DR. McDOUGALL’S X
1. AT THE BECK OF THIRTEEN MASTERS
Dr. William McDougall, once of Oxford and Harvard, now of Duke
University in North Carolina, came to America as one of England’s
leading psychologists. If he is less well known to the public than some
other psychologists, it is because he is less eminently “verbalized”
along the lines of gripping, every-day speech. As an example of his
literary style, as well as of his philosophy, take his definition of
Instinct.
“An inherited or innate psycho-physical disposition which determines
its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a
certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a particular
quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in
a particular manner, or, at least, to experience an impulse to such
action.”
McDougall is nothing if not cautious. His subtile mind foresees every
objection which can be made, and tries to forestall it. The result is a
labyrinth in which even a professor, lacking a golden thread from the
head of Ariadne to guide him, must--and does--frequently get lost. And
yet all that this famous definition actually means is that we are born
in such a way that we act in such a way.
As to whether the way is marked by physical roads or by roads which
are something else; as to whether these roads are bequeathed to us
by our ancestors, or whether we just have them, McDougall does not
commit himself. But he implies that there is something in us which
pays attention or does not pay attention, and that this something does
not always follow a road even if it sees it. Sometimes it merely wants
to follow, but forbears. Each road, we learn as we continue to read
from this, his “Outline of Psychology,”[32] has a lure of its own--as
roads are apt to have--something which he calls the “hormic impulse,”
or “hormic faculty.” And sometimes, instead of having it always acting
from the roads themselves and moving us with a pull, he seems to
think of it as in or behind us and giving us a push. In its latter
position it can easily be mistaken for a will--even for a free will. To
experience an impulse to act, and then not to act as the impulse would
have you--is not that to be free to act as you like?
Yes; but what determines the like? Has the slave-driver gone, or has he
merely stepped into the background?
A hormic impulse is a “striving” impulse. We are born with these
impulses, therefore they are “instincts.” William James gave us
twenty-four--the instincts of climbing, imitation, emulation, rivalry,
pugnacity, anger, resentment, sympathy, hunting, fear, approbation,
acquisitiveness, kleptomania, constructiveness, play, curiosity,
sociability, shyness, cleanliness, modesty, shame, love, jealousy,
parental love. Dr. Watson says he has been able to find none of them.
Dr. McDougall rejects some and discovers several new ones, leaving
thirteen in all--which was for him an unlucky number.
Instead of being free, we have now thirteen masters, always wrangling
among themselves, it is true, but never consulting us about their
decisions. If we hesitate to obey one of them it is only because
some other happens for the moment to be stronger. Or we are mastered
by a combination; by a bloc. If we decide to move from the city to
the country, it is probably a farm bloc. According to this theory, a
sufficiently knowing person could calculate your conduct in advance.
Draw two straight lines of the same length, or of different lengths,
as you prefer, from a single point; call that point yourself; let the
direction of the lines represent the direction of the instincts, and
let the relative lengths of the lines represent the relative strength
of the instincts. If you then draw two other lines, each one parallel
to one of the first two, and if you finally draw a diagonal from the
original point to the opposite corner of the parallelogram you have
just constructed, this diagonal will represent the action you will take
when played upon by two hormic impulses at the same time.
But is this not free will, to do as you are moved to do? It was
Schopenhauer, I think, who said that if a stone thrown through the air
could be conscious, it would imagine that it was free; would translate
gravity, momentum, resistance and the like into terms of personal
desire. And it was Will Durant who, in his “Story of Philosophy,” said
that Schopenhauer was right. This, of course, is but another way of
saying that free will is an illusion. It seems to come from within us,
but in reality comes from without. And so it must be if we are the
playthings of these hormic, instinctive impulses with which we are said
to be born.
McDougall has specifically repudiated this interpretation of his
theory. He calls himself a “Vitalist”; a believer in an active
“life-principle,” in something which, if not an actual soul, is at
least a mind. But being an eminently fair-minded gentleman, he has
been at pains to marshal together all the objections to his own views
which he can think of, and he has proven himself to be a better enemy
propagandist than defender of his own territory.
Thus C. E. M. Joad, a British writer, author of “The Babbitt Warren,”
in his essay, “The End of Ethics,”[33] compared McDougall to Watson
and to Freud, and finds that one and all “preclude free will.” And he
adds: “Whether ... the conscious will overcomes the unconscious desire,
or whether the unconscious desire overcomes the conscious will, is a
matter which appears to lie outside our control.”
Mr. Joad does not go half far enough. Under the McDougall hypothesis,
the conscious will overcoming the unconscious desire is a matter
which can never happen. Will is merely the conscious result of a war
of unconscious impulses. But he is quite right in believing that it
makes no difference whether a striving be called an “instinct,” as by
McDougall; an “emotion-reflex,” as by Watson; or a “libido,” with or
without a “complex,” as by Freud. If we were born with it, or found
it innate within us, or acquired it through circumstances not of our
making, then we are its puppets or the puppets of its fellows. So Mr.
Joad quite logically groups McDougall, Watson and Freud together as
determinists, all the protests of the eminent English professor to the
contrary notwithstanding.
McDougall nevertheless is possessed by an idea which negatives such a
conclusion, negatives his whole philosophy; but he has never let it
possess him wholly. That is why he has become so subtile, so difficult
to read. Among those objects “of a certain class” which his thirteen
innate or inherited instincts have moved him to pay attention to, is
the materialistic physical science of the nineteenth century. And the
conclusions of that science emphatically forbid the conclusion which he
longs to arrive at in his own particular sphere. He wants to be free;
to have a soul. And this old science tells him that he can’t be free,
nor have anything of the sort.
The trouble, of course, comes from the “law” of the Conservation of
Energy--the idea that force is incapable of being either increased or
diminished; that the amount of power which enters into anything is the
amount of power which eventually issues from it, no more and no less.
If will be anything but the net result of a group of pushes and pulls,
it obviously contravenes this law by “creating” enough force to upset
the balance--that is, unless we interpret the law very liberally and
take it to mean that the sum total of the force of the entire universe
alone is constant. In that case, if the will can smuggle in a little
energy without having to pay for it, so to speak, it could be free to
that extent.
The nineteenth century provided against this catastrophe by making
matter indestructible. No particle of it was to be permitted to give
up the ghost--a ghost which might be snatched by the will and used to
wreck the materialistic machine. So even if matter had some energy
locked up in it somehow, it was going to stay locked up. Those were
the days of a static universe; of a world completely finished, set
going and deserted by a God who had gone out of business and was never
expected to return. And to prove it, scientists devised instruments,
measured the energy--income and output, found that the two balanced,
and boldly announced that they always “must” balance.
Naturally, McDougall is not so crude as to accept either those
experiments or those theories today. It takes a popular author to
do that--one whose reading stopped or was curtailed many years ago.
After saying that the only ground for doubting the freedom of the
will is that offered by the strict determinists who contend for the
universality of the Law of Causation--a dependent brother of the Law of
Conservation,--after saying this, he boldly adds that this law “is not
susceptible of being proved”; has “had its day”; and “is merely a clog
on speculation.”
Nothing could be more hopeful. We seem to be setting out on a
magnificent, unincumbered highway. But McDougall is a born reconciler
of irreconcilables. He can not abandon Conservation even after having
repudiated it. Earlier predilections, no doubt, bar the way. So he
seeks to retain both his Will and the Law which forbids it. Fit
successor to James and to Santayana, he presents the spectacle of a
house divided against itself. Yet he lacks the wistful melancholy of
the unbelieving Catholic, who found the intellect so hard and dry and
useless when made supreme over all, but strove faithfully to worship it
nevertheless. Nor has he the reckless inconsistency of the unbelieving
Protestant, James, who could say one thing heartily, and then, in
another mood, say something quite the opposite--no less heartily.
McDougall is neither hearty nor melancholy. He has partially
accepted Freud, and has worked in the same clinic with Jung. He is
a psychiatrist. His important contributions to knowledge all deal
with the abnormal. He has studied insects and animals. But such
thirst for the human as he owns to has been largely satisfied by his
practical ministrations to the sick and semi-demented. Therefore he is
able to weave his intricate patterns of words about the incompatible
presumptions of his argument with a certain appearance of enjoyment,
and seems to fancy that when the thread of the discourse has become
sufficiently tangled it will have brought the incompatibles together.
“Resolutions of the will are not bolts from the blue,” he asserts.[34]
And he does not see that this commits him hopelessly to the mechanistic
camp. For resolutions of the will must be bolts from the blue--just
that, exactly--or they do not transcend the law of the Conservation of
Energy. And if they do not add a jot or tittle by way of effect to what
is already found in the cause, they are not free.
“Shall we say that Divine [clearly he means ‘human’] Reason sits at the
head, controlling the fierce passions that reside in the belly as a
charioteer controlls a team of savage steeds?” asks McDougall.[35]
“Aye!” cried the great Aristotle, centuries ago.
“Hardly!” exclaims our Carolina professor. “Reason is not a conative
[i. e. striving] energy that may be thrown on this side or that in our
moral conflicts.”[36] “Reason is not that X of which we are in search,
though it plays an important part in bringing that X to bear.”[37]
It begins to have the interest of a detective story. X marks the spot
where the Will is to be found--and if X is something superior to
Reason, all the better. But it is clearly asserted here that the Will
is not the Reason; that Reason merely plays a part in bringing the
Will to bear. That is, Reason guides, directs, aims the Will? No; for
in such a case Reason would be the master, the mysterious Mr. X after
all--which is contrary to the hypothesis. Is Reason, then, a channel of
information, an open book where the Will reads the latest returns from
the environment, so that there may be no action without knowledge? It
looks that way for the moment. But McDougall goes on: “The X of which
we are in search is always an impulse awakened within the sentiment
of self-regard. It is the desire that I, the precious self ... shall
realize in action the ideal of conduct which it has formulated and
accepted.”[38]
So X is an impulse wakened within a sentiment, which[39] he tells us is
the “most general term to denote all acquired conative (i. e. striving)
trends.” This makes X an impulse wakened within an acquired striving
trend. And if we turn back to the definition of instinct we are
reminded that a disposition to experience an impulse is an instinct,
and therefore not acquired. So the impulse must have slumbered in
a disposition before the sentiment within which it eventually woke
had been acquired. X is also a desire belonging to an “I” which has
formulated and accepted an ideal of conduct. Are we ringing the changes
upon an octave of bells, or are we trying to say something?
[Illustration: PROFESSOR WILLIAM MCDOUGALL
Are we trying to say something?]
Here we have Reason, Desire, Impulse, Instinct and Sentiment, not to
mention Trend, all getting together and trying to make a Will with the
help of an X and an I. We were out fishing, and just when the prospect
seemed encouraging for a bite of something edible, we catch a wad
of verbal flounces, beneath which if anything be concealed it looks
strangely like a gudgeon in the shape of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”
rechristened as the Sentiment of Self-Regard. Or it may be the “libido”
of Freud, or the “egotistic impulse” of Dr. Alfred Adler, of Vienna,
which even Freud has denounced as “founded entirely upon the impulse of
aggression,” leaving “no place at all for love.” It is a Will such as
Dr. Watson might have made, had he been making one. But at least, you
will say, it is a Will. Yet is it?
A Will must have power, else it cannot move at all. And it must have
the direction of that power, else it has no choice as to the way in
which it shall move. X, being an impulse and a desire, may be said to
have power. But McDougall puts it within an acquired striving trend,
and my dictionary tells me that a trend is an inclination to move in
a particular direction--which is precisely what an instinct is. The
channel, you will note, has already been dug. Whatever was acquired
was foredoomed to be acquired. The ideal of conduct which the “I”
formulated and accepted lay hidden from the first, with no possibility
of its being rejected in favor of some other ideal. The “balance sheet”
of the Law of Conservation has been retained, all protestations to the
contrary notwithstanding.
McDougall has also attempted to make a Will out of attention.
Now attention is probably the slightest piece of luggage of all our
inner impedimenta. It is such a little thing. It weighs almost nothing.
Can’t we get at least “attention” past the old-fashioned scientific
custom-house without paying duty under the Conservation law? This looks
at first like a feasible scheme. But the customsmen are lynx-eyed.
Once we submit to their jurisdiction they will let nothing pass, though
it weigh less than the tiniest bit of fuzz off the end of a feather
boa. Thus far McDougall has been held up as an undesirable citizen by
these hoary custodians, and not allowed to land in Mechanistia. They
have been alarmed by the suspicious manner of the traveler. But in
thinking that he has any free will hidden in his theoretical baggage
they are deceived.
This “interest” or “attention” with which we have to deal, is
“conative.”[40] And conation is “a convenient Latin word ... to denote
the striving aspect of the mental processes.”[41] I am afraid that it
is all it is, a convenient Latin word. For “instinct” too is a “direct
conative trend.”[42] Here we have two kinds of striving, only one of
which is said to be direct, that is to have a direction. But this
directed striving comes first; it is in-born, instinctive. Naturally so
is instinct, “a disposition which determines its possessor to perceive,
and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class.” But in trying to
find a Will it is precisely this determining which we are interested
in. We don’t care what makes the water run in the ditch, we want to
know what digs the ditch. In McDougall it is always instinct. He has
studied insects too much. He has seen too many lunatics whose wills
were paralyzed. “Instinctively” he gives us only the mechanisms which
he thinks he finds in grasshoppers.
Once, indeed, he does get up to the level of birds. On page 255 of the
book[43] which contains the most complete expression of his theories,
he says: “The only instance of pure cognition, as distinct from
recognition, are those in which a creature is confronted for the first
time with an object of the kind that evokes an instinctive reaction....
As when the hen nightingale hears for the first time the song of the
male.”
We are back to a first time, so for the moment are freed from habit.
But “instinctive reaction” evoked by an object in the environment
promptly takes us in charge. If the hen nightingale has no X, neither
have we. She is merely a concrete example of the class “creature,”
to which we unquestionably belong. And obviously the hen can pay no
attention to objects in which she has no instinctive interest, since it
is instinct which “determines” the disposition to attend.
But what if the hen sees a snake as well as hears a song? Can reason
dig a channel for her striving which will lead her to make a detour on
her way past snake towards song? Is Reason the X? Impossible. “Reason
is not a conative [striving] energy.” Then it has no power, it cannot
dig ditches.
It cannot even control attention, since that is the yes-man of
instinct, the only thing having power which we have yet encountered.
So if the hen nightingale decides to risk the possibility of laying
unfertilized eggs rather than the possibility of making a snake’s
dinner--if she turns a deaf ear to the song of the male and simply goes
away from there, it will be because her instinct of self-preservation
proved a stronger and a quicker ditch-digger and trend-giver for her
hormic impulses than did her sexual or maternal instincts. Or perhaps
it was her instinct of self-regard which led her to take wing.
No doubt it will be argued that it was Reason which put before her
the probable consequences of coming too close to a snake, reason
based on experience or observation. Let us suppose that Reason did
have this information--though I don’t see how a powerless reason could
acquire anything,--what is it going to do with it? Call it to the hen’s
attention? It cannot. Her attention wears the shackles of instinct. She
moves without waiting to know. Moving without knowing why is the very
core of instinctive behavior.
And yet McDougall assures us[44] that “conative [striving] behavior is
indicative of an energy that works teleologically [i. e. purposefully]
and which is therefore radically different from the energies which
physical science conceives as working always mechanistically.” He
loves to console himself with sentences like this one. We grow more
rational and less instinctive as we grow older. How perfectly true. But
McDougall brings it about by having Reason “waken” in a world where no
energy is required to amass and classify data and then bring them to
the attention of an X in the face of thirteen instincts which among
them possess all the power there is.
If Reason only were a bolt from the blue! Or if X were such a bolt and
could lend Reason a little current! But X itself wakens in a particular
instinct, self-regard, and it is wakened by nothing. X does not mark
the place where the will is to be found, it marks the place where the
_body_ is to be found. And what is McDougall’s conclusion of the whole
matter? What one might expect. “The stallion arches his thick neck ...
the bull bellows; the lion roars; the cat caterwauls; and the young man
curls his mustache.”
2. PSYCHE WIELDS THE BROOM
In an unclaimed desert anyone may erect fences, but it is difficult
to see how fences, especially when they are only imaginary, can
earn dividends if they enclose no cattle. McDougall introduces us
to a region where there is not even sand--only words. And nothing
is required of these words, whether they be conveniently Latin or
less conveniently English, except that they follow one another in
grammatical order. He makes distinction after distinction; and as they
are verbal distinctions merely, all that ensues when they contradict
each other is a conflict like that of several contending currents of
air.
We see now why Dr. Watson so much objected to the introspective method.
In truth, “introspective” is an unhappy term. We may note what goes on
inside of our bodies, and even of our brains to a certain extent; and
give names to various thoughts, feelings and sensations, or to what
we take to be such. We can tell in what order they occur. But this is
not introspection in any literal sense, it is simply paying attention
to things which are intimate and near. Actually to try to look inside
of “ourselves,” implies that “we” are standing outside and looking
in--an impossible situation. Its physical counterpart is the attempt to
roll the eyeballs so as to get a view of the interior of the skull--a
performance not to be recommended.
The outer world, physicists tells us, is a “continuum,” something all
of a piece. A chair and the air around it are not so separate as one
might suppose. It is the sense of touch and the sense of sight which
distinguish so sharply between one and the other. Make the chair of
glass, and the eye is not so certain. Lenses and mirrors can be so
arranged as to project a visible chair which the hand cannot feel.
Make the chair of aromatic wood and the sense of smell will perceive it
as pervasively emanating from a vague center yet permeating the whole
room.
But in dividing such a continuum we have at least the warrant of our
senses. We remain practical. When we attempt to divide up the continuum
perceived only by the inner self, such guides are lacking. We have
to depend upon psychologists. And if we try to go further and cut
the inner self, itself doing the cutting, we only commit subjective
_hari-kari_, the sensation of which is very uncomfortable. This is the
sort of metaphysics which is indeed but methodical befuddlement. Yet
it is practiced, not by metaphysicians but by men calling themselves
scientists; men who profess for the most part to despise both
metaphysics and philosophy--dogmatic men, who never lose an opportunity
for expressing their horror of dogma. Such misbehavior entitles anyone
to the title “misbehaviorist,” whether he be a Watsonian or a Freudian,
and McDougall, for all his agreeable manners, will have to be convicted.
R. H. Hingley, B.A., who signs himself a “research student in
psychology, Edinburgh University,” picking and choosing such
verbalization as pleases him, even attempts to reconcile McDougall
with the impalpable Boris Sidis. Hingley writes as a friend of the
accused, and in his book, “Psycho-Analysis,” proves it by defining
“self-consciousness” as “a recognized and acknowledged synthesis of
... impulses.”[45] If that is all self-consciousness is, it is this
same familiar nothing with which we have already had so much to do.
Can you imagine a “synthesis” as existing by itself? In the case of
gin, perhaps, for the atoms in synthetic gin are real atoms in good
standing in their several communities brought together by no fault
of their own. Nor even yet do they exist as gin except as there is
something outside of themselves capable of conceiving of them as gin.
They belong to the physical continuum--and generally it is safer to
leave them where they belong.
I won’t ask what is to be expected of a synthesis of McDougallian
hormic impulses. Another verbal whirlwind threatens to blow, and it
will be better to keep out of it. But let us make a synthesis of
matches.
Arrange a number of matches on the table before you so that they form
a cross, a star, or any other geometrical figure. Then sweep them up
in your hand and forget all about it. Where is the figure now? What
has become of it? Have you at last succeeded in defying “natural
law,” and annihilated something? No; the figure did not exist, as a
figure, except in you. And if some trace of it be not in you now, as an
“unconscious idea” or what not, it can be nowhere. It was only a form,
and form is an entity only by grace of the perceiver of form.
It was you who perceived certain relations among the matches. The
relations were not in the matches. Unless the matches managed somehow
to get outside of themselves, they had no idea that they were parts
of a cross, a star, or a triangle. And when this form is “destroyed”
they are conscious of no loss. Now a self, or a self-consciousness
which is only a form made out of the things which constitute it and not
perceived by anything else, is less a self than a piece of bread rubbed
on the outside of an empty closet door is a cheese sandwich.
This habit of playing with words signifying a multitude of things
conceived of as a unit, is evident in all the literature of mechanist
thinking. As soon as such a word is found, the group of things is
treated as if it were a force, an entity, or even an intelligent
creature standing on its own legs. And usually the things in the groups
are also but words.
Dr. McDougall, for instance, says that a man in the presence of a great
work of art is being played upon by a “fusion” of the “instincts” of
“curiosity” and “wonder,” fused in their turn with the instinct of
“submission.” It is a predicament in which no one should lightly wish
to find even an art critic.
But if we have thirteen instincts, why not fourteen? Why not the whole
twenty-four listed by James? Why not twenty-five? If I can be played
upon by a fusion of curiosity, wonder and submission, all instinctive,
why cannot I be played upon by the instinct to light my pipe at three
o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, the Thirteenth of January? Think of
a self-conscious synthesis of unconscious impulses being played upon
by a fusion of unconscious determining impulses wakened in an innate
psycho-physical disposition to pay attention!
But let us abandon the materialistic hypothesis, however disguised.
Let us say that it was Psyche who built her house, not the house which
built Psyche--and how the situation changes! She cannot have built it
out of nothing, it is true. So let Dr. Watson give her a dwelling with
only the foundation reflex courses laid, or let Dr. McDougall escort
her into a completely and instinctively furnished apartment. In either
case, she begins at once to make alterations, for she is a “choosy”
woman, this Psyche of ours. She has power in her right arm, and does
not care a tinker’s dam about the conservation of energy.
So she proceeds in her disposition to pay attention to objects “of
a certain class,” and totally to ignore others. Things progress
from a “predominantly mechanical to a predominantly teleological
determination.” Pure instincts, the original furnishings of the flat,
become modified by experience and rational reflection. Dr. Watson[46]
says “there is no mystery in building the human being into as
complicated an organism as he is.” Avowed mechanists are never tired of
telling us this, and they are right. There is no mystery at all--save
in Psyche herself. And she is all mystery. I would no sooner think of
trying to explain her than I would think of explaining myself. For she
_is_ myself. And she and I, like Drs. Watson and McDougall, are totally
inexplicable. Not even we understand in the least.
What is explanation? Let us explain a sunset. It is caused, we will
say, by the earth turning upon its axis, so that the sun, which at
noon was overhead, seems to sink to the horizon. Actually, it is the
horizon which rises and obscures the sun--no matter. The rays which
were perpendicular, become slant. They encounter drops of water in the
atmosphere--encounter too the laws of refraction, and break up into
gorgeous yellows and purples. Follow the rays in one direction, and
you come to the “rods” in the eye; the optic nerve; the brain; and to
Something which translates the result into the color sensations, and
these, perhaps, into a fusion of wonder, curiosity and submission--and
these into a lot of theories.
Follow the rays in the other direction, and you arrive at the sun,
and are tempted to construct various theories of light. Whence came
the sun? Whence came these primal particles or protons of which it
is theoretically composed? We know of the sun’s existence only from
what Psyche perceives--through her senses or otherwise. Imagine
that neither Psyche nor the sun exists. Start now and try to imagine
yourself creating either or both. Why, you cannot even make a
beginning. You have nothing to imagine with. You are lost between the
impossibility of existence and the impossibility of non-existence. Did
you ever stop to think how utterly impossible is either of these two
opposite impossibilities? And yet--here we are!
Explanation, then, consists in nothing but the addition to one
mysterious experience of Psyche certain other mysterious experiences
which precede, accompany or follow it. And as they usually precede,
accompany or follow in much the same order, we call them causes,
controlling circumstances, and effects. But instead of explaining the
mystery away, we have merely heaped Pelions and Ossas of mystery all
about it. And so we often manage to hide it, and to fancy that there
is no mystery at all. Would it not be wholesome exercise occasionally
to admit openly that we do not know what we are talking about? Why not
for once exclaim with Dr. Bertry, in “_L’évasion_,” by Brieux, “_On ’s
imagine savoir des millions de choses!--on veut formuler les lois de la
vie--et l’on assiste impuissant à sa propre agonie!--Nous ne comprenons
rien à tout ce qui se passe autour de nous, rien à ce que se passe en
nous_”?
So far as the mind is concerned, this is undoubtedly true. The mind
can know nothing of the proper essence of that which surrounds us. The
mind, says Newman, cannot comprehend even its own activities to the
full. So we “do but assist at our own agony.... Why is it that I die?
The scelerose invades the arteries. Why? What is the scelerose?” And
Dr. Bertry continues: “Do you wish me to tell you? We know nothing
about it--nothing! We have found nothing about it--but words.”
That is no reason, however, why we should use yet other words to create
mysteries of our own--like the unconscious emotions of Dr. Watson, or
the enslaved freedom of Dr. McDougall. And this is my answer to those
who will object that my explanation, too, is incomprehensible. Its
incomprehensibility comes from the facts, not from my contrivance. The
metaphor of Psyche grants the natural mystery by making our inner self
a human being, which, after all, is what it is. And with this for a
start, the reason can work--at the only job for which it is fitted.
It does not follow that Psyche discovers nothing which is of any use.
Knowledge is relative, but Truth is not--Pragmatism or no Pragmatism.
And she soon discovers, let William James have said what he may have
said, that it makes a great difference whether her approximations are
more or less wide of the mark. Which is to say that she profits by
experience. Her original house does not suit her. She makes certain
rearrangements. They suit her better, but not to perfection. She
continues to rearrange and to build, with such material as life affords
her. That, I fancy, is what she is here for--to learn how to keep
house. For though the house be not Psyche, any more than your house
or your body is you, do not think for a moment that it is useless. As
well say that the parallel bars in the gymnasium are of no use to the
athlete for whom they afford the opportunity of exercise.
Scientists at one time used to exercise--not their powers of
observation, but their verbal ingenuity--upon a set of bars of their
own which they called the psycho-neural parallel, saying that inasmuch
as two parallel lines can never touch, so neurology and psychology,
nerves and mind, matter and the immaterial, can never influence one
another. According to this theory, there were two eternally separate
twins dancing along, each on its own line of the parallel, forever
aping each other as our reflections ape us in a mirror. And it was
strictly forbidden to cross the track!
The materialists have repealed this “law,” on the ground that there is
no psychic rail out of which to make the right hand parallel. Others
would repeal it, saying that there is no left-hand rail. The rails are
there, nevertheless. What is not there nor anywhere is the prohibition
against crossing. The idea that the immaterial cannot influence the
material because spirit and matter are things of different orders comes
from the same sort of logic as would maintain that waves cannot rock a
boat because wood and water, too, are of different orders of things.
But, think you, this is merely human experience and common sense, not
science? That there is no Scientific Psyche? That the idea of there
being somebody at home within us is a sweet but forbidden doctrine;
something forever outlawed by the experimental method? On the contrary,
it was the experimental method which first made us aware of this state
of things. And the experimental method in its most modern, scientific
form, politely lifts its hat to the Housekeeper whenever she appears.
It was only during a decade or two--the decade or two when most of
our psychologists were young and learned all they ever did learn of
physics--that science forgot her manners. If you want to be in style,
do not continue to wear your hat in the house. In the best circles it
is no longer done.
We are not ready yet, however, to enter the best circles. We have first
to pass through the fires of passion, of madness and dreams.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] My quotations are from the edition of 1925.
[33] _Harper’s Magazine_, August, 1927.
[34] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 446.
[35] _Ibid._, p. 439.
[36] _Ibid._, p. 446.
[37] _Ibid._, p. 440.
[38] “Outline of Psychology,” pp. 140 and 141.
[39] _Ibid._, p. 418.
[40] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 274.
[41] _Ibid._, p. 418.
[42] _Ibid._, p. 418.
[43] _Op. cit._
[44] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 317.
[45] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 18.
[46] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July,
1927.