as honest nor as wise as he is reputed. Egotism is one of the
chief causes of folly, as we have already had occasion to notice.
Some people who are not conspicuous for direct vanity yet show the vice
indirectly, through their blind preferences for their own families,
their own parties, their own causes. “Wrong or right, my country,” is
no wiser a saying than “Right or wrong, my prejudices.” The recent
attempts to make out a case for Germanic or Nordic supremacy are
entirely ridiculous. As a matter of fact, most Englishmen are racially
about the same as most Frenchmen.
It is by no means so evident as it once seemed that the white race is
far superior to those of a darker hue. There are even Europeans and
Americans who declare the Chinese and the Japanese are wiser than we.
As to the negro race, there is but little evidence that it stands on a
low intellectual level because of organic limitations. A few colored
people of pure blood have performed outstanding achievements. We have
reason to believe that their accomplishments are exceptional only
because the negroes have had few educational opportunities. The colored
people living in the north seem to be more alert and less stupid than
those working in the fields of Mississippi and Florida.
Woltmann declares that the negroes are inferior because they attain
the age of puberty sooner. At this time, according to some students of
the matter, brain development ceases. If this were the case, and if the
rate of brain development while it lasts were the same in all races,
then we should be able to grade intelligence among races according to
climate. We should expect the Eskimos, to whom nubility comes late, to
be far more intelligent than the Spanish and Italians, to whom it comes
early. But we have no reason to come to any such conclusion.
Otto Ammon, after studying the people of Baden, came to the conclusion
that the Nordics (with long heads, blue eyes, and blond hair) are
superior to those of Alpine derivation (with short heads and dark
hair). But he and the writers in Germany and other countries who
agree with him have assumed rather than proved their conclusions. By
way of rebuttal, Loewenfeld declares that the two greatest German
philosophers, Kant and Schopenhauer, were both short-headed. Goethe,
whatever shape his skull may have had, certainly possessed dark hair
and eyes. The assumption of Nordic superiority is based upon prejudice
rather than upon scientific evidence.
Is stupidity more common among the poor than among the rich? Of course
we are unable to answer such questions accurately because of the lack
of dependable criteria. But we know that most persons want to become
wealthy and we may reasonably infer that those who acquire fortunes
do excel in certain intellectual characteristics. That these traits
or general mental superiority is transmitted to rich men’s children
is sometimes asserted. Of course they are likely to have special
educational facilities. Besides this, they have unusual opportunities
to show what they can do in positions of responsibility.
And yet they often prove to be inferior in business or in the
professions to the children of the poor. Often they have failed to
acquire habits of industry. Or else they are anxious to do no work
which might seem menial or undignified.
There can be no question that most dynasties have been founded by
men of unusual ability. Nevertheless, the kings and queens of Europe
are in most cases persons of merely average intellect. Psychoses and
neuroses are not rare among them. Perhaps a partial explanation of
royal degeneration is to be found in their inbreeding. The mixed fruit
of royalty and the common people is almost always declared illegitimate.
Very few great men have had children gifted with genius. So far,
the laws of heredity explain comparatively little about the sudden
appearance of remarkable traits. But the children of intelligent people
are likely to be less stupid than those whose parents are fools. The
factors of original nature and of education are both in favor of the
former class.
Forms of stupidity vary much with time and place. The tendency to do
as one’s fellows do is a strong one. Especially in a mob, it sometimes
appears that the prevailing level of intelligence is that of the most
stupid members. But mob psychology deals in general with states of
excitement. Sometimes actions are attributed to mere numbers which are
due to emotional stress felt by all the individuals in the crowd.
For intelligence is no guarantee against impulsive action. Love and
hate and fear and jealousy and sympathy make normally wise people do
exceedingly foolish things. The mob is capable of killing innocent
persons. So is almost any man, when his hate is aroused.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
These verses of Oscar Wilde’s are justified. The passions do not exert
themselves in a definite and controlled direction. Therefore love can
slay about as well as hate. Probably better, for the opportunities are
greater.
Physical ill health is at the bottom of much stupidity. Although the
direct influence upon the higher nervous centers may be little, there
are all sorts of indirect effects caused by illness. Frequently the
patient is in a constant state of suppressed anger. Any trifle makes
him find fault with his physician and his attendants.
Sometimes, indeed, the patient does not become angry with his
nurse. He may fall into an attitude of dependence upon her. This
occasionally--especially in the case of men just entering the first
stage of senile dementia--leads to foolish marriages.
Old age, like childhood, is more or less the scene of folly.
Comparatively few individuals are as intelligent in the 70’s and 80’s
as they were in the 30’s and 40’s. Most men are physically strongest at
about the age of 25. The height of mental power comes later, perhaps
at about 45. After that the memory tends to decline. The other mental
traits become impaired usually in the 60’s.
The folly peculiar to youth depends largely upon lack of experience.
Deficiency in self-control is also an important element--one, to be
sure, that frequently lasts through life. Child prodigies usually show
a one-sided development. Though they may be quick thinkers, they seldom
probe deeply.
The thinker is immature until he has a supply of experiences and
ideas at his service. These will come, if he only learns to apply the
principle of order. This is the instrument with which we make the most
of our minds. When we learn how to use order, we become as gods. For
then we can take the chaos about us and build it into a universe.
Transcriber’s Notes
In the .txt version, surrounding characters have been used to indicate
_Italics_
Minor typographical and spelling errors have been corrected
p. 29 retained unchanged the sentence beginning “The educational
critics”