Europe. Antiquity readily trusted the wonderful knowledge of men which
Homer displays. He has instinctively delineated the characters with
the inner truth of life. How far was this art of the creative poet
accompanied by the power of psychological abstraction? I do not think
that we can find in the forty-eight books of Homer even a dozen
contributions to our unwritten system of the naïve psychology of the
nations. To be sure we ought not to omit in such a system the
following reflections from the "Odyssey": "Wine leads to folly, making
even the wise to love immoderately, to dance, and to utter what had
better have been kept silent"; or "Too much rest itself becomes a
pain"; or still better, "The steel blade itself often incites to
deeds of violence." We may have more doubt whether it is
psychologically true when we read: "Few sons are equal to their sires,
most of them are less worthy, only a few are superior to their
fathers"; or, "Though thou lovest thy wife, tell not everything which
thou knowest to her, but unfold some trifle while thou concealest the
rest." From the "Iliad" we may quote: "Thou knowest the over-eager
vehemence of youth, quick in temper, but weak in judgment"; or,
"Noblest minds are easiest bent"; or, "With everything man is
satiated--sleep, sweet singing, and the joyous dance; of all these man
gets sooner tired than of war." Some may even doubt whether Homer's
psychology is right when he claims: "Even though a man by himself may
discover the best course, yet his judgment is slower and his
resolution less firm than when two go together." And in the alcohol
question he leaves us a choice: "Wine gives much strength to wearied
men"; or if we prefer, "Bring me no luscious wines, lest they unnerve
my limbs and make me lose my wonted powers and strength."
It is not surprising that the theoretical psychology of the Bible is
no less meagre. Almost every word which deals with man's mind reflects
the moral and religious values and is thus removed from pure
psychology into ethics. Or we find comparisons which suggestively
illuminate the working of the mind without amplifying our
psychological understanding. We approach empirical psychology most
nearly in verses like these: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of the
child, but the word of correction should drive it far from him"; or
"He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much;
and he that is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much"; or
"Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant"; or
"The full soul loatheth an honeycomb, but to the hungry soul every
bitter thing is sweet"; or "For if any man be a hearer of the word and
not a doer, he is like a man beholding his natural face in a glass,
for he beholdeth himself and goeth his way and straightway forgetteth
what manner of man he was"; or "Sorrow is better than laughter, for by
the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better." But here we
have almost overstepped the limits of real psychology; we are moving
toward ethics. Nor can we call metaphors like this psychology: "He
that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken
down and without walls."
Let us turn for a moment to the greatest knower of men in mediæval
days, to Dante. How deeply his poetic eye looked into the hearts of
men, how living are the characters in his "Divine Comedy"; and yet he
left us hardly any psychological observations. Some psychology may be
acknowledged in words like these: "The man in whose bosom thought on
thought awakes is always disappointed in his object, for the strength
of the one weakens the other"; "When we are wholly absorbed by
feelings of delight or of grief, our soul yields itself to this one
object, and we are no longer able to direct our thoughts elsewhere";
"There is no greater grief than to remember our happy time in misery."
It is hardly psychology if we hear, "The bad workman finds fault with
his tools"; or, "Likeness ever gives birth to love"; or "The wisest
are the most annoyed to lose time."
From Dante we naturally turn to Shakespeare. We have so often heard
that he is the greatest psychologist, and yet we ought not to forget
that such a popular classification does not in itself really mean that
Shakespeare undertakes the work of the psychologist. It does mean that
he creates figures with the temperament, character, thought, and will
so similar to life and so full of inner mental truth that the
psychologist might take the persons of the poet's imagination as
material for his psychological studies. But this by no means suggests
that Shakespeare phrased abstract judgments about mental life; and as
we seek his wisdom in his dramatic plays, it may be taken for granted
that in this technical sense he must be a poor psychologist, because
he is a great dramatist. Does not the drama demand that every word
spoken be spoken not from the author's standpoint, but from the
particular angle of the person in the play? And this means that every
word is embedded in the individual mood and emotion, thought, and
sentiment of the speaker. A truly psychological statement must be
general and cannot be one thing for Hamlet and another for Ophelia.
The dramatist's psychological sayings serve his art, unfolding before
us the psychological individuality of the speaker, but they do not
contribute to the textbooks of psychology, which ought to be
independent of personal standpoints. And yet what a stream of verses
flows down to us, which have the ring of true psychology!
"Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep."
"Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmation strong
As proofs of holy writ."
"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such sharp fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends."
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."
"Present fears
Are less than horrible imagining."
"Too swift runs as tardy as too slow."
"Never anger made good guard for itself."
"Anger is like
A full-hot horse; who being allow'd his way
Self-mettle tires him."
"Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind."
"All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd."
"Celerity is never more admir'd
Than by the negligent."
"Strong reasons make strong actions."
"The whiteness in thy cheek
Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand."
"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."
"Sweet love, I see, changing his property,
Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate."
"Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs."
"I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius; he reads much;
He is a great observer...."
And so on.
* * * * *
We all know it, and we know it so well and feel so much with Cæsar or
with Lear or with Othello or with Macbeth, that we instinctively take
it all for true psychology, while it after all covers just the
exceptional cases of the dramatic situation.
No! If we are to seek real generalities, we must not consult the
playwright. Perhaps we may find the best conditions for general
statement where we do not even have to deal with an individual, but
can listen to the mind of the race and can absorb its wisdom from its
proverbs. Let us take the word proverb in its widest sense, including
popular sayings which have not really the stamp of the proverb. There
is surely no lack of sharply coined psychology. This is true of all
countries. I find the harvest richest in the field of the German
proverbs, but almost as many in the field of the English, and a large
number of sayings are common to the two countries. Very
characteristic psychological remarks can be found among the Russian
proverbs, and not a few among those in Yiddish. But this type of
psychology is sufficiently characterized, if we confine ourselves here
to the English proverbial phrases. Often they need a commentary in
order to be understood in their psychological truth. We hear in almost
all countries: "Children and fools speak the truth." As a matter of
course we all know that their chance of speaking the objective truth
is very small. What is psychologically tenable is only that they are
unable to hide the subjective truth. Many such phrases are simply
epigrams where the pleasure in the play of words must be a substitute
for the psychological truth; for instance: "Long hair and short wit."
Not a few contradict one another, and yet there is not a little wisdom
in sayings like these: "Beware of a silent dog and still water";
"Misery loves company"; "Hasty love is soon hot and soon cold"; "Dogs
that put up many hares kill none"; "He that will steal an egg will
steal an ox"; "Idle folks have the least leisure"; "Maids say no and
take"; "A boaster and a liar are cousins german"; "A young twig is
easier twisted than an old tree"; "Imitation is the sincerest
flattery"; "Pride joined with many virtues chokes them all";
"Offenders never pardon"; "The more wit, the less courage"; "We are
more mindful of injuries than of benefits"; "Where there's a will,
there's a way"; "An idle brain is the devil's workshop"; "Anger and
haste hinder good counsel"; "Wise men change their minds, fools
never"; "Sudden joy kills sooner than excessive grief"; "Lazy folks
take the most pains"; "Nature passes nurture"; "Necessity is the
mother of invention"; "We are apt to believe what we wish for"; "Where
your will is ready, your foot is light."
All these proverbs and the maxims of other nations may be true, but
can we deny that they are on the whole so trivial that a psychologist
would rather hesitate to proclaim them as parts of his scientific
results? As far as they are true they are vague and hardly worth
mentioning, and where they are definite and remarkable they are hardly
true. We shall after all have to consult the individual authors to
gather the subtler observations on man's behaviour, even though they
furnish only semi-naïve psychology. But the English contributions are
so familiar to every reader that it may be more interesting to listen
to the foreigners. Every nation has its thinkers who have the
reputation of being especially fine knowers of men. The French turn
most readily to La Rochefoucauld, and the Germans to Lichtenberg.
Certainly a word of La Rochefoucauld beside the psychologizing proverb
looks like the scintillating, well-cut diamond beside a moonstone. "We
imitate good actions through emulation, and bad ones through a
malignity in our nature which shame concealed and example sets at
liberty"; "It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to
satisfy those that follow"; "While the heart is still agitated by the
remains of a passion, it is more susceptible to a new one than when
entirely at rest"; "Women in love more easily forgive great
indiscretions than small infidelities"; "The reason we are not often
wholly possessed by a single vice is that we are distracted by
several." But is this not ultimately some degrees too witty to be
true, and has our system of prescientific psychology the right to open
the door to such glittering epigrams which are uttered simply to
tickle or to whip the vanity of man? Or what psychologist would
believe Lichtenberg when he claims: "All men are equal in their mental
aptitudes, and only their surroundings are responsible for their
differences"? He observes better when he says: "An insolent man can
look modest when he will, but a modest man can never make himself look
insolent"; or when he remarks: "Nothing makes a man old more quickly
than the thought that he is growing older"; or "Men do not think so
differently about life as they talk about it"; or "I have always found
that intense ambition and suspicion go together"; or "I am convinced
that we not only love ourselves in loving others, but that we also
hate ourselves in hating others." Often his captivating psychological
words are spoiled by an ethical trend. For instance, he has hardly the
right to say: "In the character of every man is something which cannot
be broken; it is the skeleton of his character." But he balances such
psychological rashness by fine observations like these: "The character
of a man can be recognized by nothing more surely than by the joke he
takes amiss"; and "I believe that we get pale from fright also in
darkness, but I do not think that we would turn red from shame in the
dark, because we are pale on our own account, but we blush on account
of others as well as on account of ourselves." And we are in the midst
of the up-to-date psychology when we read what he said a hundred years
ago: "From the dreams of a man, if he report them accurately enough,
we might trace much of his character, but one single dream is not
sufficient; we must have a large number for that."
I add a few characteristic words of distinctly psychological temper
from the great nonpsychological authors of modern times. Lessing
says: "The superstition in which we have grown up does not lose its
power over us when we see through it; not all who laugh about their
chains are free"; or again, "We are soon indifferent to the good and
even to the best, when it becomes regular"; "The genius loves
simplicity, while the wit prefers complexity"; "The characteristic of
a great man is that he treats the small things as small, and the
important things as important"; "Whoever loses his mind from love
would have lost it sooner or later in any case." But on the whole,
Lessing was too much of a fighter to be truly an objective
psychologist. We may put more confidence in Goethe's psychology:
"Where the interest fades away, the memory soon fails, too"; "The
history of man is his character"; "From nature we have no fault which
may not become a virtue, and no virtue which may not become a fault";
"A quiet, serious woman feels uncomfortable with a jolly man, but not
a serious man with a jolly woman"; "Whatever we feel too intensely, we
cannot feel very long"; "It is easy to be obedient to a master who
convinces when he commands"; "Nobody can wander beneath palms without
punishment; all the sentiments must change in a land where elephants
and tigers are at home"; "A man does not become really happy until
his absolute longing has determined its own limits"; "Hate is an
active displeasure, envy a passive one, and it is therefore not
surprising that envy so easily turns into hate"; "No one can produce
anything important unless he isolate himself"; "However we may strive
for the general, we always remain individuals whose nature necessarily
excludes certain characteristics, while it possesses certain others";
"The only help against the great merits of another is love"; "Man
longs for freedom, woman for tradition"; "A talent forms itself in
solitude, a character in the stream of the world"; "The miracle is the
dearest child of belief"; "It is not difficult to be brilliant if one
has no respect for anything."
Whoever falls into the habit of looking for psychologizing maxims in
his daily reading will easily bring home something which he picks up
in strolling through the gardens of literature. Only we must always be
on our guard lest the beautifully coloured and fragrant flowers which
we pluck are poisonous. Is it really good psychology when Vauvenargues
writes: "All men are born sincere and die impostors," or, when
Brillat-Savarin insists: "Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you
who you are"? Or can we really trust Mirabeau: "Kill your conscience,
as it is the most savage enemy of every one who wants success"; or
Klopstock: "Happiness is only in the mind of one who neither fears nor
hopes"; or Gellert: "He who loves one vice, loves all the vices"? Can
we believe Chamfort: "Ambition more easily takes hold of small souls
than great ones, just as a fire catches the straw roof of the huts
more easily than the palaces"; or Pascal: "In a great soul, everything
is great"; or the poet Bodenstedt when he sings: "A gray eye is a sly
eye, a brown eye is roguish and capricious, but a blue eye shows
loyalty"? And too often we must be satisfied with opposites. Lessing
tells us: "All great men are modest"; Goethe: "Only rascals are
modest." The psychology of modesty is probably more neatly expressed
in the saying of Jean Paul: "Modest is he who remains modest, not when
he is praised, but when he is blamed": and Ebner-Eschenbach adds:
"Modesty which comes to consciousness, comes to an end."
But in our system of naïve psychology, we ought not to omit such
distinctly true remarks as Rabelais' much-quoted words: "The appetite
comes during the eating"; or Fox's words: "Example will avail ten
times more than precept"; or Moltke's: "Uncertainty in commanding
produces uncertainty in obedience"; or Luther's: "Nothing is
forgotten more slowly than an insult, and nothing more quickly than a
benefaction." It is Fichte who first said: "Education is based on the
self-activity of the mind." Napoleon coins the good metaphor: "A mind
without memory is a fortress without garrison." Buffon said what
professional psychologists have repeated after him: "Genius is nothing
but an especial talent for patience." Schumann claims: "The talent
works, the genius creates." We may quote from Jean Paul: "Nobody in
the world, not even women and princes, is so easily deceived as our
own conscience"; or from Pascal: "Habit is a second nature which
destroys the original one." Nietzsche says: "Many do not find their
heart until they have lost their head"; Voltaire: "The secret of ennui
is to have said everything"; Jean Paul: "Sorrows are like the clouds
in a thunderstorm; they look black in the distance, but over us hardly
gray." Once more I quote Nietzsche: "The same emotions are different
in their rhythm for man and woman: therefore men and women never cease
to misunderstand each other."
This leads us to the one topic to which perhaps more naïve psychology
has been devoted than to any other psychological problem, the mental
difference between men and women. Volumes could be filled, and I
think volumes have been filled, with quotations about this eternal
source of happiness and grief. But if we look into those hundreds of
thousands of crisp sayings and wise maxims, we find in the material of
modern times just what we recognized in the wisdom of India. Almost
all is metaphor and comparison, or is practical advice and warning, or
is enthusiastic praise, or is maliciousness, but among a hundred
hardly one contains psychology. And if we really bring together such
psychologizing observations, we should hardly dare to acknowledge that
they deserve that right of generality by merit of which they might be
welcomed to our psychological system. Bruyere insists: "Women are
extreme; they are better or worse than men"; and the same idea is
formulated by Kotzebue: "When women are good they stand between men
and angels; when they are bad, they stand between men and devils."
Rousseau remarks: "Woman has more esprit, and man more genius; the
woman observes, and the man reasons." Jean Paul expresses the contrast
in this way: "No woman can love her child and the four quarters of the
globe at the same time, but a man can do it." Grabbe thinks: "Man
looks widely, woman deeply; for man the world is the heart, for woman
the heart is the world." Schiller claims: "Women constantly return to
their first word, even if reason has spoken for hours." Karl Julius
Weber, to whom German literature has to credit not a few psychological
observations, says: "Women are greater in misfortune than men on
account of the chief female virtue, patience, but they are smaller in
good fortune than men, on account of the chief female fault, vanity."
Yet as to patience, a German writer of the seventeenth century,
Christoph Lehmann, says: "Obedience and patience do not like to grow
in the garden of the women." But I am anxious to close with a more
polite German observation. Seume holds: "I cannot decide whether the
women have as much reason as the men, but I am perfectly sure that
they have not so much unreason." And yet: "How hard it is for women to
keep counsel," and how many writers since Shakespeare have said this
in their own words.
The poets, to be sure, feel certain that in spite of all these inner
contradictions, they know better than the psychologists, and where
their knowledge falls short, they at least assure the psychologist
that he could not do better. Paul Heyse, in his booklet of
epigrammatic stanzas, writes a neat verse which, in clumsy prose,
says: "Whoever studies the secrets of the soul may bring to light
many a hidden treasure, but which man fits which woman no psychologist
will ever discover." To be sure, as excuse for his low opinion of us
psychologists, it may be said that when he wrote it in Munich thirty
years ago there was no psychological laboratory in the university of
his jolly town and only two or three in the world. But to-day we have
more than a hundred big laboratories in all countries, and even Munich
now has its share in them, so that Heyse may have improved on his
opinion since then. But in any case we psychologists do not take our
revenge by thinking badly of the naïve psychology of the poets and of
the man on the street. Yet we have seen that their so-called
psychology is made up essentially of picturesque metaphors, or of
moral advice, of love and malice, and that we have to sift big volumes
before we strike a bit of psychological truth; even then, how often it
has shown itself haphazard and accidental, vague and distorted! The
mathematical statistics of the professional students of the mind and
their test experiments in the laboratories are certainly less
picturesque, but they have the one advantage that the results are
true. Mankind has no right to deceive itself with half-true, naïve
psychology of the amateur, when our world is so full of social
problems which will be solved only if the aptitudes and the workings
of the mind are clearly recognized and traced. The naïve psychology is
sometimes stimulating and usually delightful, but if reliable
psychology is wanted, it seems after all that only one way is open--to
consult the psychologists.
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
BOOKS BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
Psychology and Life, Boston, 1899
Grundzüge der Psychologie, Leipzig, 1900
American Traits, Boston, 1902
Die Amerikaner, Berlin, 1904
The Americans, New York, 1904
Principles of Art Education, New York, 1905
The Eternal Life, Boston, 1905
Science and Idealism, Boston, 1906
Philosophie der Werte, Leipzig, 1907
On the Witness Stand, New York, 1908
Aus Deutsch Amerika, Berlin, 1908
The Eternal Values, Boston, 1909
Psychotherapy, New York, 1909
Psychology and the Teacher, New York, 1910
American Problems, New York, 1910
Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben, Berlin, 1912
Vocation and Learning, St. Louis, 1912
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, Boston, 1913
American Patriotism, New York, 1913
Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, Leipzig, 1914
Psychology and Social Sanity, New York, 1914
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
Obvious printer's errors have been fixed. See below for the full list.
The list of books by Hugo Münsterberg has been moved from the
beginning to the end of the project.
Errors fixed
page viii--typo fixed: changed 'pyschology' to 'psychology'
page 067--typo fixed: changed 'pulsebeat' to 'pulse-beat'
page 086--spelling normalized: changed 'world-wide' to 'worldwide'
page 281--typo fixed: changed 'mratial' to 'martial'
page 283--spelling normalized: changed 'onesided' to 'one-sided'
page 299--spelling normalized: changed 'onesidedness' to 'one-sidedness'
page 315--typo fixed: changed 'Eschenback' to 'Eschenbach'
End of Project Gutenberg's Psychology and Social Sanity, by Hugo Münsterberg