For thinking cannot itself escape the influence of habit, any more than

anything else human. If it is not a part of ordinary habits, then it is

a separate habit, habit alongside other habits, apart from them, as

isolated and indurated as human structure permits. Theory is a

possession of the theorist, intellect of the intellectualist. The

so-called separation of theory and practice means in fact the separation

of two kinds of practice, one taking place in the outdoor world, the

other in the study. The habit of thought commands some materials (as

every habit must do) but the materials are technical, books, words.

Ideas are objectified in action but speech and writing monopolize their

field of action. Even then subconscious pains are taken to see that the

words used are not too widely understood. Intellectual habits like other

habits demand an environment, but the environment is the study, library,

laboratory and academy. Like other habits they produce external results,

possessions. Some men acquire ideas and knowledge as other men acquire

monetary wealth. While practising thought for their own special ends

they deprecate it for the untrained and unstable masses for whom

"habits," that is unthinking routines, are necessities. They favor

popular education--up to the point of disseminating as matter of

authoritative information for the many what the few have established by

thought, and up to the point of converting an original docility to the

new into a docility to repeat and to conform.

Yet all habit involves mechanization. Habit is impossible without

setting up a mechanism of action, physiologically engrained, which

operates "spontaneously," automatically, whenever the cue is given. But

mechanization is not of necessity _all_ there is to habit. Consider the

conditions under which the first serviceable abilities of life are

formed. When a child begins to walk he acutely observes, he intently and

intensely experiments. He looks to see what is going to happen and he

keeps curious watch on every incident. What others do, the assistance

they give, the models they set, operate not as limitations but as

encouragements to his own acts, reinforcements of personal perception

and endeavor. The first toddling is a romantic adventuring into the

unknown; and every gained power is a delightful discovery of one's own

powers and of the wonders of the world. We may not be able to retain in

adult habits this zest of intelligence and this freshness of

satisfaction in newly discovered powers. But there is surely a middle

term between a normal exercise of power which includes some excursion

into the unknown, and a mechanical activity hedged within a drab world.

Even in dealing with inanimate machines we rank that invention higher

which adapts its movements to varying conditions.

All life operates through a mechanism, and the higher the form of life

the more complex, sure and flexible the mechanism. This fact alone

should save us from opposing life and mechanism, thereby reducing the

latter to unintelligent automatism and the former to an aimless splurge.

How delicate, prompt, sure and varied are the movements of a violin

player or an engraver! How unerringly they phrase every shade of emotion

and every turn of idea! Mechanism is indispensable. If each act has to

be consciously searched for at the moment and intentionally performed,

execution is painful and the product is clumsy and halting. Nevertheless

the difference between the artist and the mere technician is

unmistakeable. The artist is a masterful technician. The technique or

mechanism is fused with thought and feeling. The "mechanical" performer

permits the mechanism to dictate the performance. It is absurd to say

that the latter exhibits habit and the former not. We are confronted

with two kinds of habit, intelligent and routine. All life has its élan,

but only the prevalence of dead habits deflects life into mere élan.

Yet the current dualism of mind and body, thought and action, is so

rooted that we are taught (and science is said to support the teaching)

that the art, the habit, of the artist is acquired by previous

mechanical exercises of repetition in which skill apart from thought is

the aim, until suddenly, magically, this soulless mechanism is taken

possession of by sentiment and imagination and it becomes a flexible

instrument of mind. The fact, the scientific fact, is that even in his

exercises, his practice _for_ skill, an artist uses an art he already

has. He acquires greater skill because practice _of_ skill is more

important to him than practice _for_ skill. Otherwise natural endowment

would count for nothing, and sufficient mechanical exercise would make

any one an expert in any field. A flexible, sensitive habit grows more

varied, more adaptable by practice and use. We do not as yet fully

understand the physiological factors concerned in mechanical routine on

one hand and artistic skill on the other, but we do know that the latter

is just as much habit as is the former. Whether it concerns the cook,

musician, carpenter, citizen, or statesman, the intelligent or artistic

habit is the desirable thing, and the routine the undesirable

thing:--or, at least, desirable and undesirable from every point of view

except one.

Those who wish a monopoly of social power find desirable the separation

of habit and thought, action and soul, so characteristic of history. For

the dualism enables them to do the thinking and planning, while others

remain the docile, even if awkward, instruments of execution. Until this

scheme is changed, democracy is bound to be perverted in realization.

With our present system of education--by which something much more

extensive than schooling is meant--democracy multiplies occasions for

imitation not occasions for thought in action. If the visible result is

rather a messy confusion than an ordered discipline of habits, it is

because there are so many models of imitation set up that they tend to

cancel one another, so that individuals have the advantage neither of

uniform training nor of intelligent adaptation. Whence an

intellectualist; the one with whom thinking is itself a segregated

habit, infers that the choice is between muss-and-muddling and a

bureaucracy. He prefers the latter, though under some other name,

usually an aristocracy of talent and intellect, possibly a dictatorship

of the proletariat.

It has been repeatedly stated that the current philosophical dualism of

mind and body, of spirit and mere outward doing, is ultimately but an

intellectual reflex of the social divorce of routine habit from thought,

of means from ends, practice from theory. One hardly knows whether most

to admire the acumen with which Bergson has penetrated through the

accumulation of historic technicalities to this essential fact, or to

deplore the artistic skill with which he has recommended the division

and the metaphysical subtlety with which he has striven to establish its

necessary and unchangeable nature. For the latter tends to confirm and

sanction the dualism in all its obnoxiousness. In the end, however,

detection, discovery, is the main thing. To envisage the relation of

spirit, life, to matter, body, as in effect an affair of a force which

outruns habit while it leaves a trail of routine habits behind it, will

surely turn out in the end to imply the acknowledgment of the need of a

continuous unification of spirit and habit, rather than to be a sanction

of their divorce. And when Bergson carries the implicit logic to the

point of a clear recognition that upon this basis concrete intelligence

is concerned with the habits which incorporate and deal with objects,

and that nothing remains to spirit, pure thought, except a blind onward

push or impetus, the net conclusion is surely the need of revision of

the fundamental premiss of separation of soul and habit. A blind

creative force is as likely to turn out to be destructive as creative;

the vital _élan_ may delight in war rather than in the laborious arts of

civilization, and a mystic intuition of an ongoing splurge be a poor

substitute for the detailed work of an intelligence embodied in custom

and institution, one which creates by means of flexible continuous

contrivances of reorganization. For the eulogistic qualities which

Bergson attributes to the _élan vital_ flow not from its nature but from

a reminiscence of the optimism of romanticism, an optimism which is only

the reverse side of pessimism about actualities. A spiritual life which

is nothing but a blind urge separated from thought (which is said to be

confined to mechanical manipulation of material objects for personal

uses) is likely to have the attributes of the Devil in spite of its

being ennobled with the name of God.

V

For practical purposes morals mean customs, folkways, established

collective habits. This is a commonplace of the anthropologist, though

the moral theorist generally suffers from an illusion that his own place

and day is, or ought to be, an exception. But always and everywhere

customs supply the standards for personal activities. They are the

pattern into which individual activity must weave itself. This is as

true today as it ever was. But because of present mobility and

interminglings of customs, an individual is now offered an enormous

range of custom-patterns, and can exercise personal ingenuity in

selecting and rearranging their elements. In short he can, if he will,

intelligently adapt customs to conditions, and thereby remake them.

Customs in any case constitute moral standards. For they are active

demands for certain ways of acting. Every habit creates an unconscious

expectation. It forms a certain outlook. What psychologists have

laboriously treated under the caption of association of ideas has little

to do with ideas and everything to do with the influence of habit upon

recollection and perception. A habit, a routine habit, when interfered

with generates uneasiness, sets up a protest in favor of restoration and

a sense of need of some expiatory act, or else it goes off in casual

reminiscence. It is the essence of routine to insist upon its own

continuation. Breach of it is violation of right. Deviation from it is

transgression.

All that metaphysics has said about the nisus of Being to conserve its

essence and all that a mythological psychology has said about a special

instinct of self-preservation is a cover for the persistent

self-assertion of habit. Habit is energy organized in certain channels.

When interfered with, it swells as resentment and as an avenging force.

To say that it will be obeyed, that custom makes law, that _nomos_ is

lord of all, is after all only to say that habit is habit. Emotion is a

perturbation from clash or failure of habit, and reflection, roughly

speaking, is the painful effort of disturbed habits to readjust

themselves. It is a pity that Westermarck in his monumental collection

of facts which show the connection of custom with morals[4] is still so

much under the influence of current subjective psychology that he

misstates the point of his data. For although he recognizes the

objectivity of custom, he treats sympathetic resentment and approbation

as distinctive inner feelings or conscious states which give rise to

acts. In his anxiety to displace an unreal rational source of morals he

sets up an equally unreal emotional basis. In truth, feelings as well as

reason spring up within action. Breach of custom or habit is the source

of sympathetic resentment, while overt approbation goes out to fidelity

to custom maintained under exceptional circumstances.

[4] "The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas."

Those who recognize the place of custom in lower social forms generally

regard its presence in civilized society as a mere survival. Or, like

Sumner, they fancy that to recognize its abiding place is equivalent to

the denial of all rationality and principle to morality; equivalent to

the assertion of blind, arbitrary forces in life. In effect, this point

of view has already been dealt with. It overlooks the fact that the real

opposition is not between reason and habit but between routine,

unintelligent habit, and intelligent habit or art. Even a savage custom

may be reasonable in that it is adapted to social needs and uses.

Experience may add to such adaptation a conscious recognition of it, and

then the custom of rationality is added to a prior custom.

External reasonableness or adaptation to ends precedes reasonableness of

mind. This is only to say that in morals as well as in physics things

have to be there before we perceive them, and that rationality of mind

is not an original endowment but is the offspring of intercourse with

objective adaptations and relations--a view which under the influence of

a conception of knowing the like by the like has been distorted into

Platonic and other objective idealisms. Reason as observation of an

adaptation of acts to valuable results is not however a mere idle

mirroring of pre-existent facts. It is an additional event having its

own career. It sets up a heightened emotional appreciation and provides

a new motive for fidelities previously blind. It sets up an attitude of

criticism, of inquiry, and makes men sensitive to the brutalities and

extravagancies of customs. In short, it becomes a custom of expectation

and outlook, an active demand for reasonableness in other customs. The

reflective disposition is not self-made nor a gift of the gods. It

arises in some exceptional circumstance out of social customs, as we see

in the case of the Greeks. But when it has been generated it establishes

a new custom, which is capable of exercising the most revolutionary

influence upon other customs.

Hence the growing importance of personal rationality or intelligence, in

moral theory if not in practice. That current customs contradict one

another, that many of them are unjust, and that without criticism none

of them is fit to be the guide of life was the discovery with which the

Athenian Socrates initiated conscious moral theorizing. Yet a dilemma

soon presented itself, one which forms the burden of Plato's ethical

writings. How shall thought which is personal arrive at standards which

hold good for all, which, in modern phrase, are objective? The solution

found by Plato was that reason is itself objective, universal, cosmic

and makes the individual soul its vehicle. The result, however, was

merely to substitute a metaphysical or transcendental ethics for the

ethics of custom. If Plato had been able to see that reflection and

criticism express a conflict of customs, and that their purport and

office is to re-organize, re-adjust customs, the subsequent course of

moral theory would have been very different. Custom would have provided

needed objective and substantial ballast, and personal rationality or

reflective intelligence been treated as the necessary organ of

experimental initiative and creative invention in remaking custom.

We have another difficulty to face: a greater wave rises to overwhelm

us. It is said that to derive moral standards from social customs is to

evacuate the latter of all authority. Morals, it is said, imply the

subordination of fact to ideal consideration, while the view presented

makes morals secondary to bare fact, which is equal to depriving them of

dignity and jurisdiction. The objection has the force of the custom of

moral theorists behind it; and therefore in its denial of custom avails

itself of the assistance of the notion it attacks. The criticism rests

upon a false separation. It argues in effect that either ideal standards

antecede customs and confer their moral quality upon them, or that in

being subsequent to custom and evolved from them, they are mere

accidental by-products. But how does the case stand with language? Men

did not intend language; they did not have social objects consciously in

view when they began to talk, nor did they have grammatical and phonetic

principles before them by which to regulate their efforts at

communication. These things come after the fact and because of it.

Language grew out of unintelligent babblings, instinctive motions called

gestures, and the pressure of circumstance. But nevertheless language

once called into existence is language and operates as language. It

operates not to perpetuate the forces which produced it but to modify

and redirect them. It has such transcendent importance that pains are

taken with its use. Literatures are produced, and then a vast apparatus

of grammar, rhetoric, dictionaries, literary criticism, reviews, essays,

a derived literature _ad lib_. Education, schooling, becomes a

necessity; literacy an end. In short language when it is produced meets

old needs and opens new possibilities. It creates demands which take

effect, and the effect is not confined to speech and literature, but

extends to the common life in communication, counsel and instruction.

What is said of the institution of language holds good of every

institution. Family life, property, legal forms, churches and schools,

academies of art and science did not originate to serve conscious ends

nor was their generation regulated by consciousness of principles of

reason and right. Yet each institution has brought with its development

demands, expectations, rules, standards. These are not mere

embellishments of the forces which produced them, idle decorations of

the scene. They are additional forces. They reconstruct. They open new

avenues of endeavor and impose new labors. In short they are

civilization, culture, morality.

Still the question recurs: What authority have standards and ideas which

have originated in this way? What claim have they upon us? In one sense

the question is unanswerable. In the same sense, however, the question

is unanswerable whatever origin and sanction is ascribed to moral

obligations and loyalties. Why attend to metaphysical and transcendental

ideal realities even if we concede they are the authors of moral

standards? Why do this act if I feel like doing something else? Any

moral question may reduce itself to this question if we so choose. But

in an empirical sense the answer is simple. The authority is that of

life. Why employ language, cultivate literature, acquire and develop

science, sustain industry, and submit to the refinements of art? To ask

these questions is equivalent to asking: Why live? And the only answer

is that if one is going to live one must live a life of which these

things form the substance. The only question having sense which can be

asked is _how_ we are going to use and be used by these things, not

whether we are going to use them. Reason, moral principles, cannot in

any case be shoved behind these affairs, for reason and morality grow

out of them. But they have grown into them as well as out of them. They

are there as part of them. No one can escape them if he wants to. He

cannot escape the problem of _how_ to engage in life, since in any case

he must engage in it in some way or other--or else quit and get out. In

short, the choice is not between a moral authority outside custom and

one within it. It is between adopting more or less intelligent and

significant customs.

Curiously enough, the chief practical effect of refusing to recognize

the connection of custom with moral standards is to deify some special

custom and treat it as eternal, immutable, outside of criticism and

revision. This consequence is especially harmful in times of rapid

social flux. For it leads to disparity between nominal standards, which

become ineffectual and hypocritical in exact ratio to their theoretical

exaltation, and actual habits which have to take note of existing

conditions. The disparity breeds disorder. Irregularity and confusion

are however practically intolerable, and effect the generation of a new

rule of some sort or other. Only such complete disturbance of the

physical bases of life and security as comes from plague and starvation

can throw society into utter disorder. No amount of intellectual

transition can seriously disturb the main tenor of custom, or morals.

Hence the greater danger which attends the attempt in period of social

change to maintain the immutability of old standards is not general

moral relaxation. It is rather social clash, an irreconciled conflict of

moral standards and purposes, the most serious form of class warfare.

For segregated classes develop their own customs, which is to say their

own working morals. As long as society is mainly immobile these diverse

principles and ruling aims do not clash. They exist side by side in

different strata. Power, glory, honor, magnificence, mutual faith here;

industry, obedience, abstinence, humility, and reverence there: noble

and plebeian virtues. Vigor, courage, energy, enterprise here;

submission, patience, charm, personal fidelity there: the masculine and

feminine virtues. But mobility invades society. War, commerce, travel,

communication, contact with the thoughts and desires of other classes,

new inventions in productive industry, disturb the settled distribution

of customs. Congealed habits thaw out, and a flood mixes things once

separated.

Each class is rigidly sure of the rightness of its own ends and hence

not overscrupulous about the means of attaining them. One side proclaims

the ultimacy of order--that of some old order which conduces to its own

interest. The other side proclaims its rights to freedom, and identifies

justice with its submerged claims. There is no common ground, no moral

understanding, no agreed upon standard of appeal. Today such a conflict

occurs between propertied classes and those who depend upon daily wage;

between men and women; between old and young. Each appeals to its own

standard of right, and each thinks the other the creature of personal

desire, whim or obstinacy. Mobility has affected peoples as well.

Nations and races face one another, each with its own immutable

standards. Never before in history have there existed such numerous

contacts and minglings. Never before have there been such occasions for

conflict which are the more significant because each side feels that it

is supported by moral principles. Customs relating to what has been and

emotions referring to what may come to be go their independent ways. The

demand of each side treats its opponent as a wilful violator of moral

principles, an expression of self-interest or superior might.

Intelligence which is the only possible messenger of reconciliation

dwells in a far land of abstractions or comes after the event to record

accomplished facts.

VI

The prior discussion has tried to show why the psychology of habit is an

objective and social psychology. Settled and regular action must contain

an adjustment of environing conditions; it must incorporate them in

itself. For human beings, the environing affairs directly important are

those formed by the activities of other human beings. This fact is

accentuated and made fundamental by the fact of infancy--the fact that

each human being begins life completely dependent upon others. The net

outcome accordingly is that what can be called distinctively individual

in behavior and mind is not, contrary to traditional theory, an original

datum. Doubtless physical or physiological individuality always colors

responsive activity and hence modifies the form which custom assumes in

its personal reproductions. In forceful energetic characters this

quality is marked. But it is important to note that it is a quality of

habit, not an element or force existing apart from adjustment of the

environment and capable of being termed a separate individual mind.

Orthodox psychology starts however from the assumption of precisely such

independent minds. However much different schools may vary in their

definitions of mind, they agree in this premiss of separateness and

priority. Hence social psychology is confused by the effort to render

its facts in the terms characteristic of old psychology, when the

distinctive thing about it is that it implies an abandonment of that

psychology.

The traditional psychology of the original separate soul, mind or

consciousness is in truth a reflex of conditions which cut human nature

off from its natural objective relations. It implies first the severance

of man from nature and then of each man from his fellows. The isolation

of man from nature is duly manifested in the split between mind and

body--since body is clearly a connected part of nature. Thus the

instrument of action and the means of the continuous modification of

action, of the cumulative carrying forward of old activity into new,

is regarded as a mysterious intruder or as a mysterious parallel

accompaniment. It is fair to say that the psychology of a separate and

independent consciousness began as an intellectual formulation of those

facts of morality which treated the most important kind of action as a

private concern, something to be enacted and concluded within character

as a purely personal possession. The religious and metaphysical

interests which wanted the ideal to be a separate realm finally

coincided with a practical revolt against current customs and

institutions to enforce current psychological individualism. But this

formulation (put forth in the name of science) reacted to confirm the

conditions out of which it arose, and to convert it from a historic

episode into an essential truth. Its exaggeration of individuality is

largely a compensatory reaction against the pressure of institutional

rigidities.

Any moral theory which is seriously influenced by current psychological

theory is bound to emphasize states of consciousness, an inner private

life, at the expense of acts which have public meaning and which

incorporate and exact social relationships. A psychology based upon

habits (and instincts which become elements in habits as soon as they

are acted upon) will on the contrary fix its attention upon the

objective conditions in which habits are formed and operate. The rise at

the present time of a clinical psychology which revolts at traditional

and orthodox psychology is a symptom of ethical import. It is a protest

against the futility, as a tool of understanding and dealing with human

nature in the concrete, of the psychology of conscious sensations,

images and ideas. It exhibits a sense for reality in its insistence upon

the profound importance of unconscious forces in determining not only

overt conduct but desire, judgment, belief, idealization.

Every moment of reaction and protest, however, usually accepts some of

the basic ideas of the position against which it rebels. So the most

popular forms of the clinical psychology, those associated with the

founders of psycho-analysis, retain the notion of a separate psychic

realm or force. They add a statement pointing to facts of the utmost

value, and which is equivalent to practical recognition of the

dependence of mind upon habit and of habit upon social conditions. This

is the statement of the existence and operation of the "unconscious," of

complexes due to contacts and conflicts with others, of the social

censor. But they still cling to the idea of the separate psychic realm

and so in effect talk about unconscious consciousness. They get their

truths mixed up in theory with the false psychology of original

individual consciousness, just as the school of social psychologists

does upon its side. Their elaborate artificial explanations, like the

mystic collective mind, consciousness, over-soul, of social psychology,

are due to failure to begin with the facts of habit and custom.

What then is meant by individual mind, by mind as individual? In effect

the reply has already been given. Conflict of habits releases impulsive

activities which in their manifestation require a modification of habit,

of custom and convention. That which was at first the individualized

color or quality of habitual activity is abstracted, and becomes a

center of activity aiming to reconstruct customs in accord with some

desire which is rejected by the immediate situation and which therefore

is felt to belong to one's self, to be the mark and possession of an

individual in partial and temporary opposition to his environment. These

general and necessarily vague statements will be made more definite in

the further discussion of impulse and intelligence. For impulse when it

asserts itself deliberately against an existing custom is the beginning

of individuality in mind. This beginning is developed and consolidated

in the observations, judgments, inventions which try to transform the

environment so that a variant, deviating impulse may itself in turn

become incarnated in objective habit.

PART TWO

THE PLACE OF IMPULSE IN CONDUCT

I

Habits as organized activities are secondary and acquired, not native

and original. They are outgrowths of unlearned activities which are part

of man's endowment at birth. The order of topics followed in our

discussion may accordingly be questioned. Why should what is derived and

therefore in some sense artificial in conduct be discussed before what

is primitive, natural and inevitable? Why did we not set out with an

examination of those instinctive activities upon which the acquisition

of habits is conditioned?

The query is a natural one, yet it tempts to flinging forth a paradox.

In conduct the acquired is the primitive. Impulses although first in

time are never primary in fact; they are secondary and dependent. The

seeming paradox in statement covers a familiar fact. In the life of the

individual, instinctive activity comes first. But an individual begins

life as a baby, and babies are dependent beings. Their activities could

continue at most for only a few hours were it not for the presence and

aid of adults with their formed habits. And babies owe to adults more

than procreation, more than the continued food and protection which

preserve life. They owe to adults the opportunity to express their

native activities in ways which have meaning. Even if by some miracle

original activity could continue without assistance from the organized

skill and art of adults, it would not amount to anything. It would be

mere sound and fury.

In short, the _meaning_ of native activities is not native; it is

acquired. It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium. In

the case of a tiger or eagle, anger may be identified with a serviceable

life-activity, with attack and defense. With a human being it is as

meaningless as a gust of wind on a mud puddle apart from a direction

given it by the presence of other persons, apart from the responses they

make to it. It is a physical spasm, a blind dispersive burst of wasteful

energy. It gets quality, significance, when it becomes a smouldering

sullenness, an annoying interruption, a peevish irritation, a murderous

revenge, a blazing indignation. And although these phenomena which have

a meaning spring from original native reactions to stimuli, yet they

depend also upon the responsive behavior of others. They and all similar

human displays of anger are not pure impulses; they are habits formed

under the influence of association with others who have habits already

and who show their habits in the treatment which converts a blind

physical discharge into a significant anger.

After ignoring impulses for a long time in behalf of sensations, modern

psychology now tends to start out with an inventory and description of

instinctive activities. This is an undoubted improvement. But when it

tries to explain complicated events in personal and social life by

direct reference to these native powers, the explanation becomes hazy

and forced. It is like saying the flea and the elephant, the lichen and

the redwood, the timid hare and the ravening wolf, the plant with the

most inconspicuous blossom and the plant with the most glaring color are

alike products of natural selection. There may be a sense in which the

statement is true; but till we know the specific environing conditions

under which selection took place we really know nothing. And so we need

to know about the social conditions which have educated original

activities into definite and significant dispositions before we can

discuss the psychological element in society. This is the true meaning

of social psychology.

At some place on the globe, at some time, every kind of practice seems

to have been tolerated or even praised. How is the tremendous diversity

of institutions (including moral codes) to be accounted for? The native

stock of instincts is practically the same everywhere. Exaggerate as

much as we like the native differences of Patagonians and Greeks, Sioux

Indians and Hindoos, Bushmen and Chinese, their original differences

will bear no comparison to the amount of difference found in custom and

culture. Since such a diversity cannot be attributed to an original

identity, the development of native impulse must be stated in terms of

acquired habits, not the growth of customs in terms of instincts. The

wholesale human sacrifices of Peru and the tenderness of St. Francis,

the cruelties of pirates and the philanthropies of Howard, the practice

of Suttee and the cult of the Virgin, the war and peace dances of the

Comanches and the parliamentary institutions of the British, the

communism of the Southsea islander and the proprietary thrift of the

Yankee, the magic of the medicine man and the experiments of the chemist

in his laboratory, the non-resistance of Chinese and the aggressive

militarism of an imperial Prussia, monarchy by divine right and

government by the people; the countless diversity of habits suggested by

such a random list springs from practically the same capital-stock of

native instincts.

It would be pleasant if we could pick and choose those institutions

which we like and impute them to human nature, and the rest to some

devil; or those we like to our kind of human nature, and those we

dislike to the nature of despised foreigners on the ground they are not

really "native" at all. It would appear to be simpler if we could point

to certain customs, saying that they are the unalloyed products of

certain instincts, while those other social arrangements are to be

attributed wholly to other impulses. But such methods are not feasible.

The same original fears, angers, loves and hates are hopelessly

entangled in the most opposite institutions. The thing we need to know

is how a native stock has been modified by interaction with different

environments.

Yet it goes without saying that original, unlearned activity has its

distinctive place and that an important one in conduct. Impulses are the

pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are

agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and

changing their quality. Consequently whenever we are concerned with

understanding social transition and flux or with projects for reform,

personal and collective, our study must go to analysis of native

tendencies. Interest in progress and reform is, indeed, the reason for

the present great development of scientific interest in primitive human

nature. If we inquire why men were so long blind to the existence of

powerful and varied instincts in human beings, the answer seems to be

found in the lack of a conception of orderly progress. It is fast

becoming incredible that psychologists disputed as to whether they

should choose between innate ideas and an empty, passive, wax-like mind.

For it seems as if a glance at a child would have revealed that the

truth lay in neither doctrine, so obvious is the surging of specific

native activities. But this obtuseness to facts was evidence of lack of

interest in what could be done with impulses, due, in turn, to lack of

interest in modifying existing institutions. It is no accident that men

became interested in the psychology of savages and babies when they

became interested in doing away with old institutions.

A combination of traditional individualism with the recent interest in

progress explains why the discovery of the scope and force of instincts

has led many psychologists to think of them as the fountain head of all

conduct, as occupying a place before instead of after that of habits.

The orthodox tradition in psychology is built upon isolation of

individuals from their surroundings. The soul or mind or consciousness

was thought of as self-contained and self-enclosed. Now in the career of

an individual if it is regarded as complete in itself instincts clearly

come before habits. Generalize this individualistic view, and we have an

assumption that all customs, all significant episodes in the life of

individuals can be carried directly back to the operation of instincts.

But, as we have already noted, if an individual be isolated in this

fashion, along with the fact of primacy of instinct we find also the

fact of death. The inchoate and scattered impulses of an infant do not

coordinate into serviceable powers except through social dependencies

and companionships. His impulses are merely starting points for

assimilation of the knowledge and skill of the more matured beings upon

whom he depends. They are tentacles sent out to gather that nutrition

from customs which will in time render the infant capable of independent

action. They are agencies for transfer of existing social power into

personal ability; they are means of reconstructive growth. Abandon an

impossible individualistic psychology, and we arrive at the fact that

native activities are organs of re-organization and re-adjustment. The

hen precedes the egg. But nevertheless this particular egg may be so

treated as to modify the future type of hen.

II

In the case of the young it is patent that impulses are highly flexible

starting points for activities which are diversified according to the

ways in which they are used. Any impulse may become organized into

almost any disposition according to the way it interacts with

surroundings. Fear may become abject cowardice, prudent caution,

reverence for superiors or respect for equals; an agency for credulous

swallowing of absurd superstitions or for wary scepticism. A man may be

chiefly afraid of the spirits of his ancestors, of officials, of

arousing the disapproval of his associates, of being deceived, of fresh

air, or of Bolshevism. The actual outcome depends upon how the impulse

of fear is interwoven with other impulses. This depends in turn upon the

outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social environment.

In a definite sense, then, a human society is always starting afresh. It

is always in process of renewing, and it endures only because of

renewal. We speak of the peoples of southern Europe as Latin peoples.

Their existing languages depart widely from one another and from the

Latin mother tongue. Yet there never was a day when this alteration of

speech was intentional or explicit. Persons always meant to reproduce

the speech they heard from their elders and supposed they were

succeeding. This fact may stand as a kind of symbol of the

reconstruction wrought in habits because of the fact that they can be

transmitted and be made to endure only through the medium of the crude

activities of the young or through contact with persons having different

habits.

For the most part, this continuous alteration has been unconscious and

unintended. Immature, undeveloped activity has succeeded in modifying

adult organized activity accidentally and surreptitiously. But with the

dawn of the idea of progressive betterment and an interest in new uses

of impulses, there has grown up some consciousness of the extent to

which a future new society of changed purposes and desires may be

created by a deliberate humane treatment of the impulses of youth. This

is the meaning of education; for a truly humane education consists in an

intelligent direction of native activities in the light of the

possibilities and necessities of the social situation. But for the most

part, adults have given training rather than education. An impatient,

premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of

adult habits of thought and affection has been desired. The combined

effect of love of power, timidity in the face of the novel and a

self-admiring complacency has been too strong to permit immature impulse

to exercise its re-organizing potentialities. The younger generation has

hardly even knocked frankly at the door of adult customs, much less been

invited in to rectify through better education the brutalities and

inequities established in adult habits. Each new generation has crept

blindly and furtively through such chance gaps as have happened to be

left open. Otherwise it has been modeled after the old.

We have already noted how original plasticity is warped and docility is

taken mean advantage of. It has been used to signify not capacity to

learn liberally and generously, but willingness to learn the customs of

adult associates, ability to learn just those special things which those

having power and authority wish to teach. Original modifiability has not

been given a fair chance to act as a trustee for a better human life. It

has been loaded with convention, biased by adult convenience. It has

been practically rendered into an equivalent of non-assertion of

originality, a pliant accommodation to the embodied opinions of others.

Consequently docility has been identified with imitativeness, instead of

with power to re-make old habits, to re-create. Plasticity and

originality have been opposed to each other. That the most precious part

of plasticity consists in ability to form habits of independent judgment

and of inventive initiation has been ignored. For it demands a more

complete and intense docility to form flexible easily re-adjusted habits

than it does to acquire those which rigidly copy the ways of others. In

short, among the native activities of the young are some that work

towards accommodation, assimilation, reproduction, and others that work

toward exploration, discovery and creation. But the weight of adult

custom has been thrown upon retaining and strengthening tendencies

toward conformity, and against those which make for variation and

independence. The habits of the growing person are jealously kept within

the limit of adult customs. The delightful originality of the child is

tamed. Worship of institutions and personages themselves lacking in

imaginative foresight, versatile observation and liberal thought, is

enforced.

Very early in life sets of mind are formed without attentive thought,

and these sets persist and control the mature mind. The child learns to

avoid the shock of unpleasant disagreement, to find the easy way out, to

appear to conform to customs which are wholly mysterious to him in order

to get his own way--that is to display some natural impulse without

exciting the unfavorable notice of those in authority. Adults distrust

the intelligence which a child has while making upon him demands for a

kind of conduct that requires a high order of intelligence, if it is to

be intelligent at all. The inconsistency is reconciled by instilling in

him "moral" habits which have a maximum of emotional empressment and

adamantine hold with a minimum of understanding. These habitudes, deeply

engrained before thought is awake and even before the day of experiences

which can later be recalled, govern conscious later thought. They are

usually deepest and most unget-at-able just where critical thought is

most needed--in morals, religion and politics. These "infantalisms"

account for the mass of irrationalities that prevail among men of

otherwise rational tastes. These personal "hang-overs" are the cause of

what the student of culture calls survivals. But unfortunately these

survivals are much more numerous and pervasive than the anthropologist

and historian are wont to admit. To list them would perhaps oust one

from "respectable" society.

And yet the intimation never wholly deserts us that there is in the

unformed activities of childhood and youth the possibilities of a better

life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This

dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood. For

with all its extravagancies and uncertainties, its effusions and

reticences, it remains a standing proof of a life wherein growth is

normal not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where

habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrinkage. Habit and

impulse may war with each other, but it is a combat between the habits

of adults and the impulses of the young, and not, as with the adult, a

civil warfare whereby personality is rent asunder. Our usual measure for

the "goodness" of children is the amount of trouble they make for

grownups, which means of course the amount they deviate from adult

habits and expectations. Yet by way of expiation we envy children their

love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting the last drop of

significance from each situation, their vital seriousness in things that

to us are outworn.

We compensate for the harshness and monotony of our present insistence

upon formed habits by imagining a future heaven in which we too shall

respond freshly and generously to each incident of life. In consequence

of our divided attitude, our ideals are self-contradictory. On the one

hand, we dream of an attained perfection, an ultimate static goal, in

which effort shall cease, and desire and execution be once and for all

in complete equilibrium. We wish for a character which shall be

steadfast, and we then conceive this desired faithfulness as something

immutable, a character exactly the same yesterday, today and forever.

But we also have a sneaking sympathy for the courage of an Emerson in

declaring that consistency should be thrown to the winds when it stands

between us and the opportunities of present life. We reach out to the

opposite extreme of our ideal of fixity, and under the guise of a return

to nature dream of a romantic freedom, in which _all_ life is plastic to

impulse, a continual source of improvised spontaneities and novel

inspirations. We rebel against all organization and all stability. If

modern thought and sentiment is to escape from this division in its

ideals, it must be through utilizing released impulse as an agent of

steady reorganization of custom and institutions.

While childhood is the conspicuous proof of the renewing of habit

rendered possible by impulse, the latter never wholly ceases to play its

refreshing rôle in adult life. If it did, life would petrify, society

stagnate. Instinctive reactions are sometimes too intense to be woven

into a smooth pattern of habits. Under ordinary circumstances they

appear to be tamed to obey their master, custom. But extraordinary

crises release them and they show by wild violent energy how superficial

is the control of routine. The saying that civilization is only skin

deep, that a savage persists beneath the clothes of a civilized man, is

the common acknowledgment of this fact. At critical moments of unusual

stimuli the emotional outbreak and rush of instincts dominating all

activity show how superficial is the modification which a rigid habit

has been able to effect.

When we face this fact in its general significance, we confront one of

the ominous aspects of the history of man. We realize how little the

progress of man has been the product of intelligent guidance, how

largely it has been a by-product of accidental upheavals, even though by

an apologetic interest in behalf of some privileged institution we later

transmute chance into providence. We have depended upon the clash of

war, the stress of revolution, the emergence of heroic individuals, the

impact of migrations generated by war and famine, the incoming of

barbarians, to change established institutions. Instead of constantly

utilizing unused impulse to effect continuous reconstruction, we have

waited till an accumulation of stresses suddenly breaks through the

dikes of custom.

It is often supposed that as old persons die, so must old peoples. There

are many facts in history to support the belief. Decadence and

degeneration seems to be the rule as age increases. An irruption of some

uncivilized horde has then provided new blood and fresh life--so much so

that history has been defined as a process of rebarbarization. In truth

the analogy between a person and a nation with respect to senescence and

death is defective. A nation is always renewed by the death of its old

constituents and the birth of those who are as young and fresh as ever

were any individuals in the hey-day of the nation's glory. Not the

nation but its customs get old. Its institutions petrify into rigidity;

there is social arterial sclerosis. Then some people not overburdened

with elaborate and stiff habits take up and carry on the moving process

of life. The stock of fresh peoples is, however, approaching exhaustion.

It is not safe to rely upon this expensive method of renewing

civilization. We need to discover how to rejuvenate it from within. A

normal perpetuation becomes a fact in the degree in which impulse is

released and habit is plastic to the transforming touch of impulse. When

customs are flexible and youth is educated as youth and not as premature

adulthood, no nation grows old.

There always exists a goodly store of non-functioning impulses which may

be drawn upon. Their manifestation and utilization is called conversion

or regeneration when it comes suddenly. But they may be drawn upon

continuously and moderately. Then we call it learning or educative

growth. Rigid custom signifies not that there are no such impulses but

that they are not organically taken advantage of. As matter of fact, the

stiffer and the more encrusted the customs, the larger is the number of

instinctive activities that find no regular outlet and that accordingly

merely await a chance to get an irregular, uncoordinated manifestation.

Routine habits never take up all the slack. They apply only where

conditions remain the same or recur in uniform ways. They do not fit the

unusual and novel.

Consequently rigid moral codes that attempt to lay down definite

injunctions and prohibitions for every occasion in life turn out in fact

loose and slack. Stretch ten commandments or any other number as far as

you will by ingenious exegesis, yet acts unprovided for by them will

occur. No elaboration of statute law can forestall variant cases and the

need of interpretation _ad hoc_. Moral and legal schemes that attempt

the impossible in the way of definite formulation compensate for

explicit strictness in some lines by implicit looseness in others. The

only truly severe code is the one which foregoes codification, throwing

responsibility for judging each case upon the agents concerned, imposing

upon them the burden of discovery and adaptation.

The relation which actually exists between undirected instinct and

over-organized custom is illustrated in the two views that are current

about savage life. The popular view looks at the savage as a wild man;

as one who knows no controlling principles or rules of action, who

freely follows his own impulse, whim or desire whenever it seizes him

and wherever it takes him. Anthropologists are given to the opposed

notion. They view savages as bondsmen to custom. They note the network

of regulations that order his risings-up and his sittings-down, his

goings-out and his comings-in. They conclude that in comparison with

civilized man the savage is a slave, governed by many inflexible tribal

habitudes in conduct and ideas.

The truth about savage life lies in a combination of these two

conceptions. Where customs exist they are of one pattern and binding on

personal sentiment and thought to a degree unknown in civilized life.

But since they cannot possibly exist with respect to all the changing

detail of daily life, whatever is left uncovered by custom is free from

regulation. It is therefore left to appetite and momentary circumstance.

Thus enslavement to custom and license of impulse exist side by side.

Strict conformity and unrestrained wildness intensify each other. This

picture of life shows us in an exaggerated form the psychology current

in civilized life whenever customs harden and hold individuals enmeshed.

Within civilization, the savage still exists. He is known in his degree

by oscillation between loose indulgence and stiff habit.

Impulse in short brings with itself the possibility but not the

assurance of a steady reorganization of habits to meet new elements in

new situations. The moral problem in child and adult alike as regards

impulse and instinct is to utilize them for formation of new habits, or

what is the same thing, the modification of an old habit so that it may

be adequately serviceable under novel conditions. The place of impulse

in conduct as a pivot of re-adjustment, re-organization, in habits may

be defined as follows: On one side, it is marked off from the territory

of arrested and encrusted habits. On the other side, it is demarcated

from the region in which impulse is a law unto itself.[5] Generalizing

these distinctions, a valid moral theory contrasts with all those

theories which set up static goals (even when they are called

perfection), and with those theories which idealize raw impulse and find

in its spontaneities an adequate mode of human freedom. Impulse is a

source, an indispensable source, of liberation; but only as it is

employed in giving habits pertinence and freshness does it liberate

power.

[5] The use of the words instinct and impulse as practical

equivalents is intentional, even though it may grieve

critical readers. The word instinct taken alone is still too

laden with the older notion that an instinct is always

definitely organized and adapted--which for the most part is

just what it is not in human beings. The word impulse

suggests something primitive, yet loose, undirected, initial.

Man can progress as beasts cannot, precisely because he has

so many 'instincts' that they cut across one another, so that

most serviceable actions must be _learned_. In learning

habits it is possible for man to learn the habit of learning.

Then betterment becomes a conscious principle of life.

III

Incidentally we have touched upon a most far-reaching problem: The

alterability of human nature. Early reformers, following John Locke,

were inclined to minimize the significance of native activities, and to

emphasize the possibilities inherent in practice and habit-acquisition.

There was a political slant to this denial of the native and a priori,

this magnifying of the accomplishments of acquired experience. It held

out a prospect of continuous development, of improvement without end.

Thus writers like Helvetius made the idea of the complete malleability

of a human nature which originally is wholly empty and passive, the

basis for asserting the omnipotence of education to shape human society,

and the ground of proclaiming the infinite perfectibility of mankind.

Wary, experienced men of the world have always been sceptical of schemes

of unlimited improvement. They tend to regard plans for social change

with an eye of suspicion. They find in them evidences of the proneness

of youth to illusion, or of incapacity on the part of those who have

grown old to learn anything from experience. This type of conservative

has thought to find in the doctrine of native instincts a scientific

support for asserting the practical unalterability of human nature.

Circumstances may change, but human nature remains from age to age the

same. Heredity is more potent than environment, and human heredity is

untouched by human intent. Effort for a serious alteration of human

institutions is utopian. As things have been so they will be. The more

they change the more they remain the same.

Curiously enough both parties rest their case upon just the factor which

when it is analyzed weakens their respective conclusions. That is to

say, the radical reformer rests his contention in behalf of easy and

rapid change upon the psychology of habits, of institutions in shaping

raw nature, and the conservative grounds his counter-assertion upon the

psychology of instincts. As matter of fact, it is precisely custom which

has greatest inertia, which is least susceptible of alteration; while

instincts are most readily modifiable through use, most subject to

educative direction. The conservative who begs scientific support from

the psychology of instincts is the victim of an outgrown psychology

which derived its notion of instinct from an exaggeration of the fixity

and certainty of the operation of instincts among the lower animals. He

is a victim of a popular zoology of the bird, bee and beaver, which was

largely framed to the greater glory of God. He is ignorant that

instincts in the animals are less infallible and definite than is

supposed, and also that the human being differs from the lower animals

in precisely the fact that his native activities lack the complex

ready-made organization of the animals' original abilities.

But the short-cut revolutionist fails to realize the full force of the

things about which he talks most, namely institutions as embodied

habits. Any one with knowledge of the stability and force of habit will

hesitate to propose or prophesy rapid and sweeping social changes. A

social revolution may effect abrupt and deep alterations in external

customs, in legal and political institutions. But the habits that are

behind these institutions and that have, willy-nilly, been shaped by

objective conditions, the habits of thought and feeling, are not so

easily modified. They persist and insensibly assimilate to themselves

the outer innovations--much as American judges nullify the intended

changes of statute law by interpreting legislation in the light of

common law. The force of lag in human life is enormous.

Actual social change is never so great as is apparent change. Ways of

belief, of expectation, of judgment and attendant emotional dispositions

of like and dislike, are not easily modified after they have once taken

shape. Political and legal institutions may be altered, even abolished;

but the bulk of popular thought which has been shaped to their pattern

persists. This is why glowing predictions of the immediate coming of a

social millennium terminate so uniformly in disappointment, which gives

point to the standing suspicion of the cynical conservative about

radical changes. Habits of thought outlive modifications in habits of

overt action. The former are vital, the latter, without the sustaining

life of the former, are muscular tricks. Consequently as a rule the

moral effects of even great political revolutions, after a few years of

outwardly conspicuous alterations, do not show themselves till after the

lapse of years. A new generation must come upon the scene whose habits

of mind have been formed under the new conditions. There is pith in the

saying that important reforms cannot take real effect until after a

number of influential persons have died. Where general and enduring

moral changes do accompany an external revolution it is because

appropriate habits of thought have previously been insensibly matured.

The external change merely registers the removal of an external

superficial barrier to the operation of existing intellectual

tendencies.

Those who argue that social and moral reform is impossible on the ground

that the Old Adam of human nature remains forever the same, attribute

however to native activities the permanence and inertia that in truth

belong only to acquired customs. To Aristotle slavery was rooted in

aboriginal human nature. Native distinctions of quality exist such that

some persons are by nature gifted with power to plan, command and

supervise, and others possess merely capacity to obey and execute. Hence

slavery is natural and inevitable. There is error in supposing that

because domestic and chattel slavery has been legally abolished,

therefore slavery as conceived by Aristotle has disappeared. But matters

have at least progressed to a point where it is clear that slavery is a

social state not a psychological necessity. Nevertheless the worldlywise

Aristotles of today assert that the institutions of war and the present

wage-system are so grounded in immutable human nature that effort to

change them is foolish.

Like Greek slavery or feudal serfdom, war and the existing economic

regime are social patterns woven out of the stuff of instinctive

activities. Native human nature supplies the raw materials, but custom

furnishes the machinery and the designs. War would not be possible

without anger, pugnacity, rivalry, self-display, and such like native

tendencies. Activity inheres in them and will persist under every

condition of life. To imagine they can be eradicated is like supposing

that society can go on without eating and without union of the sexes.

But to fancy that they must eventuate in war is as if a savage were to

believe that because he uses fibers having fixed natural properties in

order to weave baskets, therefore his immemorial tribal patterns are

also natural necessities and immutable forms.

From a humane standpoint our study of history is still all too

primitive. It is possible to study a multitude of histories, and yet

permit history, the record of the transitions and transformations of

human activities, to escape us. Taking history in separate doses of this

country and that, we take it as a succession of isolated finalities,

each one in due season giving way to another, as supernumeraries succeed

one another in a march across the stage. We thus miss the fact of

history and also its lesson; the diversity of institutional forms and

customs which the same human nature may produce and employ. An infantile

logic, now happily expelled from physical science, taught that opium put

men to sleep because of its dormitive potency. We follow the same logic

in social matters when we believe that war exists because of bellicose

instincts; or that a particular economic regime is necessary because of

acquisitive and competitive impulses which must find expression.

Pugnacity and fear are no more native than are pity and sympathy. The

important thing morally is the way these native tendencies interact, for

their interaction may give a chemical transformation not a mechanical

combination. Similarly, no social institution stands alone as a product

of one dominant force. It is a phenomenon or function of a multitude of

social factors in their mutual inhibitions and reinforcements. If we

follow an infantile logic we shall reduplicate the unity of result in an

assumption of unity of force behind it--as men once did with natural

events employing teleology as an exhibition of causal efficiency. We

thus take the same social custom twice over: once as an existing fact

and then as an original force which produced the fact, and utter sage

platitudes about the unalterable workings of human nature or of race. As

we account for war by pugnacity, for the capitalistic system by the

necessity of an incentive of gain to stir ambition and effort, so we

account for Greece by power of esthetic observation, Rome by

administrative ability, the middle ages by interest in religion and so

on. We have constructed an elaborate political zoology as mythological

and not nearly as poetic as the other zoology of phoenixes,

griffins and unicorns. Native racial spirit, the spirit of the people or

of the time, national destiny are familiar figures in this social zoo.

As names for effects, for existing customs, they are sometimes useful.

As names for explanatory forces they work havoc with intelligence.

An immense debt is due William James for the mere title of his essay:

The Moral Equivalents of War. It reveals with a flash of light the true

psychology. Clans, tribes, races, cities, empires, nations, states have

made war. The argument that this fact proves an ineradicable belligerent

instinct which makes war forever inevitable is much more respectable

than many arguments about the immutability of this and that social

tradition. For it has the weight of a certain empirical generality back

of it. Yet the suggestion of an _equivalent_ for war calls attention to

the medley of impulses which are casually bunched together under the

caption of belligerent impulse; and it calls attention to the fact that

the elements of this medley may be woven together into many differing

types of activity, some of which may function the native impulses in

much better ways than war has ever done.

Pugnacity, rivalry, vainglory, love of booty, fear, suspicion, anger,

desire for freedom from the conventions and restrictions of peace, love

of power and hatred of oppression, opportunity for novel displays, love

of home and soil, attachment to one's people and to the altar and the

hearth, courage, loyalty, opportunity to make a name, money or a career,

affection, piety to ancestors and ancestral gods--all of these things

and many more make up the war-like force. To suppose there is some one

unchanging native force which generates war is as naive as the usual

assumption that our enemy is actuated solely by the meaner of the

tendencies named and we only by the nobler. In earlier days there was

something more than a verbal connection between pugnacity and fighting;

anger and fear moved promptly through the fists. But between a loosely

organized pugilism and the highly organized warfare of today there

intervenes a long economic, scientific and political history. Social

conditions rather than an old and unchangeable Adam have generated wars;

the ineradicable impulses that are utilized in them are capable of being

drafted into many other channels. The century that has witnessed the

triumph of the scientific doctrine of the convertibility of natural

energies ought not to balk at the lesser miracle of social equivalences

and substitutes.

It is likely that if Mr. James had witnessed the world war, he would

have modified his mode of treatment. So many new transformations entered

into the war, that the war seems to prove that though an equivalent has

not been found for war, the psychological forces traditionally

associated with it have already undergone profound changes. We may take

the Iliad as a classic expression of war's traditional psychology as

well as the source of the literary tradition regarding its motives and

glories. But where are Helen, Hector and Achilles in modern warfare? The

activities that evoke and incorporate a war are no longer personal love,

love of glory, or the soldier's love of his own privately amassed booty,

but are of a collective, prosaic political and economic nature.

Universal conscription, the general mobilization of all agricultural and

industrial forces of the folk not engaged in the trenches, the

application of every conceivable scientific and mechanical device, the

mass movements of soldiery regulated from a common center by a

depersonalized general staff: these factors relegate the traditional

psychological apparatus of war to a now remote antiquity. The motives

once appealed to are out of date; they do not now induce war. They

simply are played upon after war has been brought into existence in

order to keep the common soldiers keyed up to their task. The more

horrible a depersonalized scientific mass war becomes, the more

necessary it is to find universal ideal motives to justify it. Love of

Helen of Troy has become a burning love for all humanity, and hatred of

the foe symbolizes a hatred of all the unrighteousness and injustice and

oppression which he embodies. The more prosaic the actual causes, the

more necessary is it to find glowingly sublime motives.

Such considerations hardly prove that war is to be abolished at some

future date. But they destroy that argument for its necessary

continuance which is based on the immutability of specified forces in

original human nature. Already the forces that once caused wars have

found other outlets for themselves; while new provocations, based on new

economic and political conditions, have come into being. War is thus

seen to be a function of social institutions, not of what is natively

fixed in human constitution. The last great war has not, it must be

confessed, made the problem of finding social equivalents simpler and

easier. It is now naive to attribute war to specific isolable human

impulses for which separate channels of expression may be found, while

the rest of life is left to go on about the same. A general social

re-organization is needed which will redistribute forces, immunize,

divert and nullify. Hinton was doubtless right when he wrote that the

only way to abolish war was to make peace heroic. It now appears that

the heroic emotions are not anything which may be specialized in a

side-line, so that the war-impulses may find a sublimation in special

practices and occupations. They have to get an outlet in all the tasks

of peace.

The argument for the abiding necessity of war turns out, accordingly, to

have this much value. It makes us wisely suspicious of all cheap and

easy equivalencies. It convinces us of the folly of striving to

eliminate war by agencies which leave other institutions of society

pretty much unchanged. History does not prove the inevitability of war,

but it does prove that customs and institutions which organize native

powers into certain patterns in politics and economics will also

generate the war-pattern. The problem of war is difficult because it is

serious. It is none other than the wider problem of the effective

moralizing or humanizing of native impulses in times of peace.

The case of economic institutions is as suggestive as that of war. The

present system is indeed much more recent and more local than is the

institution of war. But no system has ever as yet existed which did not

in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the

advantage of others. And it is argued that this trait is unassailable

because it flows from the inherent, immutable qualities of human nature.

It is argued, for example, that economic inferiorities and disabilities

are incidents of an institution of private property which flows from an

original proprietary instinct; it is contended they spring from a

competitive struggle for wealth which in turn flows from the absolute

need of profit as an inducement to industry. The pleas are worth

examination for the light they throw upon the place of impulses in

organized conduct.

No unprejudiced observer will lightly deny the existence of an original

tendency to assimilate objects and events to the self, to make them part

of the "me." We may even admit that the "me" cannot exist without the

"mine." The self gets solidity and form through an appropriation of

things which identifies them with whatever we call myself. Even a

workman in a modern factory where depersonalization is extreme gets to

have "his" machine and is perturbed at a change. Possession shapes and

consolidates the "I" of philosophers. "I own, therefore I am" expresses

a truer psychology than the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." A man's

deeds are imputed to him as their owner, not merely as their creator.

That he cannot disown them when the moment of their occurrence passes is

the root of responsibility, moral as well as legal.

But these same considerations evince the versatility of possessive

activity. My worldly goods, my good name, my friends, my honor and shame

all depend upon a possessive tendency. The need for appropriation has

had to be satisfied; but only a calloused imagination fancies that the

institution of private property as it exists A. D. 1921 is the sole or

the indispensable means of its realization. Every gallant life is an

experiment in different ways of fulfilling it. It expends itself in

predatory aggression, in forming friendships, in seeking fame, in

literary creation, in scientific production. In the face of this

elasticity, it requires an arrogant ignorance to take the existing

complex system of stocks and bonds, of wills and inheritance, a system

supported at every point by manifold legal and political arrangements,

and treat it as the sole legitimate and baptized child of an instinct of

appropriation. Sometimes, even now, a man most accentuates the fact of

ownership when he gives something away; use, consumption, is the normal

end of possession. We can conceive a state of things in which the

proprietary impulse would get full satisfaction by holding goods as mine

in just the degree in which they were visibly administered for a benefit

in which a corporate community shared.

Does the case stand otherwise with the other psychological principle

appealed to, namely, the need of an incentive of personal profit to keep

men engaged in useful work? We need not content ourselves with pointing

out the elasticity of the idea of gain, and possible equivalences for

pecuniary gain, and the possibility of a state of affairs in which only

those things would be counted personal gains which profit a group. It

will advance the discussion if we instead subject to analysis the whole

conception of incentive and motive.

There is doubtless some sense in saying that every conscious act has an

incentive or motive. But this sense is as truistic as that of the not

dissimilar saying that every event has a cause. Neither statement throws

any light on any particular occurrence. It is at most a maxim which

advises us to search for some other fact with which the one in question

may be correlated. Those who attempt to defend the necessity of existing

economic institutions as manifestations of human nature convert this

suggestion of a concrete inquiry into a generalized truth and hence into

a definitive falsity. They take the saying to mean that nobody would do

anything, or at least anything of use to others, without a prospect of

some tangible reward. And beneath this false proposition there is

another assumption still more monstrous, namely, that man exists

naturally in a state of rest so that he requires some external force to

set him into action.

The idea of a thing intrinsically wholly inert in the sense of

absolutely passive is expelled from physics and has taken refuge in the

psychology of current economics. In truth man acts anyway, he can't help

acting. In every fundamental sense it is false that a man requires a

motive to make him do something. To a healthy man inaction is the

greatest of woes. Any one who observes children knows that while periods

of rest are natural, laziness is an acquired vice--or virtue. While a

man is awake he will do something, if only to build castles in the air.

If we like the form of words we may say that a man eats only because he

is "moved" by hunger. The statement is nevertheless mere tautology. For

what does hunger mean except that one of the things which man does

naturally, instinctively, is to search for food--that his activity

naturally turns that way? Hunger primarily names an act or active

process not a motive to an act. It is an act if we take it grossly, like

a babe's blind hunt for the mother's breast; it is an activity if we

take it minutely as a chemico-physiological occurrence.

The whole concept of motives is in truth extra-psychological. It is an

outcome of the attempt of men to influence human action, first that of

others, then of a man to influence his own behavior. No sensible person

thinks of attributing the acts of an animal or an idiot to a motive. We

call a biting dog ugly, but we don't look for his motive in biting. If

however we were able to direct the dog's action by inducing him to

reflect upon his acts, we should at once become interested in the dog's

motives for acting as he does, and should endeavor to get him interested

in the same subject. It is absurd to ask what induces a man to activity

generally speaking. He is an active being and that is all there is to be

said on that score. But when we want to get him to act in this specific

way rather than in that, when we want to direct his activity that is to

say in a specified channel, then the question of motive is pertinent. A

motive is then that element in the total complex of a man's activity

which, if it can be sufficiently stimulated, will result in an act

having specified consequences. And part of the process of intensifying

(or reducing) certain elements in the total activity and thus regulating

actual consequence is to impute these elements to a person as his

actuating motives.

A child naturally grabs food. But he does it in our presence. His manner

is socially displeasing and we attribute to his act, up to this time

wholly innocent, the motive of greed or selfishness. Greediness simply

means the quality of his act as socially observed and disapproved. But

by attributing it to him as his motive for acting in the disapproved

way, we induce him to refrain. We analyze his total act and call his

attention to an obnoxious element in its outcome. A child with equal

spontaneity, or thoughtlessness, gives way to others. We point out to

him with approval that he acted considerately, generously. And this

quality of action when noted and encouraged becomes a reinforcing

stimulus of that factor which will induce similar acts in the future. An

element in an act viewed as a tendency to produce such and such

consequences is a motive. A motive does not exist prior to an act and

produce it. It is an act _plus_ a judgment upon some element of it, the

judgment being made in the light of the consequences of the act.

At first, as was said, others characterize an act with favorable or

condign qualities which they impute to an agent's character. They react

in this fashion in order to encourage him in future acts of the same

sort, or in order to dissuade him--in short to build or destroy a habit.

This characterization is part of the technique of influencing the

development of character and conduct. It is a refinement of the ordinary

reactions of praise and blame. After a time and to some extent, a person

teaches himself to think of the results of acting in this way or that

before he acts. He recalls that if he acts this way or that some

observer, real or imaginary, will attribute to him noble or mean

disposition, virtuous or vicious motive. Thus he learns to influence his

own conduct. An inchoate activity taken in this forward-looking

reference to results, especially results of approbation and

condemnation, constitutes a motive. Instead then of saying that a man

requires a motive in order to induce him to act, we should say that when

a man is going to act he needs to know _what_ he is going to do--what

the quality of his act is in terms of consequences to follow. In order

to act properly he needs to view his act as others view it; namely, as a

manifestation of a character or will which is good or bad according as

it is bent upon specific things which are desirable or obnoxious. There

is no call to furnish a man with incentives to activity in general. But

there is every need to induce him to guide his own action by an

intelligent perception of its results. For in the long run this is the

most effective way of influencing activity to take this desirable

direction rather than that objectionable one.

A motive in short is simply an impulse viewed as a constituent in a

habit, a factor in a disposition. In general its meaning is simple. But

in fact motives are as numerous as are original impulsive activities

multiplied by the diversified consequences they produce as they operate

under diverse conditions. How then does it come about that current

economic psychology has so tremendously oversimplified the situation?

Why does it recognize but one type of motive, that which concerns

personal gain. Of course part of the answer is to be found in the

natural tendency in all sciences toward a substitution of artificial

conceptual simplifications for the tangles of concrete empirical facts.

But the significant part of the answer has to do with the social

conditions under which work is done, conditions which are such as to put

an unnatural emphasis upon the prospect of reward. It exemplifies again

our leading proposition that social customs are not direct and necessary

consequences of specific impulses, but that social institutions and

expectations shape and crystallize impulses into dominant habits.

The social peculiarity which explains the emphasis put upon profit as an

inducement to productive serviceable work stands out in high relief in

the identification of work with labor. For labor means in economic

theory something painful, something so onerously disagreeable or

"costly" that every individual avoids it if he can, and engages in it

only because of the promise of an overbalancing gain. Thus the question

we are invited to consider is what the social condition is which makes

productive work uninteresting and toilsome. Why is the psychology of the

industrialist so different from that of inventor, explorer, artist,

sportsman, scientific investigator, physician, teacher? For the latter

we do not assert that activity is such a burdensome sacrifice that it is

engaged in only because men are bribed to act by hope of reward or are

coerced by fear of loss.

The social conditions under which "labor" is undertaken have become so

uncongenial to human nature that it is not undertaken because of

intrinsic meaning. It is carried on under conditions which render it

immediately irksome. The alleged need of an incentive to stir men out of

quiescent inertness is the need of an incentive powerful enough to

overcome contrary stimuli which proceed from the social conditions.

Circumstances of productive service now shear away direct satisfaction

from those engaging in it. A real and important fact is thus contained

in current economic psychology, but it is a fact about existing

industrial conditions and not a fact about native, original activity.

It is "natural" for activity to be agreeable. It tends to find

fulfilment, and finding an outlet is itself satisfactory, for it marks

partial accomplishment. If productive activity has become so inherently

unsatisfactory that men have to be artificially induced to engage in it,

this fact is ample proof that the conditions under which work is carried

on balk the complex of activities instead of promoting them, irritate

and frustrate natural tendencies instead of carrying them forward to

fruition. Work then becomes labor, the consequence of some aboriginal

curse which forces man to do what he would not do if he could help it,

the outcome of some original sin which excluded man from a paradise in

which desire was satisfied without industry, compelling him to pay for

the means of livelihood with the sweat of his brow. From which it

follows naturally that Paradise Regained means the accumulation of

investments such that a man can live upon their return without labor.

There is, we repeat, too much truth in this picture. But it is not a

truth concerning original human nature and activity. It concerns the

form human impulses have taken under the influence of a specific social

environment. If there are difficulties in the way of social

alteration--as there certainly are--they do not lie in an original

aversion of human nature to serviceable action, but in the historic

conditions which have differentiated the work of the laborer for wage

from that of the artist, adventurer, sportsman, soldier, administrator

and speculator.

IV

War and the existing economic regime have not been discussed primarily

on their own account. They are crucial cases of the relation existing

between original impulse and acquired habit. They are so fraught with

evil consequences that any one who is disposed can heap up criticisms

without end. Nevertheless they persist. This persistence constitutes the

case for the conservative who argues that such institutions are rooted

in an unalterable human nature. A truer psychology locates the

difficulty elsewhere. It shows that the trouble lies in the inertness of

established habit. No matter how accidental and irrational the

circumstances of its origin, no matter how different the conditions

which now exist to those under which the habit was formed, the latter

persists until the environment obstinately rejects it. Habits once

formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native

stock of activities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select,

concentrate and organize the latter into their own likeness. They create

out of the formless void of impulses a world made in their own image.

Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.

Recognition of the correct psychology locates the problem but does not

guarantee its solution. Indeed, at first sight it seems to indicate that

every attempt to solve the problem and secure fundamental

reorganizations is caught in a vicious circle. For the direction of

native activity depends upon acquired habits, and yet acquired habits

can be modified only by redirection of impulses. Existing institutions

impose their stamp, their superscription, upon impulse and instinct.

They embody the modifications the latter have undergone. How then can we

get leverage for changing institutions? How shall impulse exercise that

re-adjusting office which has been claimed for it? Shall we not have to

depend in the future as in the past upon upheaval and accident to

dislocate customs so as to release impulses to serve as points of

departure for new habits?

The existing psychology of the industrial worker for example is slack,

irresponsible, combining a maximum of mechanical routine with a maximum

of explosive, unregulated impulsiveness. These things have been bred by

the existing economic system. But they exist, and are formidable

obstacles to social change. We cannot breed in men the desire to get

something for as nearly nothing as possible and in the end not pay the

price. We satisfy ourselves cheaply by preaching the charm of

productivity and by blaming the inherent selfishness of human nature,

and urging some great moral and religious revival. The evils point in

reality to the necessity of a change in economic institutions, but

meantime they offer serious obstacles to the change. At the same time,

the existing economic system has enlisted in behalf of its own

perpetuity the managerial and the technological abilities which must

serve the cause of the laborer if he is to be emancipated. In the face

of these difficulties other persons seek an equally cheap satisfaction

in the thought of universal civil war and revolution.

Is there any way out of the vicious circle? In the first place, there

are possibilities resident in the education of the young which have

never yet been taken advantage of. The idea of universal education is as

yet hardly a century old, and it is still much more of an idea than a

fact, when we take into account the early age at which it terminates for

the mass. Also, thus far schooling has been largely utilized as a

convenient tool of the existing nationalistic and economic regimes.

Hence it is easy to point out defects and perversions in every existing

school system. It is easy for a critic to ridicule the religious

devotion to education which has characterized for example the American

republic. It is easy to represent it as zeal without knowledge,

fanatical faith apart from understanding. And yet the cold fact of the

situation is that the chief means of continuous, graded, economical

improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing the opportunities

of educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire.

The young are not as yet as subject to the full impact of established

customs. Their life of impulsive activity is vivid, flexible,

experimenting, curious. Adults have their habits formed, fixed, at least

comparatively. They are the subjects, not to say victims, of an

environment which they can directly change only by a maximum of effort

and disturbance. They may not be able to perceive clearly the needed

changes, or be willing to pay the price of effecting them. Yet they wish

a different life for the generation to come. In order to realize that

wish they may create a special environment whose main function is

education. In order that education of the young be efficacious in

inducing an improved society, it is not necessary for adults to have a

formulated definite ideal of some better state. An educational

enterprise conducted in this spirit would probably end merely in

substituting one rigidity for another. What is necessary is that habits

be formed which are more intelligent, more sensitively percipient, more

informed with foresight, more aware of what they are about, more direct

and sincere, more flexibly responsive than those now current. Then they

will meet their own problems and propose their own improvements.

Educative development of the young is not the only way in which the life

of impulse may be employed to effect social ameliorations, though it is

the least expensive and most orderly. No adult environment is all of one

piece. The more complex a culture is, the more certain it is to include

habits formed on differing, even conflicting patterns. Each custom may

be rigid, unintelligent in itself, and yet this rigidity may cause it to

wear upon others. The resulting attrition may release impulse for new

adventures. The present time is conspicuously a time of such internal

frictions and liberations. Social life seems chaotic, unorganized,

rather than too fixedly regimented. Political and legal institutions are

now inconsistent with the habits that dominate friendly intercourse,

science and art. Different institutions foster antagonistic impulses and

form contrary dispositions.

If we had to wait upon exhortations and unembodied "ideals" to effect

social alterations, we should indeed wait long. But the conflict of

patterns involved in institutions which are inharmonious with one

another is already producing great changes. The significant point is not

whether modifications shall continue to occur, but whether they shall be

characterized chiefly by uneasiness, discontent and blind antagonistic

struggles, or whether intelligent direction may modulate the harshness

of conflict, and turn the elements of disintegration into a constructive

synthesis. At all events, the social situation in "advanced" countries

is such as to impart an air of absurdity to our insistence upon the

rigidity of customs. There are plenty of persons to tell us that the

real trouble lies in lack of fixity of habit and principle; in departure

from immutable standards and structures constituted once for all. We are

told that we are suffering from an excess of instinct, and from laxity

of habit due to surrender to impulse as a law of life. The remedy is

said to be to return from contemporary fluidity to the stable and

spacious patterns of a classic antiquity that observed law and

proportion: for somehow antiquity is always classic. When instability,

uncertainty, erratic change are diffused throughout the situation, why

dwell upon the evils of fixed habit and the need of release of impulse

as an initiator of reorganizations? Why not rather condemn impulse and

exalt habits of reverencing order and fixed truth?

The question is natural, but the remedy suggested is futile. It is not

easy to exaggerate the extent to which we now pass from one kind of

nurture to another as we go from business to church, from science to the

newspaper, from business to art, from companionship to politics, from

home to school. An individual is now subjected to many conflicting

schemes of education. Hence habits are divided against one another,

personality is disrupted, the scheme of conduct is confused and

disintegrated. But the remedy lies in the development of a new morale

which can be attained only as released impulses are intelligently

employed to form harmonious habits adapted to one another in a new

situation. A laxity due to decadence of old habits cannot be corrected

by exhortations to restore old habits in their former rigidity. Even

though it were abstractly desirable it is impossible. And it is not

desirable because the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief

cause of their decay and disintegration. Plaintive lamentations at the

prevalence of change and abstract appeals for restoration of senile

authority are signs of personal feebleness, of inability to cope with

change. It is a "defense reaction."

V

We may sum up the discussion in a few generalized statements. In the

first place, it is unscientific to try to restrict original activities

to a definite number of sharply demarcated classes of instincts. And the

practical result of this attempt is injurious. To classify is, indeed,

as useful as it is natural. The indefinite multitude of particular and

changing events is met by the mind with acts of defining, inventorying

and listing, reducing to common heads and tying up in bunches. But these

acts like other intelligent acts are performed for a purpose, and the

accomplishment of purpose is their only justification. Speaking

generally, the purpose is to facilitate our dealings with unique

individuals and changing events. When we assume that our clefts and

bunches represent fixed separations and collections _in rerum natura_,

we obstruct rather than aid our transactions with things. We are guilty

of a presumption which nature promptly punishes. We are rendered

incompetent to deal effectively with the delicacies and novelties of

nature and life. Our thought is hard where facts are mobile; bunched and

chunky where events are fluid, dissolving.

The tendency to forget the office of distinctions and classifications,

and to take them as marking things in themselves, is the current fallacy

of scientific specialism. It is one of the conspicuous traits of

highbrowism, the essence of false abstractionism. This attitude which

once flourished in physical science now governs theorizing about human

nature. Man has been resolved into a definite collection of primary

instincts which may be numbered, catalogued and exhaustively described

one by one. Theorists differ only or chiefly as to their number and

ranking. Some say one, self-love; some two, egoism and altruism; some

three, greed, fear and glory; while today writers of a more empirical

turn run the number up to fifty and sixty. But in fact there are as many

specific reactions to differing stimulating conditions as there is time

for, and our lists are only classifications for a purpose.

One of the great evils of this artificial simplification is its

influence upon social science. Complicated provinces of life have been

assigned to the jurisdiction of some special instinct or group of

instincts, which has reigned despotically with the usual consequences of

despotism. Politics has replaced religion as the set of phenomena based

upon fear; or after having been the fruit of a special Aristotelian

political faculty, has become the necessary condition of restraining

man's self-seeking impulse. All sociological facts are disposed of in a

few fat volumes as products of imitation and invention, or of

cooperation and conflict. Ethics rest upon sympathy, pity, benevolence.

Economics is the science of phenomena due to one love and one

aversion--gain and labor. It is surprising that men can engage in these

enterprises without being reminded of their exact similarity to natural

science before scientific method was discovered in the seventeenth

century. Just now another simplification is current. All instincts go

back to the sexual, so that _cherchez la femme_ (under multitudinous

symbolic disguises) is the last word of science with respect to the

analysis of conduct.

Some sophisticated simplifications which once had great influence are

now chiefly matters of historic moment. Even so they are instructive.

They show how social conditions put a heavy load on certain tendencies,

so that in the end an acquired disposition is treated as if it were an

original, and almost the only original activity. Consider, for example,

the burden of causal power placed by Hobbes upon the reaction of fear.

To a man living with reasonable security and comfort today, Hobbes'

pervasive consciousness of fear seems like the idiosyncrasy of an

abnormally timid temperament. But a survey of the conditions of his own

time, of the disorders which bred general distrust and antagonism, which

led to brutal swashbuckling and disintegrating intrigue, puts the matter

on a different footing. The social situation conduced to fearfulness. As

an account of the psychology of the natural man his theory is unsound.

As a report of contemporary social conditions there is much to be said

for it.

Something of the same sort may be said regarding the emphasis of

eighteenth century moralists upon benevolence as the inclusive moral

spring to action, an emphasis represented in the nineteenth century by

Comte's exaltation of altruism. The load was excessive. But it testifies

to the growth of a new philanthropic spirit. With the breaking down of

feudal barriers and a consequent mingling of persons previously divided,

a sense of responsibility for the happiness of others, for the

mitigation of misery, grew up. Conditions were not ripe for its

translation into political action. Hence the importance attached to the

private disposition of voluntary benevolence.

If we venture into more ancient history, Plato's threefold division of

the human soul into a rational element, a spirited active one, and an

appetitive one, aiming at increase or gain, is immensely illuminating.

As is well known, Plato said that society is the human soul writ large.

In society he found three classes: the philosophic and scientific, the

soldier-citizenry, and the traders and artisans. Hence the

generalization as to the three dominating forces in human nature. Read

the other way around, we perceive that trade in his days appealed

especially to concupiscence, citizenship to a generous _élan_ of

self-forgetting loyalty, and scientific study to a disinterested love of

wisdom that seemed to be monopolized by a small isolated group. The

distinctions were not in truth projected from the breast of the natural

individual into society, but they were cultivated in classes of

individuals by force of social custom and expectation.

Now the prestige that once attached to the "instinct" of self-love has

not wholly vanished. The case is still worth examination. In its

"scientific" form, start was taken from an alleged instinct of

self-preservation, characteristic of man as well as of other animals.

From this seemingly innocuous assumption, a mythological psychology

burgeoned. Animals, including man, certainly perform many acts whose

consequence is to protect and preserve life. If their acts did not upon

the whole have this tendency, neither the individual or the species

would long endure. The acts that spring from life also in the main

conserve life. Such is the undoubted fact. What does the statement

amount to? Simply the truism that life is life, that life is a

continuing activity as long as it is life at all. But the self-love

school converted the fact that life tends to maintain life into a

separate and special force which somehow lies back of life and accounts

for its various acts. An animal exhibits in its life-activity a

multitude of acts of breathing, digesting, secreting, excreting, attack,

defense, search for food, etc., a multitude of specific responses to

specific stimulations of the environment. But mythology comes in and

attributes them all to a nisus for self-preservation. Thence it is but a

step to the idea that all conscious acts are prompted by self-love. This

premiss is then elaborated in ingenious schemes, often amusing when

animated by a cynical knowledge of the "world," tedious when of a

would-be logical nature, to prove that every act of man including his

apparent generosities is a variation played on the theme of

self-interest.

The fallacy is obvious. Because an animal cannot live except as it is

alive, except that is as its acts have the result of sustaining life, it

is concluded that all its acts are instigated by an impulse to

self-preservation. Since all acts affect the well-being of their agent

in one way or another, and since when a person becomes reflective he

prefers consequences in the way of weal to those of woe, therefore all

his acts are due to self-love. In actual substance, one statement says

that life is life; and the other says that a self is a self. One says

that special acts are acts of a living creature and the other that they

are acts of a self. In the biological statement the concrete diversity

between the acts of say a clam and of a dog are covered up by pointing

out that the acts of each tend to self-preservation, ignoring the

somewhat important fact that in one case it is the life of a clam and in

the other the life of a dog which is continued. In morals, the concrete

differences between a Jesus, a Peter, a John and a Judas are covered up

by the wise remark that after all they are all selves and all act as

selves. In every case, a result or "end" is treated as an actuating

cause.

The fallacy consists in transforming the (truistic) fact of acting _as_

a self into the fiction of acting always _for_ self. Every act,

truistically again, tends to a certain fulfilment or satisfaction of

some habit which is an undoubted element in the structure of character.

Each satisfaction is qualitatively what it is because of the disposition

fulfilled in the object attained, treachery or loyalty, mercy or

cruelty. But theory comes in and blankets the tremendous diversity in

the quality of the satisfactions which are experienced by pointing out

that they are all satisfactions. The harm done is then completed by

transforming this artificial unity of result into an original love of

satisfaction as the force that generates all acts alike. Because a Nero

and a Peabody both get satisfaction in acting as they do it is inferred

that the satisfaction of each is the same in quality, and that both were

actuated by love of the same objective. In reality the more we

concretely dwell upon the common fact of fulfilment, the more we realize

the difference in the kinds of selves fulfilled. In pointing out that

both the north and the south poles are poles we do not abolish the

difference of north from south; we accentuate it.