In general it may be said that imposture is of considerable but always

secondary importance; it is a sort of parasite upon human idealism and

thrives only by the impulse to believe. A correct intuition on the part

of mankind in the choice of their leaders is the only guaranty of the

effectual organization of life in any or every sphere; and in the long

run and on a large scale this correctness seems to exist. On the whole,

the great men of history were real men, not shams, their characters were

genuinely representative of the deeper needs and tendencies of human

nature, so that in following them men were truly expressing themselves.

We have seen that all leadership has an aspect of sympathy and

conformity, as well as one of individuality and self-will, so that every

leader must also be a follower, in the sense that he shares the general

current of life. He leads by appealing to our own tendency, not by

imposing something external upon us. Great men are therefore the symbols

or expressions, in a sense, of the social conditions, under which they

work, and if these conditions were not favorable the career of the great

man would be impossible.

Does the leader, then, really lead, in the sense that the course of

history would have been essentially different if he had not lived? Is

the individual a true cause, or would things have gone on about the same

if the famous men had been cut off in infancy? Is not general tendency

the great thing, and is it not bound to find expression independently of

particular persons? Certainly many people have the impression that in an

evolutionary view of life single individuals become insignificant, and

that all great movements must be regarded as the outcome of vast,

impersonal tendencies.

If one accepts the view of the relation between particular individuals

and society as a whole already stated in various connections, the answer

to these questions must be that the individual _is_ a cause, as

independent as a cause can be which is part of a living whole, that the

leader does lead, and that the course of history must have been notably

different if a few great men had been withdrawn from it.

As to general tendency, it is false to set it over against individuals,

as if it were a separate thing; it is only through individuals that

general tendency begins or persists. “Impersonal tendency” in society is

a mere abstraction; there is no such thing. Whether idiosyncrasy is such

as we all have in some measure, or whether it takes the form of

conspicuous originality or genius, it is a variant element in life

having always some tendency to innovation. Of course, if we believe in

the prevalence of continuity and law, we cannot regard it as a new

creation out of nothing; it must be a reorganization of hereditary and

social forces. But however this may be, the person as a whole is always

more or less novel or innovating. Not one of us floats quite inert upon

the general stream of tendency; we leave the world somewhat different

from what it would have been if we had been carried off by the croup.

Now in the case of a man of genius, this variant tendency may be so

potent as to reorganize a large part of the general life in its image,

and give it a form and direction which it could not have had otherwise.

How anyone can look at the facts and doubt the truth of this it is hard

to see. Would the life we receive from the last century have been the

same if, say, Darwin, Lincoln, and Bismarck had not lived? Take the case

of Darwin. No doubt his greatness depended upon his representing and

fulfilling an existing tendency, and this tendency entered into him from

his environment, that is from other individuals. But it came out of him

no longer the vague drift toward evolutionary theory and experiment that

it was before, but concrete, common-sense, matter-of-fact knowledge,

thoroughly Darwinized, and so accredited by his character and labors

that the world accepts it as it could not have done if he had not lived.

We may apply the same idea to the author of Christianity. Whatever we

may or may not believe regarding the nature of Christ’s spiritual

leadership, there is, I take it, nothing necessarily at variance with a

sound social science in the Christian theory that the course of history

has been transformed by his life.

The vague instincts which it is the function of the leader to define,

stimulate and organize, might have remained latent and ineffectual, or

might have developed in a totally different manner, if he had not lived.

No one can guess what the period following the French Revolution, or any

period of French history since then, might have been without Napoleon;

but it is apparent that all would have been very different. It is true

that the leader is always a symbol, and can work only by using existing

elements of life; but in the peculiar way in which he uses those

elements is causation, is creation, in the only sense, perhaps, in which

creation is definitely conceivable. To deny its importance is as absurd

as to say that the marble as it comes from the quarry and the marble

after Michelangelo is through with it, are one and the same thing.

Most, if not all, of our confusion regarding such points as these arises

from the almost invincible habit of thinking of “society,” or

“historical tendency,” as a distinct entity from “individuals,” instead

of remembering that these general and particular terms merely express

different aspects of the same concrete fact—human life. In studying

leadership we may examine the human army one by one, and inquire why

certain persons stand out from the rest as captains, colonels, or

generals, and what, in particular, it is that they have to do; or, in

studying social tendency, we may disregard individuality and look at the

movements of the army, or of its divisions and regiments, as if they

were impersonal wholes. But there is no separation in fact: the leader

is always the nucleus of a tendency, and, on the other hand, all social

movement, closely examined, will be found to consist of tendencies

having such nuclei. It is never the case that mankind move in any

direction with an even front, but there are always those who go before

and show the way.

I need hardly add that leadership is not a _final_ explanation of

anything; but is simply one of many aspects in which human life, always

inscrutable, may be studied. In these days we no longer look for final

explanations, but are well content if we can get a glimpse of things in

process, not expecting to know how they began or where they are to end.

The leader is a cause, but, like all causes we know of, he is also an

effect. His being, however original, is rooted in the past of the race,

and doubtless as susceptible of explanation as anything else, if we

could only get at the facts.

CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF CONSCIENCE

THE RIGHT AS THE RATIONAL—SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS VIEW—THE RIGHT AS THE

ONWARD—THE RIGHT AS HABIT—RIGHT IS NOT THE SOCIAL AS AGAINST THE

INDIVIDUAL—IT IS, IN A SENSE, THE SOCIAL AS AGAINST THE SENSUAL—THE

RIGHT AS A SYNTHESIS OF PERSONAL INFLUENCES—PERSONAL

AUTHORITY—CONFESSION, PRAYER, PUBLICITY—TRUTH—DEPENDENCE OF RIGHT

UPON IMAGINATION—CONSCIENCE REFLECTS A SOCIAL GROUP—IDEAL PERSONS AS

FACTORS IN CONSCIENCE.

I agree with those moralists who hold that what we judge to be the right

is simply the rational, in a large sense of that word. The mind is the

theatre of conflict for an infinite number of impulses, variously

originating, among which it is ever striving to produce some sort of

unification or harmony. This endeavor to harmonize or assimilate

includes deliberate reasoning, but is something much more general and

continuous than that. It is mostly an unconscious or subconscious

manipulation of the materials presented, an unremitting comparison and

rearrangement of them, which ever tends to organize them into some sort

of a whole. The right, then, is that which stands this test; the

sanction of conscience attaches to those thoughts which, in the long

run, maintain their places as part of that orderly whole which the

mental instinct calls for, and which it is ever working with more or

less success to build up. That is right which presents itself, after the

mind has done its full work upon the matter, as the mentally necessary,

which we cannot gainsay without breaking up our mental integrity.

According to this view of the matter, judgments of right and wrong are

in no way isolated or radically different in kind from other judgments.

Such peculiarity as they have seems to come chiefly from the unusual

intensity of the mental conflict that precedes them. The slightest

scrutiny of experience shows, it seems to me, that the sharp and

absolute distinction often assumed to exist between conscience and other

mental activities does not hold good in life. There are gradual

transitions from judgments which no one thinks of as peculiarly moral,

through others which some would regard as moral and others would not, to

those which are universally so regarded; and likewise moral feeling or

sentiment varies a good deal in different individuals, and in the same

individual under different conditions.

The class of judgments which everyone considers as moral is perhaps

limited to such as follow an exciting and somewhat protracted mental

struggle, involving an imaginative weighing of conflicting personal

ideas. A line of conduct has to be chosen; alternatives present

themselves, each of which is backed by strong impulses, among which are

some, at least, of sympathetic origin; the mind is intensely, even

painfully, aroused, and when a decision is reached, it is accompanied by

a somewhat peculiar sort of feeling called the sense of obligation,

duty, or right. There would be little agreement, however, as to what

sort of situations evoke this feeling. We are apt to feel that any

question in regard to which we are much in earnest is a question of

right and wrong. To the artist a consciously false stroke of brush or

chisel is a moral wrong, a sin; and a good carpenter will suffer remorse

if he lets a bad joint go uncorrected.

The fact that the judgment of right is likely to present itself to

people of emotional temperament as an imagined voice, admonishing them

what they ought to do, is an illustration of that essentially social or

interlocutory character of thought, spoken of in an earlier chapter. Our

thoughts are always, in some sort, imaginary conversations; and when

vividly felt they are likely to become quite distinctly so. On the other

hand, people whose moral life is calm perceive little or no distinction,

in this regard, between the conclusions of conscience and other

judgments.

Of course, the view that the right is the rational would be untrue, if

by rational were meant merely the result of formal reasoning. The

judgment of right and the conclusion of formal thought are frequently

opposed to each other, because, I take it, the latter is a comparatively

narrow, partial, and conventional product of the mind. The former is

rational and mentally authoritative in a larger sense; its premises are

immeasurably richer; it deals with the whole content of life, with

instincts freighted with the inarticulate conclusions of a remote past,

and with the unformulated inductions of individual experience. To set

the product of a superficial ratiocination over the final output, in

conscience, of our whole mental being, is a kind of pedantry. I do not

mean to imply that there is usually an opposition between the two—they

should work harmoniously together—but only to assert that when there is,

conscience must be regarded as of a profounder rationality.

On the other hand, the wrong, the immoral, is, in a similar sense, the

irrational. It is that which, after the mind has done its full work upon

the matter, presents itself as the mentally isolated, the inharmonious,

that which we cannot follow without having, in our more collected moods,

a sense of having been untrue to ourselves, of having done ourselves a

harm. The mind in its fullest activity is denied and desecrated; we are

split in two. To violate conscience is to act under the control of an

incomplete and fragmentary state of mind; and so to become less a

person, to begin to disintegrate and go to pieces. An unjust or

incontinent deed produces remorse, apparently because the thought of it

will not lie still in the mind, but is of such a nature that there is no

comfortable place for it in the system of thought already established

there.

The question of right and wrong, as it presents itself to any particular

mind, is, then, a question of the completest practicable organization of

the impulses with which that mind finds itself compelled to deal. The

working out of the right conclusion may be compared to the process by

which a deliberative body comes to a conclusion upon some momentous

public measure. Time must be given for all the more important passions,

prejudices, traditions, interests, and the like, to be urged upon the

members with such cogency as their advocates can give them, and for

attempts to harmonize these conflicting forces so that a measure can be

framed which the body can be induced to pass. And when a decision is

finally reached there is a sense of relief, the greater in proportion as

the struggle has been severe, and a tendency, even on the part of the

opposition, to regard the matter as settled. Those people who cannot

achieve moral unity, but have always a sense of two personalities

warring within them, may be compared to certain countries in whose

assemblies political parties are so embittered that they never come to

an understanding with one another.

The mental process is, of course, only the proximate source of the idea

of right, the conflict by which the competitive strength of the various

impulses is measured, and some combination of them achieved; behind it

is the whole history of the race and of the individual, in which

impulses are rooted. Instinctive passions, like love, ambition, and

revenge; the momentum of habit, the need of change, personal

ascendencies, and the like, all have their bearing upon the final

synthesis, and must either be conciliated or suppressed. Thus in case of

a strong passion, like revenge let us say, one of two things is pretty

sure to happen; either it will succeed in getting its revengeful

impulse, more or less disguised perhaps, judged as right; or, if

opposing ideas prove stronger, revenge will be kept under by the rise of

an intense feeling of wrong that associates itself with it. If one

observes that a person has a very vivid sense of the wrong of some

particular impulse, one may usually infer that he has had in some way to

contend with it; either as a temptation in his own mind, or as

injuriously manifested in the conduct of others.

The natural way to solve a moral question, when immediate action is not

required, is to let it lie in the mind, turning it over from time to

time as attention is directed to it. In this manner the new situation

gradually relates itself to all the mental forces having pertinency to

it. The less violent but more persistent tendencies connect themselves

quietly but firmly to recalcitrant impulse, enwrapping it like the

filaments of a spider’s web, and bringing it under discipline. Something

of this sort is implied in the rule of conduct suggested by Mr. H. R.

Marshall, in his excellent work, “Instinct and Reason”: “Act to restrain

the impulses which demand immediate reaction, in order that the impulse

order determined by the existence of impulses of less strength, but of

wider significance, may have full weight in the guidance of your

life.”[93]

It occurs to me, however, that there is no absolute rule that the right

is the deliberate. It is usually so, because the danger of irrationality

and disintegration comes, in most cases, from the temporary sway of some

active impulse, like that to strike or use injurious words in anger. But

rationality involves decision as well as deliberation; and there are

persons in whom the impulse to meditate and ponder so much outweighs the

impulse to decide and act, as itself to endanger the unity of life. Such

a person may well come to feel that the right is the decisive. It seems

likely that in most minds the larger rationality, which gives the sense

of right, is the sequel of much pondering, but is definitely achieved in

moments of vivid insight.

The main significance of the view that the right is the rational is to

deny that there is any sharp distinction in kind between the question of

right and wrong and other mental questions; the conclusion of conscience

being held to be simply a more comprehensive judgment, reached by the

same process as other judgments. It still leaves untouched the remoter

problems, mental and social, underlying all judgments; as, for instance,

of the nature of impulses, of what determines their relative intensity

and persistence, of the character of that process of competition and

assimilation among them of which judgments are the outcome; and of the

social order as determining impulses both indirectly, through its action

upon heredity, and directly through suggestion.

And behind these is that problem of problems, to which all the roads of

thought lead, that question of organization or vital process, of which

all special questions of society or of the mind are phases. From

whatever point of view we look at life, we can see something going on

which it is convenient to call organization, development, or the like;

but I suppose that all who have thought much about the matter feel that

we have only a vague notion of what the fact is that lies behind these

words.

I mention these things merely to disclaim any present attempt to fathom

them, and to point out that the aim of this chapter is limited to some

observations on the working of social or personal factors in the

particular sort of organization which we call conscience or moral

judgment.

It is useless to look for any other or higher criterion of right than

conscience. What is felt to be right is right; that is what the word

means. Any theory of right that should turn out to be irreconcilable

with the sense of right must evidently be judged as false. And when it

is urged that conscience is variable, we can only answer that, for this

very reason, the right cannot be reduced to a universal and conclusive

formula. Like life in all its phases, it is a progressive revelation out

of depths we do not penetrate.

For the individual considering his own conduct, his conscience is the

only possible moral guide, and though it differ from that of everyone

else, it is the only right there is for him; to violate it is to commit

moral suicide. Speculating more largely on conduct in general he may

find the right in some collective aspect of conscience, in which his own

conscience appears as member of a larger whole; and with reference to

which certain particular consciences, at variance with his own, like

those of certain sorts of criminals, may appear as degenerate or

wrong—and this will not surprise him, because science teaches us to

expect degenerate variations in all forms of life. But, however broad a

view he takes, he cannot do otherwise than refer the matter to his

conscience; so that what I think, or—to generalize it—what _we_ think,

must, in one form or another, be the arbiter of right and wrong, so far

as there can be any. Other tests become valid only in so far as

conscience adopts them.

It would seem that any scientific study of the matter must consist

essentially in investigating the conditions and relations of concrete

right—the when, where, and why of what people _do_ think is right.

Social or moral science can never be a final source or test of morality;

though it can reveal facts and relations which may help conscience in

making its authoritative judgment.

The view that the right is the rational is quite consistent with the

fact that, for those who have surplus energy, the right is the _onward_.

The impulse to act, to become, to let out the life that rises within

from obscure springs of power, is the need of needs, underlying all more

special impulses; and this onward _Trieb_ must always count in our

judgments of right: it is one of the things conscience has to make room

for. There can be no harmony in a mental life which denies expression to

this most persistent and fundamental of all instinctive tendencies: and

consequently the equilibrium which the active mind seeks, and a sense of

which is one with the sense of right, is never a state of rest, but an

_equilibrium mobile_. Our situation may be said to resemble that of an

acrobat balancing himself upon a rolling sphere, and enabled to stand

upright only on condition of moving continually forward. The right never

remains precisely the same two days in succession; but as soon as any

particular state of right is achieved, the mental centre of gravity

begins to move onward and away from it, so that we can hold our ground

only by effecting a new adjustment. Hence the merely negative can never

be the right to a vigorous person, or to a vigorous society, because the

mind will not be content with anything so inadequate to its own nature.

The good self must be what Emerson calls a “crescive self,” and the

right must mark a track across the “waste abyss of possibility” and lead

out the energies to congenial exertion.

This idea is nowhere, perhaps, more cogently stated and illustrated than

in M. Guyau’s penetrating work, “A Sketch of Morality.” He holds that

the sense of duty is, in one aspect, a sense of a power to do things,

and that this power tends in itself to create a sense of obligation. We

can, therefore we must. “Obligation is an internal expansion—a need to

complete our ideas by converting them into action.”[94] Even pain may be

sought as part of that larger life which the growing mind requires.

“Leopardi, Heine, or Lenau would probably not have exchanged those hours

of anguish in which they composed their finest songs for the greatest

possible enjoyment. Dante suffered.... Which of us would not undergo a

similar suffering? Some heart-aches are infinitely sweet.”[95] And so

with benevolence and what is called self-sacrifice. “... charity is but

one with overflowing fecundity; it is like a maternity too large to be

confined within the family. The mother’s breast needs life eager to

empty it; the heart of the truly humane creature needs to be gentle and

helpful to all.”[96] “The young man is full of enthusiasm; he is ready

for every sacrifice because, in point of fact, it is necessary that he

should sacrifice something of himself—that he should diminish himself to

a certain extent; he is too full of life to live only for himself.”[97]

The right, then, is not merely the repressive discipline with which we

sometimes identify it, but is also something warm, fresh and

outward-looking. That which we somewhat vaguely and coldly call mental

development is, when at its best, the revelation of an expanding,

variegating, and beautiful whole, of which the right act is a harmonious

member.

When, on the other hand, we say that right is largely determined by

habit, we only emphasize the other aspect of that progressive mingling

of continuity with change, which we see in mental life in all its

phases. Habit, we know, makes lines of less resistance in thought,

feeling, and action; and the existence of these tracks must always count

in the formation of a judgment of right, as of any other judgment. It

ought not, apparently, to be set over against novel impulses as a

contrary principle, but rather thought of as a phase of all impulses,

since novelty always consists, from one point of view, in a fresh

combination of habits. It is much the same question as that of

suggestion and choice, or of invention and imitation. The concrete fact,

the real thing, in each case, is not one of these as against the other,

or one modified by the other, but a single, vital act of which these are

aspects, having no separate existence.

Whether a person’s life, in its moral or any other aspect, is obviously

changeful, or, on the contrary, appears to be merely repetitive or

habitual, depends upon whether the state of his mind, and of the

conditions about it, are favorable to rapid changes in the system of his

thought. Thus if he is young and vigorous, and if he has a natural

open-mindedness and keenness of sensibility, he will be so much the more

likely, other things equal, to incorporate fresh elements of thought and

make a new synthesis, instead of running on habit. Variety of life in

the past, preventing excessive deepening of the mental ruts, and contact

with strong and novel influences in the present, have the same tendency.

The rigidly habitual or traditionary morality of savages is apparently a

reflection of the restriction and sameness of their social life; and a

similar type of morals is found even in a complex society, as in China,

when the social system has become rigid by the equilibration of

competing ideas. On the other hand, the stir and change of the more

active parts of our society make control by mere habit impossible. There

are no simple dominant habits; tendencies are mixed and conflicting, so

that the person must either be intelligently moral or else degenerate.

He must either make a fresh synthesis or have no synthesis at all.

What is called principle appears to be simply a habit of conscience, a

rule formed originally by a synthesis of various impulses, but become

somewhat mechanical and independent of its origin—as it is the nature of

habit to do. As the mind hardens and matures there is a growing

inaptitude to take in novel and powerful personal impressions, and a

corresponding ascendency of habit and system; social sentiment, the

flesh and blood of conduct, partly falls away, exposing a skeleton of

moral principles. The sense of duty presents itself less and less as a

vivid sympathetic impulse, and more and more as a sense of the economy

and restfulness of a definite standard of conduct. When one has come to

accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of

lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and

renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear

way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of

uncertainty.

Actions that appear memorable or heroic are seldom achieved at the

moment of decisive choice, but are more likely to come after the habit

of thought which produces the action has become somewhat mechanical and

involuntary. It is probably a mistake to imagine that the soldier who

braves death in battle, the fireman who enters the burning building, the

brakeman who pursues his duty along the icy top of a moving train, or

the fisherman who rows away from his vessel into the storm and mist, is

usually in an acute state of heroism. It is all in the day’s work; the

act is part of a system of thought and conduct which has become habitual

and would be painful to break. Death is not imagined in all its terrors

and compared with social obligation; the case is far simpler. As a rule

there is no time in a crisis for complicated mental operations, and

whether the choice is heroic or cowardly it is sure to be simple. If

there is any conflict of suggestions it is brief, and the one that gains

ascendency is likely to be followed mechanically, without calculation of

the future.

One who studies the “sense of oughtness” in children will have no

difficulty in seeing that it springs largely from a reluctance to break

habits, an indisposition, that is, to get out of mental ruts. It is in

the nature of the mind to seek a principle or unifying thought—the mind

is a rule-demanding instinct—and in great part this need is met by a

habit of thought, inculcated perhaps by some older person who proclaims

and enforces the rule, or perhaps by the unintended pressure of

conditions which emphasize one suggestion and shut out others. However

the rule originates, it meets a mental want, and, if not too strongly

opposed by other impulses, is likely to be adopted and felt as

obligatory just because it is a consistent way of thinking. As Mr. Sully

says, “The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law.”[98]

The books on child-study give many instances of the surprising

allegiance which children often give to rule, merely as rule, and even

an intermittent observer will be sure to corroborate them. Thus a child

five years old, when on a visit, was invited to “open his mouth and shut

his eyes,” and upon his doing so a piece of candy was put into the

former. When he tasted it he pulled it out and exclaimed, “Mamma don’t

want me to have candy.” Now this did not seem to be affectation, nor was

the child other than fond of sweets, nor afraid of punishment or blame;

he was simply under the control of a need for mental consistency. The

no-candy rule had been promulgated and enforced at home; he had adopted

it as part of his system of thought, and, when it was broken, his moral

sense, otherwise the harmony of his mind, was shocked to a degree that

the sweet taste of the candy could not overcome. Again, R. was subjected

nearly every evening for several years to a somewhat painful operation

called “bending his foot,” intended to correct a slight deformity. After

becoming accustomed to this he would sometimes protest and even cry if

it were proposed to omit it. I thought I could see that moral allegiance

to a rule, merely as such, weakened as he grew older; and the

explanation of this I took to be that the increasing competition of

suggestions and conflict of precepts made this simple, mechanical unity

impossible, and so forced the mind, still striving for harmony, to exert

its higher organizing activity and attempt a larger sort of unification.

It is the same principle as that which prevents the civilized man from

retaining the simple allegiance to rule and habit that the savage has;

his complex life cannot be unified in this way, any more than his

accounts can be notched on a stick; and he is forced, if he is to

achieve any unity of life, to seek it in some more elaborate standard of

behavior. Under uniform conditions the habitual is the rational, and

therefore the moral; but under complex conditions this ceases to be the

case.

Of course this way of looking at the matter does not do away with all

the difficulties involved in it, but does, it seems to me, put habitual

and other morality on the common ground of rationality, and show the

apparently sharp division between them to be an illusion.

Those who think as I do will reject the opinion that the right is, in

any general sense, the social as opposed to the individual. As already

stated, I look upon this antithesis as false when used to imply a

radical opposition. All our human thought and activity is either

individual or social, according to how you look at it, the two being no

more than phases of the same thing, which common thought, always

inclined to confuse words with things, attempts to separate. This is as

true in the ethical field as in any other. The consideration of other

persons usually enters largely into questions of right and wrong; but

the ethical decision is distinctly an assertion of a private,

individualized view of the matter. Surely there is no sound general

principle in accordance with which the right is represented by the

suggestions of the social environment, and the wrong by our more private

impulses.

The right is always a private impulse, always a self-assertion, with no

prejudice, however, to its social character. The “ethical self” is not

less a self for being ethical, but if anything more of a self, because

it is a fuller, more highly organized expression of personality. All

will recognize, I imagine, that a strong sense of duty involves

self-feeling, so that we say to ourselves emphatically I ought. It would

be no sense of duty at all if we did not feel that there was something

about it peculiar to us and antithetical to some of the influences

acting upon us. It is important for many purposes to emphasize the fact

that the ethical self is always a public self; but it is equally true

and important that it is always a private self.

In short, ethical thinking and feeling, like all our higher life, has

its individual and social aspects, with no peculiar emphasis on either.

If the social aspect is here at its highest, so also is the individual

aspect.

The same objection applies to any form of the antithesis self _versus_

other, considered as a general statement of moral situations. It is a

fallacious one, involving vague and material notions of what personality

is—vague because material, for we cannot, I think, reflect closely upon

the facts of personality without seeing that they are primarily mental

or spiritual, and by no means even analogous to the more obvious aspects

of the physical. As a matter of fact, ego and alter, self and sympathy,

are correlative, and always mingled in ethical judgments, which are not

distinguished by having less self and more other in them, but by being a

completer synthesis of all pertinent impulses. The characteristic of a

sense of right is not ego or alter, individual or social, but mental

unification, and the peculiar feeling that accompanies it.

Egoism can be identified with wrong only when we mean by it some narrow

or unstable phase of the self; and altruism, if we take it to mean

susceptibility to be impressed by other people, is equally wrong when

it, in turn, becomes narrow or unstable, as we see it in hysterical

persons. As I have already said, I hold altruism, when used, as it seems

to be ordinarily, to denote a supposed peculiar class of impulses,

separate from another supposed class called egoistic, to be a mere

fiction, engendered by the vaguely material idea of personality just

mentioned. Most higher kinds of thought are altruistic, in the sense

that they involve a more or less distinct reference to other persons;

but when intensely conceived, these same kinds of thought are usually,

if not always, self-thoughts, or egoistic, as well.

The question whether a man shall keep his dollar or give it to a beggar,

for example, looks at first sight like a question of ego _versus_ alter,

because there are two physical bodies present and visibly associated

with the conflicting impulses. In this merely physical sense, of

referring to one material body rather than another, it is in fact such a

question, but not necessarily in any properly mental, social, or moral

sense.

Let us look at the matter a moment with reference to various possible

meanings of the words altruism and altruistic. Taking the latter word as

the most convenient for our purpose, I can think of three meanings, any

one of which would answer well enough to the vague current usage of it:

first, that which is suggested by another person, that is by his

appearance, words, or other symbols; second, that which is for the

benefit of another; third, good or moral.

In the first sense, which carries no moral implication at all, it is

altruistic to give to the beggar, but the word is also applicable to the

greater part of our actions, since most of them are suggested by others

in some way. And, of course, many of the actions included are what are

generally called selfish ones. To strike a man with whom we are angry,

to steal from one of whom we are envious, to take liberties with an

attractive woman, and all sorts of reprehensible proceedings suggested

by the sight of another person, would be altruistic in this sense, which

I suppose, therefore, cannot be the one intended by those who use the

word as the antithesis to egoistic.

If we use the word in the second sense, that of being for the benefit of

another, to give to the beggar may or may not be altruistic; thoughtful

philanthropy is inclined to say that it is usually for his harm. It may,

perhaps, be said that we at least intend to benefit or please him, that

this is the main thing, and that it is a question whether the action has

an I-reference or a you-reference in the mind of the actor. As to this I

would again call attention to what was said of the nature of I and you

as personal ideas in Chapter III., and of the nature of egotism in

Chapter VI. Our impulses regarding persons cannot, in my opinion, be

classified in this way. What could be more selfish than the action of a

mother who cannot refuse her child indigestible sweetmeats? She gives

them both to please the child and to gratify a shallow self which is

identified with him. To refuse the money to the beggar may be as

altruistic, in the sense of springing from the desire to benefit others,

as to give it. The self for which one wishes to keep the dollar is

doubtless a social self of some sort, and very possibly has better

social claims upon him than the beggar: he may wish to buy flowers for a

sick child.

I need hardly add that to give the money is not necessarily the moral

course. The attempt to identify the good with what refers to others as

against what refers to one’s self is hopelessly confusing and false,

both theoretically and in practical application.

In short it is hard to discover, in the word altruism, any definite

moral significance.

The individual and the group are related in respect to moral thought

quite as they are everywhere else; individual consciences and the social

conscience are not separate things, but aspects of one thing, namely,

the moral Life, which may be regarded as individual by fixing our

attention upon a particular conscience in artificial isolation, or as

general, by attending to some collective phase, like public opinion upon

a moral question. Suppose, for instance, one were a member of the

Congress that voted the measure which brought on the war with Spain. The

question how he should vote on this measure would be, in its individual

aspect, a matter of private conscience; and so with all other members.

But taking the vote as a whole, as a synthesis, showing the moral drift

of the group, it appears as an expression of a social conscience. The

separation is purely artificial, every judgment of an individual

conscience being social in that it involves a synthesis of social

influences, and every social conscience being a collective view of

individual consciences. The concrete thing, the moral Life, is a whole

made up of differentiated members. If this is at all hard to grasp, it

is only because the fact is a large one. We certainly cannot get far

unless we can learn to _see_ organization, since all our facts present

it.

The idea that the right is the social as opposed to the sensual is, it

seems to me, a sound one, if we mean by it that the mentally higher,

more personal or imaginative impulses have on the whole far more weight

in conscience than the more sensual. The immediate reason for this seems

to be that the mind of one who shares the higher life is so thronged

with vivid personal or social sentiments, that the merely sensual cannot

be the rational except where it is allied with these, or at any rate not

opposed to them. It is for the psychologist to explain the mental

processes involved, but apparently the social interests prevail in

conscience over the sensual because they are the major force; that is,

they are, on the whole, so much more numerous, vivid, and persistent,

that they determine the general system of thought, of which conscience

is the fullest expression.

We may, perhaps, represent the matter nearly enough for our purpose by

comparing the higher and lower kinds of thought to the human race and

the inferior animals. The former is so much more powerful, on the whole,

though not always so individually, that it determines, in all settled

countries, the general organization of life, erecting cities and

railroads, clearing forests, and the like, to suit itself, and with only

incidental regard to other animals. The latter are preserved within the

system only in so far as they are useful, or at any rate not very

troublesome, to mankind. So all sensual impulses are judged by their

relation to a system of thought dominated by social sentiment. The

pleasures of eating, harmless in themselves, begin to be judged wrong so

soon as they are indulged in such a way as to blunt the higher

faculties, or to violate justice, decency, or the like. A shipwrecked

man, it is felt, should rather perish of hunger than kill and eat

another man, because the latter action violates the whole system of

social thought. And in like manner it is held that a soldier, or indeed

any man, should prefer honor and duty to life itself.

The working of personal influence upon our judgments of right is not

different in kind from its working upon other judgments: it simply

introduces vivid impulses, which affect the moral synthesis something in

the way that picking up a weight will change one’s centre of gravity and

force him to alter his footing.

As was suggested above, the morality of mere rule and habit becomes the

less conspicuous in the life of children the more they are subjected to

fresh personal influences. If their sympathies are somewhat dull, or if

they are secluded, their minds naturally become grooved; and all

children, perhaps, become much bound to habit in matters where personal

influence is not likely to interfere. But in most children, and in most

matters, it will be found that the moral judgment and feeling are, from

the very earliest, intensely sympathetic and personal, charged with

shame, affection, anger, jealousy, and desire to please. The mind has

already to struggle for harmony among vivid emotions, aroused by the

appeals of life to hereditary instinct, each giving intensity to certain

ideas of conduct, and tending to sway the judgment of right in their

sense.

If the boy who refused the candy, as mentioned above, had possessed a

vivid imagination of personal attitudes, which he did not, his situation

might have been much more intricate. He might have been drawn to accept

it not only by the sweet taste but by a desire to please the friends who

offered it; and on the other hand he might have been deterred by a

vision of the reproving face and voice of his mother. Thus M., nearly

sixteen months old, had been frowned at and called naughty in a severe

tone of voice when she tried to claw her brother’s face. Shortly after,

while sitting with him on the bed, her mother being at a distance, she

was observed to repeat the offence and then, without further cause or

suggestion, to bow her head and look abashed and guilty. Apparently she

had a sense of wrong, a conviction of sin, perhaps consisting only in a

reminiscence of the shame she had previously felt when similar behavior

was followed by rebuke.

Here, then, we have a simple manifestation of a moral force that acts

upon every one of us in countless ways, and every day of his life—the

imagined approval or disapproval of others, appealing to instinctive

emotion, and giving the force of that emotion to certain views of

conduct. The behavior that connects itself with such social sentiment as

we like and feel the impulse to continue, is so much the more likely to

be judged as right; but if the sentiment is one from which we are

averse, the behavior is the more likely to be judged as wrong. The

child’s moral sense, says Perez, “begins as soon as he understands the

signification of certain intonations of the voice, of certain attitudes,

of a certain expression of countenance, intended to reprimand him for

what he has done or to warn him against something he was on the point of

doing. This penal and remunerative sanction gives rise by degrees to a

clear distinction of concrete good and evil.”[99]

A child who is not sensitive to praise or blame, but whose interests are

chiefly impersonal, or at any rate only indirectly personal, sometimes

appears to have no moral sense at all, to be without the conviction of

sin or any notion of _personal_ wrong. He has little experience of those

peculiarly acute and trying mental crises which result from the conflict

of impulses of sympathetic origin with one another or with animal

appetites. This was much the case with R. in his earliest years. Living

in quiet surroundings, somewhat isolated from other children, with no

violent or particularly mischievous impulses, occupied all day long with

blocks, sand-pile, and other impersonal interests, not sensitive to

blame nor inclined to take it seriously, he gave the impression of being

non-moral, an unfallen spirit. M. was the very opposite of all this.

From the first week she was visibly impulsive, contentious, sensitive,

sympathetic; laying traps for approval, rebelling against criticism,

sudden and quick to anger, sinning, repenting, rejoicing; living almost

altogether in a vivid personal world.

A character of the latter sort has an intenser moral life, because the

variety of strong impulses introduced by a sensitive and personally

imaginative temperament are sure to make crises for the mind to wrestle

with. The ethics of personal feeling which it has to work out seems

widely apart from the ethics of rule and habit, as in fact it is, so far

as regards the materials that enter into the moral synthesis. The color

and content, all the concrete elements of the moral life, are as

different as are the different characters of people: the idea of right

is not a fraction of thought alike in all minds, but a comprehensive,

integrating state of mind, characteristic of the personality of which it

is an expression.

The idea of justice is, of course, a phase of the idea of right, and

arises out of the mental attempt to reconcile conflicting impulses. As

Professor Baldwin points out, the child is puzzled by contradictions

between his simpler impulses, such as those to appropriate food and

playthings, and other impulses of more imaginative or sympathetic

origin. Needing to allay this conflict he readily grasps the notion of a

_tertium quid_, a reconciling rule or law which helps him to do so.

Our mature life is not radically distinguished from childhood as regards

the working of personal influence upon our moral thought. If there is

progress it is in the way of fulness of experience and better

organization: the mental life may become richer in those sympathetic or

imaginative impulses which we derive from healthy intercourse with the

world, and without a good store of which our judgments of right must be

narrow and distorted; there may at the same time be a completer ordering

and discipline of these materials, a greater power to construct the

right, the unifying thought, out of diverse elements, a quicker

recognition of it when achieved, and a steadier disposition to act upon

it. In most cases, perhaps, a person after thirty years of age gains

something in the promptness and steadfastness of his moral judgment, and

loses something in the imaginative breadth of his premises. But the

process remains the same, and our view of right is still a sort of

microcosm of our whole character. Whatever characteristic passions we

have will in some way be represented in it, and until we stiffen into

mental rigidity and decline, it will change more or less with every

important change in our social surroundings.

To a very large class of minds, perhaps to the largest class, the notion

of right presents itself chiefly as a matter of personal authority. That

is, what we feel we ought to do is simply what we imagine our guide or

master would do, or would wish us to do. This, for instance, is the idea

very largely inculcated and practised by the Christian Church. It is not

anything opposed to or different from the right as a mental synthesis,

but simply means that admiration, reverence, or some other strong

sentiment, gives such overwhelming force to the suggestions of a certain

example, that they more or less completely dominate the mind. The

authority works through conscience and not outside of it. Moreover the

relation is not so one-sided as it would seem, since our guide is

always, in one point of view, the creation of our own imaginations,

which are sure to interpret him in a manner congenial to our native

tendency. Thus the Christ of Fra Angelico is one thing, and the Christ

of Michelangelo, directing the ruin of the damned, is quite another.

The ascendency of personal authority is usually greater in proportion as

the mind is of a simple, visually imaginative, rather than reflective

turn. People of the sort commonly called “emotional,” with ready and

vivid personal feeling but little constructive power, are likely to

yield to an ascendent influence as a whole, with little selection or

reconstruction. Their individuality is expressed chiefly in the choice

of a master; having chosen, they are all his. If they change masters

they change morals at the same time. The mental unity of which they,

like all the rest of us, are in search, is found in allegiance to a

concrete personality, which saves them the impossible task of abstract

thought. Such people, however, usually feel an attraction toward

stability in others, and secure it for themselves by selecting a

steadfast personality to anchor their imaginations to.

This, of course, is possible or congenial only to those who lack the

mental vigor to make in a more intellectual manner that synthesis of

which moral judgment is the expression. Those who have this vigor make

use of many examples, and if they acknowledge the pre-eminence of

anyone, he is likely to be vaguely conceived and to be in reality no

more than the symbol of their own moral conclusions.

The immediate power of personal images or influences over our sense of

right is probably greater in all of us than we realize. “It is

wonderful,” says George Eliot in “Middlemarch,” “how much uglier things

will look when we only think we are blamed for them ... and, on the

other hand, it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our

encroachments on those who never complain, or have nobody to complain

for them.” That is to say, other persons, by awaking social self-feeling

in us, give life and power to certain sentiments of approval or

disapproval regarding our own actions. The rule, already suggested, that

the self of a sensitive person, in the presence of an ascendent

personality, tends to become his interpretation of what the other thinks

of him, is a prime factor in determining the moral judgments of all of

us. Everyone must have felt the moral renewal that comes with the mere

presence of one who is vigorously good, whose being enlivens our

aspiration and shames our backsliding, who makes us really feel the

desirability of the higher life and the baseness and dulness of the

lower.

In one of Mr. Theodore Child’s papers on French art he relates that

Dagnan said after the death of Bastien-Lepage, “With every new picture I

paint in future I shall try to think if he would have been satisfied

with it.” Almost the same has been said by an American author with

reference to Robert Louis Stevenson. And these instances are typical of

the general fact that our higher selves, our distinctively right views

and choices, are dependent upon imaginative realization of the points of

view of other persons. There is, I think, no possibility of being good

without living, imaginatively of course, in good company; and those who

uphold the moral power of personal example, as against that of abstract

thought are certainly in the right. A mental crisis, by its very

difficulty, is likely to call up the thought of some person we have been

used to look to as a guide, and the confronting of the two ideas, that

of the person and that of the problem, compels us to answer the question

What would he have thought of it? The guide we appeal to may be a person

in the room, or a distant friend, or an author whom we have never seen,

or an ideal person of religion. The strong, good men we have once

imagined live in our minds and fortify there the idea of worthiness.

They were free and noble and make us unhappy to be less.

Of course the influence of other persons often goes by contraries. The

thought of one who is repugnant to us often brings a strong sense of the

wrong of that for which he stands, and our conviction of the hatefulness

of any ill trait is much enlivened by intimate contact with one who

exhibits it.

The moral potency of confession, and of all sorts of publicity, rests

upon the same basis. In opening ourselves to another we are impelled to

imagine how our conduct appears to him; we take an outside view of

ourselves. It makes a great difference to whom we confess: the higher

the character of the person whose mind we imagine, the more enlightening

and elevating is the view of ourselves that we get. Even to write our

thoughts in a diary, and so to confess, not to a particular person, but

to that vague image of an interlocutor that connects itself with all

articulate expression, makes things look different.

It is, perhaps, much the same with prayer. To pray, in a higher sense,

is to confront our moral perplexities with the highest personal ideal we

can form, and so to be unconsciously integrating the two, straightening

out the one in accordance with the other. It would seem that social

psychology strongly corroborates the idea that prayer is an essential

aspect of the higher life; by showing, I mean, that thought, and

especially vivid thought, is interlocutory in its very nature, and that

aspiration almost necessarily takes, more or less distinctly, the form

of intercourse with an ideal being.

Whatever publishes our conduct introduces new and strong factors into

conscience; but whether this publicity is wholesome or otherwise depends

upon the character of the public; or, more definitely, upon whether the

idea of ourselves that we impute to this public is edifying or

degrading. In many cases, for instance, it is ruinous to a person’s

character to be publicly disgraced, because he, or she, presently

accepts the degrading self that seems to exist in the minds of others.

There are some people to whom we should be ashamed to confess our sins,

and others, perhaps, to whom we should not like to own our virtues.

Certainly it should not be assumed that it is good for us to have our

acts displayed before the generality of persons: while this may be a

good thing as regards matters, like the tax-roll, that relate to our

obvious duty to the immediate community, it has in most things a

somewhat vulgarizing effect, tending to promote conformity rather than a

distinctive life. If the scholar’s study were on the market-place, so

that the industrious townspeople could see how many hours of the day he

spends in apparent idleness, he might lack courage to pursue his

vocation. In short, we need privacy as against influences that are not

edifying, and communion with those that are.

Even telling the truth does not result so much from a need of mental

accuracy, though this is strong in some minds, as from a sense of the

unfairness of deceiving people of our own sort, and of the shame of

being detected in so doing. Consequently the maxim, “Truth for friends

and lies for enemies,” is very generally followed, not only by savages

and children, but, more or less openly, by civilized people. Most

persons feel reluctant to tell a lie in so many words, but few have any

compunctions in deceiving by manner, and the like, persons toward whom

they feel no obligation. We all know business men who will boast of

their success in deceiving rivals; and probably few of us hold ourselves

to quite the same standard of honor in dealing with one we believe to be

tricky and ill-disposed toward us, that we would if we thought him

honest and well meaning. “Conscience is born of love” in this as in many

matters. A thoughtful observer will easily see that injustice and not

untruth is the essence of lying, as popularly conceived.

It is because of our need to recall vanished persons, that all goodness

and justice, all right of any large sort, depend upon an active

imagination. Without it we are the prisoners of the immediate

environment and of the suggestions of the lower organism. It is only

this that enables us to live with the best our lives have afforded, and

maintain higher suggestions to compete with the baser ones that assail

us. Let us hear Professor James again: “When for motives of honor and

conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club and ‘set’;

when as a Protestant I turn Catholic; as a Catholic, free-thinker; as a

‘regular practitioner,’ homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly

strengthened in my course, and steeled against the loss of my actual

social self by the thought of other and better _possible_ social judges

than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self

which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote; it

may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its

realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future

generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing

about me when I am dead and gone.”[100] As regards the nearness or

remoteness of the companion it would perhaps be sufficient to say that

if imagined he is actually present, so far as our mental and moral life

are concerned, and except as affecting the vividness of our idea of him,

it makes no immediate difference whether we ever saw him or whether he

ever had any corporeal existence at all.

The alteration of conscience due to the advent in thought of a new

person is often so marked that one view of duty is quite evidently

supplanted by a fresh one, due to the fresh suggestion. Thus, to take an

example probably familiar to all who are used to mental application, it

sometimes happens that a student is fagged and yet feels that he must

think out his problem; there is a strong sense of oughtness backing this

view, which, so long as it is unopposed, holds its ground as the call of

duty. But now a friend may come in and suggest to him that he ought to

stop, that if he goes on he will harm himself and do poor work. Here is

another view of right, and the mind must now make a fresh synthesis and

come, perhaps, to feel that its duty is to leave off.

Because of its dependence upon personal suggestion, the right always

reflects a social group; there is always a circle of persons, more or

less extended, whom we really imagine, and who thus work upon our

impulses and our conscience; while people outside of this have not a

truly personal existence for us. The extent of this circle depends upon

many circumstances, as for instance upon the vigor of our imaginations,

and the reach of the means of communication through which personal

symbols are impressed upon them.

In these days of general literacy, many get their most potent

impressions from books, and some, finding this sort of society more

select and stimulating than any other, cultivate it to the neglect of

palpable persons. This kind of people often have a very tender

conscience regarding the moral problems presented in novels, but a

rather dull one for those of the flesh-and-blood life about them. In

fact, a large part of the sentiments of imaginative persons are purely

literary, created and nourished by intercourse with books, and only

indirectly connected with what is commonly called experience. Nor should

it be assumed that these literary sentiments are necessarily a mere

dissipation. Our highest ideals of life come to us largely in this way,

since they depend upon imaginative converse with people we do not have a

chance to know in the flesh. Indeed, the expansion of conscience that is

so conspicuous a fact of recent years, the rise of moral sentiment

regarding international relations, alien races and social and industrial

classes other than our own, could not have taken place without the aid

of cheap printing and rapid communication. Such understanding and sense

of obligation as we have regarding the populace of great cities, for

instance, is due chiefly to writers who, like the author of “How the

Other Half Lives,” describe the life of such people in a vivid, personal

way, and so cause us to imagine it.

Not to pursue this line of thought too far, it is enough for our purpose

to note that conscience is always a group conscience, however the group

may be formed, so that our moral sentiment always reflects our time, our

country, and our special field of personal imagination. On the other

hand, our sense of right ignores those whom we do not, through sympathy,

feel as part of ourselves, no matter how close their physical

contiguity. To the Norman conqueror the Saxon was an inferior animal,

whose sentiments he no more admitted to his imagination, I suppose, than

a farmer does those of his cattle, and toward whom, accordingly, he did

not feel human obligation. It was the same with the slaveholder and the

slave, and so it sometimes is with employer and wage-earner. The

behavior of the Europeans toward the Chinese during the recent invasion

of China showed in a striking manner how completely moral obligation

breaks down in dealing with people who are not felt to be of kindred

humanity with ourselves.

In minds capable of constructive imagination the social factor in

conscience may take the form of ideal persons, whose traits are used as

a standard of behavior.

Idealization, of this or any other sort, is not to be thought of as

sharply marked off from experience and memory. It seems probable that

the mind is never indifferent to the elements presented to it, but that

its very nature is to select, arrange, harmonize, idealize. That is, the

whole is always acting upon the parts, tending to make them one with

itself. What we call distinctively an ideal is only a relatively complex

and finished product of this activity. The past, as it lives in our

minds, is never a mere repetition of old experience, but is always

colored by our present feeling, is always idealized in some sense; and

it is the same with our anticipation of the future, so that to wholesome

thought expectation is hope. Thus the mind is ever an artist,

re-creating things in a manner congenial to itself, and special arts are

only a more deliberate expression of a general tendency.

An ideal, then, is a somewhat definite and felicitous product of

imagination, a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of the elements

of experience. And a personal ideal is such a harmonious and congenial

reconstruction of our experience of persons. Its active function is to

symbolize and define the desirable, and by so doing to make it the

object of definite endeavor. The ideal of goodness is only the next step

beyond the good man of experience, and performs the same energizing

office. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, there is no separation

between actual and ideal persons, only a more or less definite

connection of personal ideas with material bodies.

There are all degrees of vagueness or definition in our personal ideals.

They may be no more than scattered imaginings of traits which we have

met in experience and felt to be worthy; or they may assume such fulness

and cohesion as to be distinct ideal persons. There may even be several

personal ideals; one may cherish one ideal of himself and a different

one for each of his intimate friends; or his imagination may project

several ideals of himself, to correspond to various phases of his

development.

Probably the phrase “ideal person” suggests something more unified and

consistent than is actually present in the minds of most people when

they conceive the desirable or good in personal character. Is it not

rather ideal traits or sentiments, fragments of personal experience,

phases of past intercourse returning in the imagination with a new

emphasis in the presence of new situations? We have at times divined in

other people courage, generosity, patience and justice, and judged them

to be good. Now, when we find ourselves in a situation where these

traits are called for, we are likely to be reminded by that very fact of

our previous experience of them; and the memory of it brings these

sentiments more vividly to life and gives them more authority in

conscience. Thus a person hesitating whether to smuggle in dutiable

goods is likely to think in his perplexity of some one whom he has come

to regard as honorable in such matters, and of how that one would feel

and act under like conditions.

This building up of higher personal conceptions does not lend itself to

precise description. It is mostly subconscious; the mind is continually

at work ordering and bettering its past and present experiences, working

them up in accordance with its own instinctive need for consistency and

pleasantness; ever idealizing, but rarely producing clean-cut ideals. It

finds its materials both in immediate personal intercourse and through

books and other durable media of expression. “Books, monuments,

pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments

he is forming.” “All that is said of the wise man ... describes to each

reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.”[101]

“A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few

incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to

their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary

standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do

not reject them and cast about for illustrations more usual in

literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis

is always right.”[102]

Idealism in this vague form has neither first, second, nor third person.

It is simply an impression of the desirable in personality, and is

impulsively applied to your conduct, my conduct, or his conduct, as the

case may be. The sentiment occurs to us, and the connection in which it

occurs determines its moral application. We sometimes speak as if it

required an unusual effort of virtue to apply the same standards to

ourselves as to others; and so it does, in one sense; but in another it

is easier and more common to do this than not to do it. The simplest

thing, as regards the mental process concerned, is to take ideas of

conduct as they come, without thinking specially where they come from,

and judge them by the standard that conscience presents to us. Injustice

and personal wrong of all sorts, as between one’s self and others,

commonly consist, not in imagining the other man’s point of view and

refusing to give it weight; but in not imagining it, not admitting him

to the tribunal at all. It is in exerting the imagination that the

effort of virtue comes in. One who entertains the thought and feeling of

others can hardly refuse them justice; he has made them a part of

himself. There is, as we have seen, no first or second person about a

sentiment; if it is alive in the mind that is all there is to the

matter.

It is perhaps the case, however, that almost every person of imagination

has at times a special and somewhat definite ideal self, concerning

which he has the “my” feeling, and which he would not use in judging

others. It is, like all ideals, a product of constructive imagination

working upon experience. It represents what we should like to see

ourselves, and has an especially vigorous and varied life in early

youth, when the imagination projects models to match each new aspiration

that gains power over it. In a study of the “Continued Stories” of

children, by Mabel W. Learoyd, many interesting facts are given

illustrating sustained self-idealization. These continued stories are

somewhat consecutive series of imaginations on the part of the young,

recalled and described at a later period. Two-thirds are said to embody

an ideal, and the author, in an idealized form, is the hero of many of

them.[103] An instance of this same process continued into old age is

the fact mentioned by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his “Emerson in

Concord,”[104] that the poet’s diary contains frequent allusion to one

Osman, who stands for an ideal self, a more perfect Emerson of his

aspiration.

It would always be found, I think, that our ideal self is constructed

chiefly out of ideas about us attributed to other people. We can hardly

get any distinct view of ourselves except in this way, that is by

placing ourselves at the standpoint of someone else. The impressions

thus gained are worked over and over, like other mental material, and,

according to the imaginative vigor of the mind, more or less

reorganized, and projected as an ideal.

With some this ideal is quite definite and visible before the eye of the

mind. I have heard the expression “seeing yourself” applied to it. Thus

one woman says of another “She always sees herself in evening dress,”

meaning that her ideal of herself is one of social propriety or

distinction, and that it takes the form of an image of her visible

person as it appears to others in a shape expressing these traits. This

is, of course, a phase of the reflected self, discussed in the fifth

chapter. Some people “see themselves” so constantly, and strive so

obviously to live up to the image, that they give a curious impression

of always acting a part, as if one should compose a drama with himself

as chief personage, and then spend his life playing it. Perhaps

something of this sort is inevitable with persons of vivid imagination.

Once formed and familiarized the ideal self serves, like any ideal only

more directly, as an incitement to growth in its direction, and a

punishment to retrogression. A man who has become used to imagining

himself as noble, beneficent and respected has a real picture in his

mind, a fair product of aspiring thought, a work of art. If his conduct

violates this imagination he has a sense of ugliness and shame; there is

a rent in the picture, a rude, shapeless hole, shattering its beauty,

and calling for painful and tedious repairs before it can be even

tolerable to look upon. Repentance is the pain of this spectacle; and

the clearer and more firmly conceived the ideal, the greater the pain.

The ideal person or persons of an ethical religion are the highest

expression of this creative outreaching of the mind after the admirable

in personality. It can hardly be supposed, by anyone who is willing to

go into the psychology of the matter at all, that they are radically

different from other ideal persons, or in any way sharply divided from

the mass of personal thought. Any comparative study of idealism, among

nations in various stages of civilization, among persons of different

intellectual power, among the various periods of development in one

individual, can hardly fail, I should say, to leave a conviction that

all hangs together, that there is no chasm anywhere, that the most

rudimentary idealizing impulse of the savage or the child is of a piece

with the highest religious conceptions. The tendency of such a view, of

course, is not to drag down the exalted, but to show all as part of a

common life.

All ideals of personality are derived from intercourse, and all that

attain any general acceptance have a social organization and history.

Each historical epoch or nation has its somewhat distinctive personal

ideals, which are instilled into the individual from the general store

of thought. It is especially true that the persons of religion have this

character. They are communal and cumulative, are gradually built up and

become in some degree an institution. In this way they may acquire

richness, clearness, sanctity, and authority, and may finally be

inculcated as something above and outside of the human mind. The latter

is certain to happen if they are made the basis of a discipline to be

applied to all sorts of people. The dogma that they are extra-human

serves, like the forms and ceremonies of a court, to secure to them the

prestige of distance and inaccessibility.

It is a chief function of religious organization to make the moral

synthesis more readily attainable, by establishing a spiritual

discipline, or system of influences and principles, which shall

constantly stimulate one’s higher sentiments, and furnish a sort of

outline or scaffolding of suggestions to aid him in organizing his

thought. In doing this its main agent is the inculcation of personal

ideals, although the teaching of creeds is also, perhaps, important to

the same purpose. It is apparently part of the legitimate function of

organized moral thought to enter the vaguer fields of speculation about

conduct and inculcate provisional ideas, relating for instance to the

origin and meaning of life—matters which the mind must and will explore,

with or without a guide. To have suggested to them definite ways of

thinking regarding such matters helps to make mental unity possible, and

to save men from the aimless and distracting wanderings that often end

in despair. Of course these ideas must be in harmony with the general

state of thought, consistent, for example, with the established results

of science. Otherwise they only increase the distraction. But a

_credible creed_ is an excellent thing, and the lack of it is a real

moral deficiency.

Now in times of intellectual unsettlement, like the present, the ideal

may become disorganized and scattered, the face of God blurred to the

view, like the reflection of the sun in troubled waters. And at the same

time the creeds become incredible, so that, until new ones can be worked

out and diffused, each man must either make one for himself—a task to

which few are equal—or undergo distraction, or cease to think about such

matters, if he can. This state of things involves some measure of

demoralization, although it may be part of a movement generally

beneficent. Mankind needs the highest vision of personality, and needs

it clear and vivid, and in the lack of it will suffer a lack in the

clearness and cogency of moral thought. It is the natural apex to the

pyramid of personal imagination, and when it is wanting there will be an

unremitting and eventually more or less successful striving to replace

it. When it reappears it will, of course, express in all its lineaments

a new era of thought; but the opinion that it is gone to stay, which is

entertained by some, seems very ill grounded.

CHAPTER XI

PERSONAL DEGENERACY

IS A PHASE OF THE QUESTION OF RIGHT AND WRONG—RELATION TO THE IDEA OF

DEVELOPMENT—JUSTIFICATION AND MEANING OF THE PHRASE “PERSONAL

DEGENERACY”—HEREDITARY AND SOCIAL FACTORS IN PERSONAL

DEGENERACY—DEGENERACY AS A MENTAL TRAIT—CONSCIENCE IN

DEGENERACY—CRIME, INSANITY, AND RESPONSIBILITY—GENERAL AIMS IN THE

TREATMENT OF DEGENERACY.

I wish to touch upon this subject only in so far as to suggest a general

way of conceiving it in accord with the views set forth in the preceding

chapters.

The question of personal degeneracy is a phase of the question of right

or wrong and is ultimately determined by conscience. A degenerate might

be defined as one whose personality falls distinctly short of a standard

set by the dominant moral thought of a group. It is the nature of the

mind to form standards of better or worse in all matters toward which

its selective activity is directed; and this has its collective as well

as its individual aspect, so that not only every man but every group has

its preferences and aversions, its good and bad. The selective,

organizing processes which all life, and notably the life of the mind,

presents, involve this distinction; it is simply a formulation of the

universal fact of preference. We cannot view things in which we are

interested without liking some and disliking others; and somewhat in

proportion to our interest is our tendency to express these likes and

dislikes by good and bad or similar words. And since there is nothing

that interests us so much as persons, judgments of right and wrong

regarding them have always been felt and expressed with peculiar zest

and emphasis. The righteous and the wicked, the virtuous and the

vicious, the good and bad under a hundred names, have been sharply and

earnestly discriminated in every age and country.

Although this distinction between personal good and bad has always been

a fact of human thought, a broader view of it is reached, in these days,

through the idea of evolution. The method of nature being everywhere

selective, growth is seen to take place not by making a like use of the

elements already existing, but by the fostering of some to the

comparative neglect or suppression of others. Or, if this statement

gives too much the idea of a presiding intelligence outside the process

itself, we may simply say that the functions of existing elements in

contributing to further growth are extremely different, so much so that

some of them usually appear to have no important function at all, or

even to impede the growth, while others appear to be the very heart of

the onward or crescent life. This idea is applicable to physiological

processes, such as go on within our bodies, to the development of

species, as illustrated with such convincing detail by Darwin, and to

all the processes of thought and of society; so that the forces that are

observed in the present, if viewed with reference to function or

tendency, never appear to be on the same level of value, but are strung

along at different levels, some below a mean, some above it. Thus we not

only have the actual discrimination of good and bad in persons, but a

philosophy which shows it as an incident of evolution, a reflection in

thought of the general movement of nature.

Or, to regard the process of evolution in more detail, we find

degeneracy or inferiority implied in that idea of variation which is the

starting-point of Darwinism. All forms of life, it seems, exhibit

variation; that is, the individuals are not quite alike but differ from

one another and from the parents in a somewhat random manner, so that

some are better adapted to the actual conditions of life, and some

worse. The change or development of a species takes place by the

cumulative survival and multiplication, generation after generation, of

fit or fortunate variations. The very process that produces the fittest

evidently implies the existence of the unfit; and the distinctly unfit

individuals of any species may be regarded as the degenerate.

It will not do to transfer these ideas too crudely to the mental and

social life of mankind; but it will hardly be disputed that the

character of persons exhibits variations which are partly at least

incalculable, and which produce on the one hand leadership and genius

and on the other weakness and degeneracy. We probably cannot have the

one without having something, at least, of the other, though I believe

that the variations of personality are capable, to a great degree, of

being brought under rational control.

This truth that all forms of deficient humanity have a common

philosophical aspect is one reason for giving them some common name,

like degeneracy. Another is that the detailed study of fact more and

more forces the conclusion that such things as crime, pauperism, idiocy,

insanity, and drunkenness have, in great measure, a common causation,

and so form, practically, parts of a whole. We see this in the study of

heredity, which shows that the transmitted taint commonly manifests

itself in several or all of these forms in different generations or

individuals of the same family; and we see it in the study of social

conditions, in the fact that where these conditions are bad, as in the

slums of great cities, all the forms become more prevalent. A third

reason for the use of a special term is that it is desirable that the

matter receive more dispassionate study than formerly, and this may

possibly be promoted by the use of words free, so far as possible, from

irrelevant implications. Many of the words in common use, such as

badness, wickedness, crime and the like, reflect particular views of the

facts, such as the religious view of them as righteousness or sin, and

the legal view as criminal or innocent, while degeneracy suggests the

disinterestedness of science.

I do not much care to justify the particular word degeneracy in this

connection, further than to say that I know of none more convenient or

less objectionable. It comes, of course, from _de_ and _genus_ through

_degenerare_, and seems to mean primarily the state of having fallen

from a type. It is not uncommon in English literature, usually meaning

inferiority to the standard set by ancestors, as when we say a

degenerate age, a degenerate son, etc.; and recently it has come into

use to describe any kind of marked and enduring mental defect or

inferiority. I see no objection to this usage unless it be that it is

doubtful whether the mentally or morally inferior person can in all

cases be said _to have fallen_ from a higher state. This might be

plausibly argued on both sides, but it does not seem worth while.

I use the phrase personal degeneracy, then, to describe the state of

persons whose character and conduct fall distinctly below the type or

standard regarded as normal by the dominant sentiment of the group.

Although it must be admitted that this definition is a vague one, it is

not more so, perhaps, than most definitions of mental or social

phenomena. There is no sharp criterion of what is mentally and socially

up to par and what is not, but there are large and important classes

whose inferiority is evident, such as idiots, imbeciles, the insane,

drunkards and criminals; and no one will question the importance of

studying the whole of which these are parts.

It is altogether a social matter at bottom; that is to say, degeneracy

exists only in a certain relation between a person and the rest of a

group. In so far as any mental or physical traits constitute it they do

so because they involve unfitness for a normal social career, in which

alone the essence of the matter is found. The only palpable test of

it—and this an uncertain one—is found in the actual career of the

person, and especially in the attitude toward him of the organized

thought of the group. We agree fairly well upon the degeneracy of the

criminal, largely because his abnormality is of so obvious and

troublesome a kind that something in particular has to be done about it,

and so he becomes definitely and formally stigmatized by the organs of

social judgment. Yet even from this decisive verdict an appeal is

successfully made in some cases to the wider and maturer thought of

mankind, so that many have been executed as felons who, like John Brown,

are now revered as heroes.

In short, the idea of wrong, of which the idea of degeneracy is a phase,

partakes of the same uncertainty that belongs to its antithesis, the

idea of right. Both are expressions of an ever-developing, always

selective life, and share in the indeterminateness that necessarily goes

with growth. They assume forms definite enough for the performance of

their momentous practical functions, but always remain essentially

plastic and variable.

Concerning the causation of degeneracy, we may say, as of every aspect

of personality, that its roots are to be looked for somewhere in the

mingling of hereditary and social factors from which the individual life

springs. Both of these factors exhibit marked variation; men differ in

their natural traits very much as other animals do, and they also find

themselves subject to the varying influences of a diversified social

order. The actual divergences of character and conduct which they

exhibit are due to the composition of these two variables into a third

variable, the man himself.

In some cases the hereditary factor is so clearly deficient as to make

it natural and justifiable to regard heredity as the cause; in a much

larger number of cases there is good reason to think that social

conditions are more particularly to blame, and that the original

hereditary outfit was fairly good. In a third class, the largest,

perhaps, of all, it is practically impossible to discriminate between

them. Indeed, it is always a loose way of speaking to set heredity and

environment over against each other as separable forces, or to say that

either one is the cause of character or of any personal trait. They have

no separate existence after personal development is under way; each

reacts upon the other, and every trait is due to their intimate union

and co-operation. All we are justified in saying is that one or the

other may be so aberrant as to demand our special attention.

Congenital idiocy is regarded as hereditary degeneracy, because it is

obvious that no social environment can make the individual other than

deficient, and we must work upon heredity if we wish to prevent it. On

the other hand, when we find that certain conditions, like residence in

crowded parts of a city, are accompanied by the appearance of a large

per cent. of criminality, among a population whom there is no reason to

suppose naturally deficient, we are justified in saying that the causes

of this degeneracy are social rather than hereditary. The fact probably

is, in the latter case, that the criminality is due to the conjunction

of degrading surroundings with a degree of hereditary deficiency that a

better training would have rendered harmless, or at least inconspicuous;

but, practically, if we wish to diminish this sort of degeneracy, we

must work upon social conditions.

A sound mental heredity consists essentially in teachability, a capacity

to learn the things required by the social order; and the congenital

idiot is degenerate by the hereditary factor alone, because he is

incapable of learning these things. But a sound heredity is no safeguard

against personal degeneracy; if we have teachability all turns upon what

is taught, and this depends upon the social environment. The very

faculties that lead a child to become good or moral in a good

environment may cause him to become criminal in a criminal environment;

it is all a question of what he finds to learn. It may be said, then,

that of the four possible combinations between good and bad heredity and

good and bad environment, three—bad heredity with bad or good

environment, and good heredity with bad environment—lead to degeneracy.

Only when both elements are favorable can we have a good result. Of

course, by bad environment in this connection must be understood bad in

its action upon this particular individual, not as judged by some other

standard.

As the social surroundings of a person can be changed, and his

hereditary bias cannot, it is expedient, in that vast majority of cases

in which causation is obscure, to assume as a working hypothesis that

the social factor is at fault, and to try by altering it to alter the

person. This is more and more coming to be done in all intelligent

treatment of degeneracy.

As a mental trait, marking a person off as, in some sense, worse than

others in the same social group, degeneracy appears to consist in some

lack in the higher organization of thought. It is not that one has the

normal mental outfit plus something additional, called wrong, crime,

sin, madness, or the like, but that he is in some way deficient in the

mental activity by which sympathy is created and by which all impulses

are unified with reference to a general life. The criminal impulses,

rage, fear, lust, pride, vanity, covetousness, and so on, are the same

in general type as those of the normal person; the main difference is

that the criminal lacks, in one way or another, the higher mental

organization—a phase of the social organization—to which these impulses

should be subordinate. It would not be very difficult to take the seven

deadly sins—Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, and

Lust—and show that each may be regarded as the undisciplined

manifestation of a normal or functional tendency. Indeed, as regards

anger this was attempted in a previous chapter.

“To describe in detail the different varieties of degeneracy that are

met with,” says Dr. Maudsley, “would be an endless and barren labor. It

would be as tedious as to attempt to describe particularly the exact

character of the ruins of each house in a city that had been destroyed

by an earthquake: in one place a great part of the house may be left

standing, in another place a wall or two, and in another the ruin is so

great that scarcely one stone is left upon another.”[105]

In the lowest phases mental organization can hardly be said to exist at

all: an idiot has no character, no consistent or effective

individuality. There is no unification, and so no self-control or stable

will; action simply reflects the particular animal impulse that is

ascendent. Hunger, sexual lust, rage, dread, and, in somewhat higher

grades, a crude, naïve kindliness, are each felt and expressed in the

simplest manner possible. There can, of course, be little or no true

sympathy, and the unconsciousness of what is going on in the minds of

other persons prevents any sense of decency or attempt to conform to

social standards.

In the higher grades we may make the distinction, already suggested in

speaking of egotism, between the unstable and the rigid varieties.

Indeed, as was intimated, selfishness and degeneracy are of the same

general character; both being defined socially by a falling short of

accepted standards of conduct, and mentally by some lack in the scope

and organization of the mind.

There is, then, one sort of persons in whom the most conspicuous and

troublesome trait is mere mental inconsistency and lack of character,

and another who possess a fair degree, at least, of consistency and

unity of purpose, but whose mental scope or reach of sympathy is so

small that they have no adequate relation to the life about them.

An outgrowing, impressionable sort of mind, if deficient in the power to

work up its material, is necessarily unstable and lacking in momentum

and definite direction: and in the more marked cases we have people of

the hysterical type, unstable forms of dementia and insanity, and

impulsive crime. “The fundamental defect in the hysterical brain,” says

Dr. Dana, “is that it is circumscribed in its associative functions; the

field of consciousness is limited just as is the field of vision. The

mental activity is confined to personal feelings, which are not

regulated by connotation of past experiences, hence they flow over too

easily into emotional outbursts or motor paroxysms. The hysterical

person cannot think.”[106] It is evident that something similar might be

said of all manifestations of instability.

On the other hand, an ingrowing sort of mind, whose tendency is rather

to work over and over its cherished thoughts than to open out to new

ones, may have a marked deficiency of sensibility and breadth of

perception. If so, the person is likely to exhibit some form of gross

and persistent egotism, such as sensuality, avarice, narrow and ruthless

ambition, fanaticism, of a hard, cold sort, delusion of greatness, or

those kinds of crime that result from habitual insensibility to social

standards rather than from transient impulse.

As conscience is simply the completest product of mental organization,

it will of course share in whatever defect there may be in the mental

life as a whole. In the lower grades of idiocy we may assume that there

is no system in the mind from which a conscience could spring. In a

higher degenerate of the unstable type, there is a conscience, but it is

vacillating in its judgments, transient in duration and ineffectual in

control, proportionally to the mental disintegration which it reflects.

We all, probably, can think of people conspicuously lacking in

self-control, and it will perhaps be evident, when we reflect upon them,

that their consciences are of this sort. The voice of conscience, with

them, is certain to be chiefly an echo of temporary emotions, because a

synthesis embracing long periods of time is beyond their range; it is

frequently inaudible, on account of their being engrossed by passing

impulses, and their conduct is largely without any rational control at

all. They are likely to suffer sharp and frequent attacks of remorse, on

account of failure to live up to their standards, but it would seem that

the wounds do not go very deep as a rule, but share in the general

superficiality of their lives. People of this sort, if not too far gone

in weakness, are probably the ones who profit most by punishment,

because they are helped by the sharp and definite pain which it

associates with acts that they recognize as wrong, but cannot keep from

doing without a vivid emotional deterrent. They are also the ones who,

in their eagerness to escape from the pains of fluctuation and

inconsistency, are most prone to submit blindly to some external and

dogmatic authority. Unable to rule themselves, they crave a master, and

if he only is a master, that is, one capable of grasping and dominating

the emotions by which they are swayed, they will often cleave to him and

kiss the rod.

With those whose defect is rigidity rather than instability, conscience

may exist and may control the life; the trouble with it is, that it is

not in key with the consciences of other people. There is an original

poverty of the impulses that extends to any result that can be worked

out of them. It may appear startling to some to assert that conscience

may dictate the wrong, but such is quite clearly the fact, if we

identify the right with some standard of conduct accepted among people

of broad sympathies. Conscience is the only possible moral guide—any

external authority can work morally upon us only through conscience—but

it always partakes of the limitations of one’s character, and so far as

that is degenerate the idea of right is degenerate also. As a matter of

fact, the very worst men of the hard, narrow, fanatical, or brutal

sorts, often live at peace with their consciences. I feel sure that

anyone who reflects imaginatively upon the characters of people he has

known of this sort will agree that such is the case. A bad conscience

implies mental division, inconsistency between thought and deed, and men

of this sort are often quite at one with themselves. The usurer who

grinds the faces of the poor, the unscrupulous speculator who causes the

ruin of innocent investors to aggrandize himself, the fanatical

anarchist who stabs a king or shoots a president, the Kentucky

mountaineer who regards murderous revenge as a duty, the assaulter who

causes pictures commemorative of his crimes to be tattooed on his skin,

are diverse examples of wrong-doers whose consciences not only do not

punish, but often instigate their ill deeds.

The idea, cherished by some, that crime or wrong of any sort is

invariably pursued by remorse, arises from the natural but mistaken

assumption that all other people have consciences similar to our own.

The man of sensitive temperament and refined habit of thought feels that

he would suffer remorse if he had done the deed, and supposes that the

same must be the case with the perpetrator. On the contrary, it seems

likely that only a very small proportion of those whom the higher moral

sentiment regards as wrong-doers suffer much from the pricks of

conscience. If the general tenor of a man’s life is high, and the act is

the fearful outcome of a moment of passion, as is often the case with

unpremeditated murder, he will suffer, but if his life is all of a

piece, he will not. All authorities agree that the mass of criminals,

and the same is clearly true of ill-doers within the law, have a habit

of mind of which the ill deed is the logical outcome, so that there is

nothing sudden or catastrophic about it. Of course, if we apply the word

conscience only to the mental synthesis of a mind rich in higher

sentiments, then such people have no consciences, but it seems a broader

view of the matter to say that they have a conscience, in so far as they

have mental unity, but that it reflects the general narrowness and

perversion of their lives. In fact, people of this description usually,

if not always, have standards of their own, some sort of honor among

thieves, which they will not transgress, or which, if transgressed,

cause remorse. It is impossible that mental organization should not

produce a moral synthesis of some sort.

There is nothing in this way of conceiving degeneracy which tends to

break down the practical distinctions among the various forms of it, as,

for instance, that between crime and insanity. Though the line between

these two is arbitrary and uncertain, as must always be the case in the

classification of mental facts, and as is confessed by the existence of

a class called the criminal insane, yet the distinction itself and the

difference in treatment associated with it are sound enough in a general

way.

The contrast between our attitudes toward crime and toward insanity is

primarily a matter of personal idea and impulse. We understand the

criminal act, or think we do, and we feel toward it resentment, or

hostile sympathy; while we do not understand the insane act, and so do

not resent it, but regard it with pity, curiosity, or disgust. If one

man strikes down another to rob him, or in revenge, we can imagine the

offender’s state of mind, his motive lives in our thought and is

condemned by conscience precisely as if we thought of doing the act

ourselves. Indeed, to understand an act _is_ to think of doing it

ourselves. But, if it is done for no reason that we can comprehend, we

do not imagine, do not get a personal impression of the case at all, but

have to think of it as merely mechanical. It is the same sort of

difference as that between a person who injures us accidentally and one

who does it “on purpose.”

Secondarily, it is a matter of expediency. We feel that the act which we

can imagine ourselves doing ought to be punished, because we perceive by

our own sympathy with it that more of this sort of thing is likely to

take place if it is not put down. We want the house-breaker to be

stigmatized, disgraced, and imprisoned, because we feel that, if this is

not done, he and others will be encouraged to more housebreaking; but we

feel only pity for the man who thinks he is Julius Cæsar, because we

suppose there is nothing to be feared either from him or his example.

This practical basis of the distinction expresses itself in the general,

and I think justifiable, reluctance to apply the name and treatment of

insanity to behavior which seems likely to be imitated. It is felt that

whatever may be the mental state of the man who commits an act of

violence or fraud, it is wholesome that people in general, who draw no

fine distinctions, but judge others by themselves, should be taught by

example that such conduct is followed by moral and legal penalties. On

the other hand, when the behavior is so evidently remote from ordinary

habits of thought that it can be a matter only of pity or curiosity,

there is no occasion to do anything more than the good of the person

affected seems to require.

The same analysis applies to the whole question of responsibility or

irresponsibility. It is a matter of imaginative contact and personal

idea. To hold a man responsible, is to imagine him as a man like

ourselves, having similar impulses but failing to control them as we do,

or at least as we feel we ought to do. We think of doing as he does,

find it wrong, and impute the wrong to him. The irresponsible person is

one who is looked upon as a different sort of being, not human with

reference to the conduct in question, not imaginable, not near enough to

us to be the object of hostile sentiment. We _blame_ the former; that

is, we visit him with a sympathetic resentment; we condemn that part of

ourselves that we find in him. But in the latter we do not find

ourselves at all.

It is worth noting in this connection, that we could not altogether

cease to blame others without ceasing to blame ourselves, which would

mean moral apathy. It is sometimes thought that the cool analysis of

such questions as this tends toward indifferentism; but I do not see

that this is the case. The social psychologist finds in moral sentiment

a central and momentous fact of human life, and if perchance he does not

himself feel it very vividly, he should have the candor to confess

himself so much the less a man. Indeed, if there is such a thing as an

indifferentist, in the sense of one who does not feel any cogency in

moral sentiment, he must be quite unsuited to the pursuit of social or

moral science, because he lacks power to sympathize with, and so

observe, the facts upon which this sort of science must be based.

I do not purpose to give this discussion a practical turn by entering

into the details of the treatment of various forms of degeneracy; but it

may help to show the bearing of our general view, if I point out in

brief the line of procedure which common-sense would seem to call for.

This procedure naturally divides itself into prevention, reform or cure,

and isolation, according to the stage of development which the evil has

reached.

Everything which acts in a favorable manner upon either the hereditary

or the social factor in life is more or less preventive of degeneracy,

and of course influences of this general sort are of far more importance

as a whole than any more particular measures. Under the head of

prevention would also come punishment, disgrace, and the like—everything

in the treatment of criminals, paupers, and other special classes which

is designed to impress the minds of the rest of the people, and to check

the degenerate tendencies possibly existing among them. Although it is

now thought that the efficacy of these deterrent influences, in the case

of crime at least, is less than was formerly supposed, still it is by no

means desirable that the attempt to exert them should be abandoned.

If degenerate tendencies actually manifest themselves, the main thing to

be done is to take note of them as early in the individual’s life as

possible, and to attempt to counteract them by a suitable change in the

social environment. I need hardly point out that it is now believed that

such counteraction is much more practicable than was formerly supposed,

or mention that many beneficent institutions and other enterprises exist

which aim to secure it.

And if, as must always be the fact in a considerable proportion of

cases, the person remains so distinctly and persistently below the

standard of character and conduct that it is clearly inexpedient to

leave him at large, the rational treatment of him is evidently a decent

isolation, which shall prevent him from propagating his degenerate

traits through either heredity or social influence.

CHAPTER XII

FREEDOM

THE MEANING OF FREEDOM—FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE—FREEDOM AS A PHASE OF

THE SOCIAL ORDER—FREEDOM INVOLVES INCIDENTAL STRAIN AND DEGENERACY.

Goethe remarks in his Autobiography[107] that the word freedom has so

fair a sound that we cannot do without it even though it designate an

error. Certainly it is a word inseparable from our higher sentiments,

and if, in its popular use at the present day, it has no precise

meaning, there is so much the more reason why we should try to give it

one, and to continue its use as a symbol of something that mankind

cherishes and strives for.

The common notion of freedom is negative, that is, it is a notion of the

absence of constraint. Starting with the popular individualistic view of

things, the social order is thought of as something apart from, and more

or less a hinderance to, a man’s natural development. There is an

assumption that an ordinary person is self-sufficient in most respects,

and will do very well if he is only left alone. But there is, of course,

no such thing as the absence of restraint, in the sense of social

limitations; man has no existence apart from a social order, and can

develop his personality only through the social order, and in the same

degree that it is developed. A freedom consisting in the removal of

limiting conditions is inconceivable. If the word is to have any

definite meaning in sociology, it must therefore be separated from the

idea of a fundamental opposition between society and the individual, and

made to signify something that is both individual and social. To do this

it is not necessary to do any great violence to accepted ideas of a

practical sort; since it is rather in theory than in application that

the popular view is objectionable. A sociological interpretation of

freedom should take away nothing worth keeping from our traditional

conception of it, and may add something in the way of breadth,

clearness, and productiveness.

The definition of freedom naturally arising from the chapters that have

gone before is perhaps this: that it is _opportunity for right

development_, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal

of life that we have in conscience. A child comes into the world with an

outfit of vague tendencies, for all definite unfolding of which he is

dependent upon social conditions. If cast away alone on a desert island

he would, supposing that he succeeded in living at all, never attain a

real humanity, would never know speech, or social sentiment, or any

complex thought. On the other hand, if all his surroundings are from the

first such as to favor the enlargement and enrichment of his life, he

may attain the fullest development possible to him in the actual state

of the world. In so far as the social conditions have this favoring

action upon him he may be said to be free. And so every person, at every

stage of his growth, is free or unfree in proportion as he does or does

not find himself in the midst of conditions conducive to full and

harmonious personal development. Thinking in this way we do not regard

the individual as separable from the social order as a whole, but we do

regard him as capable of occupying any one of an indefinite number of

positions within that order, some of them more suitable to him than

others.

No doubt there are elements of vagueness in this conception. What is

full and harmonious personal development? What is the right, the

opportunity to achieve which is freedom? The possibilities of

development are infinitely various, and unimaginable until they begin to

be realized, so that it would appear that our notion gives us nothing

definite to go by after all. This is largely true: development cannot be

defined, either for the race or for individuals, but is and must remain

an ideal, of which we can get only partial and shifting glimpses. In

fact, we should cease to think of freedom as something definite and

final, that can be grasped and held fast once for all, and learn to

regard it as a line of advance, something progressively appearing out of

the invisible and defining itself, like the forms of a mountain up which

one is climbing in a mist. This vagueness and incompleteness are only

what we meet in every direction when we attempt to define our ideals.

What is progress? What is right? What is beauty? What is truth? The

endeavor to produce unmistakable and final definitions of these things

is now, I suppose, given up, and we have come to recognize that the

good, in all its forms, is evolved rather than achieved, is a process

rather than a state.

The best definition of freedom is perhaps nothing other than the most

helpful way of thinking about it; and it seems to me that the most

helpful way of thinking about it is to regard it in the light of the

contrast between what a man is and what he might be, as our experience

of life enables us to imagine the two states. Ideas of this sort are

suggested by defining freedom as opportunity, and their tendency is to

stimulate and direct practical endeavor. If the word helps us to

realize, for instance, that it is possible to make healthy, intelligent,

and hopeful children out of those that are now sickly, dull, and

unhappy, so much the better. On the other hand, the definition of it as

letting people alone, well enough suited, perhaps, to an over-governed

state of society, does not seem especially pertinent to our time and

country.

We have always been taught by philosophy that the various forms of the

good were merely different views of the same thing, and this idea is

certainly applicable to such notions as those of freedom, progress, and

right. Thus freedom may be regarded as merely the individual aspect of

progress, the two being related as the individual and the social order

were asserted to be in the first chapter, and no more distinct or

separable. If instead of contrasting what a particular man is with what

he might be, we do the same for mankind as a whole, we have the notion

of progress. Progress which does not involve liberation is evidently no

progress at all; and, on the other hand, a freedom that is not part of

the general onward movement of society is not free in the largest sense.

Again, any practicable idea of freedom must connect it with some

standard of right, in which, like opposing claims in a clearing-house,

the divergent tendencies of each person, and of different persons, are

disciplined and reconciled. The wrong is the unfree; it is that which

tends, on the whole, to restrict personal development. It is no

contribution to freedom to turn loose the insane or the criminal, or to

allow children to run on the streets instead of going to school. The

only test of all these things—of right, freedom, progress, and the

like—is the instructed conscience; just as the only test of beauty is a

trained æsthetic sense, which is a mental conclusion of much the same

sort as conscience.

So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the

use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are

lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by

appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his

self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the

mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as

rational a manner as you are fit for.

Thus freedom is relative to the particular persons and states who are to

enjoy it, some individuals within any society, and some societies as

wholes, being capable of a higher sort of response than others. In the

family, it implies the substitution, so far as practicable, of

familiarity and moral suasion for distance and the rod; in government

the growth of public opinion and education as compared with autocracy

and the military and police functions; in the church, the decline of

dogma, form, the fear of hell and hypnotic conversion, relatively to

intelligence, sympathy, and good works. But any relaxation of lower

forms of discipline which is not supplied by higher, which tends, on the

whole, to confusion rather than reorganization, is not in the way of

real freedom. The question what this is is always one that is relative

to the actual situation, never one that can be absolutely or abstractly

answered. Freedom can be increased only in connection with the increase

of sympathy, intelligence, and self-control in individuals.

The social order is antithetical to freedom only in so far as it is a

bad one. Freedom can exist only in and through a social order, and must

be increased by all the healthy growth of the latter. It is only in a

large and complex social system that any advanced degree of it is

possible, because nothing else can supply the multifarious opportunities

by means of which all sorts of persons can work out a congenial

development through the choice of influences.

In so far as we have freedom in the United States at the present time,

in what does it consist? Evidently, it seems to me, in the access to a

great number and variety of influences by whose progressive selection

and assimilation a child may become, within vague limits set by the

general state of our society, the best that he is naturally fitted to

become. It consists, to begin with infancy, in a good family life, in

intelligent nurture and training, adapted to the special traits of

character which every child manifests from the first week of life. Then

it involves good schooling, admitting the child through books and

teachers to a rich selection from the accumulated influences of the best

minds of the past. Free technical and professional education, so far as

it exists, contributes to it, also the facility of travel, bringing him

in contact with significant persons from all over the world; public

libraries, magazines, good newspapers, and so on. Whatever enlarges his

field of selection without permanently confusing him adds to his

liberty. In fact, institutions—government, churches, industries, and the

like—have properly no other function than to contribute to human

freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this

function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.