disregarded from a social point of view. It awakes to an unusual
degree the impulse to imitation. The seeing of rhythmic movements
starts similar motor impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well
known that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe suffered
from dancing epidemics. They started from pathological cases of St.
Vitus' dance and released in the excitable crowds cramplike impulses
to imitative movements. But we hear the same story of instinctive
imitations on occasions of less tragic character. It is reported that
in the eighteenth century papal Rome was indignant over the passionate
Spanish fandango. It was decided solemnly to put this wild dance under
the ban. The lights of the church were assembled for the formal
judgment, when it was proposed to call a pair of Spanish dancers in
order that every one of the priests might form his own idea of the
unholy dance. But history tells that the effect was an unexpected one.
After a short time of fandango demonstration the high clerics began
involuntarily to imitate the movements, and the more passionately the
Spaniards indulged in their native whirl, the more the whole court was
transformed into one great dancing party. Even the Italian tarantella
probably began as a disease with nervous dancing movements, and then
spread over the land through mere imitation which led to an ecstatic
turning around and around. Whoever studies the adventures of American
dancing during the last season from New York to San Francisco must be
impressed by this contagious character of our dancing habits. But this
means that the movement carries in itself the energy to spread farther
and farther, and to fill the daily life with increased longing for the
ragtime. We are already accustomed to the dance at the afternoon tea;
how long will it take before we are threatened by the dance at the
breakfast coffee?
We have spoken of three mental effects: the license, the eroticism,
and the imitativeness which are stirred up by the dancing movements.
But in the perspective of history we ought not to overlook another
significant trait: the overemphasis on dancing has usually
characterized a period of political reaction, of indifference to
public life, of social stagnation and carelessness. When the volcanoes
were rumbling, the masses were always dancing. At all times when
tyrants wanted to divert the attention of the crowd, they gave the
dances to their people. A nation which dances cannot think, but lives
from hour to hour. The less political maturity, the more happiness
does a national community show in its dancing pleasures. The Spaniards
and the Polish, the Hungarians and the Bohemians, have always been the
great dancers--the Gypsies dance. There is no fear that the New
Yorkers will suddenly stop reading their newspapers and voting at the
primaries; they will not become Spaniards. But an element of this
psychological effect of carelessness and recklessness and stagnation
may influence them after all, and may shade the papers which they
read, and even the primaries at which they do vote.
Yet how one-sided would it be, if we gave attention only to the
dangers which the dance may bring to a nation's mind. The credit
account of the social dance is certainly not insignificant, and
perhaps momentous just for the Americans of to-day. The dance is a
wonderful discharge of stirred up energy; its rhythmic form relieves
the tension of the motor apparatus and produces a feeling of personal
comfort. The power to do this is a valuable asset, when so much
emotional poverty is around us. The dance makes life smooth in the
midst of hardship and drudgery. For the dancer the cup is always
overflowing, even though it may be small. There is an element of
relaxation and of joyfulness in the rhythm of the music and the
twinkling of the feet, which comes as a blessing into the dulness and
monotony of life. The overworked factory girl does not seek rest for
her muscles after the day of labour, but craves to go on contrasting
them in the rhythmic movements of the dance. So it has been at all
times. The hardest worked part of the community has usually been the
most devoted to the gayety of popular dances. The refined society has
in many periods of civilization declined to indulge in dancing,
because it was too widely spread among the lowest working classes in
towns and in the country. The dance through thousands of years has
been the bearer of harmless happiness: who would refuse a welcome to
such a benefactor? And with the joyfulness comes the sociability. The
dance brings people near together. It is unfair to claim that the
dance is aristocratic, because it presupposes leisure and luxury. On
the contrary, throughout the history of civilization the dance has
been above all, democratic, and has reënforced the feeling of good
fellowship, of community, of intimacy, of unity. Like the popular
games which melt all social groups together by a common joyful
interest, and like humour which breaks all social barriers, the love
for dancing removes mutual distrust and harmonizes the masses.
This social effect has manifold relation to another aspect of the
dance, which is psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an
art, and as such, of deep æsthetic influence on the whole mental life.
Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is
developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to
the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to
learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the
great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery of the exact
rules appeared one of the most difficult parts of higher education,
and as a real test of the truly cultivated gentleman and gentlewoman;
scholarly books analysed every detail of the necessary forms, and the
society dances in the castles of the eighteenth century were more
elaborate than the best prepared ballets on the stage of to-day. But
the popular dances of the really dancing nations are no less bound by
traditions, and we know that even the dances of the savages are moving
on in strictly inherited forms. Far from the license of haphazard
movements, the self-expression of the dancer is thus regulated and
bound by rules which are taken by him as prescriptions of beauty. To
dance thus means a steady adjustment to artistic requirements; it is
an æsthetic education by which the whole system of human impulses
becomes harmonized and unified. The chance movements are blended into
a beautiful whole, and this reflects on the entire inner setting.
Educators have for a long time been aware that calisthenics, with its
subtly tuned movements of the body, develops refinement in the
interplay of mental life. The personality who understands how to live
in gentle, beautiful motions through that trains his mind to beauty.
In Europe, for instance in Hellerau near Dresden, they have recently
begun to establish schools for young men and women in which the main,
higher education is to be moulded by the æsthetics of bodily
expression, and the culture of the symbolic dance.
This æsthetic character of the dance, however, leads still further. It
is not only the training in beautiful expression; it is the
development of an attitude which is detached from practical effects
and from the practical life of outer success. The dance is an action
by which nothing is produced and nothing in the surroundings changed.
It is an oasis in the desert of our materialistic behaviour. From
morning till night we are striving to do things, to manufacture
something in the mill of the nation: but he who dances is satisfied in
expressing himself. He becomes detached from the cares of the hour, he
acquires a new habit of disinterested attitude toward life. Who can
underestimate the value of such detachment in our American life? The
Americans have always been eagerly at work, but have never quite
learned to enjoy themselves and to take the æsthetic attitude which
creates the wonders of beauty and the true harmonies of life. To
forget drudgery and to sink into the rhythms of the dance may bring to
millions that inner completeness which is possible only when practical
and æsthetic attitude are blending in a personality. The one means
restless change; the other means repose, perfection, eternity. This
hardworking, pioneer nation needs the noisy teachings of efficiency
and scientific management less than the melodious teaching of song and
dance and beauty. In short, the dance may bring both treacherous
perils and wonderful gifts to our community. It depends upon us
whether we reënforce the dangerous elements of the dance, or the
beneficial ones. It will depend on ourselves whether the dance will
debase the nation, as it has so often done in the history of
civilization, or whether it will help to lead it to new heights of
beauty and harmony, as it has not seldom done before. Our social
conscience must be wide awake; it will not be a blind fate which will
decide when the door of the future opens whether we shall meet the
lady or the tiger.
X
NAÏVE PSYCHOLOGY
The scientific psychologists started on a new road yesterday. For a
long time their chief interest was to study the laws of the mind. The
final goal was a textbook which would contain a system of laws to
which every human mind is subjected. But in recent times a change has
set in. The trend of much of the best work nowadays is toward the
study of individual differences. The insight into individual
personalities was indeed curiously neglected in modern psychology.
This does not mean that the declaration of psychological independence
insisted that all men are born equal, nor did any psychologist fancy
that education or social surroundings could form all men in equal
moulds. But as scientists they felt no particular interest in the
richness of colours and tints. They intentionally neglected the
question of how men differ, because they were absorbed by the study of
the underlying laws which must hold for every one. It is hardly
surprising that the psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it
was a kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the psychology
of olden times. Speculations about the soul had served for centuries.
Metaphysics had reigned and the observation of the real facts of life
and experience had been disregarded. When the new time came in which
the psychologists were fascinated by the spirit of scientific method
and exact study of actual facts, the safest way was for them to
imitate the well-tested and triumphant procedures of natural science.
The physicist and the chemist seek the laws of the physical universe,
and the psychologist tried to act like them, to study the elements
from which the psychical universe is composed and to find the laws
which control them. But while it was wise to make the first forward
march in this one direction, the psychologist finally had to
acknowledge that a no less important interest must push him on an
opposite way. The human mind is not important to us only as a type.
Every social aim reminds us that we must understand the individual
personality. If we deal with children in the classroom or with
criminals in the courtroom, with customers in the market or with
patients in the hospital, we need not only to know what is true of
every human being; we must above all discover how the particular
individual is disposed and composed, or what is characteristic of
special groups, nations, races, sexes, and ages. It is clear that new
methods were needed to approach these younger problems of scientific
psychology, but the scientists have eagerly turned with concerted
efforts toward this unexplored region and have devoted the methods of
test experiments, of statistics, and of laboratory measurements to the
examination of such differences between various individuals and
groups.
But in all these new efforts the psychologist meets a certain public
resistance, or at least a certain disregard, which he is not
accustomed to find in his routine endeavours. As long as he was simply
studying the laws of the mind, he enjoyed the approval of the wider
public. His work was appreciated as is that of the biologist and the
chemist. But when it becomes his aim to discover mental features of
the individual, and to foresee what he can expect from the social
groups of men, every layman tells him condescendingly that it is a
superfluous task, as instinct and intuition and the naïve psychology
of the street will be more successful than any measurements with
chronoscopes and kymographs. Do we not know how the skilful politician
or the efficient manager looks through the mind of a man at the first
glance? The life insurance agent has hardly entered the door before he
knows how this particular mind must be handled. Every commercial
traveller knows more than any psychologist can tell him, and even the
waiter in the restaurant foresees when the guest sits down how large a
tip he can expect from him. In itself it would hardly be convincing to
claim that scientific efforts to bring a process down to exact
principles are unnecessary because the process can be performed by
instinct. We all can walk without needing a knowledge of the muscles
which are used, and can find nourishment without knowing the
physiology of nutrition. Yet the physiologist has not only brought to
light the principles according to which we actually eat, but he has
been able to make significant suggestions for improved diet, and in
not a few cases his knowledge can render services which no instinctive
appetite could replace. The psychological study of human traits, too,
may not only find out the principles underlying the ordinary knowledge
of men, but may discover means for an insight which goes as far beyond
the instinctive understanding of man as the scientific diet prescribed
by a physician goes beyond the fancies of a cook. The manager may
believe that he can recognize at the first glance for which kind of
work the labourer is fit: and yet the psychological analysis with the
methods of exact experiments may easily demonstrate that his judgment
is entirely mistaken. Moreover, although such practical psychologists
of the street or of the office may develop a certain art of
recognizing particular features in the individual, they cannot
formulate the laws and cannot lay down those permanent relations from
which others may learn.
Yet even this claim of the psychological scholar seems idle pride. Had
the world really to wait for his exact statistics and his formulæ of
correlation of mental traits in order to get general statements and
definite descriptions of the human types and of the mental
diversities? Are not the writings of the wise men of all times full of
such psychological observations? Has not the consciousness of the
nations expressed itself in an abundance of sayings and songs, of
proverbs and philosophic words, which contains this naïve
psychological insight into the characters and temperaments of the
human mind? We may go back thousands of years to the contemplations of
oriental wisdom, we may read the poets of classic antiquity, or
Shakespeare, or Goethe, we may study what the great religious leaders
and statesmen, the historians and the jurists, have said about man and
his behaviour; and we find an over-abundance of wonderful sayings
with which no textbooks of psychology can be compared.
This is all true. And yet, is it not perhaps all entirely false? Can
this naïve psychology of the ages, to which the impressionism and the
wisdom of the finest minds have so amply contributed, really make
superfluous the scientific efforts for the psychology of groups and
correlations and individual traits? It seems almost surprising that
this overwhelmingly rich harvest of prescientific psychology has never
been examined from the standpoint of scientific psychology, and that
no one has sifted the wheat from the chaff. The very best would be not
only to gather such material, but to combine the sayings of the naïve
psychologists in a rounded system of psychology. In all ages they
surely must have been among the best observers of mankind, as even
what is not connected with the name of an individual author, but is
found in proverbs or in the folk-epics of the nations, must have
originated in the minds of individual leaders. My aim here is more
modest: I have made my little pilgrimage through literature to find
out in a tentative fashion whether the supply of psychology, outside
of science, is really so rich and valuable as is usually believed.
What I wish to offer, therefore, is only a first collection of
psychological statements, which the prescientific psychologists have
proclaimed, and surely will go on proclaiming, and ought to go on
proclaiming, as they do it so beautifully, where we scientists have
nothing but tiresome formulæ.
Let us begin at the beginning. There has never been a nation whose
contemplation was richer in wisdom, whose view of man was subtler and
more suggestive, than those of old India. The sayings of its
philosophers and poets and thinkers have often been gathered in large
volumes of aphorisms. How many of these fine-cut remarks about man
contain real psychology? The largest collection which I could discover
is that of Boehtlinck, who translated seventy-five hundred Indian
sayings into German. Not a few of them refer to things of the outer
world, but by far the largest part of them speaks of man and of man's
feeling and doing. But here in India came my first disappointment, a
disappointment which repeated itself in every corner of the globe.
After carefully going through those thousands of general remarks, I
could not find more than a hundred and nine in which the observation
takes a psychological turn. All those other thousands of reflections
on men are either metaphors and comparisons of distinctly æsthetic
intent, or rules of practical behaviour with social or moral or
religious purpose. Yet even if we turn to this 1½ per cent. which
has a psychological flavour, we soon discover that among those hundred
and nine, more than a half are simply definitions of the type of this:
"Foolish are they who trust women or good luck, as both like a young
serpent creep hither and thither," or this: "Men who are rich are like
those who are drunk; in walking they are helped by others, they
stagger on smooth roads and talk confusedly." It cannot be said that
any psychological observations of the fool's or of the rich man's mind
are recorded here. If I sift those maxims more carefully, I cannot
find more than two score which, stripped of their picturesque
phrasing, could really enter into that world system of naïve
psychology. And yet even this figure is still too high. Of those
forty, most are after all epigrams, generalizations of some chance
cases, exaggerations of a bit of truth, or expressions of a mood of
anger, of love, of class spirit, or of male haughtiness. The analysis
of woman's mind is typical. "Inclination to lies, falsehood,
foolishness, greediness, hastiness, uncleanliness, and cruelty are
inborn faults of the woman"; or "Water never remains in an unbaked
vessel, flour in a sieve, nor news in the mind of women"; or "The mind
of a woman is less stable than the ear of an elephant or the flash of
lightning." On the other hand we read: "True women have twice as much
love, four times as much endurance, and eight times as much modesty as
men"; or "The appetite of women is twice as large, their understanding
four times as large, their spirit of enterprise six times as large,
and their longing for love eight times as large as that of men." Again
we read: "The character of women is as changeable as a wave of the
sea; their affection, like the rosy tint of a cloud in the evening
sky, lasts just for a moment"; or "When women have a man's money, they
let him go, as he is no longer of any use to them."
The same one-sidedness and epigrammatic exaggeration can always be
felt where whole groups of men are to be characterized. "The faults of
the dwarf are sixty, of the red-haired man eighty, of the humpback a
hundred, and of the one-eyed man innumerable."
But let us rather turn to sayings in which the subtlety of
psychological observation deserves admiration: "The drunkard, the
careless, the insane, the fatigued, the angry, the hungry, the greedy,
the timid, the hasty, and the lover know no law"; "If a man commits a
crime, his voice and the colour of his face become changed, his look
becomes furtive, and the fire is gone from his eye"; "The best remedy
for a pain is no longer to think of it; if you think of it, the pain
will increase"; "A greedy man can be won by money, an angry man by
folding the hands, a fool by doing his will, and an educated man by
speaking the truth"; "The wise man can recognize the inner thoughts of
another from the colour of his face, from his look, from the sound of
his words, from his walk, from the reflections in his eyes, and from
the form of his mouth"; "The good and bad thoughts, however much they
are hidden, can be discovered from a man when he talks in his sleep or
in his drunkenness"; "The ignorant can be satisfied easily, and still
more easily the well educated, but a man who has become confused by a
little knowledge cannot be won over even by Brahma"; "Good people are
pacified by fair treatment, even if they have been very angry, but not
common people; gold, though it is hard, can be melted, but not grass";
"By too great familiarity we produce low esteem, by too frequent
visits, indifference; in the Malaja mountains a beggar woman uses the
sandalwood tree for firewood"; "The silly man steps in without being
invited, talks much without being questioned, and trusts him who does
not deserve confidence"; "New knowledge does not last in the mind of
the uneducated any more than a string of pearls about the neck of a
monkey"; "The inner power of great men becomes more evident in their
misfortune than in their fortune; the fine perfume of aloes wood is
strongest when it falls into the fire"; "The anger of the best man
lasts an instant, of the mediocre man six hours, of the common man a
day and a night, and the rascal will never get rid of it"; "The
scholar laughs with his eyes, mediocre people show their teeth when
they laugh, common people roar, and true men of wisdom never laugh";
"Truthfulness and cleverness can be found out in the course of a
conversation, but modesty and restraint are visible at the first
glance"; "Grief destroys wisdom, grief destroys scholarship, grief
destroys endurance; there is no perturbation of the mind like grief."
Often we hardly know whether a psychological observation or a metaphor
is given to us. In any case we may appreciate the fineness of a saying
like this: "Even a most translucent, beautiful, perfectly round and
charming pearl can be strung on a thread as soon as it has been
pierced; so a mind which longs for salvation, perfectly pure, free
from quarrel with any one and full of goodness, will nevertheless be
bound down to the earthly life as soon as it quarrels with itself." On
the borderland of psychology we may find sayings like these: "As a
tailor's needle fastens the thread in the garment, so the thread of
our earthly life becomes fastened by the needle of our desires"; "An
elephant kills us if he touches us, a snake even if he smells us, a
prince even if he smiles on us, and a scoundrel even if he adores us."
But there is one saying which the most modern psychologist would
accept, as it might just as well be a quotation from a report of the
latest exact statistics. The Indian maxim says: "There is truth in the
claim that the minds of the sons resemble more the minds of the
fathers, those of the daughters more those of the mothers."