I must remind myself that my purpose does not conclude with a statement
of the auxiliary relation of psychology to education; but that we are
concerned with this as a type case of a wider problem--the relation of
psychology to social practice in general. So far I have tried to show
that it is not in spite of its statement of personal aims and social
relations in terms of mechanism that psychology is useful, but because
of this transformation and abstraction. Through reduction of ethical
relations to presented objects we are enabled to get outside of the
existing situation; to see it objectively, not merely in relation to our
traditional habits, vague aspirations, and capricious desires. We are
able to see clearly the factors which shape it, and therefore to get an
idea of how it may be modified. The assumption of an identical
relationship of physics and psychology to practical life is justified.
Our freedom of action comes through its statement in terms of necessity.
By this translation our control is enlarged, our powers are directed,
our energy conserved, our aims illuminated.
The school is an especially favorable place in which to study the
availability of psychology for social practice; because in the school
the formation of a certain type of social personality, with a certain
attitude and equipment of working powers, is the express aim. In idea,
at least, no other purpose restricts or compromises the dominance of the
single purpose. Such is not the case in business, politics, and the
professions. All these have upon their surface, taken directly, other
ends to serve. In many instances these other aims are of far greater
immediate importance; the ethical result is subordinate or even
incidental. Yet as it profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world
and lose his own self, so indirectly and ultimately all these other
social institutions must be judged by the contribution which they make
to the value of human life. Other ends may be immediately uppermost, but
these ends must in turn be means; they must subserve the interests of
conscious life or else stand condemned.
In other words, the moment we apply an ethical standard to the
consideration of social institutions, that moment they stand on exactly
the same level as does the school, viz., as organs for the increase in
depth and area of the realized values of life. In both cases the
statement of the mechanism, through which the ethical ends are realized,
is not only permissible, but absolutely required. It is not merely
incidentally, as a grateful addition to its normal task, that
psychology serves us. The essential nature of the standpoint which calls
it into existence, and of the abstraction which it performs, is to put
in our possession the method by which values are introduced and effected
in life. The statement of personality as an object, of social relations
as a mechanism of stimuli and inhibitions, is precisely the statement
of ends in terms of the method of their realization.
It is remarkable that men are so blind to the futility of a morality
which merely blazons ideals, erects standards, asserts laws without
finding in them any organic provision for their own realization. For
ideals are held up to follow; standards are given to work by; laws are
provided to guide action. The sole and only reason for their conscious
moral statement is, in a word, that they may influence and direct
conduct. If they cannot do this, not merely by accident, but of their
own intrinsic nature, they are worse than inert. They are impudent
impostors and logical self-contradictions.
When men derive their moral ideals and laws from custom, they also
realize them through custom; but when they are in any way divorced from
habit and tradition, when they are consciously proclaimed, there must be
some substitute for custom as an organ of execution. We must know the
method of their operation and know it in detail. Otherwise the more
earnestly we insist upon our categorical imperatives, and upon their
supreme right of control, the more flagrantly helpless we are as to
their actual domination. The fact that conscious, as distinct from
customary, morality and psychology have had a historic parallel march is
just the concrete recognition of the necessary equivalence between ends
consciously conceived, and interest in the means upon which the ends
depend. We have the same reality stated twice over: once as value to be
realized, and once as mechanism of realization. So long as custom
reigns, as tradition prevails, so long as social values are determined
by instinct and habit, there is no conscious question as to the method
of their achievement, and hence no need of psychology. Social
institutions work of their own inertia, they take the individual up into
themselves and carry him along in their own sweep. The individual is
dominated by the mass life of his group. Institutions and the customs
attaching to them take care of society both as to its ideals and its
methods. But when once the values come to consciousness, when once a
Socrates insists upon the organic relation of a reflective life and
morality, then the means, the machinery by which ethical ideals are
projected and manifested, comes to consciousness also. Psychology must
needs be born as soon as morality becomes reflective.
Moreover, psychology, as an account of the mechanism of workings of
personality, is the only alternative to an arbitrary and class view of
society, to an aristocratic view in the sense of restricting the
realization of the full worth of life to a section of society. The
growth of a psychology that, as applied to history and sociology, tries
to state the interactions of groups of men in familiar psychical
categories of stimulus and inhibition, is evidence that we are ceasing
to take existing social forms as final and unquestioned. The application
of psychology to social institutions is the only scientific way of
dealing with their ethical values in their present unequal distribution,
their haphazard execution, and their thwarted development. It marks just
the recognition of the principle of sufficient reason in the large
matters of social life. It is the recognition that the existing order is
determined neither by fate nor by chance, but is based on law and
order, on a system of existing stimuli and modes of reaction, through
knowledge of which we can modify the practical outcome. There is no
logical alternative, save either to recognize and search for the
mechanism of the interplay of personalities that controls the existing
distributions of values, _or_ to accept as final a fixed hierarchy of
persons in which the leaders assert, on no basis save their own supposed
superior personality, certain ends and laws which the mass of men
passively receive and imitate. The effort to apply psychology to social
affairs means that the determination of ethical values lies, not in any
set or class, however superior, but in the workings of the social whole;
that the explanation is found in the complex interactions and
interrelations which constitute this whole. To save personality in all,
we must serve all alike--state the achievements of all in terms of
mechanism, that is, of the exercise of reciprocal influence. To affirm
personality independent of mechanism is to restrict its full meaning to
a few, and to make its expression in the few irregular and arbitrary.
The anomaly in our present social life is obvious enough. With
tremendous increase in control of nature, in ability to utilize nature
for the indefinite extension and multiplication of commodities for human
use and satisfaction, we find the actual realization of ends, the
enjoyment of values, growing unassured and precarious. At times it seems
as if we were caught in a contradiction; the more we multiply means, the
less certain and general is the use we are able to make of them. No
wonder a Carlyle or a Ruskin puts our whole industrial civilization
under a ban, while a Tolstoi proclaims a return to the desert. But the
only way to see the situation steadily, and to see it as a whole, is to
keep in mind that the entire problem is one of the development of
science, _and of its application to life_. Our control of nature, with
the accompanying output of material commodities, is the necessary result
of the growth of physical science--of our ability to state things as
interconnected parts of a mechanism. Physical science has for the time
being far outrun psychical. We have mastered the physical mechanism
sufficiently to turn out possible goods; we have not gained a knowledge
of the conditions through which possible values become actual in life,
and so are still at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and hence of
force.
Psychology, after all, simply states the mechanism through which
conscious value and meaning are introduced into human experience. As it
makes its way, and is progressively applied to history and all the
social sciences, we can anticipate no other outcome than increasing
control in the ethical sphere--the nature and extent of which can be
best judged by considering the revolution that has taken place in the
control of physical nature through a knowledge of her order. Psychology
will never provide ready-made materials and prescriptions for the
ethical life, any more than physics dictates off-hand the steam-engine
and the dynamo. But science, both physical and psychological, makes
known the conditions upon which certain results depend, and therefore
puts at the disposal of life a method for controlling them. Psychology
will never tell us just what to do ethically, nor just how to do it. But
it will afford us insight into the conditions which control the
formation and execution of aims, and thus enable human effort to expend
itself sanely, rationally, and with assurance. We are not called upon to
be either boasters or sentimentalists regarding the possibilities of our
science. It is best, for the most part, that we should stick to our
particular jobs of investigation and reflection as they come to us. But
we certainly are entitled in this daily work to be sustained by the
conviction that we are not working in indifference to or at
cross-purposes with the practical strivings of our common humanity. The
psychologist, in his most remote and technical occupation with
mechanism, is contributing his bit to that ordered knowledge which alone
enables mankind to secure a larger and to direct a more equal flow of
values in life.