CHAPTER VI
EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL
The Foundations of Personality | ||
6.
CHAPTER VI
EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL
IN a preceding chapter we discussed man as an organism reacting against an outside world and spurred on by internal activities and needs. We discussed stimulation, reflexes, inhibition, choice and the organizing activity, memory and habit, consciousness and subconsciousness, all of which are primary activities of the organism. But these are mere theories of function, for the activities we are interested in reside in more definite reactions, of which the foregoing are parts.
We see a dreaded object on the horizon or foresee a calamity,—and we fear. That state of the organism (note I do not say that state of mind) resulting from the vision is an emotion. We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run, hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if cornered. "What shall I do—what shall I do? finds no conscious answer if the emotion is overwhelming or the instinctive flight a pell-mell affair; but ordinarily memories of other experiences or of teaching come into the mind and some effort is made to meet the situation in an "intelligent'' manner.
Here, then, is a response in which three cardinal reactions have occurred and are blended,—the emotion, the instinctive action, and the intelligent action; or to make
What I wish to point out is this: that to any situation all three reactions may take place and modify one another. We are insulted—some one slaps our face— the fierce emotion of anger arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing, perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. But no,—the situation has aroused certain memories and certain inhibitions: the one who struck us has been our friend and we can see that he is acting under a mistaken impression, or else we perceive that he is right, that we have done him a wrong for which his blow is a sort of just reaction. We are checked by these cerebral activities, we choose some other reaction than fight; perhaps we prevent him from further assault, or we turn and walk away, or we start to explain, to mollify
These examples might be multiplied a thousandfold. Every day of our lives situations come up in which there is a blending or an antagonism between emotional, instinctive and intelligent responses. In fact, very few acts of the organized human being are anything else. For every emotion awakens memories of past emotions and the consequences; every instinct is hampered by other instincts or by the inhibitions aroused by obstacles; and intelligence continually struggles against emotion and blind instinct. Teaching, experience, knowledge, all modify emotional and instinctive responses so that sometimes they are hardly recognizable as such. On the other hand, though intelligence normally occupies the seat of power, it is easily ousted and in reality only steers and directs the vehicle of life, choosing not the goal but the road by which the goal can safely be reached.
In general terms we shall define emotions, instincts and intelligence as follows:
1. For emotions we shall accept a modified James-Lange theory, supplementing it by the developments of science since their day. When a thing is seen or heard (or smelled or tasted or thought), it arouses an emotion; that emotion consists of at least three parts. First, the arousal of memories and experiences that give it a value to the individual, make it a desired
For the moment we turn to instinct and instinctive reactions.
2. Man has always wondered that things can be known without teaching. So slow and painful is the process of mastering a technique, whether of handicraftsmanship or of art, so imbued are we with the need of education for the acquirement of knowledge, that we are taken aback by the realization that all around us are creatures carrying on the most elaborate technique, going through the most complicated procedures and apparently possessed of the surest knowledge without the possibility of teaching. The flight of birds, the obstetric and nursing procedures of all animals, and especially the complicated and systematized labors of bees, ants and other insects, have aroused the wonder, admiration and awe of scientists. A chick pecks its way out of its egg and shakes itself,—then immediately starts on the trail of food and usually needs no instruction as to diet. The female insect lays its eggs, the male insect fertilizes them, the progeny go through the states of evolution leading to adult life without teaching and without the possibility of previous experience. Since the parent never sees the progeny, and the progeny assume various shapes and have very varied capacities at these times, there can be no possible teaching of what is remarkably skillful and marvelously adapted conduct.[1]
Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in putrid meat in order that the larvæ may have appropriate food, although she never sees the larvæ or cannot know through experience their needs. "The smell of putrid meat attracts the gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell, and the contact combined stimulate the functions of oviposition.''[2] But as all the critics have pointed out, the theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so inevitably.
In fact, it is this internal condition in the living creature that is the most important single link in instinct. In the non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with procreative cells; these change his cœnæsthesia; that starts desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search, courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is gravid. All instinctive acts have back of them either a tension or a deficit of some kind or other, brought about by the awakening of function of some glandular structure, so that the organism becomes ready to respond to some appropriate outside stimulus and inaccessible to others. During the mating season, with certain animals, the stimulus of food has no effect until there is effected the purposes of the sexual hunger. Changes in the body due to the activity of sex glands
But this does not explain how the changes in glands make the animal seek this or that, except by saying that the animal has hereditary structures all primed to explode in the right way. We may fall back on Bergson's mystical idea that all life is a unity, and that instinct, which makes one living thing know what to do with another—to kill it in a scientific way for the good of the posterity of the killer—is merely the knowledge, unconscious, that life has of life. That pleasant explanation projects us back to a darker problem than ever: how life knows life and why one part of life so obviously seeks to circumvent the purpose of another part of life.
For us it is best to say that instinct arises out of the racial and individual needs; that physically there occur changes in the glands and tissues; that these set up desires which arouse into action simple or elaborate mechanisms which finally satisfy the need of the organs and tissues.[3]
Even in the low forms of life instincts are not perfect at the start, or perfect in details, and almost every member of a species will show individuality in dealing with an obstacle to an instinctive action. In other words, though there is instinct and this furnishes the
What I wish especially to point out is that man has many instinctive bases for conduct, but instincts as such are not often seen in pure form in man. They are constantly modified by other instincts and through them runs the influence of intelligence. The function of intelligence is to control instincts, to choose ways and means for the fulfillment of instincts that are blocked, etc. Moreover, the effects of teachings, ethics, social organization and tradition, operating through the social instincts, are to repress, inhibit and whip into conformity every mode of instinctive conduct. The main instincts are those relating to nutrition and reproduction, the care of the young, to averting danger or destroying it, to play and organized activity, to acquiring, perhaps to teaching and learning and to the social relations generally. But manners creep in to regulate our
Since instincts are too rigid to meet the needs of the social and traditional life of man, they become intellectualized and socialized into purposes and ambitions, sometimes almost beyond recognition. Nevertheless, the driving force of instinct is behind every purpose, every ambition, even though the individual himself has not the slightest idea of the force that is at work. This does not mean that instinct acts as a sort of cellar-plotter, roving around in a subconsciousness, or at least no such semi-diabolical personality need be postulated, any more than it need be postulated for the automatic
3. With this preliminary consideration of instinct, we pass on to certain of the phases of intelligence. How to define intelligence is a difficulty best met by ignoring definition. But this much is true: that the prime function of intelligence is to store up the past and present experiences so that they can be used in the future, and that it adds to the rigid mechanism of instinct a plastic force which by inhibiting and exciting activity according to need steers the organism through intricate channels.
Instinct, guided by a plan, conveniently called Nature's plan, is not itself a planner. The discharge of one mechanism discharges another and so on through a series until an end is reached,—an end apparently not foreseen by the organism but acting for the good of the race to which the organism belongs. Intelligence, often
As we study the nervous systems of animals, we find that with the apparent growth of intelligence there is a development of that part of the brain called the cerebrum. In so far as certain other parts of the brain are concerned—medulla, pons, mid-brain, basal ganglia cerebellum—we who are human are not essentially
We spoke in a previous chapter of choice as an integral function of the organism. While choice, when two competing stimuli awake competing mechanisms, may be non-cerebral in its nature, largely speaking it is a function of the cerebrum, of the intelligence. To choose is a constant work of the intelligence, just as to doubt is an unavailing effort to find a choice. Choice blocked is doubt, one of the unhappiest of mental states. I shall not pretend to solve the mystery of who chooses,— what chooses; perhaps there is a constant immortal ego; perhaps there is built up a series of permanently excited areas which give rise to ego feeling and predominate in choice; perhaps competing mechanisms, as they struggle (in Sherrington's sense) for motor pathways, give origin to the feeling of choice. At any rate, because we choose is the reason that the concept of will has arisen in the minds of both philosopher and the man in the street, and much of our feeling of worth, individuality and power—mental factors of huge importance in character—arises from the power to choose. Choice is influenced by—or it is a net result of—the praise and blame of others, conscience, memory, knowledge of the past, plans for the future. It is the fulcrum point of conduct!
That animals have intelligence in the sense in which I have used the term is without doubt. No one who reads the work of Morgan, the Peckhams, Fabré, Hobhouse and other recent investigators of the instincts can doubt it. Whether animals think in anything like the form our thought takes is another matter. We are so largely verbal in thought that speech and the capacity to speak seem intimately related to thought. For the mechanics of thought, for the laws of the association of ideas, the reader is referred to the psychologists.
Not often enough is mechanical skill, hand-mindedness, considered as one of the prime phases of intelligence. Intelligence, en route to the conquest of the world, made use of that marvelous instrument, the human hand, which in its opposable thumb and little finger sharply separates man from the rest of creation. Studying causes and effects, experimenting to produce effect, the hand became the principal instrument in investigation, and the prime verifier of belief. "Seeing is believing'' is not nearly so accurate as "Handling is believing,'' for there is in touch, and especially in touch of the hands and in the arm movements, a Reality component of the first magnitude. But not only in touching and investigating, but in pushing and pulling and striking, in causing change, does the hand become the symbol and source of power and efficiency. Undoubtedly this phase of the hands' activities remained predominant for untold centuries, during which man made but slow progress in his career toward the leadership of the world. Then came the phase of tool-making
Another difference between minds is this: that intelligence deals with the relations between things (this
We speak of people as original or as the reverse, with the understanding that originality is the basis of the world's progress. To be original in thought is to add new relationships to those already accepted, or to substitute new ones for the old. The original person is not easily credulous; he applies to traditional teaching and procedure the acid test of results. Thus the astronomers who rejected the theological idea that the earth was the center of the universe observed that eclipses could not be explained on such a basis, and Harvey, as he dissected bullocks' hearts and tied tourniquets around his arms, could not believe that Galen's teaching on circulation fitted what he saw of the veins and valves of his arm. The original observer refuses to slide over stubborn facts; authority has less influence with him than has an apple dropping downward. In another way the original thinker is constantly taking apart his experiences and readjusting the pieces into new combinations of beauty, usefulness and truth. This he does as artist, inventor and scientist. Most originality lies in
We have spoken of intelligence as controlling and directing instinct and desire, as inhibiting emotion, as exhibiting itself in handicraftsmanship, as the builder up of abstractions and the principles of power and knowledge; we have omitted its relationship to speech. Without speech and its derivatives, man would still be a naked savage and not so well off in his struggle for existence as most of the larger animals. It is possible that we can think without words, but surely very little thinking is possible under such circumstances. One might conduct a business without definite records, but it would be a very small one. Speech is a means not only of designating things but of the manifest relations between things. It "short-cuts'' thought so that we may store up a thousand experiences in one word. But its stupendous value and effects lie in this, that in words not only do we store up ourselves (could we be self-conscious without words?) and things, but we are able to interchange ourselves and our things with any one else in the world who understands our speech and writings. And we may truly converse with the dead and be profoundly changed by them. If the germ plasm is the organ of biological heredity, speech and its derivatives are the organs of social heredity!
The power of expressing thought in words, of compressing experiences into spoken and written symbols, of being eloquent or convincing either by tongue or pen, is thus a high function of intelligence. The able speaker and writer has always been powerful, and he has always found a high social value in promulgating the ideas of those too busy or unfitted for this task, and he has been the chief agent in the unification of groups.
The danger that lies in words as the symbols of thought lies in the fact pointed out by Francis Bacon[5] (and in our day by Wundt and Jung) that words have been coined by the mass of people and have come to mean very definitely the relations between things as conceived by the ignorant majority, so that when the philosopher or scientist seeks to use them, he finds himself hampered by the false beliefs inherent in the word and by the lack of precision in the current use of words. Moreover, words are also a means of stirring up emotions, hate, love, passion, and become weapons in a struggle for power and therefore obscure intelligence.
Words, themselves, arise in our social relations, for the solitary human would never speak, and the thought we think of as peculiarly our own is intensely social. Indeed, as Cooley pointed out, our thought is usually in a dialogue form with an auditor who listens and whose applause we desire and whose arguments we meet. In children, who think aloud, this trend is obvious, for they say, "you, I, no, yes, I mustn't, you mustn't,'' and terms of dialogue and social intercourse appear constantly. Thought and words offer us the basis of definite internal conflict: one part of us says to the other, "You must not do that,'' and the other answers, "What shall I do?'' Desire may run along
We live secure in the belief that our thoughts are our own and cannot be "read'' by others. Yet in our intercourse we seek to read the thoughts of others— the real thoughts—recognizing that just as we do not express ourselves either accurately or honestly, so may the other be limited or disingenuous. Whenever there occurs a feeling of inferiority, the face is averted so the thoughts may not be read, and it is very common for people mentally diseased to believe that their thoughts are being read and published. Indeed, the connection between thoughts and the personality may be severed and the patient mistakes as an outside voice his own thoughts.
A large part of ancient and modern belief and superstition hinges on the feeling of power in thought and therefore in words. Thought causes things as any other power does. Think something hard, use the appropriate word, and presto,—what you desire is done. "Faith moves mountains,'' and the kindred beliefs of the magic in words have plunged the world into abysses of superstition. Thought is powerful, words are powerful, if combined with the appropriate action, and in their indirect effects. All our trimphs{sic} are thought and word products; so, too, are our defeats.
It is not profitable for us at this stage to study the types of intelligence in greater detail. In the larger aspects of intelligence we must regard it as intimately blended with emotions, mood, instincts, and in its control of them is a measurement of character. We may
Not a line, so far, on Will. What of the will, basic force in character and center of a controversy that will never end? Has man a free will? does his choice of action and thought come from a power within himself? Is there a uniting will, operating in our actions, a something of an integral indivisible kind, which is non-material yet which controls matter?
Taking the free-will idea at its face value leads us nowhere in our study of character. If character in its totality is organic, so is will, and it therefore resides in the tissues of our organism and is subject to its laws. In some mental diseases the central disturbance is in the will, as Kraepelin postulates in the disease known as Dementia Præcox. The power of choice and the power of acting according to choice disappear gradually, leaving the individual inert and apathetic. The will may alter its directions in disease (or rather be altered) so that because of a tumor mass in the brain, or a clot of blood, or the extirpation of his testicles, he chooses and acts on different principles than ever before in his life. Or you get a man drunk, introduce into his organism the soluble narcotic alcohol, and you change his will in the sense that he chooses to be foolish or immoral
Moreover, behind each choice and each act are motives set up by the whole past of the individual, set up by heredity and training, by the will of our ancestors and our contemporaries. Logically and psychologically, we cannot agree that a free agent has any conditions; and if it has any conditions, it cannot in any phase be free. To set up an argument for free will one has to appeal to the consciousness or have a deep religious motive. But even the ecclesiastical psychologists and even so strong a believer in free will as Munsterberg take the stand that we may have two points of view, one—as religiously minded—that there is a free will, and the other—as scientists—that will is determined in its operations by causes that reach back in an endless chain. The power to choose and the power to act may be heightened by advice and admonitions. In this sense we may properly tell a man to use his will, and we may seek to introduce into him motives that will fortify his resolution, remove or increase his inhibitions, make clearer his choice. But that will is an entity, existing by itself and pulling at levers of conduct without itself being organic, need not be entertained by any serious-minded student of his kind.
Is there a unit, will? A will power? I can see no good evidence for this belief except the generalizing trend of human thought and the fallacy that raises
Such a view does not commit one to fatalism, at least in conduct. Desiring to accomplish something or desiring to avoid doing something, both of which are usually considered as part of willing, we must seek to find motives and influences that will help us. We must realize that each choice, each act, changes the world for us and every one else and seek to harmonize our choice and acts with the purposes we regard as our best. If we seek to influence others, then this view of the will is the only hopeful one, for if will is a free entity how can it possibly be influenced by another agent? The very essence of freedom is to be noninfluenced. Seeking to galvanize the will of another, there
The will is therefore no unit, but a sum total of things operating within the sphere of purpose. Purpose we have defined as arising from instinct and desire and intellectualized and socialized by intelligence, education, training, tradition, etc. Will is therefore best studied under the head of purpose and is an outgrowth of instinct. Each instinct, in its energy, its fierceness, its permanence, has its will. He who cannot desire deeply, in whom some powerful instinct does not surge, cannot will deeply.
If we look at character from the standpoint of emotion, instinct, purpose and intelligence, we find that emotion is an internal discharge of energy, which being felt by the individual becomes an aim or aversion of his life; that instinctive action is the passing over of a stimulus directly into hereditary conduct along race-old motor pathways for purposes that often enough the individual does not recognize and may even rebel against; that instinct is without reflection, but that purpose, which is an outgrowth of instinct guided and controlled by intelligence, is reflective and self-conscious. Purpose seeks the good of the individual as understood by him and is often against the welfare of the race, whereas instinct seeks the good of the race, often against
The nature of instinct has been a subject of discussion for centuries, but it is only within the last fifty years or thereabouts that instinctive actions have really been studied. I refer the reader to the works of Darwin, Romanes, Lloyd Morgan, the Peckhams, Fabré, Hobhouse, and McDougall for details as to the controversies and the facts obtained.
Kempf in his book on the vegetative nervous system goes into great detail the way the visceral needs force the animal or human to satisfy them. Life is a sort of war between the vegetative and the central nervous system. There is just enough truth in this point of view to make it very entertaining.
We are at this stage in a very dark place in human thought. We say that instincts seek the good of the race, or have some racial purpose, as the sexual instinct has procreation as its end. But the lover wooing his sweetheart has no procreation plan in his mind; he is urged on by a desire to win this particular girl, a desire which is in part sexual, in part admiration of her beauty, grace, and charm; again it is the pride of possession and achievement; and further is the result of the social and romantic ideals taught in books, theaters, etc. He may not have the slightest desire for a child; as individual he plans one thing,—but we who watch him see in his approach the racial urge for procreation and even disregard his purposes as unimportant. Who and what is the Race, where does it reside, how can it have purposes? Call it Nature, and we are no better off. We must fall back on an ancient personalization of forces, and our minds rest easier when we think of a Planner operating in all of us and perhaps smiling as He witnesses our strivings.
CHAPTER VI
EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL
The Foundations of Personality | ||