pp. 158-61. (Innsbruck: Wagnerische Univ. Buchhandlung, 1883.)
[137] Translated from Georg Simmel, _Soziologie_, by Albion W. Small,
_American Journal of Sociology_, XV (1909), 296-98; III (1898), 667-83.
[138] Translated and adapted from Georg Simmel, _Soziologie_, pp.
646-51. (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1908.)
[139] Adapted from Charles Darwin, _The Expression of the Emotions_, pp.
350-67. (John Murray, 1873.)
[140] Adapted from Charles Darwin, _The Expression of the Emotions_, pp.
310-37. (John Murray, 1873.)
[141] Translated and adapted from L. Dugas, _Psychologie du rire_, pp.
32-153. (Félix Alcan, 1902.)
[142] Adapted from C. Lloyd Morgan, _Animal Behaviour_, pp. 193-205.
(Edward Arnold, 1908.)
[143] Adapted from F. Max Müller, _The Science of Language_, I, 520-27.
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1891.)
[144] Adapted from Charles H. Judd, _Psychology_, pp. 219-24. (Ginn &
Co., 1917.)
[145] Adapted from Carl Bücher, _Industrial Evolution_. Translated by S.
Morley Wickett, pp. 216-43. (Henry Holt & Co., 1907.)
[146] From Charles H. Judd, "Imitation," in _Monroe's Cyclopedia of
Education_, III, 388-89. (Published by The Macmillan Co., 1912.
Reprinted by permission.)
[147] Adapted from G. F. Stout, _A Manual of Psychology_, pp. 390-91.
(The University Tutorial Press, 1913.)
[148] Adapted from Th. Ribot, _The Psychology of the Emotions_, pp.
230-34. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898.)
[149] Adapted from Adam Smith, _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_, pp.
3-10. (G. Bell & Sons, 1893.)
[150] From Yrjö Hirn, _The Origins of Art_, pp. 74-85. (Published by The
Macmillan Co., 1900. Reprinted by permission.)
[151] Translated and adapted from the German, _Die Bedeutung der
Suggestion im Sozialen Leben_, pp. 10-15, from the original Russian of
W. v. Bechterew. (J. F. Bergmann, Wiesbaden, 1905.)
[152] Adapted from Albert Moll, _Hypnotism_, pp. 453-57. The
Contemporary Science Series. (Walter Scott, 1909.)
[153] Translated and adapted from the German, _Die Bedeutung der
Suggestion im Sozialen Leben_, pp. 134-42, from the original Russian of
W. v. Bechterew. (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1905.)
[154] _The Social Process_, p. 28.
[155] P. xiv.
[156] P. 41.
CHAPTER VII
SOCIAL FORCES
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Sources of the Notion of Social Forces
The concept of interaction is an abstraction so remote from ordinary
experience that it seems to have occurred only to scientists and
philosophers. The idea of forces behind the manifestations of physical
nature and of society is a notion which arises naturally out of the
experience of the ordinary man. Historians, social reformers, and
students of community life have used the term in the language of common
sense to describe factors in social situations which they recognized but
did not attempt to describe or define. Movements for social reform have
usually met with unexpected obstacles. Public welfare programs have not
infrequently been received with popular antagonism instead of popular
support. Lack of success has led to the search for causes, and
investigation has revealed the obstacles, as well as the aids, to reform
embodied in influential persons, "political bosses," "union leaders,"
"the local magnate," and in powerful groups such as party organizations,
unions, associations of commerce, etc. Social control, it appears, is
resident, not in individuals as individuals, but as members of
communities and social groups. Candid recognition of the rôle of these
persons and groups led popular writers on social, political, and
economic topics to give them the impersonal designation "social forces."
A student made the following crude and yet illuminating analysis of the
social forces in a small community where he had lived: the community
club, "the Davidson clique," and the "Jones clique" (these two large
family groups are intensely hostile and divide village life); the
community Methodist church; the Presbyterian church group (no church);
the library; two soft-drink parlors where all kinds of beverages are
sold; the daily train; the motion-picture show; the dance hall; a
gambling clique; sex attraction; gossip; the "sporting" impulse; the
impulse to be "decent."
"The result," he states, "is a disgrace to our modern civilization. It
is one of the worst communities I ever saw."
The most significant type of community study has been the social survey,
with a history which antedates its recent developments. Yet the survey
movement from the _Domesday Survey_, initiated in 1085 by William the
Conqueror, to the recent _Study of Methods of Americanization_ by the
Carnegie Corporation, has been based upon an implicit or explicit
recognition of the interrelations of the community and its constituent
groups. The _Domesday Survey_, although undertaken for financial and
political purposes, gives a picture of the English nation as an
organization of isolated local units, which the Norman Conquest first of
all forced into closer unity. The surveys of the Russell Sage Foundation
have laid insistent emphasis upon the study of social problems and of
social institutions in their context within the life of the community.
The central theme of the different divisions of the Carnegie _Study of
Methods of Americanization_ is the nature and the degree of the
participation of the immigrant in our national and cultural life. In
short, the survey, wittingly or unwittingly, has tended to penetrate
beneath surface observations to discover the interrelations of social
groups and institutions and has revealed community life as a
_constellation of social forces_.
2. History of the Concept of Social Forces
The concept of social forces has had a history different from that of
interaction. It was in the writings of the historians rather than of the
sociologists that the term first gained currency. The historians, in
their description and interpretation of persons and events, discerned
definite motives or tendencies, which served to give to the mere
temporal sequence of the events a significance which they did not
otherwise possess. These tendencies historians called "social forces."
From the point of view and for the purposes of reformers social forces
were conceived as embodied in institutions. For the purposes of the
historian they are merely tendencies which combine to define the general
trend of historical change. The logical motive, which has everywhere
guided science in formulating its conceptions, is here revealed in its
most naïve and elementary form. Natural science invariably seeks to
describe change in terms of process, that is to say, in terms of
interaction of tendencies. These tendencies are what science calls
forces.
For the purposes of an adequate description, however, it is necessary
not merely to conceive change in terms of the interplay of forces, but
to think of these forces as somehow objectively embodied, as social
forces are conceived to be embodied in institutions, organizations, and
persons. These objects in which the forces are, or seem to be, resident
are not forces in any real or metaphysical sense, as the physicists tell
us. They are mere points of reference which enable us to visualize the
direction and measure the intensity of change.
Institutions and social organizations may, in any given situation, be
regarded as social forces, but they are not ultimate nor elementary
forces. One has but to carry the analysis of the community a little
farther to discover the fact that institutions and organizations may be
further resolved into factors of smaller and smaller denominations until
we have arrived at individual men and women. For common sense the
individual is quite evidently the ultimate factor in every community or
social organization.
Sociologists have carried the analysis a step farther. They have sought
to meet the problem raised by two facts: (1) the same individual may be
a member of different societies, communities, and social groups at the
same time; (2) under certain circumstances his interests as a member of
one group may conflict with his interests as a member of another group,
so that the conflict between different social groups will be reflected
in the mental and moral conflicts of the individual himself.
Furthermore, it is evident that the individual is, as we frequently say,
"not the same person" at different times and places. The phenomena of
moods and of dual personality has sociological significance in just this
connection.
From all this it is quite evident that the individual is not elementary
in a sociological sense. It is for this reason that sociologists have
invariably sought the sociological element, not in the individual but in
his appetites, desires, wishes--the human motives which move him to
action.
3. Classification of the Materials
The readings in this chapter are arranged in the natural order of the
development of the notion of social forces. They were first thought of
by historians as tendencies and trends. Then in the popular sociology
social forces were identified with significant social objects in which
the factors of the situations under consideration were embodied. This
was a step in the direction of a definition of the elementary social
forces. Later the terms interests, sentiments, and attitudes made their
appearance in the literature of economics, social psychology, and
sociology. Finally the concept of the wishes, first vaguely apprehended
by sociologists under the name "desires," having gained a more adequate
description and definition in the use made of it by psychoanalysis, has
been reintroduced into sociology by W. I. Thomas under the title of the
"four wishes." This brief statement is sufficient to indicate the
motives determining the order of the materials included under "Social
Forces."
In the list of social forces just enumerated, attitudes are, for the
purposes of sociology, elementary. They are elementary because, being
tendencies to act, they are expressive and communicable. They present us
human motives in the only form in which we can know them objectively,
namely, as behavior. Human motives become social forces only so far as
they are communicable, only when they are communicated. Because
attitudes have for the purposes of sociology this elementary character,
it is desirable to define the term "attitude" before attempting to
define its relation to the wishes and sentiments.
a) _The social element defined._--What is an attitude? Attitudes are
not instincts, nor appetites, nor habits, for these refer to specific
tendencies to act that condition attitudes but do not define them.
Attitudes are not the same as emotions or sentiments although attitudes
always are emotionally toned and frequently supported by sentiments.
Opinions are not attitudes. An opinion is rather a statement made to
justify and make intelligible an existing attitude or bias. A wish is an
inherited tendency or instinct which has been fixed by attention
directed to objects, persons, or patterns of behavior, which objects
then assume the character of values. An attitude is the tendency of the
person to react positively or negatively to the total situation.
Accordingly, attitudes may be defined as the mobilization of the will of
the person.
Attitudes are as many and as varied as the situations to which they are
a response. It is, of course, not to be gainsaid that instincts,
appetites, habits, emotions, sentiments, opinions, and wishes are
involved in and with the attitudes. Attitudes are mobilizations and
organizations of the wishes with reference to definite situations. My
wishes may be very positive and definite in a given situation, but my
attitude may be wavering and undetermined. On the other hand, my
attitude may be clearly defined in situations where my wishes are not
greatly involved. It is characteristic of the so-called academic, as
distinguished from the "practical" and emotional, attitude that, under
its influence, the individual seeks to emphasize all the factors in the
situation and thus qualifies and often weakens the will to act. The
wishes enter into attitudes as components. How many, varied,
ill-defined, and conflicting may be and have been the wishes that have
determined at different times the attitudes and the sentiments of
individuals and nations toward the issues of war and peace? The
fundamental wishes, we may assume, are the same in all situations. The
attitudes and sentiments, however, in which the wishes of the individual
find expression are determined not merely by these wishes, but by other
factors in the situation, the wishes of other individuals, for example.
The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human
nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take
the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is
the same but the attitudes in which it finds expression are different.
The attitudes which are elementary for _sociological analysis_ may be
resolved by _psychological analysis_ into smaller factors so that we may
think, if we choose, of attitudes as representing constellations of
smaller components which we call wishes. In fact it has been one of the
great contributions of psychoanalysis to our knowledge of human behavior
that it has been able to show that attitudes may be analyzed into still
more elementary components and that these components, like the
attitudes, are involved in a process of interaction among themselves. In
other words there is organization, tension, and change in the
constituent elements of the attitudes. This accounts, in part, for their
mutability.
b) _Attitudes as behavior patterns._--If the attitude may be said to
play the rôle in sociological analysis that the elementary substances
play in chemical analysis, then the rôle of the wishes may be compared
to that of the electrons.
The clearest way to think of attitudes is as behavior patterns or units
of behavior. The two most elementary behavior patterns are the tendency
to approach and the tendency to withdraw. Translated into terms of the
individual organism these are tendencies to expand and to contract. As
the self expands to include other selves, as in sympathy and in
fellowship, there is an extension of self-feeling to the whole group.
Self-consciousness passes over, in the rapport thus established, into
group consciousness. In the expansive movements characteristic of
individuals under the influence of crowd excitements the individual is
submerged in the mass.
On the other hand, in movements of withdrawal or of recoil from other
persons, characteristic of fear and embarrassment, there is a
heightening of self-consciousness. The tendency to identify one's self
with other selves, to lose one's self in the ecstasy of psychic union
with others, is essentially a movement toward contact; while the
inclination to differentiate one's self, to lead a self-sufficient
existence, apart from others, is as distinctly a movement resulting in
isolation.
The simplest and most fundamental types of behavior of individuals and
of groups are represented in these contrasting tendencies to approach an
object or to withdraw from it. If instead of thinking of these two
tendencies as unrelated, they are thought of as conflicting responses to
the same situation, where the tendency to approach is modified and
complicated by a tendency to withdraw, we get the phenomenon of _social
distance_. There is the tendency to approach, but not too near. There is
a feeling of interest and sympathy of A for B, but only when B remains
at a certain distance. Thus the Negro in the southern states is "all
right in his place." The northern philanthropist is interested in the
advancement of the Negro but wants him to remain in the South. At least
he does not want him for a neighbor. The southern white man likes the
Negro as an individual, but he is not willing to treat him as an equal.
The northern white man is willing to treat the Negro as an equal but he
does not want him too near. The wishes are in both cases essentially the
same but the attitudes are different.
The accommodations between conflicting tendencies, so flagrantly
displayed in the facts of race prejudice, are not confined to the
relation of white men and black. The same mechanisms are involved in all
the subordinations, exclusions, privacies, social distances, and
reserves which we seek everywhere, by the subtle devices of taboo and
social ritual, to maintain and defend. Where the situation calls forth
rival or conflicting tendencies, the resulting attitude is likely to be
an accommodation, in which what has been described as distance is the
determining factor. When an accommodation takes the form of the
domination of A and the submission of B, the original tendencies of
approach and withdrawal are transformed into attitudes of
superordination and subordination. If primary attitudes of expansion and
of contraction are thought of in terms of lateral distance, then
attitudes of superiority and inferiority may be charted in the vertical
plane as illustrated by the following diagram:
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--A = tendency to approach; B = tendency to
withdraw; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 = distance defining levels of accommodation; X
= superordination; Y = subordination.]
This polar conception of attitudes, in which they are conceived in terms
of movements of expansion and contraction, of approach and withdrawal,
of attraction and repulsion, of domination and submission, may be
applied in an analysis of the sentiments.
A sentiment, as defined by McDougall, is "an organized system of
emotional dispositions centered about the idea of some object." The
polarity of the sentiments is, however, one of its evident and striking
characteristics. Love and hate, affection and dislike, attachment and
aversion, self-esteem and humility have this character of polarity
because each pair of sentiments and attitudes represents a different
constellation of the same component wishes.
A significant feature of sentiments and attitudes is inner tension and
consequent tendency to mutation. Love changes into hate, or dislike is
transformed into affection, or humility is replaced by self-assertion.
This mutability is explained by the fact, just mentioned, that the
sentiment-attitude is a complex of wishes and desires organized around a
person or object. In this complex one motive--love, for example--is for
a moment the dominant component. In this case components which tend to
excite repulsion, hostility, and disgust are for the moment suppressed.
With a change in the situation, as in the distance, these suppressed
components are released and, gaining control, convert the system into
the opposite sentiment, as hate.
c) _Attitudes and wishes._--The wishes, as popularly conceived, are as
numerous as the objects or values toward which they are directed. As
there are positive and negative values, so there are positive and
negative wishes. Fears are negative wishes. The speculations of the
Freudian school of psychology have attempted to reduce all wishes to
one, the _libido_. In that case, the wishes, as we know them and as they
present themselves to us in consciousness, are to be regarded as
offshoots or, perhaps better, specifications of the _one wish_. As the
one wish is directed to this or that object, it makes of that object a
value and the object gives its name to the wish. In this way the one
wish becomes many wishes.
Science demands, however, not a theory of the origin of the wishes but a
classification based on fundamental natural differences; differences
which it is necessary to take account of in explaining human behavior.
Thomas' fourfold classification fulfils this purpose. The wish for
security, the wish for new experience, the wish for response, and the
wish for recognition are the permanent and fundamental unconscious
motives of the person which find expression in the many and changing
concrete and conscious wishes. As wishes find expression in
characteristic forms of behavior they may also be thought of in spatial
terms as tendencies to move toward or away from their specific objects.
The wish for security may be represented by position, mere immobility;
the wish for new experience by the greatest possible freedom of movement
and constant change of position; the wish for response, by the number
and closeness of points of contact; the wish for recognition, by the
level desired or reached in the vertical plane of superordination and
subordination.
The fundamental value for social research of the classification inheres
in the fact that the wishes in one class cannot be substituted for
wishes in another. The desire for response and affection cannot be
satisfied by fame and recognition or only partially so. The wholesome
individual is he who in some form or other realizes all the four
fundamental wishes. The security and permanence of any society or
association depends upon the extent to which it permits the individuals
who compose it to realize their fundamental wishes. The restless
individual is the individual whose wishes are not realized even in
dreams.
This suggests the significance of the classification for the purposes of
social science. Human nature, and personality as we know it, requires
for its healthy growth security, new experience, response, and
recognition. In all races and in all times these fundamental longings of
human nature have manifested themselves; the particular patterns in
which the wish finds expression and becomes fixed depends upon some
special experience of the person, is influenced by individual
differences in original nature, and is circumscribed by the folkways,
the mores, the conventions, and the culture of his group.
II. MATERIALS
A. TRENDS, TENDENCIES, AND PUBLIC OPINION
1. Social Forces in American History[157]
That political struggles are based upon economic interests is today
disputed by few students of society. The attempt has been made in this
work to trace the various interests that have arisen and struggled in
each social stage and to determine the influence exercised by these
contending interests in the creation of social institutions.
Back of every political party there has always stood a group or class
which expected to profit by the activity and the success of that party.
When any party has attained to power, it has been because it has tried
to establish institutions or to modify existing ones in accord with its
interests.
Changes in the industrial basis of society--inventions, new processes,
and combinations and methods of producing and distributing goods--create
new interests with new social classes to represent them. These
improvements in the technique of production are the dynamic element that
brings about what we call progress in society.
In this work I have sought to begin at the origin of each line of social
progress. I have first endeavored to describe the steps in mechanical
progress, then the social classes brought into prominence by the
mechanical changes, then the struggle by which these new classes sought
to gain social power, and, finally, the institutions which were created
or the alterations made in existing institutions as a consequence of the
struggle or as a result of the victory of a new class.
It has seemed to me that these underlying social forces are of more
importance than the individuals that were forced to the front in the
process of these struggles, or even than the laws that were established
to record the results of the conflict. In short, I have tried to
describe the dynamics of history rather than to record the accomplished
facts, to answer the question, "Why did it happen?" as well as, "What
happened?"
An inquiry into causes is manifestly a greater task than the recording
of accomplished facts. To determine causes it is necessary to spend much
time in the study of "original documents"--the newspapers, magazines,
and pamphlet literature of each period. In these, rather than in the
"musty documents" of state, do we find history in the making. Here we
can see the clash of contending interests before they are crystallized
into laws and institutions.
2. Social Tendencies as Social Forces[158]
The philosophy of the eighteenth century viewed external nature as the
principal thing to be considered in a study of society, and not society
itself. The great force in society was extraneous to society. But
according to the philosophy of our times, the chief forces working in
society are truly social forces, that is to say, they are immanent in
society itself.
Let us briefly examine the social forces which are at work, either
concentrating or diffusing the ownership of wealth. If it is true that,
necessarily, there is going forward a concentration of property, that
the rich are necessarily becoming richer, that wealth is passing into
fewer and fewer hands, this gives a strong reason for believing that
those are right who hold to the fact that every field of production must
soon be controlled by monopoly. If, on the other hand, we find that the
forces which make for diffusion are dominant, we may believe that it is
quite possible for society to control the forces of production.
a) Forces operating in the direction of concentration of wealth: (1)
The unearned increment of land, especially in cities, is no doubt a real
force. (2) The trust movement is operating in its earlier phases, at
least, in the direction of concentration. (3) In the third place, war,
whenever it comes, carries with it forces which bring wealth to the few
rather than to the many. (4) Arrangements of one kind and another may be
mentioned by means of various trust devices to secure the ends of
primogeniture and entail. (5) Another force operating to concentrate the
ownership of wealth may be called economic inertia. According to the
principle of inertia, forces continue to operate until they are checked
by other forces coming into contact with them.
b) Forces which operate to diffuse wealth: (1) Education, broadly
considered, should be mentioned first of all. (2) Next, mention must be
made of the public control of corporations. (3) Changes in taxation are
the third item in this enumeration of forces. (4) The development of the
idea of property as a trust is next mentioned. (5) Profit-sharing and
co-operation. (6) Sound currency is next mentioned. (7) Public ownership
of public utilities is a further force. (8) Labor organizations. (9)
Institutions, especially in the interest of the wage-earning and
economically weaker elements in the community. (10) Savings institutions
and insurance.
3. Public Opinion: School of Thought and Legislation in England[159]
Public legislative opinion, as it has existed in England during the
nineteenth century, presents several noteworthy aspects or
characteristics. They may conveniently be considered under five heads:
the existence at any given period of a predominant public opinion; the
origin of such opinion; the development and continuity thereof; the
checks imposed on such opinion by the existence of counter-currents and
cross-currents of opinion; the action of laws themselves as the creators
of legislative opinion.
_First_, there exists at any given time a body of beliefs, convictions,
sentiments, accepted principles, or firmly rooted prejudices, which,
taken together, make up the public opinion of a particular era, or what
we may call the reigning or predominant current of opinion, and, as
regards at any rate the last three or four centuries, and especially the
nineteenth century, the influence of this dominant current of opinion
has, in England, if we look at the matter broadly, determined, directly
or indirectly, the course of legislation.
_Second_, the opinion which affects the development of the law has, in
modern England at least, often originated with some single thinker or
school of thinkers. No doubt it is at times allowable to talk of a
prevalent belief or opinion as "being in the air," by which expression
is meant that a particular way of looking at things has become the
common possession of all the world. But though a belief, when it
prevails, may at last be adopted by the whole of a generation, it rarely
happens that a widespread conviction has grown up spontaneously among
the multitude. "The initiation," it has been said, "of all wise or noble
things comes, and must come, from individuals; generally at first from
some one individual," to which it ought surely to be added that the
origination of a new folly or of a new form of baseness comes, and must
in general come, at first from individuals or from some one individual.
The peculiarity of individuals, as contrasted with the crowd, lies
neither in virtue nor in wickedness but in originality. It is idle to
credit minorities with all the good without ascribing to them
most, at least, of the evils due to that rarest of all human
qualities--inventiveness.
The course of events in England may often, at least, be thus described:
A new and, let us assume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of
originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some
follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends
or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance
and its truth, and gradually a whole school accepts the new creed. These
apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability
or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their
peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual,
in favor of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an
impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person
of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to
impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation.
Success, however, in converting mankind to a new faith, whether
religious or economical or political, depends but slightly on the
strength of the reasoning by which the faith can be defended, or even
on the enthusiasm of its adherents. A change of belief arises, in the
main, from the occurrence of circumstances which incline the majority of
the world to hear with favor theories which, at one time, men of common
sense derided as absurdities or distrusted as paradoxes. The doctrine of
free trade, for instance, has in England for about half a century held
the field as an unassailable dogma of economic policy, but a historian
would stand convicted of ignorance or folly who should imagine that the
fallacies of protection were discovered by the intuitive good sense of
the people, even if the existence of such a quality as the good sense of
the people be more than a political fiction. The principle of free trade
may, as far as Englishmen are concerned, be treated as the doctrine of
Adam Smith. The reasons in its favor never have been, nor will, from the
nature of things, be mastered by the majority of any people. The apology
for freedom of commerce will always present, from one point of view, an
air of paradox. Every man feels or thinks that protection would benefit
his own business, and it is difficult to realize that what may be a
benefit for any man taken alone may be of no benefit to a body of men
looked at collectively. The obvious objections to free trade may, as
free traders conceive, be met; but then the reasoning by which these
objections are met is often elaborate and subtle and does not carry
conviction to the crowd. It is idle to suppose that belief in freedom of
trade--or indeed in any other creed--ever won its way among the majority
of converts by the mere force of reasoning. The course of events was
very different. The theory of free trade won by degrees the approval of
statesmen of special insight, and adherents to the new economic religion
were one by one gained among persons of intelligence. Cobden and Bright
finally became potent advocates of truths of which they were in no sense
the discoverers. This assertion in no way detracts from the credit due
to these eminent men. They performed to admiration the proper function
of popular leaders; by prodigies of energy and by seizing a favorable
opportunity, of which they made the very most use that was possible,
they gained the acceptance by the English people of truths which have
rarely, in any country but England, acquired popularity. Much was due to
the opportuneness of the time. Protection wears its most offensive guise
when it can be identified with a tax on bread, and therefore can,
without patent injustice, be described as the parent of famine and
starvation. The unpopularity, moreover, inherent in a tax on corn is
all but fatal to a protective tariff when the class which protection
enriches is comparatively small, whilst the class which would suffer
keenly from dearness of bread and would obtain benefit from free trade
is large, and, having already acquired much, is certain soon to acquire
more political power. Add to all this that the Irish famine made the
suspension of the corn laws a patent necessity. It is easy, then, to see
how great in England was the part played by external circumstances--one
might almost say by accidental conditions--in determining the overthrow
of protection. A student should further remark that after free trade
became an established principle of English policy, the majority of the
English people accepted it mainly on authority. Men who were neither
land-owners nor farmers perceived with ease the obtrusive evils of a tax
on corn, but they and their leaders were far less influenced by
arguments against protection generally than by the immediate and almost
visible advantage of cheapening the bread of artisans and laborers.
What, however, weighed with most Englishmen, above every other
consideration, was the harmony of the doctrine that commerce ought to be
free, with that disbelief in the benefits of state intervention which in
1846 had been gaining ground for more than a generation.
It is impossible, indeed, to insist too strongly upon the consideration
that whilst opinion controls legislation, public opinion is itself far
less the result of reasoning or of argument than of the circumstances in
which men are placed. Between 1783 and 1861 negro slavery was
abolished--one might almost say ceased of itself to exist--in the
northern states of the American Republic; in the South, on the other
hand, the maintenance of slavery developed into a fixed policy, and
before the War of Secession the "peculiar institution" had become the
foundation stone of the social system. But the religious beliefs and,
except as regards the existence of slavery, the political institutions
prevalent throughout the whole of the United States were the same. The
condemnation of slavery in the North, and the apologies for slavery in
the South, must therefore be referred to difference of circumstances.
Slave labor was obviously out of place in Massachusetts, Vermont, or New
York; it appeared to be, even if in reality it was not, economically
profitable in South Carolina. An institution, again, which was utterly
incompatible with the social condition of the northern states
harmonized, or appeared to harmonize, with the social conditions of the
southern states. The arguments against the peculiar institution were in
themselves equally strong in whatever part of the Union they were
uttered, but they carried conviction to the white citizens of
Massachusetts, whilst, even when heard or read, they did not carry
conviction to the citizens of South Carolina. Belief, and, to speak
fairly, honest belief, was to a great extent the result, not of
argument, nor even of direct self-interest, but of circumstances. What
was true in this instance holds good in others. There is no reason to
suppose that in 1830 the squires of England were less patriotic than the
manufacturers, or less capable of mastering the arguments in favor of or
against the reform of Parliament. But everyone knows that, as a rule,
the country gentlemen were Tories and anti-reformers, whilst the
manufacturers were Radicals and reformers. Circumstances are the
creators of most men's opinions.
_Third_, the development of public opinion generally, and therefore of
legislative opinion, has been in England at once gradual, or slow, and
continuous. The qualities of slowness and continuity may conveniently be
considered together, and are closely interconnected, but they are
distinguishable and essentially different.
Legislative public opinion generally changes in England with unexpected
slowness. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was published in 1776; the
policy of free exchange was not completely accepted by England till
1846. All the strongest reasons in favor of Catholic emancipation were
laid before the English world by Burke between 1760 and 1797; the Roman
Catholic Relief Act was not carried till 1829.
The opinion which changes the law is in one sense the opinion of the
time when the law is actually altered; in another sense it has often
been in England the opinion prevalent some twenty or thirty years before
that time; it has been as often as not in reality the opinion, not of
today, but of yesterday.
Legislative opinion must be the opinion of the day, because, when laws
are altered, the alteration is of necessity carried into effect by
legislators who act under the belief that the change is an amendment;
but this law-making opinion is also the opinion of yesterday, because
the beliefs which have at last gained such hold on the legislature as to
produce an alteration in the law have generally been created by
thinkers or writers who exerted their influence long before the change
in the law took place. Thus it may well happen that an innovation is
carried through at a time when the teachers who supplied the arguments
in its favor are in their graves, or even--and this is well worth
noting--when in the world of speculation a movement has already set in
against ideas which are exerting their full effect in the world of
action and of legislation.
Law-making in England is the work of men well advanced in life; the
politicians who guide the House of Commons, to say nothing of the peers
who lead the House of Lords, are few of them below thirty, and most of
them are above forty, years of age. They have formed or picked up their
convictions, and, what is of more consequence, their prepossessions, in
early manhood, which is the one period of life when men are easily
impressed with new ideas. Hence English legislators retain the
prejudices or modes of thinking which they acquired in their youth; and
when, late in life, they take a share in actual legislation, they
legislate in accordance with the doctrines which were current, either
generally or in the society to which the law-givers belonged, in the
days of their early manhood. The law-makers, therefore, of 1850 may give
effect to the opinions of 1830, whilst the legislators of 1880 are
likely enough to impress upon the statute book the beliefs of 1860, or
rather the ideas which in the one case attracted the young men of 1830
and in the other the youth of 1860. We need not therefore be surprised
to find that a current of opinion may exert its greatest legislative
influence just when its force is beginning to decline. The tide turns
when at its height; a school of thought or feeling which still governs
law-makers has begun to lose its authority among men of a younger
generation who are not yet able to influence legislation.
_Fourth_, the reigning legislative opinion of the day has never, at any
rate during the nineteenth century, exerted absolute or despotic
authority. Its power has always been diminished by the existence of
counter-currents or cross-currents of opinion which were not in harmony
with the prevalent opinion of the time.
A counter-current here means a body of opinion, belief, or sentiment
more or less directly opposed to the dominant opinion of a particular
era. Counter-currents of this kind have generally been supplied by the
survival of ideas or convictions which are gradually losing their hold
upon a given generation, and particularly the youthful part thereof.
This kind of "conservatism" which prompts men to retain convictions
which are losing their hold upon the mass of the world is found, it
should be remarked, as much among the adherents of one religious or
political creed as of another. Any Frenchman who clung to Protestantism
during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth; any north-country squire who
in the England of the eighteenth century adhered to the Roman
Catholicism of his fathers; Samuel Johnson, standing forth as a Tory and
a High Churchman amongst Whigs and Free Thinkers; the Abbé Gregoire,
retaining in 1830 the attitude and the beliefs of a bishop of that
constitutional church of France whereof the claims have been repudiated
at once by the Church and by the State; James Mill, who, though the
leader in 1832 of philosophic Radicals, the pioneers as they deemed
themselves of democratic progress, was in truth the last "of the
eighteenth century"--these are each and all of them examples of that
intellectual and moral conservatism which everywhere, and especially in
England, has always been a strong force. The past controls the present.
Counter-currents, again, may be supplied by new ideals which are
beginning to influence the young. The hopes or dreams of the generation
just coming into the field of public life undermine the energy of a
dominant creed.
Counter-currents of opinion, whatever their source, have one certain and
one possible effect. The certain effect is that a check is imposed upon
the action of the dominant faith.
_Fifth_, laws foster or create law-making opinion. This assertion may
sound, to one who has learned that laws are the outcome of public
opinion, like a paradox; when properly understood, it is nothing but an
undeniable, though sometimes neglected, truth.
B. INTERESTS, SENTIMENTS, AND ATTITUDES
1. Social Forces and Interaction[160]
We must guard at the outset against an illusion that has exerted a
confusing influence. There are no social forces which are not at the
same time forces lodged in individuals, deriving their energy from
individuals and operating in and through individuals. There are no
social forces that lurk in the containing ether, and affect persons
without the agency of other persons. There are, to be sure, all the
physical conditions that affect persons just as they affect all other
forms of matter. So far, these are not social forces at all. They do not
get to be social forces until they get into persons, and in these
persons they take the form of feelings which impel them to react upon
other persons. Persons are thus transmuters of physical forces into
social forces; but all properly designated social forces are essentially
personal. They are within some persons, and stimulate them to act upon
other persons; or they are in other persons, and exert themselves as
external stimuli upon otherwise inert persons. In either case social
forces are personal influences passing from person to person and
producing activities that give content to the association.
The conception of social forces was never challenged so long as it was
merely an everyday commonplace. When it passed into technical forms of
expression, doubts began to be urged. If anyone in the United States had
questioned the existence of Mrs. Grundy fifty years ago, he would have
been pitied and ignored as a harmless "natural." Social forces in the
form of gossip, and personified in Mrs. Grundy, were real to everybody.
But the particular species of social forces which Mrs. Grundy
represented were neither more nor less real than the other social forces
which had no name in folklore. Persons incessantly influence persons.
The modes of this influence are indescribably varied. They are conscious
and unconscious, accidental and momentary, or deliberate and persistent;
they are conventional and continuous, the result of individual habit, or
of customs crystallized into national or racial institutions.
The simple fact which the concept "social forces" stands for is that
every individual acts and is acted upon in countless ways by the other
persons with whom he associates. These modes of action and reaction
between persons may be classified, and the more obvious and recurrent
among them may be enumerated. More than this, the action of these social
forces may be observed, and the results of observation may be organized
into social laws. Indeed, there would be only two alternatives, if we
did not discover the presence and action of social forces. On the one
hand, social science would at most be a subdivision of natural science;
on the other hand, the remaining alternative would be the impossibility
of social science altogether.
But social forces are just as distinctly discernible as chemical forces.
The fact that we are not familiar with them no more makes against their
existence and their importance than general ignorance of the pressure of
the atmosphere takes that phenomenon out of the physical world. They are
not only the atmosphere but they are a very large part of the moral
world in general. If we could compose a complete account of the social
forces, we should at the same time have completed, from one point of
attention at least, a science of everything involved in human society.
"All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to
those mental states which are denominated desires." But we have gone
back a step beyond the desires and have found it necessary to assume the
existence of underlying interests. These have to desires very nearly the
relation of substance to attribute, or, in a different figure, of genus
to species. Our interests may be beyond or beneath our ken; our desires
are strong and clear. I may not be conscious of my health interests in
any deep sense, but the desires that my appetites assert are specific
and concrete and real. The implicit interests, of which we may be very
imperfectly aware, move us to desires which may correspond well or ill
with the real content of the interests. At all events, it is these
desires which make up the active social forces, whether they are more or
less harmonious with the interests from which they spring. The desires
that the persons associating actually feel are practically the elemental
forces with which we have to reckon. They are just as real as the
properties of matter. They have their ratios of energy, just as
certainly as though they were physical forces. They have their peculiar
modes of action, which may be formulated as distinctly as the various
modes of chemical action.
Every desire that any man harbors is a force making or marring,
strengthening or weakening, the structure and functions of the society
of which he is a part. What the human desires are, what their relations
are to each other, what their peculiar modifications are under different
circumstances--these are questions of detail which must be answered in
general by social psychology, and in particular by specific analysis of
each social situation. The one consideration to be urged at this point
is that the concept "social forces" has a real content. It represents
reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They
range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a
temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole
races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and
the theories of social arrangements have to deal.
2. Interests[161]
During the past generation, the conception of the "atom" has been of
enormous use in physical discovery. Although no one has ever seen an
atom, the supposition that there are ultimate particles of matter in
which the "promise and potency" of all physical properties and actions
reside has served as a means of investigation during the most intensive
period of research in the history of thought. Without the hypothesis of
the atom, physics and chemistry, and in a secondary sense biology, would
have lacked chart and compass upon their voyages of exploration.
Although the notion of the atom is rapidly changing, and the tendency of
physical science is to construe physical facts in terms of motion rather
than of the traditional atom, it is probably as needless as it is
useless for us to concern ourselves as laymen with this refinement.
Although we cannot avoid speaking of the smallest parts into which
matter can be divided, and although we cannot imagine, on the other
hand, how any portions of matter can exist and not be divisible into
parts, we are probably quite as incapable of saving ourselves from
paradox by resort to the vortex hypothesis in any form. That is, these
subtleties are too wonderful for most minds. Without pushing analysis
too far, and without resting any theory upon analogy with the atom of
physical theory, it is necessary to find some starting-place from which
to trace up the composition of sentient beings, just as the physicists
assumed that they found their starting-place in the atom. The notion of
interests is accordingly serving the same purpose in sociology which the
notion of atoms has served in physical science. Interests are the stuff
that men are made of. More accurately expressed, the last elements to
which we can reduce the actions of human beings are units which we may
conveniently name "interests." It is merely inverting the form of
expression to say: _Interests are the simplest modes of motion which we
can trace in the conduct of human beings._
To the psychologist the individual is interesting primarily as a center
of knowing, feeling, and willing. To the sociologist the individual
begins to be interesting when he is thought as knowing, feeling, and
willing _something_. In so far as a mere trick of emphasis may serve to
distinguish problems, this ictus indicates the sociological
starting-point. The individual given in experience is thought to the
point at which he is available for sociological assumption, when he is
recognized as a center of activities which make for something outside of
the psychical series in which volition is a term. These activities must
be referred primarily to desires, but the desires themselves may be
further referred to certain universal interests. In this character the
individual becomes one of the known or assumed terms of sociology. The
individual as a center of active interests may be thought both as the
lowest term in the social equation and as a composite term whose factors
must be understood. These factors are either the more evident desires,
or the more remote interests which the individual's desires in some way
represent. At the same time, we must repeat the admission that these
assumed interests are like the atom of physics. They are the
metaphysical recourse of our minds in accounting for concrete facts. We
have never seen or touched them. They are the hypothetical substratum of
those regularities of conduct which the activities of individuals
display.
We may start with the familiar popular expressions, "the farming
interest," "the railroad interest," "the packing interest," "the milling
interest," etc., etc. Everyone knows what the expressions mean. Our use
of the term "interest" is not co-ordinate with these, but it may be
approached by means of them. All the "interests" that are struggling for
recognition in business and in politics are highly composite. The owner
of a flour mill, for example, is a man before he is a miller. He becomes
a miller at last because he is a man; i.e., because he has interests--in
a deeper sense than that of the popular expressions--which impel him to
act in order to gain satisfactions. The clue to all social activity is
in this fact of individual interests. Every act that every man performs
is to be traced back to an interest. We eat because there is a desire
for food; but the desire is set in motion by a bodily interest in
replacing exhausted force. We sleep because we are tired; but the
weariness is a function of the bodily interest in rebuilding used-up
tissue. We play because there is a bodily interest in use of the
muscles. We study because there is a mental interest in satisfying
curiosity. We mingle with our fellow-men because there is a mental
interest in matching our personality against that of others. We go to
market to supply an economic interest, and to war because of some social
interest of whatever mixed or simple form.
With this introduction, we may venture an extremely abstract definition
of our concept "interest." In general, _an interest is an unsatisfied
capacity, corresponding to an unrealized condition, and it is
predisposition to such rearrangement as would tend to realize the
indicated condition_. Human needs and human wants are incidents in the
series of events between the latent existence of human interest and the
achievement of partial satisfaction. Human interests, then, are the
ultimate terms of calculation in sociology. _The whole life-process, so
far as we know it, whether viewed in its individual or in its social
phase, is at last the process of developing, adjusting, and satisfying
interests._
No single term is of more constant use in recent sociology than this
term "interests." We use it in the plural partly for the sake of
distinguishing it from the same term in the sense which has become so
familiar in modern pedagogy. The two uses of the term are closely
related, but they are not precisely identical. The pedagogical emphasis
is rather on the voluntary attitude toward a possible object of
attention. The sociological emphasis is on attributes of persons which
may be compared to the chemical affinities of different elements.
To distinguish the pedagogical from the sociological use of the term
"interest," we may say pedagogically of a supposed case: "The boy has no
_interest_ in physical culture, or in shopwork, or in companionship with
other boys, or in learning, or in art, or in morality." That is,
attention and choice are essential elements of interest in the
pedagogical sense. On the other hand, we may say of the same boy, in the
sociological sense: "He has not discovered his health, wealth,
sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness _interests_." We thus
imply that interests, in the sociological sense, are not necessarily
matters of attention and choice. They are affinities, latent in persons,
pressing for satisfaction, whether the persons are conscious of them
either generally or specifically, or not; they are indicated spheres of
activity which persons enter into and occupy in the course of realizing
their personality.
Accordingly, we have virtually said that interests are merely
specifications in the make-up of the personal units. We have several
times named the most general classes of interests which we find
serviceable in sociology, viz.: _health_, _wealth_, _sociability_,
_knowledge_, _beauty_, and _rightness_.
We need to emphasize, in addition, several considerations about these
interests which are the motors of all individual and social action.
First, there is a subjective and an objective aspect of them all. It
would be easy to use terms of these interests in speculative arguments
in such a way as to shift the sense fallaciously from the one aspect to
the other; e.g., moral conduct, as an actual adjustment of the person in
question with other persons, is that person's "interest," in the
objective sense. On the other hand, we are obliged to think of something
in the person himself impelling him, however unconsciously, toward that
moral conduct, i.e., interest as "unsatisfied capacity" in the
subjective sense. So with each of the other interests. The fact that
these two senses of the term are always concerned must never be ignored;
but, until we reach refinements of analysis which demand use for these
discriminations, they may be left out of sight. Second, human interests
pass more and more from the latent, subjective, unconscious state to the
active, objective, conscious form. That is, before the baby is
self-conscious, the baby's essential interest in bodily well-being is
operating in performance of the organic functions. A little later the
baby is old enough to understand that certain regulation of his diet,
certain kinds of work or play, will help to make and keep him well and
strong. Henceforth there is in him a co-operation of interest in the
fundamental sense, and interest in the derived, secondary sense,
involving attention and choice. If we could agree upon the use of terms,
we might employ the word "desire" for this development of interest;
i.e., physiological performance of function is, strictly speaking, the
health interest; the desires which men actually pursue within the realm
of bodily function may be normal or perverted, in an infinite scale of
variety. So with each of the other interests. Third, with these
qualifications provided for, resolution of human activities into pursuit
of differentiated interests becomes the first clue to the combination
that unlocks the mysteries of society. For our purposes in this
argument we need not trouble ourselves very much about nice metaphysical
distinctions between the aspects of interest, because we have mainly to
do with interests in the same sense in which the man of affairs uses the
term. The practical politician looks over the lobby at Washington and he
classifies the elements that compose it. He says: "Here is the railroad
interest, the sugar interest, the labor interest, the army interest, the
canal interest, the Cuban interest, etc." He uses the term "interest"
essentially in the sociological sense but in a relatively concrete form,
and he has in mind little more than variations of the wealth interest.
He would explain the legislation of a given session as the final balance
between these conflicting pecuniary interests. He is right, in the main;
and every social action is, in the same way, an accommodation of the
various interests which are represented in the society concerned.
3. Social Pressures[162]
The phenomena of government are from start to finish phenomena of force.
But force is an objectionable word. I prefer to use the word pressure
instead of force, since it keeps the attention closely directed upon the
groups themselves, instead of upon any mystical "realities" assumed to
be underneath and supporting them, and since its connotation is not
limited to the narrowly "physical." We frequently talk of "bringing
pressure to bear" upon someone, and we can use the word here with but
slight extension beyond this common meaning.
Pressure, as we shall use it, is always a group phenomenon. It indicates
the push and resistance between groups. The balance of the group
pressures _is_ the existing state of society. Pressure is broad enough
to include all forms of the group influence upon group, from battle and
riot to abstract reasoning and sensitive morality. It takes up into
itself "moral energy" and the finest discriminations of conscience as
easily as bloodthirsty lust of power. It allows for humanitarian
movements as easily as for political corruption. The tendencies to
activity are pressures, as well as the more visible activities.
All phenomena of government are phenomena of groups pressing one
another, forming one another, and pushing out new groups and group
representatives (the organs or agencies of government) to mediate the
adjustments. It is only as we isolate these group activities, determine
their representative values, and get the whole process stated in terms
of them that we approach to a satisfactory knowledge of government.
When we take such an agency of government as a despotic ruler, we cannot
possibly advance to an understanding of him except in terms of the group
activities of his society which are most directly represented through
him, along with those which almost seem not to be represented through
him at all, or to be represented to a different degree or in a different
manner. And it is the same with democracies, even in their "purest" and
simplest forms, as well as in their most complicated forms. We cannot
fairly talk of despotisms or of democracies as though they were
absolutely distinct types of government to be contrasted offhand with
each other or with other types. All depends for each despotism and each
democracy and each other form of government on the given interests,
their relations, and their methods of interaction. The interest groups
create the government and work through it; the government, as activity,
works "for" the groups; the government, from the viewpoint of certain of
the groups, may at times be their private tool; the government, from the
viewpoint of others of the groups, seems at times their deadly enemy;
but the process is all one, and the joint participation is always
present, however it may be phrased in public opinion or clamor.
It is convenient most of the time in studying government to talk of
these groups as interests. But I have already indicated with sufficient
clearness that the interest is nothing other than the group activity
itself. The words by which we name the interests often give the best
expression to the value of the group activities in terms of other group
activities: if I may be permitted that form of phrasing, they are more
qualitative than quantitative in their implications. But that is
sometimes a great evil as well as sometimes an advantage. We must always
remember that there is nothing in the interests purely because of
themselves and that we can depend on them only as they stand for groups
which are acting or tending toward activity or pressing themselves along
in their activity with other groups.
When we get the group activities on the lower planes worked out and show
them as represented in various forms of higher groups, culminating in
the political groups, then we make progress in our interpretations.
Always and everywhere our study must be a study of the interests that
work through government; otherwise we have not got down to facts. Nor
will it suffice to take a single interest group and base our
interpretation upon it, not even for a special time and a special place.
No interest group has meaning except with reference to other interest
groups; and those other interest groups are pressures; they count in the
government process. The lowest of despised castes, deprived of rights to
the protection of property and even life, will still be found to be a
factor in the government, if only we can sweep the whole field and
measure the caste in its true degree of power, direct or represented, in
its potentiality of harm to the higher castes, and in its identification
with them for some important purposes, however deeply hidden from
ordinary view. No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form
the government. They are an interest group within it.
Tested by the interest groups that function through them, legislatures
are of two general types. First are those which represent one class or
set of classes in the government as opposed to some other class, which
is usually represented in a monarch. Second are those which are not the
exclusive stronghold of one class or set of classes, but are instead the
channel for the functioning of all groupings of the population. The
borders between the two types are of course indistinct, but they
approximate closely to the borders between a society with class
organization and one with classes broken down into freer and more
changeable group interests.
Neither the number of chambers in the legislative body nor the
constitutional relations of the legislature to the executive can serve
to define the two types. The several chambers may represent several
classes, or again the double-chamber system may be in fact merely a
technical division, with the same interests present in both chambers.
The executive may be a class representative, or merely a co-ordinate
organ, dividing with the legislature the labor of providing channels
through which the same lot of manifold interest groups can work.
It lies almost on the surface that a legislature which is a class agency
will produce results in accordance with the class pressure behind it.
Its existence has been established by struggle, and its life is a
continual struggle against the representatives of the opposite class. Of
course there will be an immense deal of argument to be heard on both
sides, and the argument will involve the setting forth of "reasons" in
limitless number. It is indeed because of the advantages (in group
terms, of course) of such argument as a technical means of adjustment
that the legislative bodies survive. Argument under certain conditions
is a greater labor-saver than blows, and in it the group interests more
fully unfold themselves. But beneath all the argument lies the strength.
The arguments go no farther than the strength goes. What the new Russian
duma will get, if it survives, will be what the people it solidly
represents are strong enough to make it get, and no more and no less,
with bombs and finances, famine and corruption funds alike in the scale.
But the farther we advance among legislatures of the second type, and
the farther we get away from the direct appeal to muscle and weapon, the
more difficult becomes the analysis of the group components, the greater
is the prominence that falls to the process of argumentation, the more
adroitly do the group forces mask themselves in morals, ideals, and
phrases, the more plausible becomes the interpretation of the
legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more
common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at
which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se
perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a
strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is
an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative
process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence
interest group is wholly inadequate.
4. Idea-Forces[163]
The principle that I assume at the outset is that every idea tends to
act itself out. If it is an isolated idea, or if it is not
counterbalanced by a stronger force, its realization must take place.
Thus the principle of the struggle for existence and of selection,
taking the latter word in its broadest sense, is in my opinion as
applicable to ideas as to individuals and living species; a selection
takes place in the brain to the advantage of the strongest and most
exclusive idea, which is thus able to control the whole organism. In
particular, the child's brain is an arena of conflict for ideas and the
impulses they include; in the brain the new idea is a new force which
encounters the ideas already installed, and the impulses already
developed therein. Assume a mind, as yet a blank, and suddenly introduce
into it the representation of any movement, the idea of any action--such
as raising the arm. This idea being isolated and unopposed, the wave of
disturbance arising in the brain will take the direction of the arm,
because the nerves terminating in the arm are disturbed by the
representation of the arm. The arm will therefore be lifted. Before a
movement begins, we must think of this; now no movement that has taken
place is lost; it is necessarily communicated from the brain to the
organs if unchecked by any other representation or impulse. The
transmission of the idea to the limbs is inevitable as long as the idea
is isolated or unopposed. This I have called the law of idea-forces, and
I think I have satisfactorily explained the curious facts in connection
with the impulsive actions of the idea.
The well-known experiments of Chevreul on the "pendule explorateur," and
on the divining rod, show that if we represent to ourselves a movement
in a certain direction, the hand will finally execute this movement
without our consciousness, and so will transmit it to the instrument.
Table-turning is the realization of the expected movement by means of
the unconscious motion of the hands. Thought-reading is the
interpretation of imperceptible movements, in which the thought of the
subject betrays itself, even without his being conscious of it. In the
process that goes on when we are fascinated or on the point of fainting,
a process more obvious in children than in adults, there is an inchoate
movement which the paralysis of the will fails to check. When I was a
lad, I was once running over a plank across the weir of a river, it
never entering my head that I ran any risk of falling; suddenly this
idea came into play like a force obliquely compounded with the straight
course of thought which had up to that moment been guiding my footsteps.
I felt as if an invisible arm had seized me and was dragging me down. I
shrieked and stood trembling above the foaming water until assistance
came. Here the mere idea of vertigo produced vertigo. A plank on the
ground may be crossed without arousing any idea of falling; but if it is
above a precipice, and we think of the distance below, the impulse to
fall is very strong. Even when we are in perfect safety we may feel what
is known as the "fascination" of a precipice. The sight of the gulf
below, becoming a fixed idea, produces a resultant inhibition on all
other ideas. Temptation, which is always besetting a child because
everything is new to it, is nothing but the power of an idea and its
motor impulse.
The power of an idea is the greater, the more prominently it is singled
out from the general content of consciousness. This selection of an
idea, which becomes so exclusive that the whole consciousness is
absorbed in it, is called _monoïdeism_. This state is precisely that of
a person who has been hypnotized. What is called hypnotic suggestion is
nothing but the artificial selection of one idea to the exclusion of all
others, so that it passes into action. Natural somnambulism similarly
exhibits the force of ideas; whatever idea is conceived by the
somnambulist, he carries into action. The kind of dream in which
children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed
idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in
the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, a kind
of morbid monoïdeism; children, having very few ideas, would very soon
acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which
the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus
all the facts grouped nowadays under the name of auto-suggestion may, in
my opinion, be explained. Here we shall generalize the law in this form:
every idea conceived by the mind is an auto-suggestion, the selective
effect of which is only counterbalanced by other ideas producing a
different auto-suggestion. This is especially noticeable in the young,
who so rapidly carry into action what is passing through their minds.
The philosophers of the seventeenth century, with Descartes and Pascal,
considered sentiments and passions as indistinct thoughts, as "thoughts,
as it were, in process of precipitation." This is true. Beneath all our
sentiments lies a totality of imperfectly analyzed ideas, a swelling
stream of crowded and indistinct reasons by the momentum of which we are
carried away and swept along. Inversely, sentiments underlie all our
ideas; they smoulder in the dying embers of abstractions. Even language
has a power because it arouses all the sentiments which it condenses in
a formula; the mere names "honor" and "duty" arouse infinite echoes in
the consciousness. At the name of "honor" alone, a legion of images is
on the point of surging up; vaguely, as with eyes open in the dark, we
see all the possible witnesses of our acts, from father and mother to
friends and fellow-countrymen; further, if our imagination is vivid
enough, we can see those great ancestors who did not hesitate under
similar circumstances. "We must; forward!" We feel that we are enrolled
in an army of gallant men; the whole race, in its most heroic
representatives, is urging us on. There is a social and even a
historical element beneath moral ideas. Besides, language, a social
product, is also a social force. The pious mind goes farther still; duty
is personified as a being--the living Good whose voice we hear.
Some speak of lifeless formulas; of these there are very few. A word, an
idea, is a formula of possible action and of sentiments ready to pass
into acts; they are "verbs." Now, every sentiment, every impulse which
becomes formulated with, as it were, a _fiat_, acquires by this alone a
new and quasi-creative force; it is not merely rendered visible by its
own light to itself but it is defined, specified, and selected from the
rest, and _ipso facto_ directed in its course. That is why formulas
relative to action are so powerful for good or evil; a child feels a
vague temptation, a tendency for which it cannot account. Pronounce in
its hearing the formula, change the blind impulse into the luminous
idea, and this will be a new suggestion which may, perhaps, cause it to
fall in the direction to which it was already inclined. On the other
hand, some formulas of generous sentiments will carry away a vast
audience immediately they are uttered. The genius is often the man who
translates the aspirations of his age into ideas; at the sound of his
voice a whole nation is moved. Great moral, religious, and social
revolutions ensue when the sentiments, long restrained and scarcely
conscious of their own existence, become formulated into ideas and
words; the way is then opened, the means and the goal are visible alike,
selection takes place, all the volitions are simultaneously guided in
the same direction, like a torrent which has found the weakest point in
the dam.
5. Sentiments[164]
We seldom experience the primary emotions in the pure or unmixed forms
in which they are commonly manifested by the animals. Our emotional
states commonly arise from the simultaneous excitement of two or more of
the instinctive dispositions; and the majority of the names currently
used to denote our various emotions are the names of such mixed,
secondary, or complex emotions. That the great variety of our emotional
states may be properly regarded as the result of the compounding of a
relatively small number of primary or simple emotions is no new
discovery. Descartes, for example, recognized only six primary emotions,
or passions as he termed them, namely--admiration, love, hatred, desire,
joy, and sadness, and he wrote, "All the others are composed of some out
of these six and derived from them." He does not seem to have formulated
any principles for the determination of the primaries and the
distinction of them from the secondaries.
The compounding of the primary emotions is largely, though not wholly,
due to the existence of sentiments, and some of the complex emotional
processes can only be generated from sentiments. Before going on to
discuss the complex emotions, we must therefore try to understand as
clearly as possible the nature of a sentiment.
The word "sentiment" is still used in several different senses. M. Ribot
and other French authors use its French equivalent as covering all the
feelings and emotions, as the most general name for the affective aspect
of mental processes. We owe to Mr. A. F. Shand the recognition of
features of our mental constitution of a most important kind that have
been strangely overlooked by other psychologists, and the application of
the word "sentiments" to denote features of this kind. Mr. Shand points
out that our emotions, or, more strictly speaking, our emotional
dispositions, tend to become organized in systems about the various
objects and classes of objects that excite them. Such an organized
system of emotional tendencies is not a fact or mode of experience, but
is a feature of the complexly organized structure of the mind that
underlies all our mental activity. To such an organized system of
emotional tendencies centered about some object Mr. Shand proposes to
apply the name "sentiment." This application of the word is in fair
accordance with its usage in popular speech, and there can be little
doubt that it will rapidly be adopted by psychologists.
The organization of the sentiments in the developing mind is determined
by the course of experience; that is to say, the sentiment is a growth
in the structure of the mind that is not natively given in the inherited
constitution. This is certainly true in the main, though the maternal
sentiment might almost seem to be innate; but we have to remember that
in the human mother this sentiment may, and generally does, begin to
grow up about the idea of its object, before the child is born.
The growth of the sentiments is of the utmost importance for the
character and conduct of individuals and of societies; it is the
organization of the affective and conative life. In the absence of
sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos, without order,
consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our social relations and
conduct, being based on the emotions and their impulses, would be
correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable. It is only through
the systematic organization of the emotional dispositions in sentiments
that the volitional control of the immediate promptings of the emotions
is rendered possible. Again, our judgments of value and of merit are
rooted in our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source,
for they are formed by our judgments of moral value.
The sentiments may be classified according to the nature of their
objects; they then fall into three main classes: the concrete
particular, the concrete general, and the abstract sentiments--e.g., the
sentiment of love for a child, of love for children in general, of love
for justice or virtue. Their development in the individual follows this
order, the concrete particular sentiments being, of course, the earliest
and most easily acquired. The number of sentiments a man may acquire,
reckoned according to the number of objects in which they are centered,
may, of course, be very large; but almost every man has a small number
of sentiments--perhaps one only--that greatly surpass all the rest in
strength and as regards the proportion of his conduct that springs from
them.
Each sentiment has a life-history, like every other vital organization.
It is gradually built up, increasing in complexity and strength and may
continue to grow indefinitely, or may enter upon a period of decline,
and may decay slowly or rapidly, partially or completely.
When any one of the emotions is strongly or repeatedly excited by a
particular object, there is formed the rudiment of a sentiment. Suppose
that a child is thrown into the company of some person given to frequent
outbursts of violent anger, say, a violent-tempered father who is
otherwise indifferent to the child and takes no further notice of him
than to threaten, scold, and, perhaps, beat him. At first the child
experiences fear at each exhibition of violence, but repetition of these
incidents very soon creates the habit of fear, and in the presence of
his father, even in his mildest moods, the child is timorous; that is to
say, the mere presence of the father throws the child's fear-disposition
into a condition of sub-excitement, which increases on the slightest
occasion until it produces all the subjective and objective
manifestations of fear. As a further stage, the mere idea of the father
becomes capable of producing the same effects as his presence; this idea
has become associated with the emotion; or, in stricter language, the
psychophysical disposition whose excitement involves the rise to
consciousness of this idea, has become associated or intimately
connected with the psychophysical disposition whose excitement produces
the bodily and mental symptoms of fear. Such an association constitutes
a rudimentary sentiment that we can only call a sentiment of fear.
In a similar way, a single act of kindness done by A to B may evoke in B
the emotion of gratitude; and if A repeats his kindly acts, conferring
benefits on B, the gratitude of B may become habitual, may become an
enduring emotional attitude of B towards A--a sentiment of gratitude.
Or, in either case, a single act--one evoking very intense fear or
gratitude--may suffice to render the association more or less durable
and the attitude of fear, or gratitude, of B toward A more or less
permanent.
6. Social Attitudes[165]
"Consciousness," says Jacques Loeb, "is only a metaphysical term for
phenomena which are determined by associative memory. By associative
memory I mean that mechanism by which a stimulus brings about not only
the effects which its nature and the specific structure of the irritable
organ call for, but by which it brings about also the effects of other
stimuli which formerly acted upon the organism almost or quite
simultaneously with the stimulus in question. If an animal can be
trained, if it can learn, it possesses associative memory." In short,
because we have memories we are able to profit by experiences.
It is the memories that determine, on the whole, what objects shall mean
to us, and how we shall behave toward them. We cannot say, however, that
a perception or an object is ever wholly without meaning to us. The
flame to which the child stretches out its hand means, even before he
has any experience of it, "something to be reached for, something to be
handled." After the first experience of touching it, however, it means
"something naturally attractive but still to be avoided." Each new
experience, so far as it is preserved in memory, adds new meanings to
the objects with which it is associated.
Our perceptions and our ideas embody our experiences of objects and so
serve as signs of what we may expect of them. They are the means by
which we are enabled to control our behavior toward them. On the other
hand, if we lose our memories, either temporarily or permanently, we
lose at the same time our control over our actions and are still able to
respond to objects, but only in accordance with our inborn tendencies.
After all our memories are gone, we still have our original nature to
fall back upon.
There is a remarkable case reported by Sidis and Goodhart which
illustrates the rôle that memory plays in giving us control over our
inherited tendencies. It is that of Rev. Thomas C. Hanna, who, while
attempting to alight from a carriage, lost his footing, fell to the
ground and was picked up unconscious. When he awoke it was found that he
had not only lost the faculty of speech but he had lost all voluntary
control of his limbs. He had forgotten how to walk. He had not lost his
senses. He could feel and see, but he was not able to distinguish
objects. He had no sense of distance. He was in a state of complete
"mental blindness." At first he did not distinguish between his own
movements and those of other objects. "He was as much interested in the
movements of his own limbs as in that of external things." He had no
conception of time. "Seconds, minutes, and hours were alike to him." He
felt hunger but he did not know how to interpret the feeling and had no
notion of how to satisfy it. When food was offered him he did not know
what to do with it. In order to get him to swallow food it had to be
placed far back in his throat, in order to provoke reflex swallowing
movements. In their report of the case the authors say:
Like an infant, he did not know the meaning of the simplest
words, nor did he understand the use of language. Imitation was
the factor in his first education. He learned the meaning of
words by imitating definite articulate sounds made in
connection with certain objects and activities. The
pronunciation of words and their combination into whole phrases
he acquired in the same imitative way. At first he simply
repeated any word and sentence heard, thinking that this meant
something to others. This manner of blind repetition and
unintelligent imitation was, however, soon given up, and he
began systematically to learn the meaning of words in
connection with the objective content they signified. As in the
case of children who, in their early developmental stage, use
one word to indicate many objects different in their nature,
but having some common point of superficial resemblance, so was
it in the case of Mr. Hanna: the first word he acquired was
used by him to indicate all the objects he wanted.
The first word he learned was "apple" and for a time apple was the only
word he knew. At first he learned only the names of particular objects.
He did not seem able to learn words with an abstract or general
significance. But although he was reduced to a state of mental infancy,
his "intelligence" remained, and he learned with astonishing rapidity.
"His faculty of judgment, his power of reasoning, were as sound and
vigorous as ever," continues the report. "The content of knowledge
seemed to have been lost, but the form of knowledge remained as active
as before the accident and was perhaps even more precise and definite."
One reason why man is superior to the brutes is probably that he has a
better natural memory. Another reason is that there are more things that
he can do, and so he has an opportunity to gain a wider and more varied
experience. Consider what a man can do with his hands! To this he has
added tools and machinery, which are an extension of the hand and have
multiplied its powers enormously. It is now pretty well agreed, however,
that the chief advantage which mankind has over the brutes is in the
possession of speech by which he can communicate his ideas. In
comparatively recent times he has supplemented this means of
communication by the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and
the telephone. In this way he has been able not only to communicate his
experiences but to fund and transmit them from one generation to
another.
As soon as man began to point out objects and associate them with vocal
sounds, he had obtained possession of a symbol by which he was able to
deliberately communicate his desires and his intentions to other men in
a more precise and definite way than he had been able to do through the
medium of spontaneous emotional expression.
The first words, we may suppose, were onomatopoetic, that is to say,
vocal imitations of the objects to which they referred. At any rate they
arose spontaneously in connection with the situation that inspired them.
They were then imitated by others and thus became the common and
permanent possession of the group. Language thus assumed for the group
the rôle of perception in the individual. It became the sign and symbol
of those meanings which were the common possession of the group.
As the number of such symbols was relatively small in comparison to the
number of ideas, words inevitably came to have different meanings in
different contexts. In the long run the effect of this was to detach the
words from the particular contexts in which they arose and loosen their
connections with the particular sentiments and attitudes with which they
were associated. They came to have thus a more distinctively symbolic
and formal character. It was thus possible to give them more precise
definitions, to make of them abstractions and mental toys, which the
individual could play with freely and disinterestedly. Like the child
who builds houses with blocks, he was able to arrange them in orders and
systems, create ideal structures, like the constructions of mathematics,
which he was then able to employ as means of ordering and systematizing
his more concrete experiences.
All this served to give the individual a more complete control over his
own experience and that of the group. It made it possible to analyze and
classify his own experiences and compare them with those of his fellows
and so, eventually, to erect the vast structure of formal and scientific
knowledge on the basis of which men are able to live and work together
in co-operation upon the structure of a common civilization.
The point is that the breadth of the experience over which man has
control and the disinterestedness with which he is able to view it is
the basis of the intellectual attainment of the individual, as of the
race.
If human beings were thoroughly rational creatures, we may presume that
they would act, at every instant, on the basis of all their experience
and all the knowledge that they were able to obtain from the experience
of others. The truth is, however, that we are never able, at any one
time, to mobilize, control, and use all the experience and all the
knowledge that we now possess and which, if we were less human than we
are, might serve to guide and control our actions. It is precisely the
function of science to collect, organize, and make available for our
practical uses the fund of experience and of knowledge we do possess.
Not only do we already have more knowledge than we can use, but much of
our personal and individual experience drops out and is lost in the
course of a lifetime. Meanwhile, later experiences are constantly adding
themselves to the earlier ones. In this way the meaning of the world is
constantly changing for us, much as the surface of the earth is
constantly under the influence of the weather.
The actual constellation of our memories and ideas is determined at any
given moment not merely by processes of association but also by
processes of dissociation. Practical interests, sentiments, and
emotional outbursts--love, fear, and anger--are constantly interrupting
the logical and constructive processes of the mind. These forces tend to
dissolve established connections between ideas and disintegrate our
memories so that they rarely function as a whole or as a unit, but
rather as more or less dissociated systems.
The mere act of attention, for example, so far as it focuses the
activities upon a single object, tends to narrow the range of
associations, check deliberation, and, by isolating one idea or system
of ideas, prepares us to act in accordance with them without regard to
the demands of other ideas in the wider but now suppressed context of
our experience. The isolation of one group of ideas implies the
suppression of other groups which are inconsistent with them or hinder
the indicated action.
When the fundamental instinct-emotions are aroused, they invariably have
the effect of isolating the ideas with which they are associated and of
inhibiting the contrary emotions. This is the explanation of war. When
the fighting instincts are stirred, men lose the fear of death and the
horror of killing.
When an idea, particularly one that is associated with some original
tendency of human nature, is thus isolated in consciousness, the
tendency is to respond to it automatically, just as one would respond to
a simple reflex. This explains the phenomena of suggestion. A state of
suggestibility is always a pre-condition of suggestion, and
suggestibility means just such an isolation and dissociation of the
suggested idea as has been described. Hypnotic trance may be defined as
a condition of abnormal suggestibility, in which the subject tends to
carry out automatically the commands of the experimenter, "as if," as
the familiar phrase puts it, "he had no will of his own," or rather, as
if the will of the experimenter had been substituted for that of the
subject. In fact the phenomena of auto-suggestion, in which one obeys
his own suggestion, seems to differ from other forms of the same
phenomena only in the fact that the subject obeys his own commands
instead of those of the experimenter. Not only suggestion and
auto-suggestion, but imitation, which is nothing more than another form
of suggestion, are made possible by the existence of mental mechanisms
created by dissociation.
Hypnotism represents an extreme but temporary form of dissociation of
the memories, artificially produced. Fascination and abstraction
(absent-mindedness) are milder forms of the same phenomena with this
difference, that they occur "in nature" and without artificial
stimulation.
A more permanent dissociation is represented in moods. The memories
which connect themselves with moods are invariably such as will support
the dominant emotion. At the same time memories which tend in any way to
modify the prevailing tone of the mood are spontaneously suppressed.
It is a familiar fact that persons whose occupations or whose mode of
life brings them habitually into different worlds, so that the
experiences in one have little or nothing in common with those of the
other, inevitably develop something akin to a dual personality. The
business man, for example, is one person in the city and another at his
home in the suburbs.
The most striking and instructive instances of dissociation, however,
are the cases of dual or multiple personality in which the same
individual lives successively or simultaneously two separate lives, each
of which is wholly oblivious of the other. The classic instance of this
kind is the case of the Rev. Ansel Bourne reported by William James in
his _Principles of Psychology_. Ansel Bourne was an itinerant preacher
living at Greene, Rhode Island. On January 19, 1887, he drew $551.00
from a bank in Providence and entered a Pawtucket horse car and
disappeared. He was advertised as missing, foul play being suspected.
On the morning of March 24, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling
himself A. J. Brown awoke in a fright and called on the people of the
house to tell him who he was. Later he said he was Ansel Bourne. Nothing
was known of him in Norristown except that six weeks before he had
rented a small shop, stocked it with stationery, confectionery, and
other small articles, and was carrying on a quiet trade "without seeming
to anyone unnatural or eccentric." At first it was thought he was
insane, but his story was confirmed and he was returned to his home. It
was then deemed that he had lost all memory of the period which had
elapsed since he boarded the Pawtucket car. What he had done or where he
had been between the time he left Providence and arrived in Norristown,
no one had the slightest information.
In 1890 he was induced by William James to submit to hypnotism in order
to see whether in his trance state his "Brown" memories would come back.
The experiment was so successful that, as James remarks, "it proved
quite impossible to make him, while in hypnosis, remember any of the
facts of his normal life." The report continues:
He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't know as he had ever
met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he said that he
had "never seen the woman before," etc. On the other hand, he
told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight, and gave
all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole
thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be
nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of
Mr. Bourne himself. He gave no motive for the wandering except
that there was "trouble back there" and he "wanted rest."
During the trance he looks old, the corners of his mouth are
drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits screening
his eyes and trying vainly to remember what lay before and
after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm all hedged
in," he says, "I can't get out at either end. I don't know what
set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I
ever left that store or what became of it." His eyes are
practically normal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier
response) about the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped
by suggestion to run the two personalities into one, and make
the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to
accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull today still covers two
distinct personal selves.
An interesting circumstance with respect to this case and others is that
the different personalities, although they inhabit the same body and
divide between them the experiences of a single individual, not only
regard themselves as distinct and independent persons but they exhibit
marked differences in character, temperament, and tastes, and frequently
profess for one another a decided antipathy. The contrasts in
temperament and character displayed by these split-off personalities are
illustrated in the case of Miss Beauchamp, to whose strange and
fantastic history Morton Prince has devoted a volume of nearly six
hundred pages.
In this case, the source of whose morbidity was investigated by means of
hypnotism, not less than three distinct personalities in addition to
that of the original and real Miss Beauchamp were evolved. Each one of
these was distinctly different and decidedly antipathetic to the others.
Pierre Janet's patient, Madam B, however, is the classic illustration of
this dissociated personality. From the time she was sixteen years of
age, Léonie, as she was called, had been so frequently hypnotized and
subjected to so much clinical experimentation that a well-organized
secondary personality was elaborated, which was designated as Léontine.
Léonie was a poor peasant woman, serious, timid, and melancholy.
Léontine was gay, noisy, restless, and ironical. Léontine did not
recognize that she had any relationship with Léonie, whom she referred
to as "that good woman," "the other," who "is not I, she is too stupid."
Eventually a third personality, known as Léonore, appeared who did not
wish to be mistaken for either that "good but stupid woman" Léonie, nor
for the "foolish babbler" Léontine.
Of these personalities Léonie possessed only her own memories, Léontine
possessed the memories of Léonie and her own, while the memories of
Léonore, who was superior to them both, included Madam B's whole life.
What is particularly interesting in connection with this phenomenon of
multiple personality is the fact that it reveals in a striking way the
relation of the subconscious to the conscious. The term subconscious, as
it occurs in the literature of psychology, is a word of various
meanings. In general, however, we mean by subconscious a region of
consciousness in which the dissociated memories, the "suppressed
complexes," as they are called, maintain some sort of conscious
existence and exercise an indirect though very positive influence upon
the ideas in the focus of consciousness, and so upon the behavior of the
individual. The subconscious, in short, is the region of the suppressed
memories. They are suppressed because they have come into conflict with
the dominant complex in consciousness which represents the personality
of the individual.
"Emotional conflicts" have long been the theme of literary analysis and
discussion. In recent years they have become the subject of scientific
investigation. In fact a new school of medical psychology with a vast
literature has grown up around and out of the investigations of the
effects of the suppression of a single instinct--the sexual impulse. A
whole class of nervous disorders, what are known as psychoneuroses, are
directly attributed by Dr. Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic school,
as it is called, to these suppressions, many of which consist of
memories that go back to the period of early childhood before the sexual
instinct had attained the form that it has in adults.
The theory of Freud, stated briefly, amounts to this: As a result of
emotional conflicts considerable portions of the memories of certain
individuals, with the motor impulses connected with them, are thrust
into the background of the mind, that is to say, the subconscious. Such
suppressed memories, with the connected motor dispositions, he first
named "suppressed complexes." Now it is found that these suppressed
complexes, which no longer respond to stimulations as they would under
normal conditions, may still exercise an indirect influence upon the
ideas which are in the focus of consciousness. Under certain conditions
they may not get into consciousness at all but manifest themselves, for
example, in the form of hysterical tics, twitchings, and muscular
convulsions.
Under other circumstances the ideas associated with the suppressed
complexes tend to have a dominating and controlling place in the life of
the individual. All our ideas that have a sentimental setting are of
this character. We are all of us a little wild and insane upon certain
subjects or in regard to certain persons or objects. In such cases a
very trivial remark or even a gesture will fire one of these loaded
ideas. The result is an emotional explosion, a sudden burst of weeping,
a gust of violent, angry, and irrelevant emotion, or, in case the
feelings are more under control, merely a bitter remark or a chilling
and ironical laugh. It is an interesting fact that a jest may serve as
well to give expression to the "feelings" as an expletive or any other
emotional expression. All forms of fanaticism, fixed ideas, phobias,
ideals, and cherished illusions may be explained as the effects of
mental mechanisms created by the suppressed complexes.
From what has been said we are not to assume that there is any necessary
and inevitable conflict among ideas. In our dreams and day-dreams, as in
fairyland, our memories come and go in the most disorderly and fantastic
way, so that we may seem to be in two places at the same time, or we may
even be two persons, ourselves and someone else. Everything trips
lightly along, in a fantastic pageant without rhyme or reason. We
discover something of the same freedom when we sit down to speculate
about any subject. All sorts of ideas present themselves; we entertain
them for a moment, then dismiss them and turn our attention to some
other mental picture which suits our purpose better. At such times we do
not observe any particular conflict between one set of ideas and
another. The lion and the lamb lie down peacefully together, and even if
the lamb happens to be inside we are not particularly disturbed.
Conflict arises between memories when our personal interests are
affected, when our sentiments are touched, when some favorite opinion is
challenged. Conflict arises between our memories when they are connected
with some of our motor dispositions, that is to say, when we begin to
act. Memories which are suppressed as a result of emotional conflicts,
memories associated with established motor dispositions, inevitably tend
to find some sort of direct or symbolic expression. In this way they
give rise to the symptoms which we meet in hysteria and
psychasthenia--fears, phobias, obsessions, and tics, like stammering.
The suppressed complexes do not manifest themselves in the pathological
forms only, but neither do the activities of the normal complexes give
any clear and unequivocal evidence of themselves in ordinary
consciousness. We are invariably moved to act by motives of which we are
only partially conscious or wholly unaware. Not only is this true, but
the accounts we give to ourselves and others of the motives upon which
we acted are often wholly fictitious, although they may be given in
perfect good faith.
A simple illustration will serve, however, to indicate how this can be
effected. In what is called post-hypnotic suggestion we have an
illustration of the manner in which the waking mind may be influenced by
impulses of whose origin and significance the subject is wholly unaware.
In a state of hypnotic slumber the suggestion is given that after
awaking the subject will, upon a certain signal, rise and open the
window or turn out the light. He is accordingly awakened and, at the
signal agreed upon while he was in the hypnotic slumber but of which he
is now wholly unconscious, he will immediately carry out the command as
previously given. If the subject is then asked why he opened the window
or turned out the light, he will, in evident good faith, make some
ordinary explanation, as that "it seemed too hot in the room," or that
he "thought the light in the room was disagreeable." In some cases, when
the command given seems too absurd, the subject may not carry it out,
but he will then show signs of restlessness and discomfort, just for
instance as one feels when he is conscious that he has left something
undone which he intended to do, although he can no longer recall what it
was. Sometimes when the subject is not disposed to carry out the command
actually given, he will perform some other related act as a substitute,
just as persons who have an uneasy conscience, while still unwilling to
make restitution or right the wrong which they have committed, will
perform some other act by way of expiation.
Our moral sentiments and social attitudes are very largely fixed and
determined by our past experiences of which we are only vaguely
conscious.
"This same principle," as Morton Prince suggests, "underlies what is
called the 'social conscience,' the 'civic' and 'national conscience,'
'patriotism,' 'public opinion,' what the Germans call 'Sittlichkeit,'
the war attitude of mind, etc. All these mental attitudes may be reduced
to common habits of thought and conduct derived from mental experiences
common to a given community and conserved as complexes in the
unconscious of the several individuals of the community."
Sentiments were first defined and distinguished from the emotions by
Shand, who conceived of them as organizations of the emotions about some
particular object or type of object. Maternal love, for example,
includes the emotions of fear, anger, joy, or sorrow, all organized
about the child. This maternal love is made up of innate tendencies but
is not itself a part of original nature. It is the mother's fostering
care of the child which develops her sentiments toward it, and the
sentiment attaches to any object that is bound up with the life of the
child. The cradle is dear to the mother because it is connected with her
occupation in caring for the child. The material fears for its welfare,
her joy in its achievements, her anger with those who injure or even
disparage it, are all part of the maternal sentiment.
The mother's sentiment determines her attitude toward her child, toward
other children, and toward children in general. Just as back of every
sensation, perception, or idea there is some sort of motor disposition,
so our attitudes are supported by our sentiments. Back of every
political opinion there is a political sentiment and it is the sentiment
which gives force and meaning to the opinion.
Thus we may think of opinions merely as representative of a
psycho-physical mechanism, which we may call the sentiment-attitude.
These sentiment-attitudes are to be regarded in turn as organizations of
the original tendencies, the instinct-emotions, about some memory, idea,
or object which is, or once was, the focus and the end for which the
original tendencies thus organized exist. In this way opinions turn out,
in the long run, to rest on original nature, albeit original nature
modified by experience and tradition.
C. THE FOUR WISHES: A CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL FORCES
1. The Wish, the Social Atom[166]
The Freudian psychology is based on the doctrine of the "wish," just as
physical science is based, today, on the concept of function. Both of
these are what may be called dynamic concepts, rather than static; they
envisage natural phenomena not as things but as processes and largely to
this fact is due their pre-eminent explanatory value. Through the "wish"
the "thing" aspect of mental phenomena, the more substantive "content of
consciousness," becomes somewhat modified and reinterpreted. This
"wish," which as a concept Freud does not analyze, includes all that
would commonly be so classed, and also whatever would be called impulse,
tendency, desire, purpose, attitude, and the like, not including,
however, any emotional components thereof. Freud also acknowledges the
existence of what he calls "negative wishes," and these are not fears
but negative purposes. An exact definition of the "wish" is that it is
_a course of action_ which some mechanism of the body is _set_ to carry
out, whether it actually does so or does not. All emotions, as well as
the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, are separable from the
"wishes," and this precludes any thought of a merely hedonistic
psychology. The wish is any purpose of project for _a course of action_,
whether it is being merely entertained by the mind or is being actually
executed--a distinction which is really of little importance. We shall
do well if we consider this to be, as in fact it is, dependent on a
_motor attitude_ of the physical body, which goes over into overt action
and _conduct_ when the wish is carried into execution.
It is this "wish" which transforms the principal doctrines of psychology
and recasts the science, much as the "atomic theory" and later the
"ionic theory" have reshaped earlier conceptions of chemistry. This
so-called "wish" becomes the unit of psychology, replacing the older
unit commonly called "sensation," which latter, it is to be noted, was a
_content_ of consciousness unit, whereas the "wish" is a more dynamic
affair.
Unquestionably the mind is somehow "embodied" in the body. But how?
Well, if the unit of mind and character is a "wish," it is easy enough
to perceive how it is incorporated. It is, this "wish," something which
the body as a piece of mechanism can do--a course of action with regard
to the environment which the machinery of the body is capable of
carrying out. This capacity resides clearly in the parts of which the
body consists and in the way in which these are put together, not so
much in the matter of which the body is composed, as in the forms which
this matter assumes when organized.
In order to look at this more closely we must go a bit down the
evolutionary series to the fields of biology and physiology. Here we
find much talk of nerves and muscles, sense-organs, reflex arcs,
stimulation, and muscular response, and we feel that somehow these
things do not reach the core of the matter, and that they never can;
that spirit is not nerve or muscle; and that intelligent conduct, to say
nothing of conscious thought, can never be reduced to reflex arcs and
the like--just as a printing press is not merely wheels and rollers,
and still less is it chunks of iron. The biologist has only himself to
thank if he has overlooked a thing which lay directly under his nose. He
has overlooked the _form of organization_ of these his reflex arcs, has
left out of account that step which assembles wheels and rollers into a
printing press, and that which organizes reflex arcs, as we shall
presently see, into an intelligent, conscious creature. Evolution took
this important little step of organization ages ago, and thereby
produced the rudimentary "wish."
Now in the reflex arc a sense-organ is stimulated and the energy of
stimulation is transformed into nervous energy, which then passes along
an afferent nerve to the central nervous system, passes through this and
out by an efferent or motor nerve to a muscle, where the energy is again
transformed and the muscle contracts. Stimulation at one point of the
animal organism produces contraction at another. The principles of
irritability and of motility are involved, but all further study of
_this_ process will lead us only to the physics and chemistry of the
energy transformations--will lead us, that is, in the direction of
_analysis_. If, however, we inquire in what way such reflexes are
combined or "integrated" into more complicated processes, we shall be
led in exactly the opposite direction, that of _synthesis_, and here we
soon come, as is not surprising, to a synthetic novelty. This is
_specific response_ or _behavior_.
In this single reflex something is done to a sense-organ and the process
within the organ is comparable to the process in any unstable substance
when the foreign energy strikes it; it is strictly a chemical process,
and so for the conducting nerve, likewise for the contracting muscle. It
happens, as a physiological fact, that in this process stored energy is
released so that a reflex contraction is literally comparable to the
firing of a pistol. But the reflex arc is not "aware" of anything, and
indeed there is nothing more to say about the process unless we should
begin to analyze it. But even two such processes going on together in
one organism are a very different matter. Two such processes require two
sense-organs, two conduction paths, and two muscles; and since we are
considering the result of the two in combination, the relative
anatomical location of these six members is of importance. For
simplicity I will take a hypothetical but strictly possible case. A
small water animal has an eyespot located on each side of its anterior
end; each spot is connected by a nerve with a vibratory silium or fin
on the side of the posterior end; the thrust exerted by each fin is
toward the rear. If, now, light strikes one eye, say the right, the left
fin is set in motion and the animal's body is set rotating toward the
right like a rowboat with one oar. This is all that one such reflex arc
could do for the animal. Since, however, there are now two, when the
animal comes to be turned far enough toward the right so that some of
the light strikes the second eyespot (as will happen when the animal
comes around facing the light), the second fin, on the right side, is
set in motion, and the two together propel the animal forward in a
straight line. The direction of this line will be that in which the
animal lies when its two eyes receive equal amounts of light. In other
words, by the combined operation of two reflexes the animal swims
_toward the light_, while either reflex alone would only have set it
spinning like a top. It now responds specifically in the direction of
the light, whereas before it merely spun when lashed.
Suppose, now, that it possess a _third_ reflex arc--a "heat spot" so
connected with the same or other fins that when stimulated by a certain
intensity of heat it initiates a nervous impulse which stops the forward
propulsion. The animal is still "lashed," but nevertheless no light can
force it to swim "blindly to its death" by scalding. It has the
rudiments of "intelligence." But so it had before. For as soon as two
reflex arcs capacitate it mechanically to swim _toward light_, it was no
longer exactly like a pinwheel; it could respond specifically toward at
least one thing in its environment.
It is this objective reference of a process of release that is
significant. The mere reflex does not refer to anything beyond itself;
if it drives an organism in a certain direction, it is only as a rocket
ignited at random shoots off in some direction, depending on how it
happened to lie. But specific response is not merely in some random
direction, it is _toward an object_, and if this object is moved, the
responding organism changes its direction and still moves after it. And
the objective reference is that the organism is _moving with reference
to some object or fact of the environment_. For the organism, while a
very interesting mechanism in itself, is one whose movements turn on
objects outside of itself, much as the orbit of the earth turns upon the
sun; and these external, and sometimes very distant, objects are as much
_constituents_ of the behavior process as is the organism which does
the turning. It is this _pivotal outer object_, the object of specific
response, which seems to me to have been overneglected.
It is not surprising, then, that in animals as highly organized reflexly
as are many of the invertebrates, even though they should possess no
other principle of action than that of specific response, the various
life-activities should present an appearance of considerable
intelligence. And I believe that in fact this intelligence is solely the
product of accumulated specific responses. Our present point is that the
specific response and the "wish" as Freud uses the term, are one and the
same thing.
2. The Freudian Wish[167]
"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride" is a nursery saw which, in
the light of recent developments in psychology, has come to have a much
more universal application than it was formerly supposed to have. If the
followers of the Freudian school of psychologists can be believed--and
there are many reasons for believing them--all of us, no matter how
apparently contented we are and how well we are supplied with the good
things of the earth, are "beggars," because at one time or another and
in one way or another we are daily betraying the presence of unfulfilled
wishes. Many of these wishes are of such a character that we ourselves
cannot put them into words. Indeed, if they were put into words for us,
we should straightway deny that such a wish is or was ever harbored by
us in our waking moments. But the stretch of time indicated by "waking
moments" is only a minor part of the twenty-four hours. Even during the
time we are not asleep we are often abstracted, day-dreaming, letting
moments go by in reverie. Only during a limited part of our waking
moments are we keenly and alertly "all there" in the possession of our
faculties. There are thus, even apart from sleep, many unguarded moments
when these so-called "repressed wishes" may show themselves.
In waking moments we wish only for the conventional things which will
not run counter to our social traditions or code of living. But these
open and above-board wishes are not very interesting to the
psychologist. Since they are harmless and call for the kinds of things
that everybody in our circle wishes for, we do not mind admitting them
and talking about them. Open and uncensored wishes are best seen in
children (though children at an early age begin to show repressions).
Only tonight I heard a little girl of nine say: "I wish I were a boy and
were sixteen years old--I'd marry Ann" (her nine-year old companion).
And recently I heard a boy of eight say to his father: "I wish you would
go away forever; then I could marry mother." The spontaneous and
uncensored wishes of children gradually disappear as the children take
on the speech conventions of the adult. But even though the crassness of
the form of expression of the wish disappears with age, there is no
reason to suppose that the human organism ever gets to the point where
wishes just as unconventional as the above do not rise to trouble it.
Such wishes, though, are immediately repressed; we never harbor them nor
do we express them clearly to ourselves in our waking moments.
The steps by which repression takes place in the simpler cases are not
especially difficult to understand. When the child wants something it
ought not to have, its mother hands it something else and moves the
object about until the child reaches out for it. When the adult strives
for something which society denies him, his environment offers him, if
he is normal, something which is "almost as good," although it may not
wholly take the place of the thing he originally strove for. This in
general is the process of substitution or sublimation. It is never
complete from the first moment of childhood. Consequently it is natural
to suppose that many of the things which have been denied us should at
times beckon to us. But since they are banned they must beckon in
devious ways. These sometime grim specters both of the present and of
the past cannot break through the barriers of our staid and sober waking
moments, so they exhibit themselves, at least to the initiated, in
shadowy form in reverie, and in more substantial form in the slips we
make in conversation and in writing, and in the things we laugh at; but
clearest of all in dreams. I say the meaning is clear to the initiated
because it does require special training and experience to analyze these
seemingly nonsensical slips of tongue and pen, these highly elaborated
and apparently meaningless dreams, into the wishes (instinct and habit
impulses) which gave them birth. It is fortunate for us that we are
protected in this way from having to face openly many of our own wishes
and the wishes of our friends.
We get our clue to the dream as being a wish fulfilment by taking the
dreams of children. Their dreams are as uncensored as is their
conversation. Before Christmas my own children dreamed nightly that they
had received the things they wanted for Christmas. The dreams were
clear, logical, and open wishes. Why should the dreams of adults be less
logical and less open unless they are to act as concealers of the wish?
If the dream processes in the child run in an orderly and logical way,
would it indeed not be curious to find the dream processes of the adult
less logical and full of meaning?
This argument gives us good a priori grounds for supposing that the
dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is
a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The
reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were
to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our
everyday habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit
even to ourselves that we have such dreams. Immediately upon waking only
so much of the dream is remembered, that is, put into ordinary speech,
as will square with our life at the time. The dream is "censored," in
other words.
The question immediately arises, who is the censor or what part of us
does the censoring? The Freudians have made more or less of a
"metaphysical entity" out of the censor. They suppose that when wishes
are repressed, they are repressed into the "unconscious," and that this
mysterious censor stands at the trapdoor lying between the conscious and
the unconscious. Many of us do not believe in a world of the unconscious
(a few of us even have grave doubts about the usefulness of the term
consciousness), hence we try to explain censorship along ordinary
biological lines. We believe that one group of habits can "down" another
group of habits--or instincts. In this case our ordinary system of
habits--those which we call expressive of our "real selves"--inhibit or
quench (keep inactive or partially inactive) those habits and
instinctive tendencies which belong largely in the past.
This conception of the dream as having both censored and uncensored
features has led us to divide the dream into its specious or manifest
content (face value, which is usually nonsensical) and its latent or
logical content. We should say that while the manifest content of the
dream is nonsensical, its true or latent content is usually logical and
expressive of some wish that has been suppressed in the waking state.
On examination the manifest content of dreams is found to be full of
symbols. As long as the dream does not have to be put into customary
language, it is allowed to stand as it is dreamed--the symbolic features
are uncensored. Symbolism is much more common than is ordinarily
supposed. All early language was symbolic. The language of children and
of savages abounds in symbolism. Symbolic modes of expression both in
art and in literature are among the earliest forms of treating difficult
situations in delicate and inoffensive ways. In other words, symbols in
art are a necessity and serve the same purpose as does the censor in the
dreams. Even those of us who have not an artistic education, however,
have become familiar with the commoner forms of symbolism through our
acquaintance with literature. In the dream, when the more finely
controlled physiological processes are in abeyance, there is a tendency
to revert to the symbolic modes of expression. This has its use, because
on awaking the dream does not shock us, since we make no attempt to
analyze or trace back in the dream the symbol's original meaning. Hence
we find that the manifest content is often filled with symbols which
occasionally give us the clue to the dream analysis.
The dream then brings surcease from our maladjustments: If we are denied
power, influence, or love by society or by individuals, we can obtain
these desiderata in our dreams. We can possess in dreams the things
which we cannot have by day. In sleep the poor man becomes a Midas, the
ugly woman handsome, the childless woman surrounded by children, and
those who in daily life live upon a crust in their dreams dine like
princes (after living upon canned goods for two months in the Dry
Tortugas, the burden of my every dream was food). Where the wished-for
things are compatible with our daily code, they are remembered on
awaking as they were dreamed. Society, however, will not allow the
unmarried woman to have children, however keen her desire for them.
Hence her dreams in which the wish is gratified are remembered in
meaningless words and symbols.
Long before the time Freud's doctrine saw the light of day, William
James gave the key to what I believed to be the true explanation of the
wish. Thirty years ago he wrote:
I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my
selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I
could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great
athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a _bon vivant_,
and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist,
a statesman, a warrior, and African explorer, as well as a
"tone-poet" and a saint. But the thing is simply impossible.
The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the
_bon vivant_ and the philanthropist would trip each other up;
the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house
in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may
conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man.
But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less
be suppressed.
What James is particularly emphasizing here is that the human organism
is instinctively capable of developing along many different lines, but
that due to the stress of civilization some of these instinctive
capacities must be thwarted. In addition to these impulses which are
instinctive, and therefore hereditary, there are many habit impulses
which are equally strong and which for similar reasons must be given up.
The systems of habits we form (i.e., the acts we learn to perform) at
four years of age will not serve us when we are twelve, and those formed
at the age of twelve will not serve us when we become adults. As we pass
from childhood to man's estate, we are constantly having to give up
thousands of activities which our nervous and muscular systems have a
tendency to perform. Some of these instinctive tendencies born with use
are poor heritages; some of the habits we early develop are equally poor
possessions. But, whether they are "good" or "bad," they must give way
as we put on the habits required of adults. Some of them yield with
difficulty and we often get badly twisted in attempting to put them
away, as every psychiatric clinic can testify. It is among these
frustrated impulses that I would find the biological basis of the
unfulfilled wish. Such "wishes" need never have been "conscious" and
_need never have been suppressed into Freud's realm of the unconscious_.
It may be inferred from this that there is no particular reason for
applying the term "wish" to such tendencies. What we discover then in
dreams and in conversational slips and other lapses are really at heart
"reaction tendencies"--tendencies which we need never have faced nor put
into words at any time. On Freud's theory these "wishes" have at one
time been faced and put into words by the individual, and when faced
they were recognized as not squaring with his ethical code. They were
then immediately "repressed into the unconscious."
A few illustrations may help in understanding how thwarted tendencies
may lay the basis for the so-called unfulfilled wish which later appears
in the dream. One individual becomes a psychologist in spite of his
strong interest in becoming a medical man, because at the time it was
easier for him to get the training along psychological lines. Another
pursues a business career, when, if he had had his choice, he would have
become a writer of plays. Sometimes on account of the care of a mother
or of younger brothers and sisters, a young man cannot marry, even
though the mating instinct is normal; such a course of action
necessarily leaves unfulfilled wishes and frustrated impulses in its
train. Again a young man will marry and settle down when mature
consideration would show that his career would advance much more rapidly
if he were not burdened with a family. Again, an individual marries and
without even admitting to himself that his marriage is a failure he
gradually shuts himself off from any emotional expression--protects
himself from the married state by sublimating his natural domestic ties,
usually in some kind of engrossing work, but often in questionable
ways--by hobbies, speed manias, and excesses of various kinds. In
connection with this it is interesting to note that the automobile,
quite apart from its utilitarian value, is coming to be a widely used
means of repression or wish sublimation. I have been struck by the
enormously increasing number of women drivers. Women in the present
state of society have not the same access to absorbing kinds of works
that men have (which will shortly come to be realized as a crime far
worse than that of the Inquisition). Hence their chances of normal
sublimation are limited. For this reason women seek an outlet by rushing
to the war as nurses, in becoming social workers, pursuing aviation,
etc. Now if I am right in this analysis these unexercised tendencies to
do things other than we are doing are never quite got rid of. We cannot
get rid of them unless we could build ourselves over again so that our
organic machinery would work only along certain lines and only for
certain occupations. Since we cannot completely live these tendencies
down, we are all more or less "unadjusted" and ill adapted. These
maladjustments are exhibited whenever the brakes are off, that is,
whenever our higher and well-developed habits of speech and action are
dormant, as in sleep, in emotional disturbances, etc.
Many but not all of these "wishes" can be traced to early childhood or
to adolescence, which is a time of stress and strain and a period of
great excitement. In childhood the boy often puts himself in his
father's place; he wishes that he were grown like his father and could
take his father's place, for then his mother would notice him more and
he would not have to feel the weight of authority. The girl likewise
often becomes closely attached to her father and wishes her mother would
die (which in childhood means to disappear or go away) so that she could
be all in all to her father. These wishes, from the standpoint of
popular morality, are perfectly innocent; but as the children grow older
they are told that such wishes are wrong and that they should not speak
in such a "dreadful" way. Such wishes are, then, gradually
suppressed--replaced by some other mode of expression. But the
replacement is often imperfect. The apostle's saying, "When we become
men we put away childish things" was written before the days of
psychoanalysis.
3. The Person and His Wishes[168]
The human being has a great variety of "wishes," ranging from the desire
to have food to the wish to serve humanity.
Anything capable of being appreciated (wished for) is a "value." Food,
money, a poem, a political doctrine, a religious creed, a member of the
other sex, etc., are values.
There are also negative values--things which exist but which the
individual does not want, which he may even despise. Liquor or the
Yiddish language may be a positive value for one person and a negative
value for another.
The state of mind of the individual toward a value is an "attitude."
Love of money, desire for fame, appreciation of a given poem, reverence
for God, hatred of the Jew, are attitudes.
We divide wishes into four classes: (1) the desire for new experience;
(2) the desire for security; (3) the desire for recognition; (4) the
desire for response.
1. The desire for new experience is seen in simple forms in the prowling
and meddling activities of the child, and the love of adventure and
travel in the boy and the man. It ranges in moral quality from the
pursuit of game and the pursuit of pleasure to the pursuit of knowledge
and the pursuit of ideals. It is found equally in the vagabond and the
scientific explorer. Novels, theaters, motion pictures, etc., are means
of satisfying this desire vicariously, and their popularity is a sign of
the elemental force of this desire.
In its pure form the desire for new experience implies motion, change,
danger, instability, social irresponsibility. The individual dominated
by it shows a tendency to disregard prevailing standards and group
interests. He may be a complete failure, on account of his instability;
or a conspicuous success, if he converts his experiences into social
values--puts them in the form of a poem, makes of them a contribution to
science, etc.
2. The desire for security is opposed to the desire for new experience.
It implies avoidance of danger and death, caution, conservatism.
Incorporation in an organization (family, community, state) provides the
greatest security. In certain animal societies (e.g., the ants) the
organization and co-operation are very rigid. Similarly among the
peasants of Europe, represented by our immigrant groups, all lines of
behavior are predetermined for the individual by tradition. In such a
group the individual is secure as long as the group organization is
secure, but evidently he shows little originality or creativeness.
3. The desire for recognition expresses itself in devices for securing
distinction in the eyes of the public. A list of the different modes of
seeking recognition would be very long. It would include courageous
behavior, showing off through ornament and dress, the pomp of kings, the
display of opinions and knowledge, the possession of special
attainments--in the arts, for example. It is expressed alike in
arrogance and in humility, even in martyrdom. Certain modes of seeking
recognition we define as "vanity," others as "ambition." The "will to
power" belongs here. Perhaps there has been no spur to human activity so
keen and no motive so naïvely avowed as the desire for "undying fame,"
and it would be difficult to estimate the rôle the desire for
recognition has played in the creation of social values.
4. The desire for response is a craving, not for the recognition of the
public at large, but for the more intimate appreciation of individuals.
It is exemplified in mother-love (touch plays an important rôle in this
connection), in romantic love, family affection, and other personal
attachments. Homesickness and loneliness are expressions of it. Many of
the devices for securing recognition are used also in securing response.
Apparently these four classes comprehend all the positive wishes. Such
attitudes as anger, fear, hate, and prejudice are attitudes toward those
objects which may frustrate a wish.
Our hopes, fears, inspirations, joys, sorrows are bound up with these
wishes and issue from them. There is, of course, a kaleidoscopic
mingling of wishes throughout life, and a single given act may contain a
plurality of them. Thus when a peasant emigrates to America he may
expect to have a good time and learn many things (new experience), to
make a fortune (greater security), to have a higher social standing on
his return (recognition), and to induce a certain person to marry him
(response).
The "character" of the individual is determined by the nature of the
organization of his wishes. The dominance of any one of the four types
of wishes is the basis of our ordinary judgment of his character. Our
appreciation (positive or negative) of the character of the individual
is based on his display of certain wishes as against others, and on his
modes of seeking their realization.
The individual's attitude toward the totality of his attitudes
constitutes his conscious "personality." The conscious personality
represents the conception of self, the individual's appreciation of his
own character.
III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS
Literature on the concept of social forces falls under four heads: (1)
popular notions of social forces; (2) social forces and history; (3)
interests, sentiments, and attitudes as social forces; and (4) wishes as
social forces.
1. Popular Notions of Social Forces
The term "social forces" first gained currency in America with the rise
of the "reformers," so called, and with the growth of popular interest
in the problems of city life; that is, labor and capital, municipal
reform and social welfare, problems of social politics.
In the rural community the individual had counted; in the city he is
likely to be lost. It was this declining weight of the individual in the
life of great cities, as compared with that of impersonal social
organizations, the parties, the unions, and the clubs, that first
suggested, perhaps, the propriety of the term social forces. In 1897
Washington Gladden published a volume entitled _Social Facts and Forces:
the Factory, the Labor Union, the Corporation, the Railway, the City,
the Church_. The term soon gained wide currency and general acceptance.
At the twenty-eighth annual National Conference of Charities and
Correction, at Washington, D.C., Mary E. Richmond read a paper upon
"Charitable Co-operation" in which she presented a diagram and a
classification of the social forces of the community from the point of
view of the social worker[169] given on page 492.
Beginning in October, 1906, there appeared for several years in the
journal of social workers, _Charities and Commons_, now _The Survey_,
editorial essays upon social, industrial, and civic questions under the
heading "Social Forces." In the first article E. T. Devine made the
following statement: "In this column the editor intends to have his say
from month to month about the persons, books, and events which have
significance as social forces.... Not all the social forces are
obviously forces of good, although they are all under the ultimate
control of a power which makes for righteousness."
[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF FORCES WITH WHICH THE CHARITY WORKER MAY
CO-OPERATE
A. Family Forces B. Personal Forces C. Neighborhood Forces D. Civic
Forces E. Private Charitable Forces F. Public Relief Forces
A.--_Family Forces._
Capacity of each member for
Affection
Training
Endeavor
Social development.
B.--_Personal Forces._
Kindred.
Friends.
C.--_Neighborhood Forces._
Neighbors, landlords, tradesmen.
Former and present employers.
Clergymen, Sunday-school teachers, fellow church members.
Doctors.
Trade-unions, fraternal and benefit societies, social clubs,
fellow-workmen.
Libraries, educational clubs, classes, settlements, etc.
Thrift agencies, savings-banks, stamp-savings, building and
loan associations.
D.--_Civic Forces._
School-teachers, truant officers.
Police, police magistrates, probation officers, reformatories.
Health department, sanitary inspectors, factory inspectors.
Postmen.
Parks, baths, etc.
E.--_Private Charitable Forces._
Charity organization society.
Church of denomination to which family belongs.
Benevolent individuals.
National, special, and general relief societies.
Charitable employment agencies and work-rooms.
Fresh-air society, children's aid society, society for protection of
children, children's homes, etc.
District nurses, sick-diet kitchens, dispensaries, hospitals, etc.
Society for suppression of vice, prisoner's aid society, etc.
F.--_Public Relief Forces._
Almshouses.
Outdoor poor department.
Public hospitals and dispensaries.]