THE BASIC HUMAN ACTIVITIES
FOOD, SHELTER, AND SEX. Thus far our analysis has been confined
to the general types of human behavior. We have
found that all human activity is conditioned by a native
equipment consisting of certain more or less specific tendencies
to action, and that these may be modified into acquired
tendencies called "habits." We have found that through the
processes of reflection, through imaginative trial and error,
both of these may, within limits, be controlled. We must
now proceed to an inventory of those elements of our native
equipment which have an especial significance in social life.
In the first place, we must note the three great primary
drives of human action, the unlearned and native demands
for food, shelter, and sex gratification.[1] Although the last-named
does not display itself in human beings until a considerable
degree of maturity has been attained there is indubitable
evidence that it is an inborn and not an acquired reaction.
The practical utility of the first two is apparent; they are the
most essential features of the group of so-called self-preservative
instincts, among which may be grouped the natural
tendency to recover one's equilibrium and the instinct of
flight in the face of dangerous or threatening objects. The
utility of the sex instinct is racial rather than individual. The
instinctive satisfaction human beings find in sex gratification
is the natural guarantee of the continuance of the race.
[Footnote 1: The reader must be reminded that the simpler reflexes
involved in the use of the heart, lungs, intestines, and all the
internal organs, must be classed as part of man's native equipment.
They differ from those reactions commonly classed as instincts in
that they are simpler and stabler, that in their normal functioning
they never rise to consciousness, and that they are almost completely
beyond the individual's modification or control.]
In a general survey of this nature it IS impossible, as it is
unnecessary, to examine in detail the physiological elements
of the demand for food and shelter. It will suffice to point
out that the first two are the ultimate biological bases of a
large proportion of our economic activities. They are primary,
not in the sense that they are constantly conscious
motives to action, but that their fulfillment is prerequisite to
the continuance of any of the other activities of the organism.
Agriculture and manufacture, the complicated systems of
credit and exchange which human beings have devised, are,
for the most part, contrivances for the fulfillment of these
fundamental demands. With the complexity of civilization
new demands, of course, arise, but these fundamental necessities
are still the ultimate mainsprings of economic production.
The demand for sex gratification, because of its enormous
driving force and the emotional disturbances connected with
it, offers a peculiarly acute instance of the difficulties brought
about in the control of man's native endowment in his own
best interest. While the production of offspring is its chief
biological utility, satisfaction of the sex instinct itself is
stimulated in human beings quite apart from considerations of the
desirability or undesirability of offspring. Since the sex
instinct is at once so deep-rooted and intense a driving force in
human action, and its consequences of such crucial importance
to both those directly involved and to the group as a
whole, societies have, through law and custom and tradition,
built up elaborate codes for its control. In civilized society
the free operation of this instinct is checked in a thousand
ways. But, as in the case of other primitive motives to action,
the sex instinct, obvious as are the disasters of disease
and disorganization which follow as consequences of its
uncontrolled indulgence, cannot altogether be repressed.
It is generally recognized that in men and animals alike the sex
impulse is apt to manifest itself in very vigorous and sustained
efforts toward its natural end; and that in ourselves it may
determine very strong desires, in the control of which all the organized
forces of the developed personality, all our moral sentiments and
ideals, and all the restraining influences of religion, law, custom
and convention too often are confronted with a task beyond their
strength.[1]
[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, 11th ed., pp. 399-400.]
There is considerable agreement among students of the
subject that the emotional energies aroused in connection
with the sex instinct may be drained off into other channels,
and serve to quicken and sustain both artistic creation and
appreciation and social and religious enthusiasms of various
kinds. And the sex instinct, as we shall find in our discussion
of Racial Continuity (see p. 243) is the basis of the family.
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. The difference between sticks and stones
and living beings consists primarily in the fact that the latter
are positively active; the former are passively acted upon.
The stone will stay put, unless moved by some external agent,
but even the amoeba will do something to its environment.
It will stretch out pseudopodia to reach solid objects to which
to cling; it will attempt to return to these objects when dislodged;
it will actively absorb food. Higher up in the animal
scale, "Rats run about, smell, dig, or gnaw, without real reference
to the business in hand. In the same way Jack (a dog)
scrabbles and jumps, the kitten wanders and picks, the otter
slips about everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant
fumbles ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about."[2] "The
most casual notice of the activities of a young child reveals a
ceaseless display of exploring and testing activity. Objects
are sucked, fingered and thumped; drawn and pushed, handled
and thrown."[3]
[Footnote 2: Hobhouse: _Mind in Evolution_, p. 195.]
[Footnote 3 Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 31.]
When vitality is at its height in the waking period of a
young child, its environment is a succession of stimulations to
activity. Man's "innate tendency to fool" is notorious, a
tendency particularly noticeable in children. Objects are
responded to, not as means to ends, not with reference to their
use, but simply for the sheer satisfaction of manipulation.
Facial expressions, sounds, gestures, are made almost on any
provocation; they are the expressions of an abundant "physiological
uneasiness." The two-year-old is a mechanism that
simply must and will move about, make all kinds of superfluous
gestures and facial expressions, and random sounds, as
it were, just to get rid of its stored-up energy. Man's laziness
and inertia are not infrequently commented on by moralists,
but it is not laziness and inertia _per se_; certainly in normal
individuals in the temperate zone, to do _something_ most of their
waking time is a natural tendency and one intrinsically pleasant
to practice. That the tendency to be active should vary
in different individuals and at different times is, of course, as
important a fact as it is a familiar one. Some of the causes of
this variation will be noted in the succeeding.
In adult life for casual and random activity is substituted
activity directed by some end or purpose which determines
the responses called into play. Professional and business,
domestic and social enterprises and obligations take up most of
the adult's energy. The contrast between the play of the
child and the work of the adult is that in the case of the
former actions are done for their own sake; and in the latter
for some end. The child, we say, plays "for the fun of the
thing," the adult works for pay, for professional success, for
power, reputation, etc.
But even in the adult the desire for play powerfully persists.
Not all the grown-up's energy is absorbed in his work,
and even some types of work, like that of the poet or painter,
or the building-up of a great business organization, may be
intrinsically delightful and self-sufficient activity. Under the
conditions of modern industry, however, especially of machine
production, much--in many cases, most--of the activity
by which an individual earns his living, utilizes only some of
his native tendencies to act, while the working day does not,
under normal conditions, absorb all his energy. Whatever
vitality is not, therefore, absorbed in necessary work goes into
forms of purely gratuitous activity. Which form "play"
shall take in the adult depends on the degree to which certain
impulses are in him stronger than others, either by native
endowment or cultivation, and which impulses have not been
sufficiently utilized in him during the day's work. A man
musically gifted will find his recreation in some performance
on a musical instrument, let us say; on the other hand, if his
work is music, those impulses, strong though they be, that
make him a musician, will have been sufficiently exhausted in
the day's work to make some other activity a more satisfactory
recreation.
The relations between play and work can be better understood
by a consideration of the physiological importance of
variety in activity. A certain regular recurrence of response
may be pleasant, as in rowing or canoeing, or in listening to
the rhythms of poetry or music, but a prolonged repetition of
precisely the same stimulus or the same set of stimuli may
make responses dissatisfying to the degree of pain. Ideal
activity, biologically, would be one where every impulse was
just sufficiently frequently called upon to make response easy,
fluent, and satisfactory.
The reason "work" has traditionally come to be regarded
as unpleasant and "play" as pleasant is not because the former
is activity and the second is torpor. Leisure does not necessarily
mean laziness. Many a vacation, a camping party, a
walking expedition, is literally more strenuous than the work
an individual normally does. But work means human energy
expended for the sole purpose of accomplishing some end.
And an end involves the deliberate shutting-out of every
impulse which does not contribute to its fulfillment. A man
weeding a garden may tire of the weeding long before he is
really physically exhausted. One response is being repeatedly
made, while at the same time a dozen other impulses are
being stimulated. When Tom Sawyer, under the compulsion
of his aunt, is whitewashing a fence, it is shortly no fun for
him. But he can make other boys pay him apple-cores and
jackknives for the fun of wielding the brush.
What we call the feeling of boredom depends principally
upon the too repeated stimulation of one set of activities to
the exclusion of all others, the continuous presence of a kind of
stimulation to which we have been rendered unsusceptible, as,
for example, bad popular music to a cultivated musical taste,
or intricate chamber music to an uncultivated one. The
feeling of boredom may become physiologically acute, as in
the case, so frequent in machine production, of literally
monotonous or one-operation jobs. Long hours of labor at acts
calling out only one very simple response may have very serious
effects. In the first place, in the work itself, since repetitions
of one or one simple set of responses may impair speed
and accuracy. On the part of the worker, it promotes varying
degrees of stupefaction or irritation. Excesses of drink,
gambling, and dissipation among factory populations are
often traceable to this continual frustration of normal
instincts during working hours, followed by a violent search for
stimulation and relaxation after work is over. Under conditions
of machine production, the responses which the worker
must make are becoming increasingly simple and automatic.
Hence the problem of bringing variety into work and something
of the same vitality and spontaneity into industry that
goes into play and art is becoming serious and urgent.[1]
[Footnote 1: See Helen Marot: _Creative Impulse in Industry_.]
MENTAL ACTIVITY. Just as physical activity is a characteristic
of all living beings, so, from almost earliest infancy of
human beings, is mental activity. This does not mean that
individuals from their babyhood are continually solving problems.
Deliberation and reflection are simply the mature and
disciplined control of what goes on during all of our waking
hours--random play of the fancy, imagination. We are not
always controlling our thought, but so long as we are awake
something is, as we say, passing through our heads. Everything
that happens about us provokes some suggestion or idea.
"Day-dreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux
of casual and disconnected material that floats through our
minds in relaxed moments, are, in this random sense, _thinking_.
More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to
ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential
trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope."[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 2.]
This play of the imagination is most uncontrolled and
spontaneous in childhood, which is often characteristically
defined as the period of make-believe or fancy. It is this
capacity which enables the child to use chairs as locomotives,
sticks as rifles, and wheelbarrows as automobiles. As we
grow older we tend to discipline this vagrant dreaming, and to
draw only those suggestions from objects which tally with the
workaday world we live in. We stop playing with our imagination
and put our minds to work. But in adult life desire
for the play of the mind, like the desire for the play of the
body, persists. The endeavor of education is not to crush but
to control it.
Imagination, used here in the sense of random mental
activity, may be controlled in two ways, both significant for
human welfare. When it is controlled with reference to some
emotional theme, as in fiction, drama, and poetry, it has no
reference necessarily to actual objects or events; it is
concerned only with producing the effect of emotional congruity
between incidents, objects, forms, or sounds. A great novel
does not pretend to be a literal transcript of experience, nor
a portrait of an actual person. When random mental activity
is thus controlled, it is "imagination," in the popular sense,
the sense in which poets, painters, and dramatists are called
imaginative artists.
Imagination controlled with reference to facts produces
genuine reflection and science. To put it in another way, no
matter how complicated thinking becomes, no matter how
suggestions are examined and regulated with reference to the
facts at hand, new ideas, theories, and hypotheses occur to
the thinker precisely by this upshoot of irresponsible fancies
and suggestions. This free and fertile play of the imagination
is what characterizes the original thinker more than any
other single fact. Suggestions arise, as it were, willy-nilly,
depending on an individual's inheritance, his past experience,
his social position, all at the moment uncontrollable features
of his situation. We can, through scientific method, examine
and regulate suggestions once they arise, but their appearance
is in a sense casual and unpredictable, like the fancies in a
daydream. The greatest scientific discoveries have been made in
a sudden "flash of imagination," as when to the mind of Darwin,
after twenty years' painstaking collection of facts, their
explanation through the single encompassing formula of evolution
occurs, or when to the mind of Newton the hypothesis
of gravitation suddenly suggests itself.
The encouragement of a lively play of the mind over experience,
the stimulation of imagination or what Bertrand Russell
calls "the joy of mental adventure" is thus one of the
most important sources of art and science. The arousing of
imagination depends primarily on the inherited curiosity of
man which varies from the random and restless exploring
of the child to the careful and persistent investigation of the
trained scientist. The curiosity which prompts the child to
experiment with objects in a hit-or-miss fashion is little more
than the physiological overflow of action which has been noted
above.
Curiosity becomes more distinctively mental when it is
social in character, when the child explores and experiments
not by its own manipulations but by communication, by asking
questions of other people.
When the child learns that he can appeal to others to eke out his
store of experiences, so that, if objects fail to respond interestingly to
his experiments, he may call upon persons to provide interesting material,
a new epoch sets in. "What is that?" "Why?" become the
unfailing signs of a child's presence. At first this questioning is
hardly more than a projection into social relations of the physical
overflow which earlier kept the child pushing and pulling, opening
and shutting. He asks in succession what holds up the house, what
holds up the soil that holds the house, what holds up the earth that
holds the soil; but his questions are not evidence of any genuine
consciousness of rational connections. His _why_ is not a demand
for scientific explanation; the motive behind it is simply eagerness
for a larger acquaintance with the mysterious world in which he is
placed. The search is not for a law or principle, but only for a bigger
fact.... But in the feeling, however dim, that the facts which
directly meet the sense are not the whole story, that there is more
behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of
_intellectual_ curiosity.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey: _loc. cit._, p. 32.]
Curiosity passes thus from casual rudimentary inquiry
into genuinely scientific investigation. At first it is merely
physical manipulation, then merely disconnected questionings;
it becomes genuinely intellectual when it passes from
"inquisitiveness" to inquiry. To be inquisitive means
merely to want to know facts rather than to solve problems.
To be scientifically inquiring is to seek on one's own account
the significant relations between things. But these earlier
and more casual forms of curiosity are not to be despised. If
developed and controlled they lead to genuinely disinterested
study of Nature and of men, to the spirit and the methods of
science. That free play of imagination which was spoken of
above as the chief source of original thinking and discovery
is stimulated by an active hunting-out of new suggestions.
Curiosity might also be defined as aggressive imagination,
which, frequent enough in children, remains among adults to
a pronounced degree only in geniuses of art and science. We
may not agree with Bertrand Russell that "everything is done
in education to kill it," but the dogmatism and fixity of mind
which so soon settle down on maturity, the inability to be
sensitive to new experiences, these are discouragingly familiar
phenomena clearly inimical to science and to progress.
An active imagination that finds new materials to play
over is the basis of both science and art. A skillful manipulation
of its materials in words or sounds, colors, or lines makes
its result art. Their controlled examination and systematization
makes them science.
QUIESCENCE--FATIGUE. That all life, animal and human,
is characterized by activity of a more or less persistent and
positive kind has already been noted. But in human beings,
as well as in animals, activity displays a "fatigue curve."
The repeated stimulation of certain muscles produces
fatigue toxins which impair the efficiency of response and
make further stimulation painful. Of the causes of this
lessened functional efficiency we may quote from Miss Goldmark's
painstaking study:
During activity, as will be shown later, the products of chemical
change increase. A tired person is literally and actually a poisoned
person--poisoned by his own waste products. But so marvellously
is the body constructed that, like a running stream, it purifies itself,
and during repose these toxic impurities are normally burned up by
the oxygen brought by the blood, excreted by the kidneys, destroyed
in the liver, or eliminated from the body through the lungs. So rest
repaires fatigue.[1]
[Footnote 1: Goldmark, J.: _Fatigue and Efficiency_, p. 13.]
In physical activity, therefore, periods of lessened activity
or change of activity, or nearly complete inactivity as in
sleep, are not only desirable but necessary, if efficiency is to be
maintained. The demand for rest is an imperative physiological
demand. The amount of recuperation demanded by
the organism varies in different individuals, but that there are
certain limits of human productivity has been made increasingly
clear by a careful study of the effects of fatigue upon
output in industrial occupations. Repeatedly, the shortening
of working hours, especially when they have previously numbered
more than eight, has been found to be correlated with
an increase in efficiency. Likewise, the provision of rest
periods as in telephone-operating and the needle trades, has in
nearly every case increased the amount and quality of the
work performed. The human machine in order to be most
effective cannot be pressed too hard. A striking illustration
was offered in England at the beginning of the war. Under
pressure of war necessity, the munition factories relaxed all
restrictions on working hours and operated on a seven-day
week. The folly of this procedure was tersely summarized by
the British Commission investigating industrial fatigue,
which reported: "It is almost a commonplace that seven days'
labor produces six days' output."
In the study of industrial conditions, the effects of prolonged
and repeated fatigue upon output have not been the
only features taken into consideration. Not only are there
immediately observable effects in the decreased output of the
worker, but fatigue means, among other things, general loss
of control. This has the effect of producing on the part of
overworked factory hands dissipation and overstimulation in
free time, with a consequent permanent impairment of efficiency.[1]
Both for the laborer himself and for the efficiency
of the industrial system, it has been increasingly recognized
that limitation of working hours is imperatively demanded.
Rest is as fundamental a need as food, and its deprivation
almost as serious in its effects.
[Footnote 1:
For a striking array of testimony on this point see Goldmark: _loc. cit._,
pp. 220-35.]
NERVOUS AND MENTAL FATIGUE. The conditions of nervous
and mental fatigue have been less adequately studied than
the types of purely physiological fatigue just discussed. It is
difficult in experiments to discount the effects of muscular
fatigue, and to discover how far there is really impairment of
nervous tissue and functions. Experimental studies do show
that "nervous fatigue is an undoubted fact"[2] and that "we
cannot deny fatigue to the psychic centers"[3] which, like any
other part of the organism are subject to deterioration by
fatigue toxins. Most students report, however, a higher degree
of resistance to fatigue in the nerve fibers than in the
muscles, and a like high resistance to fatigue in the brain
centers.[4]
[Footnote 2:
Frederick S. Lee: "Physical Exercise from the Standpoint of Physiology,"
_Science_, N.S., vol. XXIX, no. 744, p. 525.]
[Footnote 3: Lee: _Fatigue_. Harvey Lectures, 1905-06, p. 180.]
[Footnote 4:
For a summary of nervous fatigue and extensive bibliography, see Goldmark:
_loc. cit._, p. 32.]
The conditions of mental fatigue, however, can be by no
means as simply described as those of physical fatigue. Elaborate
experiments by Professor Thorndike and others tend to
show that, in the strictest sense of the term, there is no such
thing as mental fatigue. That is, any mental function may
be performed for several hours with the most negligible decrease
in the efficiency of the results attained. The subject of
one experiment kept continuously for seven hours performing
mental multiplications of four-place numbers by four-place
numbers with scarcely any perceptible decrease in speed or
accuracy in results.[1] Professor Thorndike draws from this
and similar experiments the conclusion that it is practically
impossible to impair the efficiency of any mental function as
such. What happens when we say our mental efficiency is
being impaired is rather that we _will not_ than that we _cannot_
perform any given mental function. The causes of loss of
efficiency are rather competing impulses[2] than fatigue in
specific mental functions. We are tired _of_ the work, not _by_
it. Continuous mental work of any given kind, writing a
book, solving problems in calculus, translating French, etc.,
involves our being withheld from other activities, games,
music, or companionship, to which by force of habit or
instinct, we are diverted, and diverted more acutely the more
we remain at a fixed task. That it is not mental "fatigue" so
much as distraction that prevents us from persisting at work
is evidenced in the longer time we can stick to work that
really interests us than to tasks in which we have only a
perfunctory or compulsory interest. The college student who is
"too dead tired" to stay up studying trigonometry will,
though in the same condition, stay up studying football
strategy, rehearsing for a varsity show, or getting out the
next morning's edition of his college paper. "If each man
did the mental work for which he was fit, and which he
enjoyed, men would work willingly much longer than they now
do."[1*] The effects of mental fatigue are, when analyzed, due
chiefly to the physically injurious effects that do, but do not
necessarily, accompany mental work.
[Footnote 1: T. Arai: _Mental Fatigue_.]
[Footnote 2: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 322.]
[Footnote 1*: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 326.]
Proper air and light, proper posture and physical exercise, enough
food and sleep, and work whose purpose is rational, whose difficulty
is adapted to one's powers, and whose rewards are just, should be
tried before recourse to the abandonment of work itself. It is indeed
doubtful if sheer rest is the appropriate remedy for a hundredth part
of the injuries that result from mental work in our present irrational
conduct of it.[2]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 328.]
The study of the conditions of mental work seems to reveal,
in brief, that the conditions of fatigue are essentially physical
in character. Given adequate physical conditions, in particular
guarding against eye-strain, over-excitement (which means
distraction from the work in hand), and loss of sleep, mental
work is itself peculiarly unaffected by fatigue conditions. The
degree in which mental work can be persisted in depends,
therefore, other things being equal, on the individual's own
interests, the number and intensity of rival interests which
persist during a given piece of mental work, and the habits of
mind with which the individual approaches his work.
The experimental demonstration that so-called mental
fatigue is largely physical in its conditions has thus a dual
significance. It indicates how arduous and persistent mental
endeavor may be and how wide are the possibilities of intellectual
accomplishment. It is an important fact for human life
that the brain is possibly the most tireless part of the human
machine. What seems to be mental fatigue can be materially
reduced if the physical conditions under which studying,
writing, and all other kinds of mental work are performed are
carefully regulated. Another large part of what passes for
mental fatigue will be removed if the individual becomes
trained to a reflective appreciation of the end of his work. A
habit of alert and conscious attention, if it is really habitual,
will enable one to persist at work in the face of tempting distractions.
Learning to "tend to business" by an intelligent
application to the aims of the work to be done, will be a
healthy antidote against that yielding to every dissuading
impulse which so often passes for mental weariness.