. BY JOHN DEWEY THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT With other authors CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT An Introduction to Social Psychology BY JOHN DEWEY NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT. 1922. BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY First Printing, Jan., 1922 Second Printing, Mar., 192* Third Printing. June, 1924 Fourth Printing, Aug., 1921 Fifth Printing, Nor., 192* Sixth Printing, April, 1933 Seventh Printing, Dec., 1923 Eighth Printing, March, 1924 Ninth Printing, June, 1927 Tenth Printing, July, 1928 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY tt Onton & awtn Company BOOK MANUFACTURERS KAHWAY NEW JERSEV t> PREFACE Cop* 2- In the spring of 1918 I was invited by Leland Stan- ford Junior University to give a series of three lec- tures upon the West Memorial Foundation. One of the topics included within the scope of the Founda- tion is Human Conduct and Destiny. This volume is the result, as, according to the terms of the Founda- tion, the lectures are to be published. The lectures as given have, however, been rewritten and considerably expanded. An Introduction and Conclusion have been added. The lectures should have been published within two years from delivery. Absence from the country rendered strict compliance difficult; and I am indebted to the authorities of the University for their indulgence in allowing an extension of time, as well as for so many courtesies received during the time when the lectures were given. Perhaps the sub-title requires a word of explanation* The book does not purport to be a treatment of social psychology. But it seriously sets forth a belief that an understanding of habit and of different types of habit is the key to socffl. psychology, while the opera- tion of impulse and intelligence gives the key to indi- vidualized mental Activity. But they are secondary to habit so that mind can lie understood in the concrete only as a system of beliefs, desires and purposes which are formed in the interaction of biological aptitudes with a social environment. J. D. February, 1921. 1 CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 Contempt for human nature; pathology of good- ness; freedom; value of science. SECTION I: HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS . . 13 Habits as functions and arts; social complicity; subjective factor. SECTION II: HABITS AND WILL 24 Active means; ideas of ends; means and ends; nature of character. SECTION III: CHARACTER AND CONDUCT ... 43 Good will and consequences; virtues and natural goods; objective and subjective morals. SECTION IV: CUSTOM AND HABIT 58 Human psychology is social; habit as conservative; mind and body. SECTION V: CUSTOM AND MORALITY .... 75 Customs as standards; authority of standards; class conflicts. SECTION VI: HABIT AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY . . 84 isolation of individuality; newer movements. PART TWO THE PLACE OF IMPULSE IN CONDUCT SECTION I: IMPULSES AND CHANGE OF HABITS . . 89 Present interest in instincts; impulses as re-organ- izing. v vi CONTENTS PAGH SECTION II: PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE. ... 95 Impulse and education; uprush of impulse; fixed codes. SECTION III: CHANGING HUMAN NATURE . . . 106 Habits the inert factor; modification of impulses; war a social function; economic regimes as social products; nature of motives. SECTION IV: IMPULSE AND CONFLICT OF HABITS . 125 Possibility of social betterment; conservatism. SECTION V: CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS . . 131 False simplifications; "self-love"; will to power; acquisitive and creative. SECTION VI: No SEPARATE INSTINCTS . . . 149 Uniqueness of acts; possibilities of operation; necessity of play and art; rebelliousness. SECTION VII: IMPULSE AND THOUGHT . . . 169 SECTION I: HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE . . . 172 Habits and intellect; mind, habit and impulse. SECTION II: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING . . 181 The trinity of intellect; conscience and its alleged separate subject-matter. SECTION III: THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION . 189 Deliberation as imaginative rehearsal; preference and choice; strife of reason and passion; nature of reason. SECTION IV: DELIBERATION AND CALCULATION . 199 Error in utilitarian theory; place of the pleasant; hedonistic calculus; deliberation and prediction. SECTION V: THE UNIQUENESS OF GOOD . . . 210 Fallacy of a single good; applied to utilitarianism; profit and personality; means and ends. CONTENTS vii PAGE SECTION VI: THE NATURE OF AIMS .... 223 Theory of final ends; aims as directive means; ends as justifying means; meaning well as an aim; wishes and aims. SECTION VII: THE NATURE OF PRINCIPLES . . 238 Desire for certainty; morals and probabilities; im- portance of generalizations. SECTION VIII: DESIRE AND INTELLIGENCE . . 248 Object and consequence of desire; desire -and quiescence; self-deception in desire; desire needs intelligence; nature of idealism; living in the ideal. SECTION IX: THE PRESENT AND FUTURE . . . 265 Subordination of activity to result; control of fu- ture; production and consummation; idealism and distant goals. PART FOUR CONCLUSION SECTION I: THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY .... 278 Better and worse; morality a process; evolution and progress; optimism; Epicureanism; making others happy. SECTION II: MORALS ARE HUMAN .... 295 Humane morals; natural law and morals; place of science. SECTION III: WHAT is FREEDOM? .... 303 Elements in freedom; capacity in action; novel possibilities; force of desire. SECTION IV: MORALITY is SOCIAL .... 314 Conscience and responsibility; social pressure and opportunity; exaggeration of blame; importance of social psychology; category of right; the com- munity as religious symbol. INTRODUCTION "Give a dog a bad name and hang him." Human nature has been the dog of professional moralists, and consequences accord with the proverb. Man's nature has been regarded with suspicion, with fear, with sour looks, sometimes with enthusiasm for its possibilities but only when these were placed in contrast with its actualities. It has appeared to be so evilly disposed that the business of morality was to prune and curb it ; it would be thought better of if it could be replaced by something else. It has been supposed that morality would be quite superfluous were it not for the inherent weakness, bordering on depravity, of human nature. Some writers with a more genial conception have at- tributed the current blackening to theologians who have thought to honor the divine by disparaging the human. Theologians have doubtless taken a gloomier view of man than have pagans and secularists. But this ex- planation doesn't take us far. For after all these the- ologians are themselves human, and they would have been without influence if the human audience had not somehow responded to them. Morality is largely concerned with controlling human nature. When we are attempting to control anything we are acutely aware of what resists us. So moralists were led, perhaps, to think of human nature as evil 1 2 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT because of its reluctance to- yield to control, its rebel- liousness under the yoke. But this explanation only raises another question. Why did morality set up rules so foreign to human nature? The ends it insisted upon, the regulations it imposed, were after all out- growths of human nature. Why then was human nature so averse to them? Moreover rules can be obeyed and ideals realized only as they appeal to something in hu- man nature and awaken in it an active response. Moral principles that exalt themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide. Or else they involve human nature in unending civil war, and treat it as a hopeless mess of contradictory forces. We are forced therefore to consider the nature and origin of that control of human nature with which morals has been occupied. And the fact which is forced upon us when we raise this question is the existence of classes. Control has been vested in an oligarchy. Indifference to regulation has grown in the gap which separates the ruled from the rulers. Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors have supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were imposed, to the young, laymen, ordinary folk ; a few have given and administered rule, and the mass have in a passable fashion and with reluctance obeyed. Everybody knows that good children are those who make as little trouble as possible for their elders, and since most of them cause a good deal of annoyance they must be naughty by nature. Generally speaking, good people have been those who did what they were told to do, and lack of INTRODUCTION 3 eager compliance is a sign of something wrong in their nature. But no matter how much men in authority have turned moral rules into an agency of class supremacy, any theory which attributes the origin of rule to de- liberate design is false. To take advantage of condi- tions after they have come into existence is one thing; to create them for the sake of an advantage to accrue is quite another thing. We must go back of the bare fact of social division into superior and inferior. To say that accident produced social conditions is to per- ceive they were not produced by intelligence. Lack of understanding of human nature is the primary cause of disregard for it. Lack of insight always ends in despising or else unreasoned admiration. When men had no scientific knowledge of physical nature they either passively submitted to it or sought to control it magically. What cannot be understood cannot be managed intelligently. It has to be forced into subjec- tion from without. The opaqueness of human nature to reason is equivalent to a belief in its intrinsic irregu- larity. Hence a decline in the authority of social oligarchy was accompanied by a rise of scientific interest in human nature. This means that the make-up and: working of human forces afford a basis for moral ideas and ideals. Our science of human nature in comparison with physical sciences is rudimentary, and morals which are concerned with the health, efficiency and happiness of a development of human nature are correspondingly elementary. These pages are a dis- 4 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT cussion of some phases of the ethical change involved in positive respect for human nature when the latter is associated with scientific knowledge. We may anticipate the general nature of this change through considering the evils which have resulted from severing morals from the actualities of human physiol- ogy and psychology. There is a pathology of good- ness as well as of evil ; that is, of that sort of goodness which is nurtured by this separation. The badness of good people, for the most part recorded only in fiction, is the revenge taken by human nature for the injuries heaped upon it in the name of morality. In the first place, morals cut off from positive roots in man's nature is bound to be mainly negative. Practical emphasis falls upon avoidance, escape of evil, upon not doing things, observing prohibitions. Negative morals assume as many forms as there are types of temperament sub- ject to it. Its commonest form is the protective colora- tion of a neutral respectability, an insipidity of char- acter. For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention. Absence of social blame is the usual mark of goodness for it shows that evil has been avoided. Blame is most readily averted by being so much like everybody else that one passes unnoticed. Conventional morality is a drab morality, in which the only fatal thing is to be conspicuous. If there be flavor left in it, then some natural traits have somehow escaped being subdued. To be so good as to attract notice is INTRODUCTION 5 to be priggish, too good for this world. The same psychology that brands the convicted criminal as for- ever a social outcast makes it the part of a gentleman not to obtrude virtues noticeably upon others. The Puritan is never popular, not even in a society of Puritans. In case of a pinch, the mass prefer to be good fellows rather than to be good men. Polite vice is preferable to eccentricity and ceases to be vice. Morals that professedly neglect human nature end by emphasizing those qualities of human nature that are most commonplace and average; they exaggerate the herd instinct to conformity. Professional guardians of morality who have been exacting with respect to them- selves have accepted avoidance of conspicuous evil as enough for the masses. One of the most instructive things in all human history is the system of concessions, tolerances, mitigations and reprieves which the Catholic Church with its official supernatural morality has de- vised for the multitude. Elevation of the spirit above everything natural is tempered by organized leniency for the frailties of flesh. To uphold an aloof realm of strictly ideal realities is admitted to be possible only for a few. Protestantism, except in its most zealous forms, has accomplished the same result by a sharp separation between religion and morality in which a higher justification by faith disposes at one stroke of daily lapses into the gregarious morals of average conduct. There are always ruder forceful natures who can- 2iot tame themselves to the required level of colorless 6 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT conformity. To them conventional morality appears as an organized futility; though they are usually un- conscious of their own attitude since they are heartily in favor of morality for the mass as making it easier to manage them. Their only standard is success, put- ting things over, getting things done. Being good is to them practically synonymous with ineff ectuality ; and accomplishment, achievement is its own justifica- tion. They know by experience that much is forgiven to those who succeed, and they leave goodness to the stupid, to those whom they qualify as boobs. Their gregarious nature finds sufficient outlet in the con- spicuous tribute they pay to all established institu- tions as guardians of ideal interests, and in their denunciations of all who openly defy conventionalized ideals. Or they discover that they are the chosen agents of a higher morality and walk subject to spe- cially ordained laws. Hypocrisy in the sense of a deliberate covering up of a will to evil by loud-voiced protestations of virtue is one of the rarest of occur- rences. But the combination in the same person of an intensely executive nature with a love of popular approval is bound, in the face of conventional morality, to produce what the critical term hypocrisy. Another reaction to the separation of morals from human nature is a romantic glorification of natural im- pulse as something superior to all moral claims. There are those who lack the persistent force of the executive will to break through conventions and to use them for their own purposes, but who unite sensitiveness with INTRODUCTION 7 intensity of desire. Fastening upon the conventional element in morality, they hold that all morality is a conventionality hampering to the development of indi- viduality. Although appetites are the commonest things in human nature, the least distinctive or individualized, they identify unrestraint in satisfaction of appetite with free realization of individuality. They treat sub- jection to passion as a manifestation of freedom in the degree in which it shocks the bourgeois. The urgent need for a transvaluation of morals is caricatured by the notion that an avoidance of the avoidances of con- ventional morals constitutes positive achievement. While the executive type keeps its eyes on actual condi- tions so as to manipulate them, this school abrogates objective intelligence in behalf of sentiment, and with- draws into little coteries of emancipated souls. There are others who take seriously the idea of morals separated from the ordinary actualities of hu- manity and who attempt to live up to it. Some become engrossed in spiritual egotism. They are preoccupied T?ith the state of their character, concerned for the purity of their motives and the goodness of their souls. The exaltation of conceit which sometimes accompanies this absorption can produce a corrosive inhumanity which exceeds the possibilities of any other known form of selfishness. In other cases, persistent preoccupation with the thought of an ideal realm breeds morbid dis- content with surroundings, or induces a futile with- drawal into an inner world where all facts are fair to the eye. The needs of actual conditions are neglected, 8 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT or dealt with in a half-hearted way, because in the light of the ideal they are so mean and sordid. To speak of evils, to strive seriously for change, shows a low mind. Or, again, the ideal becomes a refuge, an asylum, a way of escape from tiresome responsibilities. In varied ways men come to live in two worlds, one the actual, the other the ideal. Some are tortured by the sense of their irreconcilability. Others alternate between the two, compensating for the strains of renunciation involved in membership in the ideal realm by pleasureable ex- cursions into the delights of the actual. If we turn from concrete effects upon character to theoretical issues, we single out the discussion regarding freedom of will as typical of the consequences that come from separating morals from human nature. Men are wearied with bootless discussion, and anxious to dis- miss it as a metaphysical subtlety. But nevertheless it contains within itself the most practical of all moral questions, the nature of freedom and the means of its achieving. The separation of morals from human nature leads to a separation of human nature in its moral aspects from the rest of nature, and from ordi- nary social habits and endeavors which are found in business, civic life, the run of companionships and rec- reations. These things are thought of at most as places where moral notions need to be applied, not as places where moral ideas are to be studied and moral energies generated. In short, the severance of morals from human nature ends by driving morals inwards from the public open out-of-doors air and light of day into the obscurities and privacies of an inner life. The signifi- cance of the traditional discussion of free will is that it reflects precisely a separation of moral activity from nature and the public life of men. One has to turn from moral theories to the general human struggle for political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought, speech, assemblage and creed, to find significant reality in the conception of freedom of will. Then one finds himself out of the stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the open-air world. The cost of confining moral freedom to an inner region is the almost complete sev- erance of ethics from politics and economics. The for- mer is regarded as summed up in edifying exhortations, and the latter as connected with arts of expediency separated from larger issues of good. In short, there are two schools of social reform. One bases itself upon the notion of a morality which springs from an inner freedom, something mysteriously cooped up within personality. It asserts that the only way to change institutions is for men to purify their own hearts, and that when this has been accomplished, change of institutions will follow of itself. The other school denies the existence of any such inner power, and in so doing conceives that it has denied all moral free- dom. It says that men are made what they are by the forces of the environment, that human nature is purely malleable, and that till institutions are changed, nothing can be done. Clearly this leaves the outcome as hope- less as does an appeal to an inner rectitude and benevo- 10 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT lence. For it provides no leverage for change of en- vironment. It throws us back upon accident, usually disguised as a necessary law of history or evolution, and trusts to some violent change, symbolized by civil war, to usher in an abrupt millennium. There is an alterna^ tive to being penned in between these two theories. We can recognize that all conduct is interaction between ele- ments of human nature and the environment, natural and social. Then we shall see that progress proceeds in two ways, and that freedom is found in that kind of interaction which maintains an environment in which human desire and choice count for something. There are in truth forces in man as well as without him. While they are infinitely frail in comparison with ex- terior forces, yet they may have the support of a fore- seeing and contriving intelligence. When we look at the problem as one of an adjustment to be intelligently attained, the issue shifts from within personality to an engineering issue, the establishment of arts of education and social guidance. The idea persists that there is something materialistic about natural science and that morals are degraded by having anything seriously to do with material things. If a sect should arise proclaiming that men ought to purify their lungs completely before they ever drew a breath it ought to win many adherents from professed moralists. For the neglect of sciences that deal spe- cifically with facts of the natural and social environ- ment leads to a side-tracking of moral forces into an unreal privacy of an unreal self. It is impossible to INTRODUCTION 11 say how much of the remediable suffering of the world is due to the fact that physical science is looked upon as merely physical. It is impossible to say how much of the unnecessary slavery of the world is due to the conception that moral issues can be settled within con- science or human sentiment apart from consistent study of facts and application of specific knowledge in industry, law and politics. Outside of manu- facturing and transportation, science gets its chance in war. These facts perpetuate war and the hardest, most brutal side of modern industry. Each sign of disregard for the moral potentialities of physical science drafts the conscience of mankind away from concern with the interactions of man and nature which must be mastered if freedom is to be a reality. It di- verts intelligence to anxious preoccupation with the un- realities of a purely inner life, or strengthens reliance upon outbursts of sentimental affection. The masses swarm to the occult for assistance. The cultivated smile contemptuously. They might smile, as the say- ing goes, out of the other side of their mouths if they realized how recourse to the occult exhibits the prac- tical logic of their own beliefs. For both rest upon a separation of moral ideas and feelings from knowable facts of life, man and the world. It is not pretended that a moral theory based upon realities of human nature and a study of the specific connections of these realities with those of physical science would do away with moral struggle and defeat. It would not make the moral life as simple a matter as 12 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT wending one's way along a well lighted boulevard. All action is an invasion of the future, of the unknown. Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate traits. But morals based upon concern with facts and . deriving guidance from knowledge of them would at least locate the points of effective endeavor and would focus avail- able resources upon them. It would put an end to the impossible attempt to live in two unrelated worlds. It would destroy fixed distinction between the human and the physical, as well as that between the moral and the industrial and political. A morals based on study of human nature instead of upon disregard for it would find the facts of man continuous with those of the rest of nature and would thereby ally ethics with physics and biology. It would find the nature and activities of one person coterminous with those of other human beings, and therefore link ethics with the study of history, sociology, law and economics. Such a morals would not automatically solve moral problems, nor resolve perplexities. But it would enable us to state problems in such forms that action could be courageously and intelligently directed to their solu- tion. It would not assure us against failure, but it would render failure a source of instruction. It would not protect us against the future emergence of equally serious moral difficulties, but it would enable us to ap- proach the always recurring troubles with a fund of growing knowledge which would add significant value? to our conduct even when we overtly failed as we should continue to do. Until the integrity of morals INTRODUCTION 13 with human nature and of both with the environment is recognized, we shall be deprived of the aid of past experience to cope with the most acute and deep prob- lems of life. Accurate and extensive knowledge will continue to operate only in dealing with purely tech- nical problems. The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature, man and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality, adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the form of calculation of profits, ideal- istic without being romantic. PART ONE THE PLACE OF HABIT IN CONDUCT HABITS may be profitably compared to physiological functions, like breathing, digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like func- tions in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of organism and environment. Breathing is an affair of the air as truly as of the lungs ; digesting an affair of food as truly as of tissues of stomach. Seeing involves light just as certainly as it does the eye and optic nerve. Walking implicates the ground as well as the legs ; speech demands physical air and human companionship and audience as well as vocal organs. We may shift from the biological to the math- ematical use of the word function, and say that natural operations like breathing and digesting, acquired ones like speech and honesty, are functions of the surround- ings as truly as of a person. They are things done by the environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions. The same air that under cer- tain conditions ruffles the pool or wrecks buildings, 14 HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 15 under other conditions purifies the blood and conveys thought. The outcome depends upon what air acts upon. The social environment acts through native im- pulses and speech and moral habitudes manifest them- selves. There are specific good reasons for the usual attribution of acts to the person from whom they im- mediately proceed. But to convert this special ref- erence into a belief of exclusive ownership is as mis- leading as to suppose that breathing and digesting are complete within the human body. To get a rational basis for moral discussion we must begin with recogniz- ing that functions and habits are ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former. We may borrow words from a context less technical than that of biology, and convey the same idea by say- ing that habits are arts. They involve skill of sensory and motor organs, cunning or craft, and objective materials. They assimilate objective energies, and eventuate in command of environment. They require order, discipline, and manifest technique. They have a beginning, middle and end. Each stage marks prog- ress in dealing with materials and tools, advance in con- verting material to active use. We should laugh at any one who said that he was master of stone working, but that the art was cooped up within himself and in no wise dependent upon support from objects and assistance from tools. In morals we are however quite accustomed to such a fatuity. Moral dispositions are thought of as be- 1 16 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT longing exclusively to a self. The self is thereby isolated from natural and social surroundings. A whole school of morals flourishes upon capital drawn from restrict- ing morals to character and then separating character from conduct, motives from actual deeds. Recognition of the analogy of moral action with functions and arts uproots the causes which have made morals subjective and " individualistic." It brings morals to earth, and if they still aspire to heaven it is to the heavens of the earth, and not to another world. Honesty, chastity, malice, peevishness, courage, triviality, industry, irre- sponsibility are not private possessions of a person. They are working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces. All virtues and vices, are jiabits which incorporate objective forces. They are^inter- actions of elements contributed by the make-up of an "'tb figments supplied by the out-door^wbrl3. They can be studieoaT ob j ectively^as physiological functions, and they can be modified by change of either personal or social elements. If an individual were alone in the world, he would form his habits (assuming the impossible, namely, that he would be able to form them) in a moral vacuum. They would belong to him alone, or to him only in ref- erence to physical forces. Responsibility and virtue would be his alone. But since habits involve the sup- port of environing conditions, a society or some specific group of fellow-men, is always accessory before and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man ; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 17 approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and re- sist. Even letting a man alone is a definite response. Envy, admiration and imitation are complicities. Neu- trality is non-existent. Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical " ou^ht " that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good. Washing one'sTiands of the guilt of others is a way of sharing guilt so far as it encourages in others a vicious way of action. Non-resistance to evil which takes the form of paying no attention to it is a way of promoting it. The desire of an individual to keep his own conscience stainless by standing aloof from badness may be a sure means of causing evil and thus of creating personal responsibility for it. Yet there are circumstances in which passive resistance may be the most effective form of nullification of wrong action, or in which heaping coals of fire on the evil-doer may be the most effective way of transforming conduct. To sentimentalize over a criminal to " forgive " because of a glow of feeling is to incur liability for production of criminals. But to suppose that infliction of retibu- tive suffering suffices, without reference to concrete consequences, is to leave untouched old causes of crim- inality and to create new ones by fostering revenge and brutality. The abstract theory of justice which de- mands the " vindication " of law irrespective of in- struction and reform of the wrong-doer is as much a refusal to recognize responsibility as is the sentimental gush which makes a suffering victim out of a criminal. 18 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT Courses of action which put the blame exclusively on a person as if his evil will were the sole cause of wrong-doing and those which condone offense on ac- count of the share of social conditions in producing bad disposition, are equally ways of making an unreal separation of man from his surroundings, mind from the world. Causes for an act always exist, but causes are not excuses. Questions of causation are physical, not moral except when they concern future conse- quences. It is as causes of future actions that excuses and accusations alike must be considered. At present we give way to resentful passion, and then " rational- ize " our surrender by calling it a vindication of justice. Our entire tradition regarding punitive justice tends to prevent recognition of social partnership in produc- ing crime; it falls in with a belief in metaphysical free-will. By killing an evil-doer or shutting him up behind stone walls, we are enabled to forget both him. and our part in creating him. Society excuses itself by laying the blame on the criminal ; he retorts by put- ting the blame on bad early surroundings, the tempta- tions of others, lack of opportunities, and the persecu- tions of officers of the law. Both are right, except in the wholesale character of their recriminations. But the effect on both sides is to throw the whole matter back into antecedent causation, a method which refuses to bring the matter to truly moral judgment. For morals has to do with acts still within our control, acts still to be performed. No amount of guilt on the part HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 19 of the evil-doer absolves us from responsibility for the consequences upon him and others of our way of treat- ing him, or from our continuing responsibility for the conditions under which persons develop perverse habits. We need to discriminate between the physical and the moral question. The former concerns what has hap- pened, and how it happened. To consider this question is indispensable to morals. Without an answer to it we cannot tell what forces are at work nor how to direct our actions so as to improve conditions. Until we know the conditions which have helped form the char- acters we approve and disapprove, our efforts to create the one and do away with the other will be blind and halting. But the moral issue concerns the future. It is prospective. To content ourselves with pronouncing judgments of merit and demerit without reference to the fact that our judgments are themselves facts which have consequences and that their value depends upon their consequences, is complacently to dodge the moral issue, perhaps even to indulge ourselves in pleasurable passion just as the person we condemn once indulged himself. The moral problem is that of modifying the factors which now influence future results. To change the working character or will of another we have to alter objective conditions which enter into his habits. Our own schemes of judgment, of assigning blame and praise, of awarding punishment and honor, are part of these conditions. In practical life, there are many recognitions of the 20 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT part played by social factors in generating personal traits. One of them is our habit of making social classifications. We attribute distinctive characteristics to rich and poor, slum-dweller and captain of industry, rustic and suburbanite, officials, politicians, professors, to members of races, sets and parties. These judg- ments are usually too coarse to be of much use. But they show our practical awareness that personal traits are functions of social situations. When we generalize this perception and act upon it intelligently we are committed by it to recognize that we change character from worse to better only by changing conditions among which, once more, are our own ways of dealing with the one we judge. We cannot change habit di- rectly: that notion is magic. But we can change it indirectly by modifying conditions, by an intelligent selecting and weighting of the objects which engage attention and which influence the fulfilment of desires. A savage can travel after a fashion in a jungle. Civilized activity is too complex to be carried on with- out smoothed roads. It requires signals and junction points; traffic authorities and means of easy and rapid transportation. It demands a congenial, antecedently prepared environment. Without it, civilization would relapse into barbarism in spite of the best of subjective intention and internal good disposition. The eternal dignity of labor and art lies in their effecting that per- manent reshaping of environment which is the substan- tial foundation of future security and progress. In- HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 21 dividuals flourish and wither away like the grass of the fields. But the fruits of their work endure and make possible the development of further activities having fuller significance. It is of grace not of ourselves that we lead civilized lives. There is sound sense in the old pagan notion thaj gratitude is the root of all virtue^ Loyalty to whatever in the established environment makes a life of excellence possible is the beginning of all progress. The best we can accomplish for posterity is to transmit unimpaired and with some increment of meaning the environment that makes it possible to maintain the habits of decent and refined~lileT Our individual habits are limes m forming the endless chain of humanity. Their significance depends upon the en- vironment inherited from our forerunners, and it is enhanced as we foresee the fruits of our labors in the world in which our successors live. For however much has been done, there always re- mains more to do. We can retain and transmit our own heritage only by constant remaking of our own environ- ment. Piety to the past is not for its own sake nor for the sake of the past, but for the sake of a present so secure and enriched that it will create a yet better future. Individuals with their exhortations, their preachings and scoldings, their inner aspirations and sentiments have disappeared, but their habits endure, because these habits incorporate objective conditions in themselves. So will it be with our activities. We may desire abolition of war, industrial justice, greater 22 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT equality of opportunity for all. But no amount of preaching good will or the golden rule or cultivation of sentiments of love and equity will accomplish the results. There must^ be change in objective arrange- ments and mstitutiQQS. We muslTwork oTTthe TmvTron- ment not merely on the hearts of men. To think other- wise is to suppose that flowers can be raised in a desert or motor cars run in a jungle. Both things can happen and without a miracle. But only by first changing the jungle and desert. Yet the distinctively personal or subjective factors in habit count. Taste for flowers may be the initial step in building reservoirs and irrigation canals. The stim- ulation of desire and effort is one preliminary in the change of surroundings. While personal exhortation, advice and instruction is a feeble stimulus compared with that which steadily proceeds from the impersonal forces and depersonalized habitudes of the environment, yet they may start the latter going. Taste, ap- preciation and effort always spring from some accom- plished objective situation. They have objective support; they represent the liberation of something formerly accomplished so that it is useful in further operation. A genuine appreciation of the beauty of flowers is not generated within a self-enclosed conscious- ness. It reflects a world in which beautiful flowers have already grown and been enjoyed. Taste and desire represent a prior objective fact recurring in action to secure perpetuation and extension. Desire for flowers comes after actual enjoyment of flowers. But it comes HABITS AS SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 23 before the work that makes the desert blossom, it comes before cultivation of plants. Everyjdeal is preceded by anactuality iJbut the ideal is more than a repetition in inner image of the actual. ^Jt^r^je^is^LsecjireiLand wider and_JulleiL_arjn_^iniL_g^^ pre- viously experienced in a precarious, accidental, fleeting wayT" n It is a significant fact that in order to appreciate the peculiar place of habit in activity we have to be- take ourselves to bad habits, foolish idling, gambling, addiction to liquor and drugs. When we think of such its, the union of habit with desire and with pro- pulsive power is forced upon us. When we think of habits in terms of walking, playing a musical instru- ment, typewriting, we are much given to thinking of habits as technical abilities existing apart from our likings and as lacking in urgent impulsion. We think of them as passive tools waiting to be called into action from without. A bad habit suggests an inherent tend- ency to action and also a hold, command over us. It makes us do things we are ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. It overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of our- selves. It has a hold upon us because we are the habit. Our self-love, our refusal to face facts, combined perhaps with a sense of a possible better although unrealized self, leads us to eject the habit from the thought of ourselves and conceive it as an evil power which has somehow overcome us. We feed our conceit by recalling that the habit was not deliberately formed ; we never intended to become idlers or gamblers or roues. M HABITS AND WILL 25 And how can anything be deeply ourselves which de- veloped accidentally, without set intention? These traits of a bad habit are precisely the things which are most instructive about all habits and about ourselves. They teach us that all habits are affections, that all have projectile power, and that f( predisposition formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious phojces. All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they con- stitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will. They form our effective desires anc they furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity. We may think of habits as means, waiting, like tools in a box, to be used by conscious resolve. But they are something more than that. They are active means, means that project themselves, energetic and dominat- ing ways of acting. We need to distinguish between materials, tools and means proper. Nails and boards are not strictly speaking means of a box. They are only materials for making it. Even the saw and ham- mer are means only when they are employed in some actual making. Otherwise they are tools, or potential means. They are actual means only when brought in conjunction with eye, arm and hand in some specific operation. And eye, arm and hand are, correspond- ingly, means proper only when they are in active opera- 26 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT tion. And whenever they are in action they a**e coop- erating with external materials and energies. Without support from beyond themselves the eye stares blankly and the hand moves fumblingly. They are means only when they enter into organization with things which independently accomplish definite results. These organ- izations are habits. This fact cuts two ways. Except in a contingent sense, with an " if," neither external materials nor bod- ily and mental organs are in themselves means. They have to be employed in coordinated conjunction with one another to be actual means, or habits. This state- ment may seem like the formulation in technical lan- guage of a common-place. But belief in magic has played a large part in human history. And the es- sence of all hocus-pocus is the supposition that results can be accomplished without the joint adaptation to each other of human powers and physical conditions. A desire for rain may induce men to wave willow branches and to sprinkle water. The reaction is nat- ural and innocent. But men then go on to believe that their act has immediate power to bring rain without the cooperation of intermediate conditions of nature. This is magic ; while it may be natural or spontaneous, it is not innocent. It obstructs intelligent study of operative conditions and wastes human desire and effort in futilities. Belief in magic did not cease when the coarser forms of superstitious practice ceased. The principle of magic is found whenever it is hoped to get results HABITS AND WILL 27 without intelligent control of means; and also when it is supposed that means can exist and yet remain inert and inoperative. In morals and politics such expecta- tions still prevail, and in so far the most important phases of human action are still affected by magic. We think that by feeling strongly enough about something, by wishing hard enough, we can get a desirable result, such as virtuous execution of a good resolve, or peace among nations, or good will in industry. We slur over the necessity of the cooperative action of objective conditions, and the fact that this cooperation is as- sured only by persistent and close study. Or, on the other hand, we fancy we can get these results by external machinery, by tools or potential means, with- out a corresponding functioning of human desires and capacities. Often times these two false and contradic- tory beliefs are combined in the same person. The man who feels that his virtues are his own personal accom- plishments is likely to be also the one who thinks that by passing laws he can throw the fear of God into others and make them virtuous by edict and prohib- itory mandate. Recently a friend remarked to me that there was one superstition current among even cultivated persons. They suppose that if one is told what to do, if the right end is pointed to them, all that is required in order to bring about the right act is will or wish on the part of the one who is to act. He used as an illus- tration the matter of physical posture ; the assumption is that if a man is told to stand up straight, all that 28 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT is further needed is wish and effort on his part, and the deed is done. He pointed out that this belief is on a par with primitive magic in its neglect of attention to the means which are involved in reaching an end. And he went on to say that the prevalence of this be- lief, starting with false notions about the control of the body and extending to control of mind and char- acter, is the greatest bar to intelligent social progress. It bars the way because it makes us neglect intelligent inquiry to discover the means which will produce a desired result, and intelligent invention to procure the means. In short, it leaves out the importance of intelli- gently controlled habit. We may cite his illustration of the real nature of a physical aim or order and its execution in its contrast with the current false notion.* A man who has a bad habitual posture tells himself, or is told, to stand up straight. If he is interested and responds, he braces himself, goes through certain movements, and it is as- sumed that the desired result is substantially attained; and that the position is retained at least as long as the man keeps the idea or order in his mind. Consider the assumptions which are here made. It is implied that the means or effective conditions of the reali- zation of a purpose exist independently of established habit and even that they may be set in motion in op- position to habit. It is assumed that means are there, so that the failure to stand erect is wholly a matter of failure of purpose and desire. It needs paralysis or I refer to Alexander, " Man's Supreme Inheritance." HABITS AND WILL 29 a broken leg or some other equally gross phenomenon to make us appreciate the importance of objective conditions. Now in fact a man who can stand properly does so, and only a man who can, does. In the former case, fiats of will are unnecessary, and in the latter useless. A man who does not stand properly forms a habit of standing improperly, a positive, forceful habit. The common implication that his mistake is merely nega- tive, that he is simply failing to do the right thing, and that the failure can be made good by an order of will is absurd. One might as well suppose that the man who is a slave of whiskey-drinking is merely one who fails to drink water. Conditions have been formed for producing a bad result, and the bad result will occur as long as those conditions exist. They can no more be dismissed by a direct effort of will than the condi- tions which create drought can be dispelled by whistling for wind. It is as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when it is ordered to stop burning as to suppose that a man can stand straight in consequence of a direct action of thought and desire. The fire can be put out only by changing objective conditions; it is the same with rectification of bad posture. Of course something happens when a man acts upon his idea of standing straight. For a little while, he stands differently, but only a different kind of badly. He then takes the unaccustomed feeling which accom- panies his unusual stand as evidence that he is now standing right. But there are many ways of standing 30 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT badly, and he has simply shifted his usual way to a compensatory bad way at some opposite extreme. When we realize this fact, we are likely to suppose that it exists because control of the body is physical and hence is external to mind and will. Transfer the com- mand inside character and mind, and it is fancied that an idea of an end and the desire to realize it will take immediate effect. After we get to the point of recog- nizing that_habits must intervene between wish and execution in the case of bodily acts, we still cherish the illusion that they can be dispensed with in the case of mental and moral acts. Thus the net result is to make us sharpen the distinction between non-moral and moral activities, and to lead us to confine the latter strictly within a private, immaterial realm. But in fact, formation of ideas as_wglj L _a3^ their execution de- pends upon habit. // we could form a correct idea without a correct habit, then possibly we could carry it out irrespective of habit. But a wish gets definite form only in connection with an idea, and an idea gets shape and consistency only when it has a habit back of it. Only when a man can already perform an act of standing straight does he know what it is like to have a right posture and only then can he summon the idea required for proper execution. The act must come before the thought, and a habit before an ability to evoke the thought at will. Ordinary psychology re- verses the actual state of affairs. Ideas, thoughts of ends, are not spontaneously gen- erated. There is no immaculate conception of mean- HABITS AND WILL 31 ings or purposes. Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction. But pure sensations out of which ideas can be framed apart from habit are equally fictitious. The sensations and ideas which are the " stuff "of thought and purpose are alike affected by habits manifested in the acts which give rise to sen- sations and meanings. The dependence of thought, or the more intellectual factor in our conceptions, upon prior experience is usually admitted. But those who attack the notion of thought pure from the influence of experience, usually identify experience with sensa- tions impressed upon an empty mind. They there- fore replace the theory of unmixed thoughts with that of pure unmixed sensations as the stuff of all conceptions, purposes and beliefs. But distinct and independent sensory qualities, far from being original elements, are the products of a highly skilled analysis which disposes of immense technical scientific resources. To be able to single out a definitive sensory element in any field is evidence of a high degree of previous training, that is, of well-formed habits. A moderate amount of observa- tion of a child will suffice to reveal that even such gross discriminations as black, white, red, green, are the re- sult of some years of active dealings with things in the course of which habits have been set up. It is not such a simple matter to have a clear-cut sensation. The latter is a sign of training, skill, habit. Admission that the idea of, say, standing erect is dependent upon sensory materials is, therefore equiva- lent to recognition that it is dependent upon the 32 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT habitual attitudes which govern concrete sensory ma- terials. The medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our perception and thought. The filter is not, however, chemically pure. It is a reagent which adds new qualities and rearranges what is received. Our ideas truly depend upon experience, but so do our sensations. And the experience upon which they both depend is the operation of habits originally of in- stincts. Thus our purposes and commands regarding action (whether physical or moral) come to us through the refracting medium of bodily and moral habits. In- ability to think aright is sufficiently striking to have caught the attention of moralists. But a false psy- chology has led them to interpret it as due to a neces- sary conflict of flesh and spirit, not as an indication that our ideas are as dependent, to say the least, upon our habits as are our acts upon our conscious thoughts and purposes. Only the man who can maintain a correct posture has the stuff out of which to form that idea of standing erect which can be the starting point of a right act. Only the man whose habits are already good can know what the good is. Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of be- havior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness. The psychology of illusions of perception is full of illustrations of the distortion in- troduced by habit into observation of objects. The same fact accounts for the intuitive element in judg- ments of action, an element which is valuable or the HABITS AND WILL 33 reverse in accord with the quality of dominant habits. For, as Aristotle remarked, the untutored moral per- ceptions of a good man are usually trustworthy, those of a bad character, not. (But he should have added that the influence of social custom as well as personal habit has to be taken into account in estimating who is the good man and the good judge.) What is true of the dependence of execution of an idea upon habit is true, then, of the formation and quality of the idea. Suppose that by a happy chance a right concrete idea or purpose concrete, not simply correct in words has been hit upon: What happens when one with an incorrect habit tries to act in accord with it? Clearly the idea can be carried into execution only with a mechanism already there. If this is de- fective or perverted, the best intention in the world will yield bad results. In the case of no other engine does one suppose that a defective machine will turn out good goods simply because it is invited to. Everywhere else we recognize that the design and structure of the agency employed tell directly upon the work done. Given a bad habit and the " will " or mental direction to get a good result, and the actual happening is a reverse or looking-glass manifestation of the usual fault a com- pensatory twist in the opposite direction. Refusal to recognize this fact only leads to a separation of mind from body, and to supposing that mental or " psychi- cal " mechanisms are different in kind from those of bodily operations and independent of them. So deep seated is this notion that even so " scientific " a theory S4> HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT as modern psycho-analysis thinks that mental habits can be straightened out by some kind of purely psychi- cal manipulation without reference to the distortions of sensation and perception which are due to bad bodily sets. The other side of the error is found in the notion of " scientific " nerve physiologists that it is only neces- sary to locate a particular diseased cell or local lesion, independent of the whole complex of organic habits, in order to rectify conduct. Means are means; they are intermediates, middle terms. To grasp this fact is to have done with the ordinary dualism of means and ends. The " end " is merely a series of acts viewed at a remote stage; and a means is merely the series viewed at an earlier one. The distinction of means and end arises in surveying the course of a proposed line of action, a connected series in time. The " end " is the last act thought of ; the means are the acts to be performed prior to it in time. To reach an end we must take our mind off from it and attend to the act which is next to be performed. We must make that the end. The only exception to this statement is in cases where customary habit de- termines the course of the series. Then all that is wanted is a cue to set it off. But when the proposed ,end involves any deviation from usual action, or any rectification of it as in the case of standing straight then the main thing is to find some act which is dif- ferent from the usual one. The discovery and per- formance of this unaccustomed act is the " end " to which we must devote all attention. Otherwise we shall HABITS AND WILL 35 simply do the old thing over again, no matter what is our conscious command. The only way of accomplish- ing this discovery is through a flank movement. We must stop even thinking of standing up straight. To think of it is fatal, for it commits us to the operation of an established habit of standing wrong. We must find an act within our power which is disconnected from any thought about standing. We must start to do another thing which on one side inhibits our falling into the customary bad position and on the other side is the beginning of a series of acts which may lead into the correct posture.* The hard-drinker who keeps think- ing of not drinking is doing what he can to initiate the acts which lead to drinking. He is starting with the stimulus to his habit. To succeed he must find some positive interest or line of action which will inhibit the drinking series and which by instituting another course of action will bring him to his desired end. In short, the man's true aim is to discover some course of action, having nothing to do with the habit of drink or stand- ing erect, which will take him where he wants to go. The discovery of this other series is at once his means and his end. Until one takes intermediate acts seri- ously enough to treat them as ends, one wastes one's time in any effort at change of habits. Of the inter- mediate acts, the most important is the next one. The first or earliest means is the most important end to discover. *The technique of this process is stated in the book of Mr. Alexander already referred to, and the theoretical statement given is borrowed from Mr. Alexander's analysis. 36 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT Means and ends are two names for the same reality. The terms denote not a division in reality but a dis- tinction in judgment. Without understanding this fact we cannot understand the nature of habits nor can we pass beyond the usual separation of the moral and non-moral in conduct. " End " is a name for a series of acts taken collectively like the term army. " Means " is a name for the same series taken distrib- utively like this soldier, that officer. To think of the end signifies to extend and enlarge our view of the act to be performed. It means to look at the next act in perspective, not permitting it to occupy the entire field of vision. To bear the end in mind signifies that we should not stop thinking about our next act until we form some reasonably clear idea of the course of action to which it commits us. To attain a remote end means on the other hand to treat the end as a series of means. To say that an end is remote or distant, to say in fact that it is an end at all, is equivalent to saying that obstacles intervene between us and it. If, however, it remains a distant end, it becomes a mere end, that is a dream. As soon as we have projected it, we must begin to work backward in thought. We must change what is to be done into a how, the means whereby. The end thus re-appears as a series of " what nexts," and the what next of chief importance is the one nearest the present state of the one acting. Only as the end is converted into means is it definitely conceived, or in- tellectually defined, to say nothing of being executable. Just as end, it is vague, cloudy, impressionistic. We HABITS AND WILL 37 do not know what we are really after until a course of action is mentally worked out. Aladdin with his lamp could dispense with translating ends into means, but no .one else can do so. Now the thing which is closest to us, the means within our power, is a habit. ^Some habit impeded by circumstances is the source of the projection of the end. It is also the primary means in its realization. The habit is propulsive and moves anyway toward some end. or re -j$, whether it is projected as an end-in-view or not. The man who can walk does walk; the man who can talk does converse if only with himself. How is this statement to be reconciled with the fact that we are not always walking and talking; that our habits seem so often to be laten^ ympprflt i i vp?> S"^V> inactivity holds only of overt, visibly obvious operation. In actuality j;ach habit operates all the timr pf wnkittfT' lifej^ihough like a member of a crew taking his turn at the wheel, its operation becomes the dominantly_ characteristic trait of an act only occasionally or rarely. The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps still, even in dreams. The recog- nition of distances and directions of things from his place at rest is the obvious proof of this statement. The habit of locomotion is latent in the sense that it is covered up, counteracted, by a habit of seeing which is definitely at the fore. But counteraction is not sup- pression. Locomotion is a potential energy, not in any metaphysical sense, but in the physical sense in 38 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT which potential energy as well as kinetic has to be taken account of in any scientific description. Everything that a man who has the habit of locomotion does and thinks he does and thinks differently on that account. This fact is recognized in current psychology, but is falsified into an association of sensations. Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character could exist. There would be simply a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. Character is the Interpenetration of habits. If each habit existed in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others, character would not exist. That is, ^conduct would lack unity being only a juxtaposition of jjJisconnected_jeflc- tions to separated situations. But since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those re- mote from one another contain like elements, acgntHro- ous modification of habits by one_anpther is constantly going on. A man may give himself away in a look or a gesture. Character can be read through the medium of individual acts. Of course interpenetration is never total. It is most marked in what we call strong characters. Integration is an achievement rather than a datum. ^A_jgeak, jjn^" stable, vacillating character is one in which different habits alternate with one another rather than embody one another. The strength, solidity of a habit is not its own possession but is due to reinforcement by the force of other habits which it absorbs into itself. Routine specialization always works against interpene- HABITS AND WILL 39 tration. Men with " pigeon-hole " minds are not in- frequent. Their diverse standards and methods of judgment for scientific, religious, political matters tes- tify to isolated compartmental habits of action. Char- acter that is unable to undergo successfully the strain of thought and effort required to bring competing tendencies into a unity, builds up barriers between different systems of likes and dislikes. The emotional stress incident to conflict is avoided not by readjust- ment but by effort at confinement. Yet the exception proves the rule. Such persons are successful in keeping different ways of reacting apart from one another in consciousness rather than in action. Their character is marked by stigmata resulting from this division. The mutual modification of habits enables us to define jhj^jiature ^? the moral situation. It is not necessary nor advisable to be always consid- ering the interaction of h^bits__wjth_one_a.nother, that is to say the effect of a particular habit upon char- acter which is a name for the total interaction. Such consideration distracts attention from the problem of building up an effective habit. A man who is learning French, or chess-playing or engineering has his hands full with his particular occupation. He would be con- fused and hampered by constant inquiry into its effect upon character. He would resemble the centipede who by trying to think of the movement of each leg in re- lation to all the others was rendered unable to travel. At any given time, certain habits must be taken for granted as a matter of course. Their operation is not 40 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT a matter of moral judgment. They are treated as technical, recreational, professional, hygienic or eco- nomic or esthetic rather than moral. To lug in morals, or ulterior effect on character at every point, is to cultivate moral valetudinarianism or priggish posing. Nevertheless any act, even that one which passes ordi- narily as trivial, may entail such consequences for habit and character as upon occasion to require judgment from the standpoint of the whole body of conduct. It then comes under moral scrutiny. To know when to leave acts without distinctive moral judgment and when to subject them to it is itself a large factor in morality. The serious matter is that this relative pragmatic, or intellectual, distinction between the moral and non-moral, has been solidified into a fixed and abso- lute distinction, so that some acts are popularly re- garded as forever within and others forever without the moral domain. From this fatal error recognition of the relations of one habit to others preserves us. For it makes us see that character is the name given to the working interaction of habits, and that the cumulative effect of insensible modifications worked by a particular habit in the body of preferences may at any moment require attention. The word habit may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use when employed as we have been using it. But we need a word to express that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a cer- ,tain ordering or systematization of minor elements of HABITS AND WILL 41 action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation ; and which is operative in some subdued subordinate ,form even when not obviously dominating activity. Habit even in its ordinary usage comes nearer to denoting these facts than any other word. If the facts are lecognized we may also use the words attitude and disposition. But unless we have first made clear to ourselves the facts which have been set forth under the name of habit, these words are more likely to be misleading than is the word habit. For the latter conveys explicitly the sense of operativeness, actuality. Attitude and, as ordinarily used, disposition suggest something latent, potential, something which requires a positive stimulus outside themselves to be- come active. If we perceive that they denote positive forms of action which are released merely through removal of some-counteracting "inhibitory" tendency. and then become overt, we may employ them instead of the word habit to denote subdued, non-patent forms of the latter. In this case, we must bear in mind that the word disposition means predisposition, readiness to act overtly in a specific fashion whenever opportunity is presented, this opportunity consisting in removal of the pressure due to the dominance of some overt habit ; and that attitude means some special case of a pre- disposition, the disposition waiting as it were to spring through an opened door. While it is admitted that the word habit has been used in a somewhat broader sense than is usual, we must protest against the tendency in 4 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT psychological literature to limit its meaning to repe- tition. This usage is much less :'n accord with popular usage than is the wider way in \vhich we have used the word. It assumes from the start the identity of habit with routine. Repetition is in- no sense the essence of habit. Tendency to repeat acts is an incident of many habits but not of all. A man with the habit of giving way to anger may show his habit by a murderous attack upon some one who has offended. His act is nonethe- less due to habit because it occurs only once in his life. The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts ex- cept as, under special conditions, these express a way of behaving. Habit means special sensitiveness or ac- cessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predi- lections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will. Ill The Dynamic force of habit taken in connection with the continuity of habits with one another explains the unity of character and conduct, or speaking more con- cretely of motive and act, will and deed. Moral the- ories have frequently separated these things from each other. One type of theory, for example, has asserted that only will, disposition, motive counts morally ; that acts are external, physical, accidental ; that moral good is different from goodness in act since the latter is meas- ured by consequences, while moral good or virtue is in- trinsic, complete in itself, a jewel shining by its own light a somewhat dangerous metaphor however. The other type of theory has asserted that such a view is equivalent to saying that all that is necessary to be virtuous is to cultivate states of feeling; that a pre- mium is put on disregard of the actual consequences of conduct, and agents are deprived of any objective criterion for the Tightness and wrongness of acts, being thrown back on their own whims, prejudices and private peculiarities. Like most opposite extremes in philo- sophic theories, the two theories suffer from a common mistake. Both of them ignore the projective force of habit and the implication of habits in one another. Hence they separate a unified deed into two disjoined parts, an inner called motive and an outer called act. 43 44 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT The doctrine that the chief good of man is good will easily wins acceptance from honest men. For common- sense employs a juster psychology than either of the theories just mentioned. By will, common-sense under- stands something practical and moving. It under- stands the body of habits, of active dispositions which makes a man do what he does. Will is thus not some- thing opposed to consequences or severed from them. It is a cause of consequences ; it is causation in its per- sonal aspect, the aspect immediately preceding action. It hardly seems conceivable to practical sense that by will is meant something which can be complete without reference to deeds prompted and results occasioned. Even the sophisticated specialist cannot prevent re- lapses from such an absurdity back into common-sense. Kant, who went the limit in excluding consequences from moral value, was sane enough to maintain that a society of men of good will would be a society which in fact would maintain social peace, freedom and cooperation. We take the will for the deed not as a substitute for doing, or a form of doing nothing, but in the sense that, other things being equal, the right disposition will produce the right deed. For a disposition means a tendency to act, a potential energy needing only op- portunity to become kinetic and overt. Apart from such tendency a " virtuous " disposition is either hy- pocrisy or self-deceit. Common-sense in short never loses sight wholly of the two facts which limit and define a moral situation. One is that consequences fix the moral quality of an 45 act. The other is thai upon the whole, or in the long run but not unqualifiedly, consequences are what they are because of the neture of desire and disposition. Hence there is a natural contempt for the morality of the " good " man who does not show his goodness in the results of his habitual acts. But there is also an aversion to attributing omnipotence to even the best of good dispositions, and hence an aversion to applying the criterion of consequences unreservedly. A holiness of character which is celebrated only on holy-days is unreal. A virtue of honesty, or chastity or benevo- lence which lives upon itself apart from definite results consumes itself and goes up in smoke. The separation of motive from motive-force in action accounts both for the morbidities and futilities of the professionally good, and for the more or less subconscious contempt for morality entertained by men of a strong executive habit with their preference for " getting things done." Yet there is justification for the common assump- tion that deeds cannot be judged properly without tak- ing their animating disposition as well as their concrete consequences into account. The reason, however, lies not in isolation of disposition from consequences, but in the need for viewing consequences broadly. This act is only one of a multitude of acts. If we confine our- selves to the consequences of this one act we shall come out with a poor reckoning. Disposition is habitual, persistent. It shows itself therefore in many acts and in many consequences. Only as we keep a running ac- count, can we judge disposition, disentangling its ten- 46 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT dency from accidental accompaniments. When once we have got a fair idea of its teidency, we are able to place the particular consequences of a single act in a wider context of continuing consequences. Thus we protect ourselves from taking as trivial a habit which is serious, and from exaggerating into momentousness an act which, viewed in the light of aggregate conse- quences, is innocent. There is no need to abandon common-sense which tells us in judging acts first to inquire into disposition; but there is great need that the estimate of disposition be enlightened by a scientific psychology. Our legal procedure, for example, wob- bles between a too tender treatment of criminality and a viciously drastic treatment of it. The vacillation can be remedied only as we can analyze an act in the light of habits, and analyze habits in the light of education, environment and prior acts. The dawn of truly sci- entific criminal law will come when each individual case is approached with something corresponding to the complete clinical record which every competent physi- cian attempts to procure as a matter of course in deal- ing with his subjects. Consequences include effects upon character, upon confirming and weakening habits, as well as tangibly obvious results. To keep an eye open to these effects upon character may signify the most reasonable of precautions or one of the most nauseating of practices. It may mean concentration of attention upon personal rectitude in neglect of objective consequences, a prac- tice which creates a wholly unreal rectitude. But it CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 47 may mean that the survey of objective consequences is duly extended in time. An act of gambling may be judged, for example, by its immediate overt effects, consumption of time, energy, disturbance of ordinary monetary considerations, etc. It may also be judged by its consequences upon character, setting up an en- during love of excitement, a persistent temper of spec- ulation, and a persistent disregard of sober, steady work. To take the latter efFt :ts into account is equiv- alent to taking a broad vie'/ of future consequences; for these dispositions affect future companionships, vocation and avocations, the whole tenor of domestic and public life. For similar reasons, while common-sense does not run into that sharp opposition of virtues or moral goods and natural goods which has played such a large part in professed moralities, it does not insist upon an exact identity of the two. Virtues are ends because they are such important means. To be honest, courageous, kindly is to be in the way of producing specific natural goods or satisfactory fulfilments. Error comes into theories when the moral goods are separated from their consequences and also when the attempt is made to secure an exhaustive and unerring identification of the two. There is a reason, valid as far as it goes, for distinguishing virtue as a moral good resident in char- acter alone, from objective consequences. As matter of fact, a desirable trait of character does not always produce desirable results while good things often hap- pen with no assistance from good will. Luck, accident, 48 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT contingency, plays its part. The act of a good char- acter it; deflected in operation, while a monomaniacal egotism may employ a desire for glory and power to perform acts which satisfy crying social needs. Reflec- tion shows that we must supplement the conviction of the moral connection betweeen character or habit and consequences by two considerations. One is the fact that ve are inclined to take the no- tions of goodness in character and goodness in results in too fixed a way. Persi'itent disparity between virtu- ous disposition and actual ^outcome shows that we have misjudged either the nature of virtue or of success. Judgments of both motive and consequences are still, in the absence of methods of scientific analysis and con- tinuous registration and reporting, rudimentary and conventional. We are inclined to wholesale judgments of character, dividing men into goats and sheep, in- stead of recognizing that all character is speckled, and that the problem of moral judgment is one of discrim- inating the complex of acts and habits into tendencies which are to be specifically cultivated and condemned. We need to study consequences more thoroughly and keep track of them more continuously before we shall be in a position where we can pass with reasonable as- surance upon the good and evil in either disposition or results. But even when proper allowances are made, we are forcing the pace when we assume that there is or ever can be an exact equation of disposition and out- come. We have to admit the role of accident. We cannot get beyond tendencies, and must perforce CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 49 content ourselves with judgments of tendency. The honest man, we are told, acts upon " principle " and not from considerations of expediency, that is, of par- ticular consequences. The truth in this saying is that it is not safe to judge the worth of a proposed act by its probable consequences in an isolated case. The word " principle " is a eulogistic cover for the fact of tendency. The word " tend^^y " i *i aftpmyt f to combine two facts, one tfoat. habits hayp ^ pprfaiy] causal efficacy, theoFKer that their outworking in any partic- ular case is subject to Contingencies, to_gircumstancaa which are unforeseeable and which carry an act one side of its usual effect. In cases of doubt, there is no recourse save to stick to " tendency," that is, to the probable effect of a habit in the long run, or as we say upon the whole. Otherwise we are on the lookout for exceptions which favor our immediate desire. The trouble is that we are not content with modest proba- bilities. So when we find that a good disposition may work out badly, we say, as Kant did, that the working- out, the consequence, has nothing to do with the moral quality of an act, or we strain for the impossible, and aim at some infallible calculus of consequences by which to measure moral worth in each specific case. Human conceit has played a great part. It has demanded that the whole universe be judged from the standpoint of desire and disposition, or at least from that of the desire and disposition of the good man. The effect of religion has been to cherish this conceit by making- men think that the universe invariably conspires 50 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT to support the good and bring the evil to naught. By a subtle logic, the effect has been to render morals unreal and transcendental. For since the world of actual ex- perience does not guarantee this identity of character and outcome, it is inferred that there must be some ulterior truer reality which enforces an equation that is violated in this life. Hence the common notion of an- other world in which vice and virtue of character pro- duce their exact moral meed. The idea is equally found as an actuating force in Plato. Moral realities must be supreme. Yet they are flagrantly contradicted in a world where a Socrates drinks the hemlock of the crim- inal, and where the vicious occupy the seats of the mighty. Hence there must be a truer ultimate reality in which justice is only and absolutely justice. Some- thing of the same idea lurks behind every aspiration for realization of abstract justice or equality or lib- erty. It is the source of all " idealistic " utopias and also of all wholesale pessimism and distrust of life. Utilitarianism illustrates another way of mistreating the situation. Tendency is not good enough for the utilitarians. They want a mathematical equation of act and consequence. Hence they make light of the steady and controllable factor, the factor of disposi- tion, and fasten upon just the things which are most subject to incalculable accident pleasures and pains and embark upon the hopeless enterprise of judging an act apart from character on the basis of definite results. An honestly modest theory will stick to the probabil- ities of tendency, and not import mathematics into CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 51 morals. It will be alive and sensitive to consequences as they actually present themselves, because it knows that they give the only instruction we can procure as to the meaning of habits and dispositions. But it will never assume that a moral judgment which reaches cer- tainty is possible. We have just to do the best we can with habits, the forces most under our control; and we shall have our hands more than full in spelling out their general tendencies without attempting an exact judgment upon each deed. For every habit incorpo- rates within itself some part of the objective environ- ment, and no habit and no amount of habits can in- corporate the entire environment within itself or them- selves. There will always be disparity between them and the results actually attained. Hence the work of intelligence in observing consequences and in revising and readjusting habits, even the best of good habits, can never be foregone. Consequences reveal unexpected potentialities in our habits whenever these habits are exercised in a different environment from that in which they were formed. The assumption of a stably uniform environment (even the hankering for one) expresses a fiction due to attachment to old habits. The utilitarian theory of equation of acts with consequences is as much a fiction of self-conceit as is the assumption of a fixed transcendental world wherein moral ideals are eternally and immutably real. Both of them deny in effect the relevancy of time, of change, to morals, while time is of the essence of the moral struggle. We thus come, by an unexpected path, upon the old 52 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT question of the objectivity or subjectivity of morals. Primarily they are objective. For will, as we have seen, means, in the concrete, habits; and habits incor- porate an environment within themselves. They are adjustments of the environment, not merely to it. At the same time, the environment is many, not one ; hence will, disposition, is plural. Diversity does not of itself imply conflict, but it implies the possibility of conflict, and this possibility is realized in fact. Life, for ex- ample, involves the habit of eating, which in turn in- volves a unification of organism and nature. But never- theless this habit comes into conflict with other habits which are also " objective," or in equilibrium with their environments. Because the environment is not all of one piece, man's house is divided within itself, against itself. Honor or consideration for others or courtesy conflict with hunger. Then the notion of the complete objectivity of morals gets a shock. Those who wish to maintain the idea unimpaired take the road which leads to transcendentalism. The empirical world, they say, is indeed divided, and hence any natural morality must be in conflict with itself. This self-contradiction however only points to a higher fixed reality with which a true and superior morality is alone concerned. Ob- jectivity is saved but at the expense of connection with human affairs. Our problem is to see what objectivity signifies upon a naturalistic basis; how morals are ob- jective and yet secular and social. Then we may be able to decide in what crisis of experience morals be- CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 53 come legitimately dependent upon character or self that is, " subjective." Prior discussion points the way to the answer. A hungry man could not conceive food as a good unless he had actually experienced, with the support of en- vironing conditions, food as good. The objective sat- isfaction comes first. But he finds himself in a situ- ation where the good is denied in fact. It then lives in imagination. The habit denied overt expression asserts itself in idea. It sets up the thought, the ideal, of food. This thought is not what is sometimes called thought, a pale bloodless abstraction, but is charged with the motor urgent force of habit. Food as a good is now subjective, personal. But it has its source in objective conditions and it moves forward to new ob- jective conditions. For it works to secure a change of environment so that food will again be present in fact. Food is a " subjective " good during a temporary tran- sitional stage from one object to another. The analogy with morals lies upon the surface. A habit impeded in overt operation continues nonetheless to operate. It manifests itself in desireful thought, that is in an ideal or imagined object which embodies within itself the force of a frustrated habit. There is therefore demand for a changed environment, a demand which can be achieved only by some modification and rearrangement of old habits. Even Plato preserves an intimation of the natural function of ideal objects when he insists upon their value as patterns for use in re- 54 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT organization of the actual scene. The pity is that he could not see that patterns exist only within and for the sake of reorganization, so that they, rather than empirical or natural objects, are the instrumental af- fairs. Not seeing this, he converted a function of reorganization into a metaphysical reality. If we essay a technical formulation we shall say that morality be- comes legitimately subjective or personal when activ- ities which once included objective factors in their oper- ation temporarily lose support from objects, and yet strive to change existing conditions until they regain a support which has been lost. It is all of a kind with the doings of a man, who remembering a prior satisfaction of thirst and the conditions under which it occurred, digs a well. For the time being water in reference to his activity exists in imagination not in fact. But this imagination is not a self-generated, self- enclosed, psychical existence. It is the persistent op- eration of a prior object which has been incorporated in effective habit. There is no miracle in the fact that an object in a new context operates in a new way. Of transcendental morals, it may at least be said that they retain the intimation of the objective char- acter of purposes and goods. Purely subjective morals arise when the incidents of the temporary (though re- current) crisis of reorganization are taken as complete and final in themselves. A self having habits and atti- tudes formed with the cooperation of objects runs ahead of immediately surrounding objects to effect a new equilibration. Subjective morals substitutes a self CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 55 always set over against objects and generating its. ideals independently of objects, and in permanent, not transitory, opposition to them. Achievement, any achievement, is to it a negligible second best, a cheap and poor substitute for ideals that live only in the mind, a compromise with actuality made from physical necessity not from moral reasons. In truth, there i but a temporal episode. For a time, a self, a person, carries in his own habits against the forces of the im- mediate environment, a good which the existing en- ,vironment denies. For this self moving temporarily, in isolation from objective conditions, between a good, a completeness, that has been and one that it is hoped to restore in some new form, subjective theories have substituted an erring soul wandering hopelessly between a Paradise Lost in the dim past and a Paradise to be Regained in a dim future. In reality, even when a person is in some respects at odds with his environment and so has to act for the time being as the sole agent of a good, he in many respects is still supported by objective conditions and is in possession of undisturbed goods and virtues. Men do die from thirst at times, but upon the whole in their search for water they are sustained by other fulfilled powers. But subjective morals taken wholesale sets up a solitary self without objective ties and sustenance. In fact, there exists a shifting mixture of vice and virtue. Theories paint a world with a God in heaven and a Devil in hell. Mor- alists in short have failed to recall that a severance of moral desire and purpose from immediate actualities 56 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT is an inevitable phase of activity when habits persist while the world which they have incorporated alters. Back of this failure lies the failure to recognize that in a changing world, old habits must perforce need modi- fication, no matter how good they have been. Obviously any such change can be only experimen- tal. The lost objective good persists in habit, but it can recur in objective form only through some con- dition of affairs which has not been yet experienced, and which therefore can be anticipated only uncertainly and inexactly. The essential point is that anticipation should at least guide as well as stimulate effort, that it should be a working hypothesis corrected and developed by events as action proceeds. There was a time when men believed that each object in the external world carried its nature stamped upon it as a form, and that intelligence consisted in simply inspecting and reading off an intrinsic self-enclosed complete nature. The sci- entific revolution which began in the seventeenth cen- tury came through a surrender of this point of view. It began with recognition that every natural object is in truth an event continuous in space and time with other events ; and is to be known only by experi- mental inquiries which will exhibit a multitude of com- plicated, obscure and minute relationships. Any ob- served form or object is but a challenge. The case is not otherwise with ideals of justice or peace or human brotherhood, or equality, or order. They too are not things self-enclosed to be known by introspection, as objects were once supposed to be known bj rational in- CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 57 sight. Like thunderbolts and tubercular disease and the rainbow they can be known only by extensive and minute observation of consequences incurred in action. A false psychology of an isolated self and a subjective morality shuts out from morals the things important to it, acts and habits in their objective consequences. At the same time it misses the point characteristic of the personal subjective aspect of morality: the signifi- cance of desire and thought in breaking down old rigidities of habit and preparing the way for acts that re-create an environment. IV We often fancy that institutions, social custom, col- lective habit, have been formed by the consolidation of individual habits. In the main this supposition is false to fact. To a considerable extent customs, or wide- spread uniformities of habit, exist because individuals face the same situation and react in like fashion. But to a larger extent customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. An individual usually acquires the morality as he inherits the speech of his social group. The activities of the group are already there, and some assimilation of his own acts to their pattern is a pre- requisite of a share therein, and hence of having any part in what is going on. Each person is born an infant, and every infant is subject from the first breath he draws and the first cry he utters to the attentions and demands of others. These others are not just persons in general with minds in general. They are beings with habits, and beings who upon the whole esteem the habits they have, if for no other reason than that, having them, their imagination is thereby lim- ited. The nature of habit is to be assertive, insistent, self-perpetuating. There is no miracle in the fact that if a child learns any language he learns the language that those about him speak and teach, especially since his ability to speak that language is a pre-condition of 68 CUSTOM AND HABIT 59 his entering into effective connection with them, making wants known and getting them satisfied. Fond parents and relatives frequently pick up a few of the child's spontaneous modes of speech and for a time at least they are portions of the speech of the group. But the ratio which such words bear to the total vocabulary in use gives a fair measure of the part played by purely individual habit in forming custom in comparison with the part played by custom in forming individual habits. Few persons have either the energy or the wealth to build private roads to travel upon. They find it con- venient, " natural," to use the roads that are already there; while unless their private roads connect at some point with the high-way they cannot build them even if they would. These simple facts seem to me to give a simple ex- planation of matters that are often surrounded with mystery. To talk about the priority of " society " to the individual is to indulge in nonsensical metaphysics. But to say that some pre-existent association of human beings is prior to every particular human being who is born into the world is to mention a commonplace. These associations are definite modes of interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form customs, institutions. There is no problem in all his- tory so artificial as that of how " individuals " manage to form " society." The problem is due to the pleasure taken in manipulating concepts, and discussion goes on because concepts are kept from inconvenient con- tact with facts. The facts of infancy and sex have 60 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT only to be called to mind to see how manufactured are the conceptions which enter into this particular problem. The problem, however, of how those established and more or less deeply grooved systems of interaction which we call social groups, big and small, modify the activities of individuals who perforce are caught-up within them, and how the activities of component indi- viduals remake and redirect previously established cus- toms is a deeply significant one. Viewed from the stand- point of custom and its priority to the formation of habits in human beings who are born babies and grad- ually grow to maturity, the facts which are now usually assembled under the conceptions of collective minds, group-minds, national-minds, crowd-minds, etc., etc., Jose the mysterious air they exhale when mind is thought of (as orthodox psychology teaches us to think of it) as something which precedes action. It is dif- ficult to see that collective mind means anything more than a custom brought at some point to explicit, em- phatic consciousness, emotional or intellectual.* * Mob psychology comes under the same principles, but in a negative aspect. The crowd and mob express a disintegration of habits which releases impulse and renders persons susceptible to immediate stimuli, rather than such a functioning of habits as is found in the mind of a club or school of thought or a political party. Leaders of an organization, that is of an inter- action having settled habits, may, however, in order to put over some schemes deliberately resort to stimuli which will break through the crust of ordinary custom and release impulses on such a scale as to create a mob psychology. Since fear is a normal reaction to the unfamiliar, dread and suspicion are the forces most played upon to accomplish this result, together with vast vague contrary hopes. This is an ordinary technique in excited political campaigns, in starting war, etc. But an assimi- CUSTOM AND HABIT 61 The family into which one is born is a family in a village or city which interacts with other more or less integrated systems of activity, and which includes a diversity of groupings within itself, say, churches, po- litical parties, clubs, cliques, partnerships, trade- unions, corporations, etc. If we start with the tradi- tional notion of mind as something complete in itself, then we may well be perplexed by the problem of how a common mind, common ways of feeling and believing and purposing, comes into existence and then forms these groups. The case is quite otherwise if we recognize that in any case we must start with grouped action, that is, with some fairly settled system of inter- action among individuals. The problem of origin and development of the various groupings, or definite cus- toms, in existence at any particular time in any par- ticular place is not solved by reference to psychic causes, elements, forces. It is to be solved by reference to facts of action, demand for food, for houses, for a lation like that of Le Bon of the psychology of democracy to the psychology of a crowd in overriding individual judgment shows lack of psychological insight. A political democracy exhibits an overriding of thought like that seen in any convention or in- stitution. That is, thought is submerged in habit. In the crowd and mob, it is submerged in undefined emotion. China and Japan exhibit crowd psychology more frequently than do western demo- cratic countries. Not in my judgment because of any essentially Oriental psychology but because of a nearer background of rigid and solid customs conjoined with the phenomena of a period of transition. The introduction of many novel stimuli creates occa- sions where habits afford no ballast. Hence great waves of emo- tion easily sweep through masses. Sometimes they are waves of enthusiasm for the new; sometimes of violent reaction against it both equally undiscriminating. The war has left behind it a somewhat similar situation in western countries. 62 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT mate, for some one to talk to and to listen to one talk, for control of others, demands which are all intensified by the fact already mentioned that each person begins a helpless, dependent creature. I do not mean of course that hunger, fear, sexual love, gregariousness, sym- pathy, parental love, love of bossing and of being or- dered about, imitation, etc., play no part. But I do mean that these words do not express elements or forces which are psychic or mental in their first intention. They denote ways of behavior. These ways of behaving involve interaction, that is to say, and prior groupings. And to understand the existence of organized ways or habits we surely need to go to physics, chemistry and physiology rather than to psychology. There is doubtless a great mystery as to why any such thing as being conscious should exist at all. But if consciousness exists at all, there is no mystery in its being connected with what it is connected with. That is to say, if an activity which is an interaction of vari- ous factors, or a grouped activity, comes to conscious- ness it seems natural that it should take the form of an emotion, belief or purpose that reflects the inter- action, that it should be an " our " consciousness or a " my " consciousness. And by this is meant both that it will be shared by those who are implicated in the associative custom, or more or less alike ir them all, and that it will be felt or thought to concern others as well as one's self. A family-custom or organized habit of action comes into contact and conflict for example with that of some other family. The emotions cf ruf- CUSTOM AND HABIT 63 fled pride, the belief about superiority or being " as good as other people," the intention to hold one's own are naturally our feeling and idea of our treatment and position. Substitute the Republican party or the American nation for the family and the general situ- ation remains the same. The conditions which de- termine the nature and extent of the particular group- ing in question are matters of supreme import. But they are not as such subject-matter of psychology, but of the history of politics, law, religion, economics, in- vention, the technology of communication and inter- course. Psychology comes in as an indispensable tool. But it enters into the matter of understanding these various special topics, not into the question of what psychic forces form a collective mind and therefore a social group. That way of stating the case puts the cart a long way before the horse, and naturally gathers obscurities and mysteries to itself. In short, the pri- mary facts of social psychology center about collective habit, custom. In addition to the general psychology of habit which is general not individual in any intel- ligible sense of that word we need to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs, pur- poses of those who are affected by them. The problem of social psychology is not how either individual or collective mind forms social groups and customs, but how different customs, established interacting arrange- ments, form and nurture different minds. From this general statement we return to our special problem, which is how the rigid character of past custom has 64 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT unfavorably influenced beliefs, emotions and purposes having to do with morals. We come back to the fact that individuals begin their career as infants. For the plasticity of the young pre- sents a temptation to those having greater experience and hence greater power which they rarely resist. It seems putty to be molded according to current designs. That plasticity also means power to change prevailing custom is ignored. Docility is looked upon not as abil- ity to learn whatever the world has to teach, but as subjection to those instructions of others which reflect their current habits. To be truly docile is to be eager to learn all the lessons of active, inquiring, expanding experience. The inert, stupid quality of current cus- toms perverts learning into a willingness to follow where others point the way, into conformity, constric- tion, surrender of scepticism and experiment. When we think of the docility of the young we first think of the stocks of information adults wish to impose and the ways of acting they want to reproduce. Then we think of the insolent coercions, the insinuating briberies, the pedagogic solemnities by which the freshness of youth can be faded and its vivid curiosities dulled. Education becomes the art of taking advantage of the helplessness of the young; the forming of habits be- comes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom. Of course it is not wholly forgotten that habits are abilities, arts. Any striking exhibition of acquired skill in physical matters, like that of an acrobat or CUSTOM AND HABIT 65 billiard-player, arouses universal admiration. But we like to have innovating power limited to technical mat- ters and reserve our admiration for those manifestations that display virtuosity rather than virtue. In moral matters it is assumed that it is enough if some ideal has been exemplified in the life of a leader, so that it is now the part of others to follow and reproduce. For every branch of conduct, there is a Jesus or Buddha, a Na- poleon or Marx, a Froebel or Tolstoi, whose pattern of action, exceeding our own grasp, is reduced to a practicable copy-size by passage through rows and rows of lesser leaders. The notion that it suffices if the idea, the end, is present in the mind of some authority dominates formal schooling. It permeates the unconscious education de- rived from ordinary contact and intercourse. Where following is taken to be normal, moral originality is pretty sure to be eccentric. But if independence were the rule, originality would be subjected to severe, ex- perimental tests and be saved from cranky eccentricity, as it now is in say higher mathematics. The regime of custom assumes that the outcome is the same whether an individual understands what he is about or whether he goes through certain motions while mouthing the words of others repetition of formulas being esteemed of greater importance, upon the whole, than repetition of deeds. To say what the sect or clique or class says is the way of proving that one also understands and approves what the clique clings to. In theory, democ- racy should be a means of stimulating original thought, 66 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT and of evoking action deliberately adjusted in advance to cope with new forces. In fact it is still so immature that its main effect is to multiply occasions for imita- tion. If progress in spite of this fact is more rapid than in other social forms, it is by accident, since the diversity of models conflict with one another and thus give individuality a chance in the resulting chaos of opinions. Current democracy acclaims success more boisterously than do other social forms, and surrounds failure with a more reverberating train of echoes. But the prestige thus given excellence is largely adventi- tious. The achievement of thought attracts others not so much intrinsically as because of an eminence due to multitudinous advertising and a swarm of imitators. Even liberal thinkers have treated habit as essen- tially, not because of the character of existing customs, conservative. In fact only in a society dominated by modes of belief and admiration fixed by past custom is habit any more conservative than it is progressive. It all depends upon its quality. Habit is an ability, an art, formed through past experience. But whether an ability is limited to repetition of past acts adopted to past conditions or is available for new emergencies depends wholly upon what kind of habit exists. The tendency to think that only " bad " habits are dis- serviceable and that bad habits are conventionally numerable, conduces to make all habits more or less bad. For what makes a habit bad is enslavement to old ruts. The common notion that enslavement to good ends converts mechanical routine into good is a CUSTOM AND HABIT 67 negation of the principle of moral goodness. It iden- tifies morality with what was sometime rational, pos- sibly in some prior experience of one's own, but more probably in the experience of some one else who is now blindly set up as a final authority. The genuine heart of reasonableness (and of goodness in conduct) lies in effective mastery of the conditions which now enter into action. To be satisfied with repeating, with trav- ersing the ruts which in other conditions led to good, is the surest way of creating carelessness about present and actual good. Consider what happens to thought when habit is merely power to repeat acts without thought. Where does thought exist and operate when it is excluded from habitual activities? Is not such thought of necessity shut out from effective power, from ability to control objects and command events? Habits deprived of thought and thought which is futile are two sides of the same fact. To laud habit as conservative while prais- ing thought as the main spring of progress is to take the surest course to making thought abstruse and irrelevant and progress a matter of accident and catas- trophe. The concrete fact behind the current separa- tion of body and mind, practice and theory, actualities and ideals, is precisely this separation of habit and thought. Thought which does not exist within ordinary jhifl.frit.s of ftction lacks means of execution. In lacking application, it also lacks test, criterion. Hence it is condemned to a separate realm. If we try to act upon it, our actions are clumsy, forced. In fact, contrary 68 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT habits (as we have already seen) come into operation and betray our purpose. After a few such experiences, it is subconsciously decided that thought is too precious and high to be exposed to the contingencies of action. It is reserved for separate uses; thought feeds only thought not action. Ideals must not run the risk of contamination and perversion by contact with actual conditions. Thought then either resorts to specialized and technical matters influencing action in the library or laboratory alone, or else it becomes sentimentalized. Meantime there are certain " practical " men who combine thought and habit and who are effectual. Their thought is about their own advantage ; and their habits correspond. They dominate the actual situation. They encourage routine in others, and they also subsidize such thought and learning as are kept remote from affairs. This they call sustaining the standard of the ideal. Subjection they praise as team-spirit, loyalty, devotion, obedience, industry, law-and-order. But they temper respect for law by which they mean the order of the existing status on the part of others with most skilful and thoughtful manipulation of it in behalf of their own ends. While they denounce as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves, on the part of others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit, they think quite literally for themselves, that is, of themselves. This is the eternal game of the practical men. Hence it is only by accident that the separate and endowed CUSTOM AND HABIT 69 * thought " of professional thinkers leaks out into ac- tion and affects custom. 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 ma- terials are technical, books, words. Ideas are objecti- fied 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 de- mand 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 mon- etary 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 educa- tion 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 70 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT converting an original docility to the new into a docility to repeat and to conform. Yet all habit involves mechanization. Habit is im- possible without setting up a mechanism of action, physiologically engrained, which operates " spontane- ously," 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 ex- periments. 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 adventur- ing 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 move- ments 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 CUSTOM AND HABIT 71 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 en- graver! How unerringly they phrase every shade of emotion and every turn of idea! Mechanism is indis- pensable. If each act has to be consciously searched for at the moment and intentionally performed, exe- cution 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 mas- terful technician. The technique or mechanism is fused with thought and feeling. The " mechanical " per- former permits the mechanism to dictate the perform- ance. 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 elan, but only the prevalence of dead habits deflects life into mere elan. 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 exer- cises of repetition in which skill apart from thought is the aim, until suddenly, magically, this soulless mechan- ism 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 prac- tice for skill, an artist uses an art he already has. He acquires greater skill because practice of skill is more 72 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 fac- tors 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, cit- izen, 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 tliat they tend to cancel one another, so that individ- uals have the advantage neither of uniform training nor of intelligent adaptation. Whence an intellectu- CUSTOM AND HABIT 73 alist, 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 philo- sophical 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 de- plore the artistic skill with which he has recommended the division and the metaphysical subtlety with which he has striven to establish its necessary and unchange- able nature. For the latter tends to confirm and sanc- tion 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 acknowledg- ment of the need of a continuous unification of spirit and habit, rather than to be a sanction of their di- vorce. 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 noth- 74 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ing remains to spirit, pure thought, except a blind on- ward push or impetus, the net conclusion is surely the need of revision of the fundamental premiss of sepa- ration of soul and habit. A blind creative force is as likely to turn out to be destructive as creative ; the vital elan may delight in war rather than in the laborious arts of civilization, and a mystic intuition of an ungoing 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 contriv- ances of reorganization. For the eulogistic qualities which Bergson attributes to the elan 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 ma- nipulation 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. For practical purposes morals mean customs, folk- ways, established collective habits. This is a common- place 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 per- sonal activities. They are the pattern into which in- dividual 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 la- boriously 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 per- ception. 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 75 76 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 mytho- logical 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 cer- tain channels. When interfered with, it swells as re- sentment 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 collec- tion of facts which show the connection of custom with morals* 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 ap- probation as distinctive inner feelings or conscious states which give rise to acts. In his anxiety to dis- place 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 cus- tom or habit is the source of sympathetic resentment, while overt approbation goes out to fidelity to custom maintained under exceptional circumstances. * " The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas." CUSTOM AND MORALITY 77 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 ii^ and then the custom of^rationalityis added to a prior custom. External reasonableness or adaptation to ends pre- cedes 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 re- sults 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 78 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT makes men sensitive to the brutalities and extrava- gancies of customs. In short, it becomes a custom of expectation and outlook, an active demand for reason- ableness 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 ration- ality 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 ^ Q th^-figiide of life was the dis- covery with which the Athenian Socrates initiated con- scious 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 sub- CUSTOM AND MORALITY 79 stantial ballast, and personal rationality or reflective intelligence been treated as the necessary organ of experimental initiative and creative invention in re- making 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 subordi- nation of fact to ideal consideration, while the view pre- sented 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 cus- tom avails itself of the assistance of the notion it at- tacks. 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 in- tend language; they did not have social objects con- sciously 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^Jnstinc- tive motions called gestures, and the pressure of circum- stance. But nevertheless language once called into ex- istence is language and operates as language. It op- crates not to perpetuate the forces which produced - j i / itl 80 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT but to modify and redirect them. It has such tran- scendent 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 ami lit- erature, but extends to the common life in communi- cation, 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 sci- ence did not originate to serve conscious ends nor was their generation regulated by consciousness of prin- ciples 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 recon- struct. They open new avenues of endeavor and impose new labors. In short they are civilization, culture, morality. Still the question recurs : What authority have stand- ards 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 CUSTOM AND MORALITY 81 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, cul- tivate 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 sub- stance. 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 en- gage in it in some way or other or else quit and get out. In short, the choice is not between a moral author- ity outside custom and one within it. It is between adopting more or less intelligent and significant customs. Curiously enough, the chief practical effect of re- fusing 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. 82 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 condi- tions. 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 vir- tues. Vigor, courage, energy, enterprise here; sub- mission, patience, charm, personal fidelity there: the masculine and feminine virtues. But mobility invades society. War, commerce, travel, communication, con- tact with the thoughts and desires of other classes, new CUSTOM AND MORALITY 83 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 Tightness 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 under- standing, 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. Mobil- ity has affected peoples as well. Nations and races ;face one another, each with its own immutable stand- ards. 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 sup- ported 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 princi- ples, 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 psy- chology 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 di- rectly 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 depend- ent 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 char- acters 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 en- vironment and capable of being termed a separate in- dividual 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 84 HABIT AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 85 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 con- ditions 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 fel-l lows. The isolation of man from nature is duly mani- fested in the split between mind and body since body is clearly a connected part of nature. Thus the instru- ment of action and the means of the continuous modi- fication of action, of the cumulative carrying forward KJ> 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 ag_ an intellectual i formulation of those facts of morality which treated/ the most important kind of action as a j>rivate c cern, something to be enacted and concluded within character as a_purely personal possession. The re- ligious and metaphysical interests which wanted the ideal to be a separate realm finally coincided with a practical revolt against current customs and institu- tions 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 essen- tial truth. Its exaggeration of individuality is largely 86 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT a compensatory reaction against the pressure of insti- tutional 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 ex- pense of acts which have public meaning and which incorporate and exact social relationships. A psy- chology 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, ideal- ization. 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 sep- arate 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 HABIT AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 87 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 psy- chology 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 psy- chology, 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 in- dividualized color or quality of habitual activity is ab- stracted, and becomes a center of activity aiming to reconstruct customs in accord with some desire which is rejected by the immediate situation and which there- fore 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 nec- essarily 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 88 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 ob- jective habit. PART TWO THE PLACE OP IMPULSE IN CONDUCT HABITS as organized activities are secondary and acquired, not native and original. They are out- growths 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 ar- tificial 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 prim- itive. Impulses although first in time are never pri- mary 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 89 90 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 na- tive; 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 mudpuddle 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 waste- ful energy. It gets quality, significance, when it be- comes a smouldering sullenness, an annoying interrup- tion, a peevish irritation, a murderous revenge, a blaz- ing 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 dis- plays 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 IMPULSES AND CHANGE 91 with an inventory and description of instinctive activ- ities. 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 red- wood, 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 condi- tions 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 dis- cuss 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 (includ- ing 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. 92 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT The wholesale human sacrifices of Peru and the tender- ness 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 ag- gressive militarism of an imperial Prussia, monarchy by divine right and government by the people; the countless diversity of habits suggested by such a ran- dom 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 in- stincts, 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 dif- ferent environments. Yet it goes without saying that original, unlearned IMPULSES AND CHANGE 93 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 col- lective, our study must go to analysis of native ten- dencies. 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 dis- puted 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 surg- ing 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 psy- chologists to think of them as the fountain head of all 94. HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 sur- roundings. 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 com- plete in itself instincts clearly come before habits. Gen- eralize this individualistic view, and we have an assump- tion that all customs, all significant episodes in the life of individuals can be carried directly back to the opera- tion 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 depend- encies 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 cap- able 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-organ- ization 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 inter- woven with other impulses. This depends in turn upon the outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social en- vironment. 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 95 96 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 en- dure 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, undevel- oped activity has succeeded in modifying adult organ- ized 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 im- pulses 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 possi- bilities 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 com- bined 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 estab- PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE 97 lished 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 mod- eled 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 ac- commodation to the embodied opinions of others. Consequently docility has been identified with imi- tativeness, instead of with power to re-make old habits, to re-create. Plasticity and originality have been op- posed to each other. That the most precious part of plasticity consists in ability to form habits of inde- pendent 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, as- similation, reproduction, and others that work toward exploration, discovery and creation. But the weight of adult custom has been thrown upon retaining 98 and strengthening tendencies toward conformity, and against those which make for variation and independ- ence. 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 institu- tions 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 dis- trust 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 be- fore thought is awake and even before the day of ex- periences 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 " infantal- isms " account for the mass of irrationalities that pre- vail among men of otherwise rational tastes. These PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE 99 personal " hang-overs " are the cause of what the stu- dent of culture calls survivals. But unfortunately these survivals are much more numerous and pervasive than the anthropologist and historian are wont to ad- mit. To list them would perhaps oust one from " re- spectable " 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 com- munity 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 uncer- tainties, its effusions and reticences, it remains a stand- ing 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 war- fare 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 chil- dren their love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting the last drop of significance from each sit- uation, 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 100 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 at- tained 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 char- acter which shall be steadfast, and we then conceive this desired faithfulness as something immutable, a char- acter 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 con- tinual source of improvised spontaneities and novel in- spirations. We rebel against all organization and all stability. If modern thought and sentiment is to es- cape from this division in its ideals, it must be through utilizing released impulse as an agent of steady re- organization 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 role in adult life. If it did, life would petrify, society stag- nate. Instinctive reactions are sometimes too intense to be woven into a smooth pattern of habits. Under ordinary circumstances they appear to be tamed to PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE 101 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 upheav- als, 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 es- tablished 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 sup- port the belief. Decadence and degeneration seems to be the rule as age increases. An irruption of some un- civilized horde has then provided new blood and fresh 102 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT life so much so that history has been defined as a pro- cess 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 rigid- ity; there is social arterial sclerosis. Then some peo- ple 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 ex- haustion. 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 perpetu- ation 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-function- ing impulses which may be drawn upon. Their mani- festation and utilization is called conversion or regen- eration 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 mat- ter of fact, the stiffer and the more encrusted the cus- toms, the larger is the number of instinctive activities PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE 103 that find no regular outlet and that accordingly merely await a chance to get an irregular, uncoordinated man- ifestation. 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 interpreta- tion ad hoc. Moral and legal schemes that attempt the impossible in the way of definite formulation com- pensate 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, im- posing upon them the burden of discovery and adap- tation. The relation which actually exists between un- directed instinct and over-organized custom is illus- trated 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. 104 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 chang- ing detail of daily life, whatever is left uncovered by custom is free from regulation. It is therefore left to appetite and momentary circumstance. Thus enslave- ment 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 exag- gerated form the psychology current in civilized life whenever customs harden and hold individuals en- meshed. Within civilization, the savage still exists. He is known in his degree by oscillation between loose in- dulgence 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 im- pulse 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 con- duct as a pivot of re-adjustment, 're-organization, in PLASTICITY OF IMPULSE 105 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.* General- izing 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 the- ories which idealize raw impulse and find in its spon- taneities an adequate mode of human freedom. Im- pulse is a source, an indispensable source, of liberation ; but only as it is employed in giving habits pertinence and freshness does it liberate power. * The use of the words instinct and impulse as practical equiva- lents 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, undi- rected, initial. Man can progress as boasts 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 ia possible for man to learn the habit of learning. Then betterment becomes a conscious principle of life. Ill Incidentally we have touched upon a most far-reach- ing problem: The alterability of human nature. Early reformers, following John Locke, were inclined to mini- mize the significance of native activities, and to em- phasize 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 ac- complishments 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 per- fectibility 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 unaltera- bility of human nature. Circumstances may change 106 CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 107 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 re- former 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 in- stincts 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 defi- nite 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 or- ganization of the animals' original abilities. But the short-cut revolutionist fails to realize the 108 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 hesi- tate to propose or prophesy rapid and sweeping social changes. A social revolution may effect abrupt and deep alterations in external customs, in legal and po- litical institutions. But the habits that are behind these institutions and that have, willy-nilly, been shaped by objective conditions, the habits of thought and feel- ing, are not so easily modified. They persist and in- sensibly 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 dis- like, 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 disappoint- ment, 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. Con- sequently as a rule the moral effects of even great po- CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 109 litical revolutions, after a few years of outwardly con- spicuous 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 gen- eral 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 ex- ternal 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. Na- tive 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 pres- 110 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ent 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 pos- sible 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 multi- tude 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 tt> CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 111 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 partic- ular economic regime is necessary because of acquisi- tive and competitive impulses which must find ex- pression. 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 inter- action may give a chemical transformation not a me- chanical 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 fac- tors 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 be- hind 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 pro- duced 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 9f phoenixes, griffins and unicorns. Native 112 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 for- ever 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 conven- tions 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, oppor- tunity to make a name, money or a career, affection, piety to ancestors and ancestral gods all of these CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 113 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 ten- dencies named and we only by the nobler. In earlier days there was something more than a verbal connec- tion 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 gen- erated 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 tra- ditionally 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 mo- tives 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, 114 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 con- ceivable 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 deper- sonalized scientific mass war becomes, the more neces- sary 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 provoca- tions, based on new economic and political conditions, CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 115 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 at- tribute 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. Hin- ton 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 im- pulses in times of peace. 116 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 con- tended 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 ex- istence 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. Posses- sion 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 CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 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 seek- ing fame, in literary creation, in scientific production. In the face of this elasticity, it requires an arrogant ig- norance 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 arrange- ments, 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 psycho- logical 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 point- 118 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ing 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 j?yerj[ conscious act has an incentive or motive. But this senseis 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 na- ture 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, with- out 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 econom- ics. In truth man acts anyway, he can't help acting. In every fundamental sense it is false that a man re- quires a motive to make him do something. To a CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 119 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, in- stinctively, is to search for food that his activity nat- urally 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 gen- erally 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 120 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT that, when we want to direct his. activity thaJL_is_tousay in a specified channel, then the question of inotiyeis pertinent. A motive is then that element in the total complex of a man's activity which, if it can be suf- ficiently stimulated, will result in an act having speci- fied consequences. And part of the process of intensi- fying (or reducing) certain elements in thejbotaj^actiyj- ityjmd thus regulating actual consequence is to impute these_^lementsto a person aj his Actuating motives. A child naturally grabs food. ButJie 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 mo- tive for acting in the disapproved way, we induce him to refrain. We analyze his total act and call his atten- tion 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 reinforc- ing 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 ^rior J^in_act and produce it. It is an act plus a judgment upon some element o? it, the judgment being made in the light of the consequences of the act. CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 121 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 con- duct. 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 act- ing in this way or that before he acts. He recalls that if he acts this way or that some observer, real or im- aginary, will attribute to him noble or mean disposi- tion, virtuous or vicious motive. Thus he learns to in- fluence 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 tomduce him to^actT^wg^hbiil? say that when a man is going to act he needs to know what he_js going to do what the quality of his act is in terms~c^Tconsequences to follow. In order to act prop- erlyne 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^jictivity 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 12 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT run this is the most effective way of influencing activity to take this desirable direction rather than that ob- jectionable 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 multi- plied 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 con- cerns 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 simplifi- cations 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 lead- ing proposition that social customs are not direct and necessary consequences of specific impulses, but that social institutions and expectations shape and crystal- lize impulses into dominant habits. The social peculiarity which explains the emphasis put upon profit as an inducement to productive serv- iceable work stands out in high relief in the identifica- tion of work with labor. For labor means in economic theory something painful, something so onerously dis- agreeable or " costly " that every individual avoids it CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 123 if he can, and engages in it only because of the prom- ise 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 burden- some 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 under- taken 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 immedi- ately irksome. The alleged need of an incentive to stir men out of quiescent inertness is the need of an incen- tive powerful enough to overcome contrary stimuli which proceed from the social conditions. Circum- stances 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 fulfillment, and finding an ouuet is itself satisfactory, for it marks partial accomplishment. If productive activity has become so inherently unsatis- factory that men have to be artificially induced to 124 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT engage in it, this fact is ample proof that the condi- tions 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 out- come 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 in- vestments 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 na- ture 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 conserva- tive 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 activ- ities. They stimulate, inhibit, intensify, weaken, select, concentrate and organize the latter into their own like- ness. 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 125 126 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT solve the problem and secure fundamental reorganiza- tions 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 institu- tions? 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 sys- tem 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 educa- tion 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 con- venient 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 educa- tion 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 opportuni- ties of educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire. The young are not as yet as subject to the full im- pact of established customs. Their life of impulsive activity is vivid, flexible, experimenting, curious. Adults have their habits formed, fixed, at least com- paratively. They are the subjects, not to say victims, of an environment which they can directly change only 128 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 in- ducing 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 expen- sive 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, unin- telligent 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 con- spicuously a time of such internal frictions and liber- ations. Social life seems chaotic, unorganized, rather IMPULSE AND CONFLICT OF HABITS 129 than too fixedly regimented. Political and legal in- stitutions are now inconsistent with the habits that dominate friendly intercourse, science and art. Dif- ferent 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 in- stitutions 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 strug- gles, or whether intelligent direction may modulate the harshness of conflict, and turn the elements of disin- tegration 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 dif- fused throughout the situation, why dwell upon the ISO HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 compan- ionship to politics, from home to school. An individ- ual is now subjected to many conflicting schemes of education. Hence habits are divided against one an- other, 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 de- sirable 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." 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 prac- tical 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 pur- pose is to facilitate our dealings with unique individ- uals and changing events. When we assume that our clefts and bunches represent fixed separations and col- lections 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 deli- cacies 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 spe- 131 132 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT cialism. It is one of the conspicuous traits of high- browism, the essence of false abstractionism. This at- titude 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 em- pirical turn run the number up to fifty and sixty. But in fact there are as many specific reactions to differ- ing 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 prov- inces 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 be- come 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 in- vention, 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 ex- CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 133 act 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 multi- tudinous 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 mo- ment. 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 to- day, 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 un- sound. As a report of contemporary social condi- tions 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. 134 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 elan of self-forgetting loyalty, and scientific study to a disinterested love of wisdom that seemed to be monopolized by a small isolated group. The dis- tinctions 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 " in- stinct " 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- CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 135 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 un- doubted fact. What does the statement amount to? Simply the truism that life is life, that life is a con- tinuing 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, at- tack, defense, search for food, etc., a multitude of spe- cific responses to specific stimulations of the environ- ment. 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 in- genious 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 136 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT 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 re- flective 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 cer- tain 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 com- CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 137 pleted 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 com- mon fact of fulfilment, the more we realize the differ- ence 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. The explanation of the fallacy is however too easy to be convincing. There must have been some material, empirical reason why intelligent men were so easily en- trapped by a fairly obvious fallacy. That material error was a belief in the fixity and simplicity of the self, a belief which had been fostered by a school far removed from the one in question, the theologians with their dogma of the unity and ready-made completeness of the soul. We arrive at true conceptions of motiva- tion and interest only by the recognition that selfhood (except as it has encased itself in a shell of routine) is in process of making, and that any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized dispositions. Even a Nero may be capable upon occasion of acts of kindness. It is even conceivable that under certain circumstances he may be appalled by the consequences of cruelty, and turn to the fostering of kindlier impulses. A sympathetic person is 138 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT not immune to harsh arrogances, and he may find him- self involved in so much trouble as a consequence of a kindly act, that he allows his generous impulses to shrivel and henceforth governs his conduct by the dic- tates of the strictest worldly prudence. Inconsistencies and shiftings in character are the commonest things in experience. Only the hold of a traditional conception of the singleness and simplicity of soul and self blinds us to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and diversity of the constituents of selfhood. There is no one ready-made self behind activities. There are complex, unstable, opposing attitudes, habits, impulses which gradually come to terms with one another, and assume a certain consistency of configuration, even though only by means of a distribution of inconsis- tencies which keeps them in water-tight compartments, giving them separate turns or tricks in action. Many good words get spoiled when the word self is prefixed to them: Words like pity, confidence, sacrifice, control, love. The reason is not far to seek. The word self infects them with a fixed introversion and isolation. It implies that the act of love or trust or control is turned back upon a self which already is in full exist- ence and in whose behalf the act operates. Pity fulfils and creates a self when it is directed outward, opening the mind to new contacts and receptions. Pity for self withdraws the mind back into itself, rendering its sub- ject unable to learn from the buffetings of fortune. Sacrifice may enlarge a self by bringing about surren- der of acquired possessions to requirements of new CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 139 growth. Self-sacrifice means a self-maiming which asks for compensatory pay in some later possession or in- dulgence. Confidence as an outgoing act is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life, trusting them to bring instruction and support to a developing self. Confidence which terminates in the self means a smug complacency that renders a person obtuse to instruc- tion by events. Control means a command of resources that enlarges the self; self-control denotes a self which is contracting, concentrating itself upon its own achievements, hugging them tight, and thereby estop- ping the growth that comes when the self is generously released; a self-conscious moral athleticism that ends in a disproportionate enlargement of some organ. What makes the difference in each of these cases is the difference between a self taken as something already made and a self still making through action. In the former case, action has to contribute profit or secur- ity or consolation to a self. In the latter, impulsive action becomes an adventure in discovery of a self which is possible but as yet unrealized, an experiment in creating a self which shall be more inclusive than the one which exists. The idea that only those impulses have moral validity which aim at the welfare of others, or are altruistic, is almost as one-sided a doctrine as the dogma of self-love. Yet altruism has one marked superiority; it at least suggests a generosity of out- going action, a liberation of power as against the close, pent in, protected atmosphere of a ready-made ego. The reduction of all impulses to forms of self-lova 140 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT is worth investigation because it gives an opportunity to say something about self as an ongoing process. The doctrine itself is faded, its advocates are belated. The notion is too tame to appeal to a generation that has experienced romanticism and has been intoxicated by imbibing from the streams of power released by the industrial revolution. The fashionable unification of today goes by the name of the will to power. In the beginning, this is hardly more than a name for a quality of all activity. Every fulfilled activity ter- minates in added control of conditions, in an art of administering objects. Execution, satisfaction, reali- zation, fulfilment are all names for the fact that an activity implies an accomplishment which is possible only by subduing circumstance to serve as an accom- plice of achievement. Each impulse or habit is thus a will to its (mm power. To say this is to clothe a truism in a figure. It says that anger or fear or love or hate is successful when it effects some change out- side the organism which measures its force and regis- ters its efficiency. The achieved outcome marks the difference between action and a cooped-up sentiment which is expended upon itself. The eye hungers for light, the ear for sound, the hand for surfaces, the arm for things to reach, throw and lift, the leg for distance, anger for an enemy to destroy, curiosity for something to shiver and cower before, love for a mate. Each im- pulse is a demand for an object which will enable it to function. Denied an object in reality it tends to create one in fancy, as pathology shows. CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 141 So far we have no generalized will to power, but only the inherent pressure of every activity for an adequate manifestation. It is not so much a demand for power as search for an opportunity to use a power already existing. If opportunities corresponded to the need, a desire -for power would hardly arise : power would be used and satisfaction would accrue. But impulse is balked. If conditions are right for an educative growth, the snubbed impulse will be " sublimated." That is, it will become a contributory factor in some more inclusive and complex activity, in which it is reduced to a subordinate yet effectual place. Some- times however frustration dams activity up, and inten- sifies it. A longing for satisfaction at any cost is en- gendered. And when social conditions are such that the path of least resistance lies through subjugation of the energies of others, the will to power bursts into flower. This explains why we attribute a will to power to others but not to ourselves, except in the complimen- tary sense that being strong we naturally wish to exer- cise our strength. Otherwise for ourselves we only want what we want when we want it, not being over- scrupulous about the means we take to get it. This psychology is naive but it is truer to facts than the supposition that there exists by itself as a separate and original thing a will to power. For it indicates that the real fact is some existing power which demands out- let, and which becomes self-conscious only when it is too weak to overcome obstacles. Conventionally the 142 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT will to power is imputed only to a comparatively small number of ambitious and ruthless men. They are prob- ably upon the whole quite unconscious of any such will, being mastered by specific intense impulses that find their realization most readily by bending others to serve as tools of their aims. Self-conscious will to power is found mainly in those who have a so-called inferiority complex, and who would compensate for a sense of per- sonal disadvantage (acquired early in childhood) by making a striking impression upon others, in the reflex of which they feel their strength appreciated. The literateur who has to take his action out in imagina- tion is much more likely to evince a will to power than a Napoleon who sees definite objects with extraordinary clearness and who makes directly for them. Explosive irritations, naggings, the obstinacy of weak persons, dreams of grandeur, the violence of those usually sub- missive are the ordinary marks of a will to power. Discussion of the false simplification involved in this doctrine suggests another unduly fixed and limited classification. Critics of the existing economic regime have divided instincts into the creative and the acquis- itive, and have condemned the present order because it embodies the latter at the expense of the former. The division is convenient, yet mistaken. Convenient be- cause it sums up certain facts of the present system, mistaken because it takes social products for psycho- logical originals. Speaking roughly we may say that native activity is both creative and acquisitive, creative as a process, acquisitive in that it terminates as a rule CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 143 in some tangible product which brings the process to consciousness of itself. Activity is creative in so far as it moves to its own enrichment as activity, that is, bringing along with it- self a release of further activities. Scientific inquiry, artistic production, social companionship possess this trait to a marked degree ; some amount of it is a normal accompaniment of all successfully coordinated action. While from the standpoint of what precedes it is a fulfilment, it is a liberative expansion with respect to what comes after. There is here no antagonism between creative expression and the production of results which endure and which give a sense of accomplishment. Architecture at its best, for example, would probably appear to most persons to be more creative, not less, than dancing at its best. There is nothing in industrial production which of necessity excludes creative activ- ity. The fact that it terminates in tangible utilities no more lowers its status than the uses of a bridge exclude creative art from a share in its design and construction. What requires explanation is why process is so definitely subservient to product in so much of modern indus- try: that is, why later use rather than present achieving is the emphatic thing. The answer seems to be twofold. An increasingly large portion of economic work is done with machines. As a rule, these machines are not under the personal control of those who operate them. The machines are operated for ends which the worker has no share in forming and in which as such, or apart 144 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT from his wage, he has no interest. He neither under- stands the machines nor cares for their purpose. He is engaged in an activity in which means are cut off from ends, instruments from what they achieve. Highly mechanized activity tends as Emerson said to turn men into spiders and needles. But if men understand what they are about, if they see the whole process of which their special work is a necessary part, and if they have concern, care, for the whole, then the mechanizing ef- fect is counteracted. But when a man is only the tender of a machine, he can have no insight and no affection ; creative activity is out of the question. What remains to the workman is however not so much acquisitive desires as love of security and a wish for a good time. An excessive premium on security springs from the precarious conditions of the workman ; desire for a good time, so far as it needs any explanation, from demand for relief from drudgery, due to the ab- sence of culturing factors in the work done. Instead of acquisition being a primary end, the net effect of the process is rather to destroy sober care for materials and products ; to induce careless wastefulness, so far as that can be indulged in without lessening the weekly wage. From the standpoint of orthodox economic theory, the most surprising thing about modern indus- try is the small number of persons who have any ef- fective interest in acquisition of wealth. This disre- gard for acquisition makes it easier for a few who do want to have things their own way, and who monopolize what is amassed. If an acquisitive impulse were only CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 145 more evenly developed, more of a real fact, than it is, it it quite possible that things would be better than they are. Even with respect to men who succeed in accumulat- ing wealth it is a mistake to suppose that acquisitive- ness plays with most of them a large role, beyond get- ting control of the tools of the game. Acquisition is necessary as an outcome, but it arises not from love of accumulation but from the fact that without a large stock of possessions one cannot engage effectively in modern business. It is an incident of love of power, of desire to impress fellows, to obtain prestige, to secure influence, to manifest ability, to " succeed " in short under the conditions of the given regime. And if we are to shove a mythological psychology of instincts be- hind modern economics, we should do better to invent instincts for security, a good time, power and success than to rely upon an acquisitive instinct. We should have also to give much weight to a peculiar sporting instinct. Not acquiring dollars, but chasing them, hunting them is the important thing. Acquisition has its part in the big game, for even the most devoted sportsman prefers, other things being equal, to bring home the fox's brush. A tangible result is the mark to one's self and to others of success in sport. Instead of dividing sharply an acquisitive impulse manifested in business and a creative instinct displayed in science, art and social fellowship, we should rather first inquire why it is that so much of creative activity is in our day diverted into business, and then ask why 146 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT it is that opportunity for exercise of the creative ca- pacity in business is now restricted to such a small class, those who have to do with banking, finding a market, and manipulating investments ; and finally ask why creative activity is perverted into an over-special- ized and frequently inhumane operation. For after all it is not the bare fact of creation but its quality which counts. That captains of industry are creative artists of a sort, and that industry absorbs an undue share of the creative activity of the present time cannot be denied. To impute to the leaders of industry and commerce simply an acquisitive motive is not merely to lack in- sight into their conduct, but it is to lose the clew to bettering conditions. For a more proportionate dis- tribution of creative power between business and other occupations, and a more humane, wider use of it in business depend upon grasping aright the forces actu- ally at work. Industrial leaders combine interest in making far-reaching plans, large syntheses of condi- tions based upon study, mastery of refined and complex technical skill, control over natural forces and events, with love of adventure, excitement and mastery of fel- low-men. When these interests are reinforced with actual command of all the means of luxury, of display and procuring admiration from the less fortunate, it is not surprising that creative force is drafted largely into business channels, and that competition for an op- portunity to display power becomes brutal. The strategic question, as was said, is to understand CLASSIFICATION OF INSTINCTS 147 how and why political, legal, scientific and educational conditions of society for the last centuries have stim- ulated and nourished such a one-sided development of creative activities. To approach the problem from this point of view is much more hopeful, though infin- itely more complex intellectually, than the approach which sets out with a fixed dualism between acquisitive and creative impulses. The latter assumes a complete split of higher and lower in the original constitution of man. Were this the case, there would be no organic remedy. The sole appeal would be to sentimental ex- hortation to men to wean themselves from devotion to the things which are beloved by their lower and material nature. And if the appeal were moderately successful the social result would be a fixed class division. There would remain a lower class, superciliously looked down upon by the higher, consisting of those in whom the acquisitive instinct remains stronger and who do the necessary work of life, while the higher " creative " class devotes itself to social intercourse, science and art. Since the underlying psychology is wrong, the prob- lem and its solution assumes in fact a radically differ- ent form. There are an indefinite number of original or instinctive activities, which are organized into inter- ests and dispositions according to the situations to which they respond. To increase the creative phase and the humane quality of these activities is an affair of modifying the social conditions which stimulate, se- lect, intensify, weaken and coordinate native activities. 148 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT The first step in dealing with it is to increase our de- tailed scientific knowledge. We need to know exactly the selective and directive force of each social situation ; exactly how each tendency is promoted and retarded. Command of the physical environment on a large and deliberate scale did not begin until belief in gross forces and entities was abandoned. Control of physical en- ergies is due to inquiry which establishes specific cor- relations between minute elements. It will not be other- wise with social control and adjustment. Having the knowledge we may set hopefully at work upon a course of social invention and experimental engineering. A study of the educative effect, the influence upon habit, of each definite form of human intercourse, is pre- requisite to effective reform. VI In spite of what has been said, it will be asserted that there are definite, independent, original instincts which manifest themselves in specific acts in a one-to-one correspondence. Fear, it will be said, is a reality, and so is anger, and rivalry, and love of mastery of others, and self-abasement, maternal love, sexual desire, gre- gariousness and envy, and each has its own appropriate deed as a result. Of course they are realities. So are suction, rusting of metals, thunder and lightning and lighter-than-air flying machines. But science and in- vention did not get on as long as men indulged in the notion of special forces to account for such phenomena. Men tried that road, and it only led them into learned ignorance. They spoke of nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; of a force of combustion; of intrinsic nisus toward this and that ; of heaviness and levity as forces. It turned out that these " forces " were only the phe- nomena over again, translated from a specific and con- crete form (in which they were at least actual) into a generalized form in which they were verbal. They con- verted a problem into a solution which afforded a sim- ulated satisfaction. Advance in insight and control came only when the mind turned squarely around. After it had dawned upon inquirers that their alleged causal forces were only 149 150 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT names which condensed into a duplicate form a variety of complex occurrences, they set about breaking up phenomena into minute detail and searching for corre- lations, that is, for elements in other gross phenomena which also varied. Correspondence of variations of elements took the place of large and imposing forces. The psychology of behavior is only beginning to un- dergo similar treatment. It is probable that the vogue of sensation-psychology was due to the fact that it seemed to promise a similar detailed treatment of per- sonal phenomena. But as yet we tend to regard sex, hunger, fear, and even much more complex active in- terests as if they were lump forces, like the combustion or gravity of old-fashioned physical science. It is not hard to see how the notion of a single and separate tendency grew up in the case of simpler acts like hunger and sex. The paths of motor outlet or dis- charge are comparatively few and are fairly well de- fined. Specific bodily organs are conspicuously in- volved. Hence there is suggested the notion of a cor- respondingly separate psychic force or impulse. There are two fallacies in this assumption. The first con- sists in ignoring the fact that no activity (even one that is limited by routine habit) is confined to the channel which is most flagrantly involved in its execu- tion. The whole organism is concerned in every act to some extent and in some fashion, internal organs as well as muscular, those of circulation, secretion, etc. Since the total state of the organism is never exactly twice alike, in so far the phenomena of hunger and sex NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 151 are never twice the same in fact. The difference may be negligible for some purposes, and yet give the key for the purposes of a psychological analysis which shall terminate in a correct judgment of value. Even physiologically the context of organic changes accom- panying an act of hunger or sex makes the difference between a normal and a morbid phenomenon. In the second place, the environment in which the act takes place is never twice alike. Even when the overt organic discharge is substantially the same, the acts impinge upon a different environment and thus have different consequences. It is impossible to regard these differences of objective result as indifferent to the quality of the acts. They are immediately sensed if not clearly perceived; and they are the only components of the meaning of the act. When feelings, dwelling antecedently in the soul, were sup- posed to be the causes of acts, it was natural to sup- pose that each psychic element had its own inherent quality which might be directly read off by introspec- tion. But when we surrender this notion, it becomes evident that the only way of telling what an organic act is like is by the sensed or perceptible changes which it occasions. Some of these will be intra-organic, and (as just indicated) they will vary with every act. Others will be external to the organism, and these con- sequences are more important than the intra-organic ones for determining the quality of the act. For they are consequences in which others are concerned and which evoke reactions of favor and disfavor as well as 152 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT cooperative and resisting activities of a more indirect sort. Most so-called self-deception is due to employing immediate organic states as criteria of the value of an act. To say that it feels good or yields direct sat- isfaction is to say that it gives rise to a comfortable internal state. The judgment based upon this experi- ence may be entirely different from the judgment passed by others upon the basis of its objective or social con- sequences. As a matter of even the most rudimentary precaution, therefore, every person learns to recognize to some extent the quality of an act on the basis of its consequences in the acts of others. But even without this judgment, the exterior changes produced by an act are immediately sensed, and being associated with the act become a part of its quality. Even a young child sees the smash of things occasionally by his anger, and the smash may compete with his satisfied feeling of dis- charged energy as an index of value. A child gives way to what, grossly speaking, we call anger. Its felt or appreciated quality depends in the first place upon the condition of his organism at the time, and this is never twice alike. In the second place, the act is at once modified by the environment upon which it impinges so that different consequences are immediately reflected back to the doer. In one case, anger is directed say at older and stronger playmates who immediately avenge themselves upon the offender, perhaps cruelly. In another case, it takes effect upon weaker and impotent children, and the reflected ap- NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 153 predated consequence is one of achievement, victory, power and a knowledge of the means of having one's own way. The notion that anger still remains a single force is a lazy mythology. Even in the cases of hunger and sex, where the channels of action are fairly demar- cated by antecedent conditions (or "nature"), the actual content and feel of hunger and sex, are indefi- nitely varied according to their social contexts. Only when a man is starving, is hunger an unqualified nat- ural impulse; as it approaches this limit, it tends to lose, moreover, its psychological distinctiveness and to become a raven of the entire organism. The treatment of sex by psycho-analysts is most in- structive, for it flagrantly exhibits both the conse- quences of artificial simplification and the transforma- tion of social results into psychic causes. Writers, usually male, hold forth on the psychology of woman, as if they were dealing with a Platonic universal entity, although they habitually treat men as individuals, vary- ing with structure and environment. They treat phe- nomena which are peculiarly symptoms of the civiliza- tion of the West at the present time as if they were the necessary effects of fixed native impulses of human nature. Romantic love as it exists today, with all the varying perturbations it occasions, is as definitely a sign of specific historic conditions as are big battle ships with turbines, internal-combustion engines, and electrically driven machines. It would be as sensible to treat the latter as effects of a single psychic cause as to attribute the phenomena of disturbance and con- 154 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT flict which accompany present sexual relations as mani- festations of an original single psychic force or Libido. Upon this point at least a Marxian simplification is nearer the truth than that of Jung. Again it is customary to suppose that there is a single instinct of fear, or at most a few well-defined sub-species of it. In reality, when one is afraid the whole being reacts, and this entire responding organism is never twice the same. In fact, also, every reaction takes place in a different environment, and its meaning is never twice alike, since the difference in environment makes a difference in consequences. It is only myth- ology which sets up a single, identical psychic force which " causes " all the reactions of fear, a force be- ginning and ending in itself. It is true enough that in all cases we are able to identify certain more or less separable characteristic acts muscular contractions, withdrawals, evasions, concealments. But in the latter words we have already brought in an environment. Such terms as withdrawal and concealment have no meaning except as attitudes toward objects. There is no such thing as an environment in general; there are specific changing objects and events. Hence the kind of eva- sion or running away or shrinking up which takes place is directly correlated with specific surrounding condi- tions. There is no one fear having diverse manifesta- tions ; there are as many qualitatively different fears as there are objects responded to and different conse- quences sensed and observed. Fear of the dark is different from fear of publicity, NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 155 fear of the dentist from fear of ghosts, fear of con- spicuous success from fear of humiliation, fear of a bat from fear of a bear. Cowardice, embarrassment, caution and reverence may all be regarded as forms of fear. They all have certain physical organic acts in common those of organic shrinkage, gestures of hesi- tation and retreat. But each is qualitatively unique. Each is what it is in virtue of its total interactions or correlations with other acts and with the environing medium, with consequences. High explosives and the aeroplane have brought into being something new in conduct. There is no error in calling it fear. But there is error, even from a limited clinical standpoint, in permitting the classifying name to blot from view the difference between fear of bombs dropped from the sky and the fears which previously existed. The new fear is just as much and just as little original and native as a child's fear of a stranger. For any activity is original when it first occurs. As conditions are continually changing, new and primitive activities are continually occurring. The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality are lost from view. This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much more illumi- nating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct than the schematizing psychologist. The artist makes perceptible individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature evoked in new 156 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT situations. In putting the case visibly and dramati- cally he reveals vital actualities. The scientific system- atizer treats each act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical combination of ele- ments drawn from a ready-made inventory. When we recognize the diversity of native activities and the varied ways in which they are modified through interactions with one another in response to different conditions, we are able to understand moral phenomena otherwise baffling. In the career of any impulse activ- ity there are speaking generally three possibilities. It may find a surging, explosive discharge blind, unin- telligent. It may be sublimated that is, become a fac- tor coordinated intelligently with others in a contin- uing course of action. Thus a gust of anger may, be- cause of its dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding conviction of social in- justice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction into execution. Or an excitation of sexual attraction may reappear in art or in tranquil domestic attachments and services. Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning of im- pulse; in which, to use our previous language, the im- pulse operates as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be " suppressed." Suppression is not annihilation. " Psychic " energy is no more capable of being abolished than the forms NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 157 we recognize as physical. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a surreptitious, subterranean life. An isolated or spasmodic manifes- tation is a sign of immaturity, crudity, savagery; a suppressed activity is the cause of all kinds of intel- lectual and moral pathology. One form of the result- ing pathology constitutes " reaction " in the sense in which the historian speaks of reactions. A conven- tionally familiar instance is Stuart license after Puri- tan restraint. A striking modern instance is the orgy of extravagance following upon the enforced economies and hardships of war, the moral let-down after its highstrung exalted idealisms, the deliberate careless- ness after an attention too intense and too narrow. Outward manifestation of many normal activities had been suppressed. But activities were not suppressed. They were merely dammed up awaiting their chance. Now such " reactions " are simultaneous as well as successive. Resort to artificial stimulation, to alcoholic excess, sexual debauchery, opium and narcotics are ex- amples. Impulses and interests that are not manifested in the regular course of serviceable activity or in rec- reation demand and secure a special manifestation. And it is interesting to note that there are two oppo- site forms. Some phenomena are characteristic of per- sons engaged in a routine monotonous life of toil at- tended with fatigue and hardship. And others are found in persons who are intellectual and executive, men whose activities are anything but monotonous, but are narrowed through over-specialization. Such men 158 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT think too much, that is, too much along a particular line. They carry too heavy responsibilities ; that is, their offices of service are not adequately shared with others. They seek relief by escape into a more sociable and easy-going 1 world. The imperative demand for companionship not satisfied in ordinary activity is met by convivial indulgence. The other class has recourse to excess because its members have in ordinary occu- pations next to no opportunity for imagination. They make a foray into a more highly colored world as a substitute for a normal exercise of invention, planning and judgment. Having no regular responsibilities, they seek to recover an illusion of potency and of social recognition by an artificial exaltation of their sub- merged and humiliated selves. Hence the love of pleasure against which moralists issue so many warnings. Not that love of pleasures is in itself in any way demoralizing. Love of the pleas- ures of cheerfulness, of companionship is one of the steadying influences in conduct. But pleasure has often become identified with special thrills, excitations, ticklings of sense, stirrings of appetite for the express purpose of enjoying the immediate stimulation irre- spective of results. Such pleasures are signs of dissi- pation, dissoluteness, in the literal sense. An activity which is deprived of regular stimulation and normal function is piqued into isolated activity, and the result is division, disassociation. A life of routine and of over-specialization in non-routine lines seek occasions in which to arouse by abnormal means a feeling of sat- NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 159 isf action without any accompanying objective fulfil- ment. Hence, as moralists have pointed out, the in- satiable character of such appetites. Activities are not really satisfied, that is fulfilled in objects. They con- tinue to seek for gratification in more intensified stim- ulations. Orgies of pleasure-seeking, varying from saturnalia to mild sprees, result. It does not follow however that the sole alternative is satisfaction by means of objectively serviceable ac- tion, that is by action which effects useful changes in the environment. There is an optimistic theory of nature according to which wherever there is natural law there is also natural harmony. Since man as well as the world is included in the scope of natural law, It is inferred that there is natural harmony be- tween human activities and surroundings, a harmony which is disturbed only when man indulges in " arti- ficial " departures from nature. According to this view, all man has to do is to keep his occupations in balance with the energies of the environment and he will be both happy and efficient. Rest, recuperation, relief can be found in a proper alternation of forms of useful work. Do the things which surroundings indicate need doing, and success, content, restoration of powers will take care of themselves. This benevolent view of nature falls in with a Puri- tanic devotion to work for its own sake and creates distrust of amusement, play and recreation. They are felt to be unnecessary, and worse, dangerous diversions from the path of useful action which is also the path of 160 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT duty. Social conditions certainly impart to occupa- tions as they are now carried on an undue element of fatigue, strain and drudgery. Consequently useful oc- cupations which are so ordered socially as to engage thought, feed imagination and equalize the impact of stress would surely introduce a tranquillity and recrea- tion which are now lacking. But there is good reason to think that even in the best conditions there is enough , ^ maladjustment between the necessities of the environ- */ ment and the activities^' natural ' 7 to man, so tjiat con- V straint and fatigue would always accompany activity, s and special forms of action be needed forms that are ^r significantly called^ej-creation. *jv Hence the immense moral importance of play and of fine, or make-believe, art of activity, that is, whicliis make-believe from thestandpoint of the useful arts en- forced by the demands of the environment. When mor- alists have not regarded play and art with a censorious eye, they often have thought themselves carrying mat- ters to the pitch of generosity by conceding that they may be morally indifferent or innocent. But in truth they are moral necessities. They are required to take care of the margin that exists between the total stock of impulses that demand outlet and the amount ex- pended in regular action. They keep the balance which work cannot indefinitely maintain. They are required to introduce variety, flexibility and sensitiveness into disposition. Yet upon the whole the humanizing capa- bilities of sport in its varied forms, drama, fiction, music, poetry, newspapers have been neglected. They NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 161 have been left in a kind of a moral no-man's territory. They have accomplished part of their function but they have not done what they are capable of doing. In many cases they have operated merely as reactions like those artificial and isolated stimulations already mentioned. The suggestion that play and art have an indispen- sable moral function which should receive an attention now denied, calls out an immediate and vehement pro- test. We omit reference to that which proceeds from professional moralists to whom art, fun and sport are habitually under suspicion. For those interested in art, professional estheticians, will protest even more strenuously. They at once imagine that some kind of organized supervision if not censorship of play, drama and fiction is contemplated which will convert them into means of moral edification. If they do not think of Comstockian interference in the alleged interest of pub- lic morals, they at least think that what is intended is the elimination by persons of a Puritanic, unartistic temperament of everything not found sufficiently ear- nest and elevating, a fostering of art not for its own sake but as a means of doing good by something to somebody. There is a natural fear of injecting into art a spirit of earnest uplift, of surrendering art to the reformers. But something quite other than this is meant. Relief from continuous moral activity in the conventional sense of moral is itself a moral necessity. The service of art and play is to engage and release impulses in 162 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ways quite different from those in which they are occu- pied and employed in ordinary activities. Their func- tion is to forestall and remedy the usual exaggera- tions and deficits of activity, even of " moral " activity and to prevent a stereotyping of attention. To say that society is altogether too careless about the moral worth of art is not to say that carelessness about useful occupations is not a necessity for art. On the con- trary, whatever deprives play and art of their own careless rapture thereby deprives them of their moral function. Art then becomes poorer as art as a matter of course, but it also becomes in the same measure less effectual in its pertinent moral office. It tries to do what other things can do better, and it fails to do what nothing but itself can do for human nature, softening rigidities, relaxing strains, allaying bitterness, dispel- ling moroseness, and breaking down the narrowness con- sequent upon specialized tasks. Even if the matter be put in this negative way, the moral value of art cannot be depreciated. But there is a more positive function. Play and art add fresh and deeper meanings to the usual activities of life. In con- trast with a Philistine relegation of the arts to a trivial by-play from serious concerns, it is truer to say that most of the significance now found in serious occupa- tions originated in activities not immediately useful, and gradually found its way from them into objectively serviceable employments. For their spontaneity and liberation from external necessities permits to them an enhancement and vitality of meaning not possible in NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 163 preoccupation with immediate needs. Later this mean- ing is transferred to useful activities and becomes a part of their ordinary working. In saying then that art and play have a moral office not adequately taken advantage of it is asserted that they are responsible to life, to the enriching and freeing of its meanings, not that they are responsible to a moral code, com- mandment or special task. To a coarse view and professed moral refinement is often given to taking coarse views there is something vulgar not only in recourse to abnormal artificial exi- tents and stimulations but also in interest in useless games and arts. Negatively the two things have fea- tures which are alike. They both spring from failure of regular occupations to engage the full scope of im- pulses and instincts in an elastically balanced way. They both evince a surplusage of imagination over fact; a demand in imaginative activity for an outlet which is denied in overt activity. They both aim at reducing the domination of the prosaic; both are pro- tests against the lowering of meanings attendant upon ordinary vocations. As a consequence no rule can be laid down for discriminating by direct inspection be- tween unwholesome stimulations and invaluable excur- sions into appreciative enhancements of life. Their difference lies in the way they work, the careers to which they commit us. Art releases energy and focuses and tranquilizes it. It releases energy in constructive forms. Castles in the air like art have their source in a turning of im- 164 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT pulse away from useful production. Both are due to the failure in some part of man's constitution to secure fulfilment in ordinary ways. But in one case the con- version of direct energy into imagination is the starting point of an activity which shapes material ; fancy is fed upon a stuff of life which assumes under its influence a rejuvenated, composed and enhanced form. In the other case, fancy remains an end in itself. It becomes an in- dulging in fantasies which bring about withdrawal from all realities, while wishes impotent in action build a world which yields temporary excitement. Any imagi- nation is a sign that impulse is impeded and is groping for utterance. Sometimes the outcome is a refreshed useful habit ; sometimes it is an articulation in creative art; and sometimes it is a futile romancing which for some natures does what self-pity does for others. The amount of potential energy of reconstruction that is dissipated in unexpressed fantasy supplies us with a fair measure of the extent to which the current organi- zation of occupation balks and twists impulse, and, by the same sign, with a measure of the function of art which is not yet utilized. The development of mental pathologies to the point where they need clinical attention has of late enforced a widespread consciousness of some of the evils of sup- pression of impulse. The studies of psychiatrists have made clear that impulses driven into pockets distil poison and produce festering sores. An organization of impulse into a working habit forms an interest. A surreptitious furtive organization which does not artic- NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 165 ulate in avowed expression forms a " complex." Cur- rent clinical psychology has undoubtedly overworked the influence of sexual impulse in this connection, refus- ing at the hands of some writers to recognize the opera- tion of any other modes of disturbance. There are explanations of this onesidedness. The intensity of the sexual instinct and its organic ramifications produce many of the cases that are so noticeable as* to demand the attention of physicians. And social taboos and the tradition of secrecy have put this impulse under greater strain than has been imposed upon others. If a society existed in which the existence of impulse toward food were socially disavowed until it was compelled to live an illicit, covert life, alienists would have plenty of cases of mental and moral disturbance to relate in con- nection with hunger. The significant thing is that the pathology arising from the sex instinct affords a striking case of a uni- versal principle. Every impulse is, as far as it goes, force, urgency. It must either be used in some func- tion, direct or sublimated, or be driven into a con- cealed, hidden activity. It has long been asserted on empirical grounds that expression and enslavement re- sult in corruption and perversion. We have at last discovered the reason for this fact. The wholesome and saving force of intellectual freedom, open confron- tation, publicity, now has the stamp of scientific sanc- tion. The evil of checking impulses is not that they are checked. Without inhibition there is no insti- gation of imagination, no redirection into more dis- 166 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT criminated and comprehensive activities. The evil re- sides in a refusal of direct attention which forces the impulse into disguise and concealment, until it enacts its own unavowed uneasy private life subject to no inspection and no control. A rebellious disposition is also a form of romanti- cism. At least rebels set out as romantics, or, in pop- ular parlance, as idealists. There is no bitterness like that of conscious impotency, the sense of suffocatingly complete suppression. The world is hopeless to one without hope. The rage of total despair is a vain ef- fort at blind destructiveness. Partial suppression in- duces in some natures a picture of complete freedom, while it arouses a destructive protest against existing institutions as enemies that stand in the way of free- dom. Rebellion has at least one advantage over re- course to artificial stimulation and to subconscious nursings of festering sore spots. It engages in action and thereby comes in contact with realities. It con- tains the possibility of learning something. Yet learn- ing by this method is immensely expensive. The costs are incalculable. As Napoleon said, every revolution moves in a vicious circle. It begins and ends in excess. To view institutions as enemies of freedom, and all conventions as slaveries, is to deny the only means by which positive freedom in action can be secured. A general liberation of impulses may set things going when they have been stagnant, but if the released forces are on their way to anything they do not know the way nor where they are going. Indeed, they are bound NO SEPARATE INSTINCTS 167 to be mutually contradictory and hence destructive destructive not only of the habits they wish to destroy but of themselves, of their own efficacy. Convention and custom are necessary to carrying forward impulse to any happy conclusion. A romantic return to nature and a freedom sought within the individual without regard to the existing environment finds its terminus in chaos. Every belief to the contrary combines pes- simism regarding the actual with an even more opti- mistic faith in some natural harmony or other a faith which is a survival of some of the traditional meta- physics and theologies which professedly are to be swept away. Not convention but stupid and rigid con- vention is the foe. And, as we have noted, a convention can be reorganized and made mobile only by using some other custom for giving leverage to an impulse. Yet it is too easy to utter commonplaces about the superiority of constructive action to destructive. At all events the professed conservative and classicist of tradition seeks too cheap a victory over the rebel. For the rebel is not self-generated. In the beginning no one is a revolutionist simply for the fun of it, however it may be after the furor of destructive power geta under way. The rebel is the product of extreme fixa- tion and unintelligent immobilities. Life is perpetu- ated only by renewal. If conditions do not permit re- newal to take place continuously it will take place ex- plosively. The cost of revolutions must be charged up to those who have taken for their aim arrest of custom instead of its readjustment. The only ones who have 168 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT the right to criticize " radicals " adopting for the moment that perversion of language which identifies the radical with the destructive rebel are those who put as much effort into reconstruction as the rebels are put- ting into destruction. The primary accusation against the revolutionary must be directed against those who having power refuse to use it for ameliorations. They are the ones who accumulate the wrath that sweeps away customs and institutions in an undiscriminating avalanche. Too often the man who should be criti- cizing institutions expends his energy in criticizing those who would re-form them. What he really objects to is any disturbance of his own vested securities, com- forts and privileged powers. VII We return to the original proposition. The position of impulse in conduct is intermediary. Morality is an endeavor to find for the manifestation of impulse in special situations an office of refreshment and renewal. The endeavor is not easy of accomplishment. It is easier to surrender the main and public channels of action and belief to the sluggishness of custom, and idealize tradition by emotional attachment to its ease, comforts and privileges instead of idealizing it in prac- tice by making it more equably balanced with pres- ent needs. Again, impulses not used for the work of rejuvenation and vital recovery are sidetracked to find their own lawless barbarities or their own sentimental refinements. Or they are perverted to pathological careers some of which have been mentioned. In the course of time custom becomes intolerable be- cause of what it suppresses and some accident of war or inner catastrophe releases impulses for unrestrained expression. At such times we have philosophies which identify progress with motion, blind spontaneity with freedom, and which under the name of the sacredness of individuality or a return to the norms of nature make impulse a law unto itself. The oscillation between im- pulse arrested and frozen in rigid custom and impulse isolated and undirected is seen most conspicuously when 169 170 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT epochs of conservatism and revolutionary ardor alter- nate. But the same phenomenon is repeated on a smaller scale in individuals. And in society the two tendencies and philosophies exist simultaneously; they waste in controversial strife the energy that is needed for specific criticism and specific reconstruction. The release of some portion of the stock of impulses is an opportunity, not an end. In its origin it is the product of chance ; but it affords imagination and in- vention their chance. The moral correlate of liberated impulse is not immediate activity, but reflection upon the way in which to use impulse to renew disposition and reorganize habit. Escape from the clutch of cus- tom gives an opportunity to do old things in new ways, and thus to construct new ends and means. Breach in the crust of the cake of custom releases impulses; but it is the work of intelligence to find the ways of using them. There is an alternative between anchoring a boat in the harbor till it becomes a rotting hulk and letting it loose to be the sport of every contrary gust. To discover and define this alternative is the business of mind, of observant, remembering, contriving dis- position. Habit as a vital art depends upon the animation of habit by impulse; only this inspiriting stands between habit and stagnation. But art, little as well as great, anonymous as well as that distinguished by titles of dignity, cannot be improvised. It is impossible without spontaneity, but it is not spontaneity. Impulse is needed to arouse thought, incite reflection and enliven 171 belief. But only thought notes obstructions, invents tools, conceives aims, directs technique, and thus con- verts impulse into an art which lives in objects. Thought is born as the twin of impulse in every mo- ment of impeded habit. But unless it is nurtured, it speedily dies, and habit and instinct continue their civil warfare. There is instinctive wisdom in the ten- dency of the young to ignore the limitations of the en- vironment. Only thus can they discover their own power and learn the differences in different kinds of environing limitations. But this discovery when once made marks the birth of intelligence ; and with its birth comes the responsibility of the mature to observe, to recall, to forecast. Every moral life has its radical- ism; but this radical factor does not find its full ex- pression in direct action but in the courage of intelli- gence to go deeper than either tradition or immediate impulse goes. To the study of intelligence in action we now turn our attention. PART THREE THE PLACE OF INTELLIGENCE IN CONDUCT IN discussing habit and impulse we have repeatedly met topics where reference to the work of thought was imperative. Explicit consideration of the place and office of intelligence in conduct can hardly begin other- wise than by gathering together these incidental refer- ences and reaffirming their significance. The stimula- tion of reflective imagination by impulse, its depend- ence upon established habits, and its effect in trans- forming habit and regulating impulse forms, accord- ingly, our first theme. Habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency. They operate in two ways upon intellect. Obviously, they restrict its reach, they fix its boundaries. They are blinders that confine the eyes of mind to the road ahead. They prevent thought from straying away from its im- minent occupation to a landscape more varied and picturesque but irrelevant to practice. Outside the scope of habits, thought works gropingly, fumbling in confused uncertainty; and yet habit made complete in routine shuts in thought so effectually that it is no longer needed or possible. The routineer's road is a 172 HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE 173 ditch out of which he cannot get, whose sides enclose him, directing his course so thoroughly that he no longer thinks of his path or his destination. All habit- forming involves the beginning of an intellectual spec- cialization which if unchecked ends in thoughtless action. Significantly enough this fullblown result is called absentmindedness. Stimulus and response are mechan- ically linked together in an unbroken chain. Each suc- cessive act facilely evoked by its predecessor pushes us automatically into the next act of a predetermined se- ries. Only a signal flag of distress recalls consciousness to the task of carrying on. Fortunately nature which beckons us to this path of least resistance also puts obstacles in the way of our complete acceptance of its invitation. Success in achieving a ruthless and dull efficiency of action is thwarted by untoward circum- stance. The most skilful aptitude bumps at times into the unexpected, and so gets into trouble from which only observation and invention extricate it. Efficiency in following a beaten path has then to be converted into breaking a new road through strange lands. Nevertheless what in effect is love of ease has mas- queraded morally as love of perfection. A goal of fin- ished accomplishment has been set up which if it were attained would mean only mindless action. It has been called complete and free activity when in truth it is only a treadmill activity or marching in one place. The practical impossibility of reaching, in an all around way and all at once such a " perfection " has been rec- 174 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ognized. But such a goal has nevertheless been con- ceived as the ideal, and progress has been defined as approximation to it. Under diverse intellectual skies the ideal has assumed diverse forms and colors. But all of them have involved the conception of a completed activity, a static perfection. Desire and need have been treated as signs of deficiency, and endeavor as proof not of power but of incompletion. In Aristotle this conception of an end which ex- hausts all realization and excludes all potentiality ap- pears as a definition of the highest excellence. It of necessity excludes all want and struggle and all de- pendencies. It is neither practical nor social. Noth- ing is left but a self-revolving, self-sufficing thought engaged in contemplating its own sufficiency. Some forms of Oriental morals have united this logic with a profounder psychology, and have seen that the final terminus on this road is Nirvana, an obliteration of all thought and desire. In medieval science, the ideal reappeared as a definition of heavenly bliss accessible only to a redeemed immortal soul. Herbert Spencer is far enough away from Aristotle, medieval Christian- ity and Buddhism; but the idea re-emerges in his con- ception of a goal of evolution in which adaptation of organism to environment is complete and final. In popular thought, the conception lives in the vague thought of a remote state of attainment in which we shall be beyond " temptation," and in which virtue by its own inertia will persist as a triumphant consum- mation. Even Kant who begins with a complete scorn HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE 175 for happiness ends with an " ideal " of the eternal and undisturbed union of virtue and joy, though in his case nothing but a symbolic approximation is admitted to be feasible. The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philos- ophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It con- sists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted uni- versally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained. It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction be- come meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally. The philosophy of Nirvana comes the closest to admission of this fact, but even it holds Nirvana to be desirable. Habit is however more than a restriction of thought. Habits become negative limits because they are first positive agencies. The more numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and foretelling. The more flexible they are, the more refined is percep- tion in its discrimination and the more delicate the pres- 176 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT entation evoked by imagination. The sailor is intel- lectually at home on the sea, the hunter in the forest, the painter in his studio, the man of science in his labo- ratory. These commonplaces are universally recog- nized in the concrete ; but their significance is obscured and their truth denied in the current general theory of mind. For they mean nothing more or less than that habits formed in process of exercising biological aptitudes are the sole agents of observation, recollec- tion, foresight and judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations is a myth. The doctrine of a single, simple and indissoluble soul was the cause and the effect of failure to recognize that concrete habits are the means of knowledge and thought. Many who think themselves scientifically emancipated and who freely advertise the soul for a superstition, perpetuate a false notion of what knows, that is, of a separate knower. Nowadays they usually fix upon consciousness in general, as a stream or process or entity ; or else, more specifically upon sensations and images as the tools of intellect. Or sometimes they think they have scaled the last heights of realism by adverting grandiosely to a formal knower in general who serves as one term in the knowing relation ; by dismissing psychology as irrelevant to knowledge and logic, they think to conceal the psychological mon- ster they have conjured up. Now it is dogmatically stated that no such concep- tions of the seat, agent or vehicle will go psychologic- HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE 177 ally at the present time. Concrete habits do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging, conceiving and reasoning that is done. " Conscious- ness," whether as a stream or as special sensations and images, expresses functions of habits, phenomena of their formation, operation, their interruption and reor- ganization. Yet habit does not, of itself, know, for it does not of itself stop to think, observe or remember. Neither does impulse of itself engage in reflection or contem- plation. It just lets go. Habits by themselves are too organized, too insistent and determinate to need to indulge in inquiry or imagination. And impulses are too chaotic, tumultuous and confused to be able to know even if they wanted to. Habit as such is too definitely adapted to an environment to survey or an- alyze it, and impulse is too indeterminately related to the environment to be capable of reporting anything about it. Habit incorporates, enacts or overrides ob- jects, but it doesn't know them. Impulse scatters and obliterates them with its restless stir. A certain deli- cate combination of habit and impulse is requisite for observation, memory and judgment. Knowledge which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles, not in consciousness. We may, indeed, be said to know how by means of our habits. And a sensible intimation of the practical func- tion of knowledge has led men to identify all acquired practical skill, or even the instinct of animals, with knowledge. We walk and read aloud, we get off and 178 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT on street cars, we dress and undress, and do a thousand useful acts without thinking of them. We know some- thing, namely, how to do them. Bergson's philosophy of intuition is hardly more than an elaborately docu- mented commentary on the popular conception that by instinct a bird knows how to build a nest and a spider to weave a web. But after all, this practical work done by habit and instinct in securing prompt and exact adjustment to the environment is not knowledge, except by courtesy. Or, if we choose to call it knowledge and no one has the right to issue an ukase to the con- trary then other things also called knowledge, knowl- edge of and about things, knowledge that things are thus and so, knowledge that involves reflection and con- scious appreciation, remains of a different sort, unac- counted for and undescribed. For it is a commonplace that the more suavely ef- ficient a habit the more unconsciously it operates. Only a hitch in its workings occasions emotion and provokes thought. Carlyle and Rousseau, hostile in tempera- ment and outlook, yet agree in looking at conscious- ness as a kind of disease, since we have no consciousness of bodily or mental organs as long as they work at ease in perfect health. The idea of disease is, however, aside from the point, unless we are pessimistic enough to regard every slip in total adjustment of a person to its surroundings as something abnormal a point of view which once more would identify well-being with perfect automatism. The truth is that in every waking mo- ment, the complete balance of the organism and its HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE 179 environment is constantly interfered with and as con- stantly restored. Hence the " stream of conscious- ness " in general, and in particular that phase of it cele- brated by William James as alternation of flights and perchings. Life is interruptions and recoveries. Con- tinuous interruption is not possible in the activities of an individual. Absence of perfect equilibrium is not equivalent to a complete crushing of organized activ- ity. When the disturbance amounts to such a pitch as that, the self goes to pieces. It is like shell-shock. Normally, the environment remains sufficiently in har- mony with the body of organized activities to sustain most of them in active function. But a novel factor in the surroundings releases some impulse which tends to initiate a different and incompatible activity, to bring about a redistribution of the elements of organ- ized activity between those have been respectively central and subsidiary. Thus the hand guided by the eye moves toward a surface. Visual quality is the dom- inant element. The hand comes in contact with an object. The eye does not cease to operate but some unexpected quality of touch, a voluptuous smoothness or annoying heat, compels a readjustment in which the touching, handling activity strives to dominate the ac- tion. Now at these moments of a shifting in activity conscious feeling and thought arise and are accentu- ated. The disturbed adjustment of organism and en- vironment is reflected in a temporary strife which con- cludes in a coming to terms of the old habit and the new impulse. 180 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT In this period of redistribution impulse determines the direction of movement. It furnishes the focus about which reorganization swirls. Our attention in short is always directed forward to bring to notice something which is imminent but which as yet escapes us. Impulse defines the peering, the search, the inquiry. It is, in logical language, the movement into the unknown, not into the immense inane of the unknown at large, but into that special unknown which when it is hit upon restores an ordered, unified action. During this search, old habit supplies content, filling, definite, recognizable, subject-matter. It begins as vague presentiment of what we are going towards. As organized habits are definitely deployed and focused, the confused situation takes on form, it is " cleared up " the essential func- tion of intelligence. Processes become objects. With- out habit there is only irritation and confused hesita- tion. With habit alone there is a machine-like repeti- tion, a duplicating recurrence of old acts. With con- flict of habits and release of impulse there is conscious search. n We are going far afield from any direct moral issue. But the problem of the place of knowledge and judg- ment in conduct depends upon getting the fundamental psychology of thought straightened out. So the ex- cursion must be continued. We compare life to a trav- eler faring forth. We may consider him first at a moment where his activity is confident, straightforward, organized. He marches on giving no direct attention to his path, nor thinking of his destination. Abruptly he is pulled up, arrested. Something is going wrong in his activity. From the standpoint of an onlooker, he has met an obstacle which must be overcome before his behavior can be unified into a successful ongoing. From his own standpoint, there is shock, confusion, perturba- tion, uncertainty. For the moment he doesn't know what hit him, as we say, nor where he is going. But a new impulse is stirred which becomes the starting point of an investigation, a looking into things, a trying to see them, to find out what is going on. Habits which were interfered with begin to get a new direction as they cluster about the impulse to look and see. The blocked habits of locomotion give him a sense of where he was going, of what he had set out to do, and of the ground already traversed. As he looks, he sees definite things which are not just things at large but which are related 181 182 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT to his course of action. The momentum of the activity entered upon persists as a sense of direction, of aim; it is an anticipatory project. In short, he recollects, observes and plans. The trinity of these forecasts, perceptions and re- membrances form a subject-matter of discriminated and identified objects. These objects represent habits turned inside out. They exhibit both the onward ten- dency of habit and the objective conditions which have been incorporated within it. Sensations in immediate consciousness are elements of action dislocated through the shock of interruption. They never, however, com- pletely monopolize the scene; for there is a body of residual undisturbed habits which is reflected in remem- bered and perceived objects having a meaning. Thus out of shock and puzzlement there gradually emerges a figured framework of objects, past, present, future. These shade off variously into a vast penumbra of vague, unfigured things, a setting which is taken for granted and not at all explicitly presented. The com- plexity of the figured scene in its scope and refinement of contents depends wholly upon prior habits and theii organization. The reason a baby can know little and an experienced adult know much when confronting the same things is not because the latter has a " mind " which the former has not, but because one has already formed habits which the other has still to acquire. The scientific man and the philosopher like the carpenter, the physician and politician know with their habits not with their " consciousness." The latter is eventual, noh THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING 183 a source. Its occurrence marks a peculiarly delicate connection between highly organized habits and un- organized impulses. Its contents or objects, observed, recollected, projected and generalized into principles, represent the incorporated material of habits coming to the surface, because habits are disintegrating at the touch of conflicting impulses. But they also gather themselves together to comprehend impulse and make it effective. This account is more or less strange as psychology but certain aspects of it are commonplaces in a static logical formulation. It is, for example, almost a truism that knowledge is both synthetic and analytic ; a set of discriminated elements connected by relations. This combination of opposite factors of unity and difference, elements and relations, has been a standing paradox and mystery of the theory of knowledge. It will remain so until we connect the theory of knowledge with an em- pirically verifiable theory of behavior. The steps of this connection have been sketched and we may enumer- ate them. We know at such times as habits are impeded, when a conflict is set up in which impulse is released. So far as this impulse sets up a definite for- ward tendency it constitutes the forward, prospective character of knowledge. In this phase unity or syn- thesis is found. We are striving to unify our responses, to achieve a consistent environment which will restore unity of conduct. Unity, relations, are prospective; they mark out lines converging to a focus. They are " ideal." But what we know, the objects that present 184 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT themselves with definiteness and assurance, are retro- spective; they are the conditions which have been mas- tered, incorporated in the past. They are elements, discriminated, analytic just because old habits so far as they are checked are also broken into objects which define the obstruction of ongoing activity. They are " real," not ideal. Unity is something sought ; split, division is something given, at hand. Were we to carry the same psychology into detail we should come upon the explanation of perceived particulars and conceived universals, of the relation of discovery and proof, in- duction and deduction, the discrete and the continuous. Anything approaching an adequate discussion is too technical to be here in plaje. But the main point, however technical and abstract it may be in statement, is of far reaching importance for everything concerned with moral beliefs, conscience and judgments of right and wrong. The most general, if vaguest issue, concerns the na- ture of the organ of moral knowledge. As long as knowledge in general is thought to be the work of a special agent, whether soul, consciousness, intellect or a knower in general, there is a logical propulsion to- wards postulating a special agent for knowledge of moral distinctions. Consciousness and conscience have more than a verbal connection. If the former is some- thing in itself, a seat or power which antecedes intel- lectual functions, why should not the latter be also a unique faculty with its own separate jurisdiction? If reason in general is independent of empirically verifi- THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING 185 able realities of human nature, such as instincts and organized habits, why should there not also exist a moral or practical reason independent of natural op- erations? On the other hand if it is recognized that knowing is carried on through the medium of natural factors, the assumption of special agencies for moral knowing becomes outlawed and incredible. Now the matter of the existence or non-existence of such special agencies is no technically remote matter. The belief in a separate organ involves belief in a separate and independent subject-matter. The question fundamen- tally at issue is nothing more or less than whether moral values, regulations, principles and objects form a separate and independent domain or whether they are part and parcel of a normal development of a life process. These considerations explain why the denial of a separate organ of knowledge, of a separate instinct or impulse toward knowing, is not the wilful philistinism it is sometimes alleged to be. There is of course a sense in which there is a distinctive impulse, or rather habit- ual disposition, to know. But in the same sense there is an impulse to aviate, to run a typewriter or write stories for magazines. Some activities result in knowl- edge, as others result in these other things. The result may be so important as to induce distinctive attention to the activities in order to foster them. From an incident, almost a by-product, attainment of truth, physical, so- cial, moral, may become the leading characteristic of some activities. Under such circumstances, they be- 186 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT come transformed. Knowing is then a distinctive activ- ity, with its own ends and its peculiarly adapted pro- cesses. All this is a matter of course. Having hit upon knowledge accidentally, as it were, and the prod- uct being liked and its importance noted, knowledge- getting becomes, upon occasion, a definite occupation. And education confirms the disposition, as it may con- firm that of a musician or carpenter or tennis- player. But there is no more an original separate im- pulse or power in one case than in the other. Every habit is impulsive, that is projective, urgent, and the habit of knowing is no exception. The reason for insisting on this fact is not failure to appreciate the distinctive value of knowledge when once it comes into existence. This value is so immense it may be called unique. The aim of the discussion is not to subordinate knowing to some hard, prosaic utili- tarian end. The reason for insistence upon the deriva- tive position of knowing in activity, roots in a sense for fact, and in a realization that the doctrine of a sepa- rate original power and impulse of knowledge cuts knowledge off from other phases of human nature, and results in its non-natural treatment. The isolation of intellectual disposition from concrete empirical facts of biological impulse and habit-formation entails a de- nial of the continuity of mind with nature. Aristotle asserted that the faculty of pure knowing enters a man from without as through a door. Many since his day have asserted that knowing and doing have no intrinsic connection with each other. Reason is asserted to have THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING 187 no responsibility to experience ; conscience is said to be a sublime oracle independent of education and social in- fluences. All of these views follow naturally from a failure to recognize that all knowing, judgment, belief represent an acquired result of the workings of natural impulses in connection with environment. Upon the ethical side, as has been intimated, the mat- ter at issue concerns the nature of conscience. Con- science has been asserted by orthodox moralists to be unique in origin and subject-matter. The same view is embodied by implication in all those popular methods of moral training which attempt to fix rigid authorita- tive notions of right and wrong by disconnecting moral judgments from the aids and tests which are used in other forms of knowledge. Thus it has been asserted that conscience is an original faculty of illumination which (if it has not been dimmed by indulgence in sin) shines upon moral truths and objects and reveals them without effort for precisely what they are. Those who hold this view differ enormously among themselves as to the nature of the objects of conscience. Some hold them to be general principles, others individual acts, others the order of worth among motives, others the sense of duty in general, others the unqualified author- ity of right. Still others carry the implied logic of authority to conclusion, and identify knowledge of moral truths with a divine supernatural revelation of a code of commandments. But among these diversities there is agreement about one fundamental. There must be a separate non- 188 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT natural faculty of moral knowledge because the things to be known, the matters of right and wrong, good and evil, obligation and responsibility, form a separate do- main, separate that is from that of ordinary action in its usual human and social significance. The latter ac- tivities may be prudential, political, scientific, economic. But, from the standpoint of these theories, they have no moral meaning until they are brought under the purview of this separate unique department of our nature. It thus turns out that the so-called intuitional theories of moral knowledge concentrate in themselves all the ideas which are subject to criticism in these pages: Namely, the assertion that morality is distinct in origin, working and destiny from the natural struc- ture and career of human nature. This fact is the ex- cuse, if excuse be desired, for a seemingly technical excursion that links intellectual activity with the con- joint operation of habit and impulse. Ill So far the discussion has ignored the fact that there is an influential school of moralists (best represented in contemporary thought by the utilitarians) which also insists upon the natural, empirical character of moral judgments and beliefs. But unfortunately this school has followed a false psychology ; and has tended, by calling out a reaction, actually to strengthen the hands of those who persist in assigning to morals a separate domain of action and in demanding a separate agent of moral knowledge. The essentials of this false psychology consist in two traits. The first, that knowl- edge originates from sensations (instead of from habits and impulses); and the second, that judgment about good and evil in action consists in calculation of agree- able and disagreeable consequences, of profit and loss. It is not surprising that this view seems to many to degrade morals, as well as to be false to facts. If the logical outcome of an empirical view of moral knowledge is that all morality is concerned with calculating what is expedient, politic, prudent, measured by consequences in the ways of pleasurable and painful sensations, then, say moralists of the orthodox school, we will have naught to do with such a sordid view: It is a reduction to the absurd of its premisses. We will have a 189 190 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT rate department for morals and a separate organ of moral knowledge. Our first problem is then to investigate the nature of ordinary judgments upon what it is best or wise to do, or, in ordinary language, the nature of deliberation. We begin with a summary assertion that deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various com- peting possible lines of action. It starts from the blocking of efficient overt action, due to that conflict of prior habit and newly released impulse to which ref- erence has been made. Then each habit, each impulse, involved in the temporary suspense of overt action takes its turn in being tried out. Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of pos- sible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon. But the trial is in imagination, not in overt fact. The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable. Each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself upon the screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it would have if it were given head. Although overt ex- THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION 191 hibition is checked by the pressure of contrary propul- sive tendencies, this very inhibition gives habit a chance at manifestation in thought. Deliberation means pre- cisely that activity is disintegrated, and that its various elements hold one another up. While none has force enough to become the center of a re-directed activity, or to dominate a course of action, each has enough power to check others from exercising mastery. Activ- ity does not cease in order to give way to reflection; activity is turned from execution into intra-organic channels, resulting in dramatic rehearsal. If activity were directly exhibited it would result in certain experiences, contacts with the environment. It would succeed by making environing objects, things and persons, co-partners in its forward movement; or else it would run against obstacles and be troubled, pos- sibly defeated. These experiences of contact with ob- jects and their qualities give meaning, character, to an otherwise fluid, unconscious activity. We find out what seeing means by the objects which are seen. They con- stitute the significance of visual activity which would otherwise remain a blank. " Pure " activity is for con- sciousness pure emptiness. It acquires a content or filling of meanings only in static termini, what it comes to rest in, or in the obstacles which check its onward movement and deflect it. As has been remarked, the ob- ject is that which objects. There is no difference in this respect between a visible course of conduct and one proposed in deliberation. We have no direct consciousness of what we purpose 192 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT to do. We can judge its nature, assign its meaning, only by following it into the situations whither it leads, noting the objects against which it runs and seeing how they rebuff or unexpectedly encourage it. In imagina- tion as in fact we know a road only by what we see as we travel on it. Moreover the objects which prick out the course of a proposed act until we can see its design also serve to direct eventual overt activity. Every ob- ject hit upon as the habit traverses its imaginary path has a direct effect upon existing activities. It rein- forces, inhibits, redirects habits already working or stirs up others which had not previously actively entered in. In thought as well as in overt action, the objects experienced in following out a course of action attract, repel, satisfy, annoy, promote and retard. Thus deliberation proceeds. To say that at last it ceases is to say that choice, decision, takes place. What then is choice? Simply hitting in imagination upon an object which furnishes an adequate stimulus to the recovery of overt action. Choice is made as soon as some habit, or some combination of elements of habits and impulse, finds a way fully open. Then energy is released. The mind is made up, composed, unified. As long as deliberation pictures shoals or rocks or trouble- some gales as marking the route of a contemplated voyage, deliberation goes on. But when the various factors in action fit harmoniously together, when imag- ination finds no annoying hindrance, when there is a picture of open seas, filled sails and favoring winds, the voyage is definitely entered upon. This decisive direc- THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION 193 tion of action constitutes choice. It is a great error to suppose that we have no preferences until there is a choice. We are always biased beings, tending in one direction rather than another. The occasion of de- liberation is an excess of preferences, not natural apathy or an absence of likings. We want things that are incompatible with one another; therefore we have to make a choice of what we really want, of the course of action, that is, which most fully releases activities. Choice is not the emergence of preference out of indif- ference. It is the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences. Biases that had held one another in check now, temporarily at least, reinforce one another, and constitute a unified attitude. The moment arrives when imagination pictures an objective consequence of action which supplies an adequate stim- ulus and releases definitive action. All deliberation is a search for a way to act, not for a final terminus. Its office is to facilitate stimulation. Hence there is reasonable and unreasonable choice. The object thought of may simply stimulate some im- pulse or habit to a pitch of intensity where it is tem- porarily irresistible. It then overrides all competitors and secures for itself the sole right of way. The object looms large in imagination ; it swells to fill the field. It allows no room for alternatives; it absorbs us, en- raptures us, carries us away, sweeps us off our feet by its own attractive force. Then choice is arbitrary, un- reasonable. But the object thought of may be one which stimulates by unifying, harmonizing, different 194 competing tendencies. It may release an activity in which all are fulfilled, not indeed, in their original form, but in a " sublimated " fashion, that is in a way which modifies the original direction of each by reducing it to a component along with others in an action of trans- formed quality. Nothing is more extraordinary than the delicacy, promptness and ingenuity with which de- liberation is capable of making eliminations and re- combinations in projecting the course of a possible activity. To every shade of imagined circumstance there is a vibrating response ; and to every complex sit- uation a sensitiveness as to its integrity, a feeling of whether it does justice to all facts, or overrides some to the advantage of others. Decision is reasonable when deliberation is so conducted. There may be error in the result, but it comes from lack of data not from ineptitude in handling them. These facts give us the key to the old controversy as to the respective places of desire and reason in con- duct. It is notorious that some moralists have de- plored the influence of desire ; they have found the heart of strife between good and evil in the conflict of desire with reason, in which the former has force on its side and the latter authority. But reasonableness is in fact a quality of an effective relationship among desires rather than a thing opposed to desire. It signifies the order, perspective, proportion which is achieved, during deliberation, out of a diversity of earlier incompatible preferences. Choice is reasonable when it induces us to act reasonably; that is, with regard to the claims THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION 195 of each of the competing habits and impulses. This implies, of course, the presence of a comprehensive ob- ject, one which coordinates, organizes and functions each factor of the situation which gave rise to conflict, suspense and deliberation. This is as true when some " bad " impulses and habits enter in as when approved ones require unification. We have already seen the effects of choking them off, of efforts at direct sup- pression. Bad habits can be subdued only by being utilized as elements in a new, more generous and com- prehensive scheme of action, and good ones be pre- served from rot only by similar use. The nature of the strife of reason and passion is well stated by William James. The cue of passion, he says in effect, istokeep imagination dwelling upon those objects which are congenial to it, whicfr feed it, and which by feeding it intensify its force, until it crowds out all Thought ofother objects. An impulse or habit which is strongly emotional magnifies all ob- jects that are congruous with it and smothers those which are opposed whenever they present themselves. A passionate activity learns to work itself up artificially as Oliver Cromwell indulged in fits of anger when he wanted to do things that his conscience would not justify. A presentiment is felt that if the thought of contrary objects is allowed to get a lodgment in imagi- nation, these objects will work and work to chill and freeze out the ardent passion of the moment. The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can be or should be eliminated in be- 196 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT half of a bloodless reason. More " passions," not fewer, is the answer. To check the influence of hate there must be sympathy, while to rationalize sympathy there are needed emotions of curiosity, caution, respect for the freedom of others dispositions which evoke objects which balance those called up by sympathy, and pre- vent its degeneration into maudlin sentiment and med- dling interference. Rationality, once more, is not a force to evoke against impulse and habit. It is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse de- sires. " Reason " as a noun signifies the happy cooper- ation of a multitude of dispositions, such as sympathy, curiosity, exploration, experimentation, frankness, pur- suit to follow things through circumspection, to look about at the context, etc., etc. The elaborate sys- tems of science are born not of reason but of impulses at first slight and flickering; impulses to handle, move about, to hunt, to uncover, to mix things separated and divide things combined, to talk and to listen. Method is their effectual organization into continuous dispo- sitions of inquiry, development and testing. It occurs after these acts and because of their consequences. Reason, the rational attitude, is the resulting disposi- tion, not a ready-made antecedent which can be in- voked at will and set into movement. The man who would intelligently cultivate intelligence will widen, not narrow, his life of strong impulses while aiming at their happy coincidence in operation. The clew of impulse is, as we say, to start some- thing. It is in a hurry. It rushes us off our feet. It THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION 197 leaves no time for examination, memory and foresight. But the clew of reason is, as the phrase also goes, to stop and think. Force, however, is required to stop the ongoing of a habit or impulse. This is supplied by another habit. The resulting period of delay, of sus- pended and postponed overt action, is the period in which activities that are refused direct outlet project imaginative counterparts. It signifies, in technical phrase, the mediation of impulse. For an isolated im- pulse is immediate, narrowing the world down to the directly present. Variety of competing tendencies en- larges the world. It brings a diversity of considera- tions before the mind, and enables action to take place finally in view of an object generously conceived and delicately refined, composed by a long process of selections and combinations. In popular phrase, to be deliberate is to be slow, unhurried. It takes time to put objects in order. There are however vices of reflection as well as of impulse. We may not look far enough ahead because we are hurried into action by stress of impulse; but we may also become overinterested in the delights of reflection; we become afraid of assuming the responsi- bilities of decisive choice and action, and in general be sicklied over by a pale cast of thought. We may be- come so curious about remote and abstract matters that we give only a begrudged, impatient attention to the things right about us. We may fancy we are glori- fying the love of truth for its own sake when we are only indulging a pet occupation and slighting demands 198 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT of the immediate situation. Men who devote themselves to thinking are likely to be unusually unthinking in some respects, as for example in immediate personal re- lationships. A man to whom exact scholarship is an absorbing pursuit may be more than ordinarily vague in ordinary matters. Humility and impartiality may be shown in a specialized field, and pettiness and ar- rogance in dealing with other persons. " Reason " is not an antecedent force which serves as a panacea. It is a laborious achievement of habit needing to be con- tinually worked over. A balanced arrangement of pro- pulsive activities manifested in deliberation namely, reason depends upon a sensitive and proportionate emotional sensitiveness. Only a one-sided, over-special- ized emotion leads to thinking of it as separate from emotion. The traditional association of justice and reason has good psychology back of it. Both imply a balanced distribution of thought and energy. Delib- eration is irrational in the degree in which an end is so fixed, a passion or interest so absorbing, that the foresight of consequences is warped to include only what furthers execution of its predetermined bias. De- liberation is rational in the degree in which forethought flexibly remakes old aims and habits, institutes percep- tion and love of new ends and acts. IV We now return to a consideration of the utilitarian theory according to which deliberation consists in cal- culation of courses of action on the basis of the profit and loss to which they lead. The contrast of this no- tion with fact is obvious. The office of deliberation is not to supply an inducement to act by figuring out where the most advantage is to be procured. It is to resolve entanglements in existing activity, restore con- tinuity, recover harmony, utilize loose impulse and re- direct habit. To this end observation of present con- ditions, recollection of previous situations are devoted. Deliberation has its beginning in troubled activity and its conclusion in choice of a course of action which straightens it out. It no more resembles the casting-up of accounts of profit and loss, pleasures and pains, than an actor engaged in drama resembles a clerk recording debit and credit items in his ledger. The primary fact is that man is a being who responds in action to the stimuli of the environment. This fact is complicated in deliberation, but it certainly is not abolished. We continue to react to an object presented in imagination as we react to objects presented in ob- servation. The baby does not move to the mother's breast because of calculation of the advantages of warmth and food over against the pains of effort. Nor 199 200 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT does the miser seek gold, nor the architect strive t whose claims are superior to those of the popular doctrine of evolution. Logic points rather in the direction of Rousseau and Tolstoi who would recur to some primitive simplicity, who would return from complicated and troubled civilization to a state of na- 286 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ture. For certainly progress in civilization has not only meant increase in the scope and intricacy of problems to be dealt with, but it entails increasing instability. For in multiplying wants, instruments and possibilities, it increases the variety of forces which enter into re- lations with one another and which have to be intelli- gently directed. Or again, Stoic indifference or Bud- dhist calm have greater claims. For, it may be argued, since all objective achievement only complicates the sit- uation, the victory of a final stability can be secured only by renunciation of desire. Since every satisfac- tion of desire increases force, and this in turn creates new desires, withdrawal into an inner passionless state, indifference to action and attainment, is the sole road to possession of the eternal, stable and final reality. Again, from the standpoint of definite approximation to an ultimate goal, the balance falls heavily on the side of pessimism. The more striving the more attainments, perhaps; but also assuredly the more needs and the more disappointments. The more we do and the more we accomplish, the more the end is vanity and vexa- tion. From the standpoint of attainment of good that stays put, that constitutes a definite sum performed which lessens the amount of effort required in order to reach the ultimate goal of final good, progress is an illusion. But we are looking for it in the wrong place. The world war is a bitter commentary on the nineteenth century misconception of moral achievement a mis- conception however which it only inherited from the traditional theory of fixed ends, attempting to bolster THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY 287 up that doctrine with aid from the " scientific " theory of evolution. The doctrine of progress is not yet bank- rupt. The bankruptcy of the notion of fixed goods to be attained and stably possessed may possibly be the means of turning the mind of man to a tenable theory of progress to attention to present troubles and pos- sibilities. Adherents of the idea that betterment, growth in goodness, consists in approximation to an exhaustive, stable, immutable end or good, have been compelled to recognize the truth that in fact we envisage the good in specific terms that are relative to existing needs, and that the attainment of every specific good merges in- sensibly into a new condition of maladjustment with its need of a new end and a renewed effort. But they have elaborated an ingenious dialectical theory to ac- count for the facts while maintaining their theory in- tact. The goal, the ideal, is infinite ; man is finite, sub- ject to conditions imposed by space and time. The specific character of the ends which man entertains and of the satisfaction he achieves is due therefore precisely to his empirical and finite nature in its con- trast with the infinite and complete character of the true reality, the end. Consequently when man reaches what he had taken to be the destination of his journey he finds that he has only gone a piece on the road. In- finite vistas still stretch before him. Again he sets his mark a little way further ahead, and again when he reaches the station set, he finds the road opening before him in unexpected ways, and sees new distant objects 288 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT beckoning him forward. Such is the popular doctrine. By some strange perversion this theory passes for moral idealism. An office of inspiration and guidance is attributed to the thought of the goal of ultimate com- pleteness or perfection. As matter of fact, the idea sincerely held brings discouragement and despair not inspiration or hopefulness. There is something either ludicrous or tragic in the notion that inspiration to continued progress is had in telling man that no matter what he does or what he achieves, the outcome is negli- gible in comparison with what he set out to achieve, that every endeavor he makes is bound to turn out a failure compared with what should be done, that every at- tained satisfaction is only forever bound to be only a disappointment. The honest conclusion is pessimism. All is vexation, and the greater the effort the greater the vexation. But the fact is that it is not the nega- tive aspect of an outcome, its failure to reach infinity, which renews courage and hope. Positive attainment, actual enrichment of meaning and powers opens new vistas and sets new tasks, creates new aims and stim- ulates new efforts. The facts are not such as to yield unthinking optimism and consolation ; for they render it impossible to rest upon attained goods. New strug- gles and failures are inevitable. The total scene of action remains as before, only for us more complex, and more subtly unstable. But this very situation is a consequence of expansion, not of failures of power, and when grasped and admitted it is a challenge to intelli- gence. Instruction in what to do next can never come THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY 289 from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation. In any case, however, arguments about pessimism and optimism based upon considerations regarding fixed attainment of good and evil are mainly literary in qual- ity. Man continues to live because he is a living crea- ture not because reason convinces him of the certainty or probability of future satisfactions and achievements. He is instinct with activities that carry him on. Indi- viduals here and there cave in, and most individuals sag, withdraw and seek refuge at this and that point. But man as man still has the dumb pluck of the animal. He has endurance, hope, curiosity, eagerness, love of action. These traits belong to him by structure, not by taking thought. Memory of past and foresight of fu- ture convert dumbness to some degree of articulate- ness. They illumine curiosity and steady courage. Then when the future arrives with its inevitable dis- appointments as well as fulfilments, and with new sources of trouble, failure loses something of its fatal- ity, and suffering yields fruit of instruction not of bit- terness. Humility is more demanded at our moments of triumph than at those of failure. For humility is not a caddish self-depreciation. It is the sense of our slight inability even with our best intelligence and ef- fort to command events; a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without our wish and plan. Its purport is not to relax effort but to make us prize every opportunity of present growth. In 290 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT morals, the infinitive and the imperative develop from the participle, present tense. Perfection means per- fecting, fulfilment, fulfilling, and the good is now or never. Idealistic philosophies, those of Plato, Aristotle, Spi- noza, like the hypothesis now offered, have found the good in meanings belonging to a conscious life, a life of reason, not in external achievement. Like it, they have exalted the place of intelligence in securing ful- filment of conscious life. These theories have at least not subordinated conscious life to external obedience, not thought of virtue as something different from ex- cellence of life. But they set up a transcendental mean- ing and reason, remote from present experience and opposed to it; or they insist upon a special form of meaning and consciousness to be attained by peculiar modes of knowledge inaccessible to the common man, involving not continuous reconstruction of ordinary experience, but its wholesale reversal. They have treated regeneration, change of heart, as wholesale and self-enclosed, not as continuous. The utilitarians also made good and evil, right and wrong, matters of conscious experience. In addition they brought them down to earth, to everyday experi- ence. They strove to humanize other-worldly goods. But they retained the notion that the good is future, and hence outside the meaning of present activity. In so far it is sporadic, exceptional, subject to accident, passive, an enjoyment not a joy, something hit upon, not a fulfilling. The future end is for them not to THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY 291 remote from present action as the Platonic realm of ideals, or as the Aristotelian rational thought, or the Christian heaven, or Spinoza's conception of the uni- versal whole. But still it is separate in principle and in fact from present activity. The next step is to iden- tify the sought for good with the meaning of our impulses and our habits, and the specific moral good or virtue with learning this meaning, a learning that takes us back not into an isolated self but out into the open-air world of objects and social ties, terminating in an increment of present significance. Doubtless there are those who will think that we thus escape from remote and external ends only to fall into an Epicureanism which teaches us to subordinate everything else to present satisfactions. The hypothe- sis preferred may seem to some to advise a subjective, self-centered life of intensified consciousness, an esthet- ically dilettante type of egoism. For is not its lesson that we should concentrate attention, each upon the consciousness accompanying his action so as to refine and develop it? Is not this, like all subjective morals, an anti-social doctrine, instructing us to subordinate the objective consequences of our acts, those which pro- mote the welfare of others, to an enrichment of our private conscious lives? It can hardly be denied that as compared with the dogmas against which it reacted there is an element of truth in Epicureanism. It strove to center attention upon what is actually within control and to find the good in the present instead of in a contingent uncer- 292 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT tain future. The trouble with it lies in its account of present good. It failed to connect this good with the full reach of activities. It contemplated good of with- drawal rather than of active participation. That is to say, the objection to Epicureanism lies in its con- ception of what constitutes present good, not in its emphasis upon satisfaction as at present. The same re- mark may be made about every theory which recognizes the individual self. If any such theory is objection- able, the objection is against the character or quality assigned to the self. Of course an individual is the bearer or carrier of experience. What of that? Every- thing depends upon the kind of experience that centers in him. Not the residence of experience counts, but its contents, what's in the house. The center is not in the abstract amenable to our control, but what gathers about it is our affair. We can't help being individual selves, each one of us. If selfhood as such is a bad thing, the blame lies not with the self but with the uni- verse, with providence. But in fact the distinction be- tween a selfishness with which we find fault and an unselfishness which we esteem is found in the quality of the activities which proceed from and enter into the self, according as they are contractive, exclusive, or expansive, outreaching. Meaning exists for some self, but this truistic fact doesn't fix the quality of any par- ticular meaning. It may be such as to make the self small, or such as to exalt and dignify the self. It is as impertinent to decry the worth of experience be- cause it is connected with a self as it is fantastic to THE GOOD OF ACTIVITY 293 idealize personality just as personality aside from the question what sort of a person one is. Other persons are selves too. If one's own present experience is to be depreciated in its meaning because it centers in a self, why act for the welfare of others? Selfishness for selfishness, one is as good as another; our own is worth as much as another's. But the rec- ognition that good is always found in a present growth of significance in activity protects us from thinking that welfare can consist in a soup-kitchen happiness, in pleasures we can confer upon others from without. It shows that good is the same in quality wherever it is found, whether in some other self or in one's own. An activity has meaning in the degree in which it establishes and acknowledges variety and intimacy of connections. As long as any social impulse endures, so long an activ- ity that shuts itself off will bring inward dissatisfaction and entail a struggle for compensatory goods, no mat- ter what pleasures or external successes acclaim its course. To say that the welfare of others, like our own, consists in a widening and deepening of the perceptions that give activity its meaning, in an educative growth, is to set forth a proposition of political import. To " make others happy " except through liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life is to harm them and to indulge ourselves under cover of exercising a special virtue. Our moral measure for estimating any existing ar- rangement or any proposed reform is its effect upon 294 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT impulse and habits. Does it liberate or suppress, ossify or render flexible, divide or unify interest? Is per- ception quickened or dulled? Is memory made apt and extensive or narrow and diffusely irrelevant? Is imag- ination diverted to fantasy and compensatory dreams, or does it add fertility to life? Is thought creative or pushed one side into pedantic specialisms? There is a sense in which to set up social welfare as an end of action only promotes an offensive condescension, a harsh interference, or an oleaginous display of com- placent kindliness. It always tends in this direction when it is aimed at giving happiness to others directly, that is, as we can hand a physical thing to another. To foster conditions that widen the horizon of others and give them command of their own powers, so that they can find their own happiness in their own fashion, is the way of " social " action. Otherwise the prayer of a freeman would be to be left alone, and to be delivered, above all, from " reformers " and " kind " people. II Since morals is concerned with conduct, it grows out of specific empirical facts. Almost all influential moral theories, with the exception of the utilitarian, have re- fused to admit this idea. For Christendom as a whole, morality has been connected with supernatural com- mands, rewards and penalties. Those who have es- caped this superstition have contented themselves with converting the difference between this world and the next into a distinction between the actual and the ideal, what is and what should be. The actual world has not been surrendered to the devil in name, but it is treated as a display of physical forces incapable of generating moral values. Consequently, moral considerations must be introduced from above. Human nature may not be officially declared to be infected because of some aborig- inal sin, but it is said to be sensuous, impulsive, sub- jected to necessity, while natural intelligence is such that it cannot rise above a reckoning of private ex- pediency. But in fact morals is the most humane of all sub- jects. It is that which is closest to human nature; it is ineradicably empirical, not theological nor meta- physical nor mathematical. Since it directly concerns human nature, everything that can be known of the human mind and body in physiology, medicine, anthro- 295 296 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT pology, and psychology is pertinent to moral inquiry. Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not " in " that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil. It is of them, continuous with their energies, dependent upon their support, capable of increase only as it utilizes them, and as it gradually rebuilds from their crude in- difference an environment genially civilized. Hence physics, chemistry, history, statistics, engineering sci- ence, are a part of disciplined moral knowledge so far as they enable us to understand the conditions and agencies through which man lives, and on account of which he forms and executes his plans. Moral science is not something with a separate province. It is phys- ical, biological and historic knowledge placed in a human context where it will illuminate and guide the activities of men. The path of truth is narrow and straitened. It is only too easy to wander beyond the course from this side to that. In a reaction from that error which has made morals fanatic or fantastic, sentimental or authoritative by severing them from actual facts and forces, theorists have gone to the other extreme. They have insisted that natural laws are themselves moral laws, so that it remains, after noting them, only to con- form to them. This doctrine of accord with nature has usually marked a transition period. When myth- ology is dying in its open forms, and when social life is so disturbed that custom and tradition fail to supply their wonted control, men resort to Nature as a norm. MORALS ARE HUMAN 297 They apply to Nature all the eulogistic predicates pre- viously associated with divine law; or natural law is conceived of as the only true divine law. This hap- pened in one form in Stoicism. It happened in another form in the deism of the eighteenth century with its notion of a benevolent, harmonious, wholly rational order of Nature. In our time this notion has been perpetuated in con- nection with a laissez-faire social philosophy and the theory of evolution. Human intelligence is thought to mark an artificial interference if it does more than reg- ister fixed natural laws as rules of human action. The process of natural evolution is conceived as the exact model of human endeavor. The two ideas met in Spen- cer. To the " enlightened " of a former generation, Spencer's evolutionary philosophy seemed to afford a scientific sanction for the necessity of moral progress, while it also proved, up to the hilt, the futility of de- liberate " interference " with the benevolent operations of nature. The idea of justice was identified with the law of cause and effect. Transgression of natural law wrought in the struggle for existence its own penalty of elimination, and conformity with it brought the reward of increased vitality and happiness. By this process egoistic desire is gradually coming into harmony with the necessity of the environment, till at last the indi- vidual automatically finds happiness in doing what the natural and social environment demands, and serves himself in serving others. From this point of view, earlier " scientific " philosophers made a mistake, but 298 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT only the mistake of anticipating the date of complete natural harmony. All that reason can do is to acknowl- edge the evolutionary forces, and thereby refrain from retarding the arrival of the happy day of perfect har- mony. Meantime justice demands that the weak and ignorant suffer the effect of violation of natural law, while the wise and able reap the rewards of their superiority. The fundamental defect of such views is that they fail to see the difference made in conditions and ener- gies by perception of them. It is the first business of mind to be " realistic," to see things " as they are." If, for example, biology can give us knowledge of the causes of competency and incompetency, strength and weakness, that knowledge is all to the good. A non- sentimental morals will seek for all the instruction nat- ural science can give concerning the biological condi- tions and consequences of inferiority and superiority. | But knowledge of facts does not entail conformity and I acquiescence^ The contrary i^ the case. Perception ( of things as they are is but a stage in the process of making them different. They have already begun to Fe different in beingknown, for by that fact they enter into a different context, a context of foresight and judgment of better and worse. A false psychology of a separate realm of consciousness is the only reason this fact is not generally acknowledged. Morality re- sides not in perception of fact, but in the use made of its perception. It is a monstrous assumption that its sole use is to utter benedictions upon fact and its MORALS ARE HUMAN 299 offspring. It is the part of intelligence to tell when to use the fact to conform and perpetuate, and when to use it to vary conditions and consequences. It is absurd to suppose that knowledge about the con- nection between inferiority and its consequences pre- scribes adherence to that connection. It is like sup- posing that knowledge of the connection between ma- laria and mosquitoes enjoins breeding mosquitoes. The fact when it is known enters into a new environment. Without ceasing to belong to the physical environment it enters _also into a mediumof human activities, of desires and aversions, habits and instincts. It thereby gains new potencies, new capacities. Gunpowder in water does not act the same as gunpowder next a flame. A fact known does not operate the same as a fact un- .perceived. When it is known it comes into contact witH the flame of desire and the cold bath of antipathy, Knowledge o the conditions that breed incapacity may fit into some desire to maintain others in that state while averting it for one's self. Or it may fall in with a character which finds itself blocked by such facts, and therefore strives to use knowledge of causes to make a change in effects. Moralitjjjegins at this Egint^ of use of knr>wjprLgp nf natural law, a use varying with the active system of dispositions an^TBesires. Intelligent action is not concerned with thelbare consequences of the thing known, but with consequences to be brought into existence by action conditioned on the knowledge. Men may use their knowledge to induce conformity or exaggeration, or to effect change and abolition of con- 800 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ditions. The quality of these consequences determines the question of better or worse. The exaggeration of the harmony attributed to Na- ture aroused men to note its disharmonies. An optimis- tic view of natural benevolence was followed by a more honest, less romantic view of struggle and conflict in nature. After Helvetius and Bentham came Malthus and Darwin. The problem of morals is the problem of desire and intelligence. What is to be done with these facts of disharmony and conflict? After we have dis- covered the place and consequences of conflict in na- ture, we have still to discover its place and working in human need and thought. What is its office, its function, its possibility, or use? In general, the answer is simple. Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to ob- servation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. Not that it always effects this result ; but that conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity. When this possibility of making use of conflict has once been noted, it is possible to utilize it systematically to substitute the arbitration of mind for that of brutal attack and brute collapse. But the tendency to take natural law for a norm of action which the supposedly scientific have inherited from eighteenth century rationalism leads to an idealization of the prin- ciple of conflict itself. Its office in promoting progress through arousing intelligence is overlooked, and it is erected into the generator of progress. Karl Marx borrowed from the dialectic of Hegel the idea of the MORALS ARE HUMAN 301 necessity of a negative element, of opposition, for ad- vance. He projected it into social affairs and reached the conclusion that all social development comes from conflict between classes, and that therefore class-war- fare is to be cultivated. Hence a supposedly scientific form of the doctrine of social evolution preaches social hostility as the road to social harmony. It would be difficult to find a more striking instance of what happens when natural events are given a social and practical sanctification. Darwinism has been similarly used to justify war and the brutalities of competition for wealth and power. The excuse, the provocation, though not the justifica- tion for such a doctrine is found in the actions of those who say peace, peace, when there is no peace, who refuse to recognize facts as they are, who proclaim a natural harmony of wealth and merit, of capital and labor, and the natural justice, in the main, of existing conditions. There is something horrible, something that makrs one fear for civilization, in denunciations of class-differ- ences and class struggles which proceed from a class in power, one that is seizing every means, even to a mo- nopoly of moral ideals, to carry on its struggle for class-power. This class adds hypocrisy to conflict and brings all idealism into disrepute. It does everything which ingenuity and prestige can do to give color to the assertions of those who say that all moral consid- erations are irrelevant, and that the issue is one of brute trial of forces between this side and that. The alternative, here as elsewhere, is not between denying 802 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT facts in behalf of something termed moral ideals and accepting facts as final. There remains the possibil- ity of recognizing facts and using them as a challenge to intelligence to modify the environment and change habits. Ill The place of natural fact and law in morals brings us to the problem of freedom. We are told that seriously to import empirical facts into morals is equivalent to an abrogation of freedom. Facts and laws mean ne- cessity we are told. The way to freedom is to turn our back upon them and take flight to a separate ideal realm. Even if the flight could be successfully accom- plished, the efficacy of the prescription may be doubted. For we need freedom in and among actual events, not apart from them. It is to be hoped therefore that there remains an alter- native ; that the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts which enables us to employ them in connection with desires and aims. A physician or en- gineer is free in his thought ancfhis action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Possibly we find here the key to any freedom. What men have esteemed and fought for in the name of liberty is varied and complex but certainly it has never been a metaphysical freedom of will. It seems to contain three elements of importance* though on their face not all of them are directly compatible with one another, (i) It includes efficiency in action, abil- ity to carry out plans, the absence of cramping and thwarting obstacles, (ii) It also includes capacity to 303 If" 304 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT vary plans, to change the~cours_of action, to experi- ence novelties. And again (iii) it signifies the power of desire and choice to be factors in events. Few men would purchase even a high amount of ef- ficient action along definite lines at the price of monot- ony, or if success in action were bought by all abandon- ment of personal preference. They would probably feel that a more precious freedom was possessed in a life of ill-assured objective achievement that contained undertaking of risks, adventuring in new fields, a pit- ting of personal choice against the odds of events, and a mixture of success and failures, provided choice had a career. The slave is a man who executes the wish of others, one doomed to act along lines predetermined to regularity. Thogewhojiave defined freedom as ability to act have unconsciouslyassumecTthat this ability is exercised in^ accord with desire, andjthat Jts operation introduces jth_agent into fields previously unexplored^ Hence the conception of freedom as involving three factors. Yet efficiency in execution cannot be ignored. To say that a man is free to choose to walk while the only walk he can take will lead him over a precipice is to strain words as well as facts. Intelligence^ is the key-^ofree- dom in act. We are likely to be able to go ahead pros- perously in the degree in which we have consulted con- ditions and formed a plan which enlists their consent- ing cooperation. The gratuitous help of unforeseen circumstance we cannot afford to despise. Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way WHAT IS FREEDOM? SOS of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid. And the gifts of fortune when they come are fleeting except when they are made taut by intelligent adaptation of conditions. In neutral and adverse cir- cumstances, study and foresight are the only roads to unimpeded action. Insistence upon a metaphysical freedom of will is generally at its most strident pitch with those who despise knowledge of matters-of-fact. They pay for their contempt by halting and confined action. Glorification of freedom in general at the ex- pense of positive abilities in particular has often char- acterized the official creed of historic liberalism. Its outward sign is the separation of politics and law from economics. Much of what is called the " individual- ism " of the early nineteenth century has in truth little to do with the nature of individuals. It goes back to a metaphysics which held that harmony between man and nature can be taken for granted, if once certain arti- ficial restrictions upon man are removed. Hence it neglected the necessity of studying and regulating in- dustrial conditions so that a nominal freedom can be made an actuality. Find a man who believes that all men need is freedom from oppressive legal and political measures, and you have found a man who, unless he is merely obstinately maintaining his own private privi- leges, carries at the back of his head some heritage of the metaphysical doctrine of free-will, plus an opti- mistic confidence in natural harmony. He needs a phi- losophy that recognizes the objective character of free- dom and its dependence upon a congruity of environ- 306 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT merit with human wants, an agreement which can be obtained only by profound thought and unremitting application. For freedom as a fact depends upon con- ditions of work which are socially and scientifically buttressed. Since industry covers the most pervasive relations of man with his environment, freedom is unreal which does not have as its basis an economic command of environment. I have no desire to add another to the cheap and easy solutions which exist of the seeming conflict between freedom and organization. It is reasonably obvious that organization may become a hindrance to freedom ; it does not take us far to say that the trouble lies not in organization but in over-organization. At the same time, it must be admitted that there is no effective or objective freedom without organization. It is easy to criticize the contract theory of the state which states that individuals surrender some at least of their natural liberties in order to make secure as civil liberties what they retain. Nevertheless there is some truth in the idea of surrender and exchange. A certain natural freedom is possessed by man. That is to say, in some respects harmony exists between a man's energies and his surroundings such that the latter support and exe- cute his purposes. In so far he is free; without such a basic natural support, conscious contrivances of leg- islation, administration and deliberate human institu- tion of social arrangements cannot take place. In this sense natural freedom is prior to political freedom and is its condition. But we cannot trust wholly to a free- WHAT IS FREEDOM? 307 dom thus procured. It is at the mercy of accident. Conscious agreements among men must supplement and in some degree supplant freedom of action which is the gift of nature. In order to arrive at these agreements, individuals have to make concessions. They must con- sent to curtailment of some natural liberties in order that any of them may be rendered secure and enduring. They must, in short, enter into an organization with other human beings so that the activities of others may be permanently counted upon to assure regularity of action and far-reaching scope of plans and courses of action. The procedure is not, in so far, unlike surren- dering a portion of one's income in order to buy insur- ance against future contingencies, and thus to render the future course of life more equably secure. It would be folly to maintain that there is no sacrifice; we can however contend that the sacrifice is a reasonable one, justified by results. Viewed in this light, the relation of individual free- dom to organization is seen to be an experimental af- fair. It is not capable of being settled by abstract theory. Take the question of labor unions and the closed or open shop. It is folly to fancy that no re- strictions and surrenders of prior freedoms and pos- sibilities of future freedoms are involved in the exten- sion of this particular form of organization. But to condemn such organization on the theoretical ground that a restriction of liberty is entailed is to adopt a position which would have been fatal to every advance step in civilization, and to every net gain in effective 308 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT freedom. Every such question is to be judged not on the basis of antecedent theory but on the basis of con- crete consequences. The question is to the balance of freedom and security achieved, as compared with prac- ticable alternatives. Even the question of the point where membership in an organization ceases to be a voluntary matter and becomes coercive or required, is also an experimental matter, a thing to be decided by scientifically conducted study of consequences, of pros and cons. It is definitely an affair of specific detail, not of wholesale theory. It is equally amusing to see one man denouncing on grounds of pure theory the coercion of workers by a labor union while he avails himself of the increased power due to corporate action in business and praises the coercion of the political state; and to see another man denouncing the latter as pure tyranny, while lauding the power of industrial labor organizations. The position of one or the other may be justified in particular cases, but justification is due to results in practice not to general theory. Organization tends, however, to become rigid and to limit freedom. In addition to security and energy in action, novelty, risk, change are ingredients of the freedom which men desire. Variety is more than the spice of life; it is largely of its essence, making a dif- ference between the free and the enslaved. Invariant virtue appears to be as mechanical as uninterrupted vice, for true excellence changes with conditions. Un- less character rises to overcome some new difficulty or conquer some temptation from an unexpected quarter WHAT IS FREEDOM? 309 we suspect its grain is only a veneer. Choice is an ele- ment in freedom and there can be no choice without unrealized and precarious possibilities. It is this de- mand for genuine contingency which is caricatured in the orthodox doctrine of a freedom of indifference, a power to choose this way or that apart from any habit or impulse, without even a desire on the part of will to show off. Such an indetermination of choice is not desired by the lover of either reason or excitement. The theory of arbitrary free choice represents indeter- minateness of conditions grasped in a vague and lazy fashion and hardened into a desirable attribute of will. Under the title of freedom men prize such uncertainty of conditions as give deliberation and choice an oppor- tunity. But uncertainty of volition which is more than a reflection of uncertainty of conditions is the mark of a person who has acquired imbecility of character through permanent weakening of his springs of action. Whether or not indeterminateness, uncertainty, actually exists in the world is a difficult question. It is easier to think of the world as fixed, settled once for all, and man as accumulating all the uncertainty there is in his will and all the doubt there is in his intellect. The rise of natural science has facilitated this dualistic partitioning, making nature wholly fixed and mind wholly open and empty. Fortunately for us we do not have to settle the question. A hypothetical answer is enough. // the world is already done and done for, if its character is entirely achieved so that its behavior is like that of a man lost in routine, then the only free- 310 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT dom for which man can hope is one of efficiency in overt action. But if change is genuine, if accounts are still in process of making, and if objective uncertainty is the stimulus to reflection, then variation in action, novelty and experiment, have a true meaning. In any case the question is an objective one. It concerns not man in isolation from the world but man in his connection with it. A world that is at points and times indeterminate enough to call out deliberation and to give play to choice to shape its future is a world in which will is free, not because it is inherently vacillating and un- stable, but because deliberation and choice are determin- ing and stabilizing factors. Upon an empirical view, uncertainty, doubt, hesita- tion, contingency and novelty, genuine change which is not mere disguised repetition, are facts. Only deduc- tive reasoning from certain fixed premisses creates a bias in favor of complete determination and finality. To say that these things exist only in human experience not in the world, and exist there only because of our " finitude " is dangerously like paying ourselves with words. Empirically the life of man seems in these re- spects as in others to express a culmination of facts in nature. To admit ignorance and uncertainty in man while denying them to nature involves a curious dual- ism. Variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation are empirically the manifesta- tion of a genuine nisus in things. At all events it is these things that are precious to us under the name of freedom. It is their elimination from the life of a WHAT IS FREEDOM? 311 slave which makes his life servile, intolerable to the freeman who has once been on his own, no matter what his animal comfort and security. A free man would rather take his chance in an open world than be guar- anteed in a closed world. These considerations give point to the third factor in love of freedom : the desire to have desire count as a factor, a force. Even if will chooses unaccountably, even if it be a capricious impulse, it does not follow that there are real alternatives, genuine possibilities, open in the future. What we want is possibilities open in the world not in the will, except as will or deliberate activity reflects the world. To foresee future objective alternatives and to be able by deliberation to choose one of them and thereby weight its chances in the struggle for future existence, measures our freedom. It is assumed sometimes that if it can be shown that deliberation determines choice and deliberation is de- termined by character and conditions, there is no free- dom. This is like saying that because a flower comes from root and stem it cannot bear fruit. The question is not what are the antecedents of deliberation and choice, but what are their consequences. What do they do that is distinctive? The answer is that they give us all the control of future possibilities which is open to us. And this control is the crux of our freedom. Without it, we are pushed from behind. With it we walk in the light. The doctrine that knowledge, intelligence rather than will, constitutes freedom is not new. It has been A 312 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT preached by moralists of many a school. All ration- alists have identified freedom with action emancipated by insight into truth. But insight into necessity has by them been substituted for foresight of possibilities. Tolstoi for example expressed the idea of Spinoza and Hegel when he said that the ox is a slave as long as he refuses to recognize the yoke and chafes under it, while if he identifies himself with its necessity and draws willingly instead of rebelliously, he is free. But as long as the yoke is a yoke it is impossible that voluntary identification with it should occur. Conscious submis- sion is then either fatalistic submissiveness or coward- ice. The ox accepts in fact not the yoke but the stall and the hay to which the yoke is a necessary incident. But if the ox foresees the consequences of the use of the yoke, if he anticipates the possibility of harvest, and identifies himself not with the yoke but with the realization of its possibilities, he acts freely, volunta- rily. He hasn't accepted a necessity as unavoidable; he has welcomed a possibility as a desirability. Perception of necessary law plays, indeed, a part. But no amount of insight into necessity brings with it, as such, anything but a consciousness of necessity. Freedom is the " truth of necessity " only when we use one " necessity " to alter another. When we use the law to foresee consequences and to consider how they may be averted or secured, then freedom begins. Em- ploying knowledge of law to enforce desire in execution gives power to the engineer. Employing knowledge of law in order to submit to it without further action con- WHAT IS FREEDOM? 313 stitutes fatalism, no matter how it be dressed up. Thus we recur to our main contention. Morality depends upon events, not upon commands and ideals alien to nature. But intelligence treats events as moving, as fraught with possibilities, not as ended, final. In fore- casting their possibilities, the distinction between bet- ter and worse arises. Human desire and ability cooper- ates with this or that natural force according as this or that eventuality is judged better. We do not use the present to control the future. We use the fore- sight of the future to refine and expand present activ- ity. In this use of desire, deliberation and choice, free- dom is actualized. IV Intelligence becomes ours in the degree in which we use it and accept responsibility for consequences. It is not ours originally or by production. " It thinks " is a truer psychological statement than " I think." Thoughts sprout and vegetate ; ideas proliferate. They come from deep unconscious sources. " I think " is a statement about voluntary action. Some suggestion surges from the unknown. Our active body of habits appropriates it. The suggestion then becomes an asser- tion. It no longer merely comes to us. It is accepted and uttered by us. We act upon it and thereby assume, by implication, its consequences. The stuff of belief and proposition is not originated by us. It comes to us from others, by education, tradition and the suggestion of the environment. Our intelligence is bound up, so far as its materials are concerned, with the community life of which we are a part. We know what it communi- cates to us, and know according to the habits it forms in us. Science is an affair of civilization not of indi- vidual intellect. So with conscience. When a child acts, those about him re-act. They shower encouragement upon him, visit him with approval, or they bestow frowns and rebuke. What others do to us when we act is as nat- ural a consequence of our action as what the fire does 314 MORALITY IS SOCIAL 315 to us when we plunge our hands in it. The social en- vironment may be as artificial as you please. But its action in response to ours is natural not artificial. In language and imagination we rehearse the responses of others just as we dramatically enact other consequences. We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowl- edge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. We know with them; there is conscience. An assembly is formed within our breast which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts. The community with- out becomes a forum and tribunal within, a judgment- seat of charges, assessments and exculpations. Our thoughts of our own actions are saturated with the ideas that others entertain about them, ideas which have been expressed not only in explicit instruction but still more effectively in reaction to our acts. Liability is the beginning of responsibility. We are held accountable by others for the consequences of our acts. They visit their like and dislike of these con- sequences upon us. In vain do we claim that these are not ours; that they are products of ignorance not design, or are incidents in the execution of a most laud- able scheme. Their authorship is imputed to us. We are disapproved, and disapproval is not an inner state of mind but a most definite act. Others say to us by their deeds we do not care a fig whether you did this deliberately or not. We intend that you shall deliber- ate before you do it again, and that if possible your deliberation shall prevent a repetition of this act we object to. The reference in blame and every unfavor- 316 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT able judgment is prospective, not retrospective. The- ories about responsibility may become confused, but in practice no one is stupid enough to try to change the past. Approbation and disapprobation are ways of influencing the formation of habits and aims ; that is, of influencing future acts. The individual is held ac- countable for what he has done in order that he may be responsive in what he is going to do. Gradually per- sons learn by dramatic imitation to hold themselves accountable, and liability becomes a voluntary delib- erate acknowledgment that deeds are our own, that their consequences come from us. These two facts, that moral judgment and moral responsibility are the work wrought in us by the social environment, signify that all morality is social; not because we ought to take into account the effect of our acts upon the welfare of others, but because of facts. Others do take account of what we do, and they re- spond accordingly to our acts. Their responses actu- ally do affect the meaning of what we do. The sig- nificance thus contributed is as inevitable as is the effect of interaction with the physical environment. In fact as civilization advances the physical environment gets itself more and more humanized, for the meaning of physical energies and events becomes involved with the part they play in human activities. Our conduct ** socially conditioned whether we perceive the fact or not. The effect of custom on habit, and of habit upon thought is enough to prove this statement. When we MORALITY IS SOCIAL 317 begin to forecast consequences, the consequences that most stand out are those which will proceed from other people. The resistance and the cooperation of others is the central fact in the furtherance or failure of our schemes. Connections with our fellows furnish both the opportunities for action and the instrumentalities by which we take advantage of opportunity. All of the actions of an individual bear the stamp of his com- munity as assuredly as does the language he speaks. Difficulty in reading the stamp is due to variety of im- pressions in consequence of membership in many groups. This social saturation is, I repeat, a matter of fact, not of what should be, not of what is desirable or un- desirable. It does not guarantee the Tightness of good- ness of an act; there is no excuse for thinking of evil action as individualistic a,nd right action as social. Deliberate unscrupulous pursuit of self-interest is as much conditioned upon social opportunities, training and assistance as is the course of action prompted by a beaming benevolence. The difference lies in the qual- ity and degree of the perception of ties and interde- pendencies ; in the use to which they are put. Consider the form commonly assumed today by self-seeking; namely command of money and economic power. Money is a social institution; property is a legal cus- tom; economic opportunities are dependent upon the state of society; the objects aimed at, the rewards sought for, are what they are because of social admira- tion, prestige, competition and power. If money-mak- ing is morally obnoxious it is because of the way these 318 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT social facts are handled, not because a money-making man has withdrawn from society into an isolated self- hood or turned his back upon society. His " individ- ualism " is not found in his original nature but in his habits acquired under social influences. It is found in his concrete aims, and these are reflexes of social con- ditions. Well-grounded moral objection to a mode of conduct rests upon the kind of social connections that figure, not upon lack of social aim. A man may at- tempt to utilize social relationships for his own ad- vantage in an inequitable way; he may intentionally or unconsciously try to make them feed one of his own appetites. Then he is denounced as egoistic. But both his course of action and the disapproval he is subject to are facts within society. They are social phe- nomena. He pursues his unjust advantage as a social asset. Explicit recognition of this fact is a prerequisite of improvement in moral education and of an intelligent understanding of the chief ideas or " categories " of morals. Morals is as much a matter of interaction of a person with his social environment as walking is an interaction of legs with a physical environment. The character of walking depends upon the strength and competency of legs. But it also depends upon whether a man is walking in a bog or on a paved street, upon whether there is a safeguarded path set aside or whether he has to walk amid dangerous vehicles. If the stand- ard of morals is low it is because the education given by the interaction of the individual with his social en- MORALITY IS SOCIAL 319 vironment is defective. Of what avail is it to preach unassuming simplicity and contentment of life when communal admiration goes to the man who " succeeds '* who makes himself conspicuous and envied because of command of money and other forms of power? If a child gets on by peevishness or intrigue, then others are his accomplices who assist in the habits which are built up. The notion that an abstract ready-made conscience exists in individuals and that it is only nec- essary to make an occasional appeal to it and to indulge in occasional crude rebukes and punishments, is asso- ciated with the causes of lack of definitive and orderly moral advance. For it is associated with lack of at- tention to social forces. There is a peculiar inconsistency in the current idea that morals ought to be social. The introduction of the moral " ought " into the idea contains an implicit assertion that morals depend upon something apart from social relations. Morals are social. The ques- tion of ought, should be, is a question of better and worse in social affairs. The extent to which the weight of theories has been thrown against the perception of the place of social ties and connections in moral activ- ity is a fair measure of the extent to which social forces work blindly and develop an accidental morality. The chief obstacle for example to recognizing the truth of a proposition frequently set forth in these pages to the effect that all conduct is potential, if not actual, mat- ter of moral judgment is the habit of identifying moral judgment with praise and blame. So great is the in- 820 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT fluence of this habit that it is safe to say that every professed moralist when he leaves the pages of theory and faces some actual item of his own or others' be- havior, first or " instinctively " thinks of acts as moral or non-moral in the degree in which they are exposed to condemnation or approval. Now this kind of judgment is certainly not one which could profitably be dispensed with. Its influence is much needed. But the tendency to equate it with all moral judgment is largely re- sponsible for the current idea that there is a sharp line between moral conduct and a larger region of non- moral conduct which is a matter of expediency, shrewd- ness, success or manners. Moreover this tendency is a chief reason why the social forces effective in shaping actual morality work blindly and unsatisfactorily. Judgment in which the emphasis falls upon blame and approbation has more heat than light. It is more emotional than intellectual. It is guided by custom, personal convenience and re- sentment rather than by insight into causes and con- sequences. It makes toward reducing moral instruc- tion, the educative influence of social opinion, to an immediate personal matter, that is to say, to an adjust- ment of personal likes and dislikes. Fault-finding cre- ates resentment in the one blamed, and approval, com- placency, rather than a habit of scrutinizing conduct objectively. It puts those who are sensitive to the judgments of others in a standing defensive attitude, creating an apologetic, self-accusing and self-exculpat- ing habit of mind when what is needed is an impersonal MORALITY IS SOCIAL 321 impartial habit of observation. " Moral " persons get so occupied with defending their conduct from real and imagined criticism that they have little time left to see what their acts really amount to, and the habit of self- blame inevitably extends to include others since it is a habit. Now it is a wholesome thing for any one to be made aware that thoughtless, self-centered action on his part exposes him to the indignation and dislike of others. There is no one who can be safely trusted to be exempt from immediate reactions of criticism, and there are few who do not need to be braced by occa- sional expressions of approval. But these influences are immensely overdone in comparison with the assistance that might be given by the influence of social judg- ments which operate without accompaniments of praise and blame; which enable an individual to see for him- self what he is doing, and which put him in command of a method of analyzing the obscure and usually un- avowed forces which move him to act. We need a per- meation of judgments on conduct by the method and materials of a science of human nature. Without such enlightenment even the best-intentioned attempts at the moral guidance and improvement of others often eventuate in tragedies of misunderstanding and division, as is so often seen in the relations of parents and children. The development therefore of a more adequate sci- ence of human nature is a matter of first-rate impor- tance. The present revolt against the notion that psy- 322 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT chology is a science of consciousness may well turn out in the future to be the beginning of a definitive turn in thought and action. Historically there are good reasons for the isolation and exaggeration of the con- scious phase of human action, an isolation which for- got that " conscious " is an adjective of some acts and which erected the resulting abstraction, ** conscious- ness," into a noun, an existence separate and complete. These reasons are interesting not only to the student of technical philosophy but also to the student of the history of culture and even of politics. They have to do with the attempt to drag realities out of occult es- sences and hidden forces and get them into the light of day. They were part of the general movement called phenomenalism, and of the growing importance of in- dividual life and private voluntary concerns. But the effect was to isolate the individual from his connections both with his fellows and with nature, and thus to cre- ate an artificial human nature, one not capable of being understood and effectively directed on the basis of analytic understanding. It shut out from view, not to say from scientific examination, the forces which really move human nature. It took a few surface phenomena for the whole story of significant human motive-forces and acts. As a consequence physical science and its technolog- ical applications were highly developed while the sci- ence of man, moral science, is backward. I believe that it is not possible to estimate how much of the dif- ficulties of the present world situation are due to the MORALITY IS SOCIAL 323 disproportion and unbalance thus introduced into af- fairs. It would have seemed absurd to say in the sev- enteenth century that in the end the alteration in methods of physical investigation which was then be- ginning would prove more important than the religious wars of that century. Yet the wars marked the end of one era ; the dawn of physical science the beginning of a new one. And a trained imagination may discover that the nationalistic and economic wars which are the chief outward mark of the present are in the end to be less significant than the development of a science of human nature now inchoate. It sounds academic to say that substantial bettering of social relations waits upon the growth of a scientific social psychology. For the term suggests something specialized and remote. But the formation of habits of belief, desire and judgment is going on at every instant under the influence of the conditions set by men's contact, intercourse and associations with one another. This is the fundamental fact in social life and in per- sonal character. It is the fact about which traditional human science gives no enlightenment a fact which this traditional science blurs and virtually denies. The enormous role played in popular morals by appeal to the supernatural and quasi-magical is in effect a des- perate admission of the futility of our science. Con- sequently the whole matter of the formation of the pre- dispositions which effectively control human relation ships is left to accident, to custom and immediate per- sonal likings, resentments and ambitions. It is a com- 324 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT monplace that modern industry and commerce are con- ditioned upon a control of physical energies due to proper methods of physical inquiry and analysis. We have no social arts which are comparable because we have so nearly nothing in the way of psychological sci- ence. Yet through the development of physical science, and especially of chemistry, biology, physiology, med- icine and anthropology we now have the basis for the development of such a science of man. Signs of its coming into existence are present in the movements in clinical, behavioristic and social (in its narrower sense) psychology. At present we not only have no assured means of forming character except crude devices of blame, praise, exhortation and punishment, but the very meaning of the general notions of moral inquiry is matter of doubt and dispute. The reason is that these notions are dis- cussed in isolation from the concrete facts of the in- teractions of human beings with one another an ab- straction as fatal as was the old discussion of phlogis- ton, gravity and vital force apart from concrete cor- relations of changing events with one another. Take for example such a basic conception as that of Right involving the nature of authority in conduct. There is no need here to rehearse the multitude of contending views which give evidence that discussion of this matter is still in the realm of opinion. We content ourselves with pointing out that this notion is the last resort of the anti-empirical school in morals and that it proves the effect of neglect of social conditions. MORALITY IS SOCIAL 325 In effect its adherents argue as follows : " Let us con- cede that concrete ideas about right and wrong and particular notions of what is obligatory have grown up within experience. But we cannot admit this about tht idea of Right, of Obligation itself. Why does moral authority exist at all? Why is the claim of the Right recognized in conscience even by those who violate it in deed? Our opponents say that such and such a course is wise, expedient, better. But why act for the wise, or good, or better? Why not follow our own im- mediate devices if we are so inclined? There is only one answer : We have a moral nature, a conscience, call it what you will. And this nature responds directly in acknowledgment of the supreme authority of the Right over all claims of inclination and habit. We may not act in accordance with this acknowledgment, but we still know that the authority of the moral law, although not its power, is unquestionable. Men may differ in- definitely according to what their experience has been as to just what is Right, what its contents are. But they all spontaneously agree in recognizing the supremacy of the claims of whatever is thought of as Right. Other- wise there would be no such thing as morality, but merely calculations of how to satisfy desire. Grant the foregoing argument, and all the apparatus of abstract moralism follows in its wake. A remote goal of perfection, ideals that are contrary in a whole- sale way to what is actual, a free will of arbitrary choice; all of these conceptions band themselves to- gether with that of a non-empirical authority of Right 826 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT and a non-empirical conscience which acknowledges it. They constitute its ceremonial or formal train. Why, indeed, acknowledge the authority of Right? That many persons do not acknowledge it in fact, in action, and that all persons ignore it at times, is as- sumed by the argument. Just what is the significance of an alleged recognition of a supremacy which is con- tinually denied in fact? How much would be lost if it were dropped out, and we were left face to face with actual facts? If a man lived alone in the world there might be some sense in the question " Why be moral? " were it not for one thing: No such question would then arise. As it is, we live in a world where other persons live too. Our acts affect them. They perceive these effects, and react upon us in consequence. Because they are living beings they make demands upon us for cer- tain things from us. They approve and condemn not in abstract theory but in what they do to us. The an- swer to the question " Why not put your hand in the fire? " is the answer of fact. If you do your hand will be burnt. The answer to the question why acknowledge the right is of the same sort. For Right is only an abstract name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others impress upon us, and of which we are obliged, if we would live, to take some account. Its authority is the exigency of their demands, the ef- ficacy of their insistencies. There may be good ground for the contention that in theory the idea of the right is subordinate to that of the good, being a statement of the course proper to attain good. But in fact it MORALITY IS SOCIAL 527 signifies the totality of social pressures exercised upon us to induce us to think and desire in certain ways. Hence the right can in fact become the road to the good only as the elements that compose this unremitting pressure are enlightened, only as social relationships become themselves reasonable. It will be retorted that all pressure is a non-moral affair partaking of force, not of right ; that right must be ideal. Thus we are invited to enter again the circle in which the ideal has no force and social actualities no ideal quality. We refuse the invitation because social pressure is involved in our own lives, as much so as the air we breathe and the ground we walk upon. If we had desires, judgments, plans, in short a mind, apart from social connections, then the latter would be exter- nal and their action might be regarded as that of a non- moral force. But we live mentally as physically only in and because of our environment. Social pressure is but a name for the interactions which are always going on and in which we participate, living so far as we par- take and dying so far as we do not. The pressure is not ideal but empirical, yet empirical here means only actual. It calls attention to the fact that considera- tions of right are claims originating not outside of life, but within it. They are " ideal " in precisely the de- gree in which we intelligently recognize and act upon them, just as colors and canvas become ideal when used in ways that give an added meaning to life. Accordingly failure to recognize the authority of right means defect in effective apprehension of the real- 328 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT ities of human association, not an arbitrary exercise of free will. This deficiency and perversion in apprehen- sion indicates a defect in education that is to say, in the operation of actual conditions, in the consequences upon desire and thought of existing interactions and interdependencies. It is false that every person has a consciousness of the supreme authority of right and then misconceives it or ignores it in action. One has such a sense of the claims of social relationships as those relationships enforce in one's desires and obser- vations. The belief in a separate, ideal or transcen- dental, practically ineffectual Right is a reflex of the inadequacy with which existing institutions perform their educative office their office in generating obser- vation of social continuities. It is an endeavor to " rationalize " this defect. Like all rationalizations, it operates to divert attention from the real state of affairs. Thus it helps maintain the conditions which created it, standing in the way of effort to make our institutions more humane and equitable. A theoretical acknowledgment of the supreme authority of Right, of moral law, gets twisted into an effectual substitute for acts which would better the customs which now pro- duce vague, dull, halting and evasive observation of actual social ties. We are not caught in a circle; we traverse a spiral in which social customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies, and this conscious- ness is embodied in acts which in improving the environ- ment generate new perceptions of social ties, and so on forever. The relationships, the interactions are for- MORALITY IS SOCIAL 329 ever there as fact, but they acquire meaning only in the desires, judgments and purposes they awaken. We recur to our fundamental propositions. Morals is connected with actualities of existence, not with ideals, ends and obligations independent of concrete actualities. The facts upon which it depends are those which arise out of active connections of human beings with one another, the consequences of their mutually intertwined activities in the life of desire, belief, judg- ment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In this sense conduct and hence morals are social: they are not just things which ought to be social and which fail to come up to the scratch. But there are enormous differences of better and worse in the quality of what is social. Ideal morals begin with the perception of these dif- ferences. Human interaction and ties are there, are operative in any case. But they can be regulated, em- ployed in an orderly way for good only as we know how to observe them. And they cannot be observed aright, they cannot be understood and utilized, when the mind is left to itself to work without the aid of science. For the natural unaided mind means precisely the habits of belief, thought and desire which have been acciden- tally generated and confirmed by social institutions or customs. But with all their admixture of accident and reasonableness we have at last reached a point where social conditions create a mind capable of scientific outlook and inquiry. To foster and develop this spirit is the social obligation of the present because it is its urgent need. 330 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT Yet the last word is not with obligation nor with the future. Infinite relationships of man with his fellows and with nature already exist. The ideal means, as we have seen, a sense of these encompassing continui- ties with their infinite reach. This meaning even now attaches to present activities because they are set in a whole to which they belong and which belongs to them. Even in the midst of conflict, struggle and defeat a consciousness is possible of the enduring and compre- hending whole. To be grasped and held this consciousness needs, like every form of consciousness, objects, symbols. In the past men have sought many symbols which no longer serve, especially since men have been idolaters worship- ing symbols as things. Yet within these symbols which have so often claimed to be realities and which have im- posed themselves as dogmas and intolerances, there has rarely been absent some trace of a vital and enduring reality, that of a community of life in which continuities of existence are consummated. Consciousness of the whole has been connected with reverences, affections, and loyalties which are communal. But special ways of expressing the communal sense have been established. They have been limited to a select social group; they have hardened into obligatory rites and been imposed as conditions of salvation. Religion has lost itself in cults, dogmas and myths. Consequently the office of religion as sense of community and one's place in it has been lost. In effect religion has been distorted into a possession or burden of a limited part of MORALITY IS SOCIAL 331 human nature, of a limited portion of humanity which finds no way to universalize religion except by imposing its own dogmas and ceremonies upon others ; of a lim- ited class within a partial group; priests, saints, a church. Thus other gods have been set up before the one God. Religion as a sense of the whole is the most individualized of all things, the most spontaneous, un- definable and varied. For individuality signifies unique connections in the whole. Yet it lias been perverted into something uniform and immutable. It has been formulated into fixed and defined beliefs expressed in required acts and ceremonies. Instead of marking the freedom and peace of the individual as a member of an infinite whole, it has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, an intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many. Yet every act may carry within itself a consoling and supporting consciousness of the whole to which it belongs and which in some sense belongs to it. With responsibility for the intelligent determination of par- ticular acts may go a joyful emancipation from the burden for responsibility for the whole which sustains them, giving them their final outcome and quality. There is a conceit fostered by perversion of religion which assimilates the universe to our personal desires; but there is also a conceit of carrying the load of the universe from which religion liberates us. Within the flickering inconsequential acts of separate selves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them. S32 HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT In its presence we put off mortality and live in the uni- versal. The life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit symbol of this relationship. The acts in which we express our perception of the ties which bind us to others arc its only rites and ceremonies. INDEX Absentmindedness, 173 Accidents, in history, 101; in consequences, 49, 51, 206-208, 241, 253, 304, 309 Acquisition, 116-118, 143-148 Activity is natural, 118-123, 160, 226, 293 Aims, see Consequences, Ends Alexander M., 28, 36 Altruism, 133, 293 Analysis, 183 Anger, 90, 152 Appetite, 7, 275; see Impulse Aristotle, 33, 109, 174, 224, 290 Arts, 15, 23, 71, 159-164, 263 Atomism moral, 243 Attitude, 41 ; see Habit Authority, 2, 65, 72, 79, 187, 324 Benevolence, 133 Bergson, 73, 178, 245 Blame, 18, 121, 320 Causation, 18, 44 Calculation, 189, 199-209; see Deliberation Casuistry, 240 Certainty, love of, 236 Character, denned, 38; and consequences, 47 Childhood, 2, 64, 89, 96, 99 Choice, 192, 304, 311 Classes, 2, 82, 270 Classification, 131, 244 Codes, 103 Compensatory, 8, 30, 33, 257, 275 Conduct, see Character, Habit, Impulse, Intelligence Confidence, 139 Conflict, 12, 39, 66, 82, 194, 208, 217, 300 Conscience, 184-188, 314 Consciousness, 62, 179, 184, 208 Consequences, and motives, 45- 47; and aims, 225-229, 245- 247 Conservatism, 66, 106, 168 Continuity, 12, 232, 239, 244, 259 Control, 21, 23, 37, 101, 139, 148, 266-270; see Accident Conventions, 6, 97, 166 Crowd psychology, 60 Creative and acquisitive, 143- 148 Customs and habits, 68-69; and standards, 75-83; rigidity, 103-105 Deliberation, 189-209; as dis- covery, 216 Democracy, 61n, 66, 72 Desire, 24, 33. 194. 234. 299. 304; and intelligence, 248-264 ; object of, 249-252 Disposition, 41; see Habit Docility, 64, 97 Dualism, 8, 12, 40, 55, 67, 71, 147, 275, 309 Economic man, 220 Economics, 9, 12, 120-124, 132, 143-148, 212-221, 270-273, 305 Education, 64, 72, 91, 107, 270, 320 Egotism, 7 Emerson, 100, 144 Emotion, 75, 83, 255, 264 333 334, INDEX End, 28, 34-37; knowledge as, 187, 215; nature of, 223-237; of desire, 250, 261; and means, 269-272; see Conse- quences, Means Environments, 2, 10, 15, 18, 21, 51, 151, 159, 179, 316 Epicureanism, 205, 291 Equilibration, 179, 252 Evolution, 284-287, 297 Execution, of desires, 33-35 Expediency, 49, 189, 210; see Deliberation Experience, 31, 245 Experimentation, moral, 56, 307 Fallacy, philosophic, 175 Fanaticism, 228 Fear, 111, 132-133, 154-155, 237 Fiat of will, 29 Foresight, 204-206, 238, 265- 270; see Deliberation, Ends Freedom, 8, 165; three phases of, 303-313; see Will Functions, 18 Gain, 117 Goal, 260, 265, 274, 281, 287- 289; see Evolution, Perfec- tion Good, 2, 44, 210-222, 274, 278 Goodness, 4-8, 16, 43-45, 48, 67, 227 Good-will, 44 Habits, place in conduct, 14-88; and desire, 24; as functions, 14; as arts or abilities, 15, 64, 66, 71, 170; and thought, 31- 33, 66-69, 172-180, 182; defini- tion, 41; and impulses, 90-98, 107-111; and principles, 238 Harmony, natural, 159, 167, 298 Hedonistic calculus, 204 Hegel, 312 Helvetius, 106, 300 Herd-instinct, 4 History, 101, 110 Hobbes, 133 Human nature, 1; and morals, 1-13, 295; alterability, 106- 124 Humility, 289 Hypocrisy, 6 Hypothesis, moral, 239, 243 Ideas, see Ends, Thought Ideals and Idealism, 2, 8, 50, 68, 77, 81, 99, 157, 166, 184, 233, 236, 255, 259-264, 274, 282-288, 301, 331 Imagination, 52, 163, 190-192, 204, 225, 234 Imitation, 66, 97, 132 Impulse, place in conduct, 89- 171; secondary, 89; inter- mediary, 169-170; as means of reorganization, 93, 102, 104, 179; plastic, 95; same as human instincts, 105n; and habit, 107-111; false simplifi- cation, 131-149; and reason, 196, 254 Individualism, 7, 85, 93 Industry, 11 Infantilisms, 98 Instinct, not fixed, 149-168; and knowledge, 178; see Impulse Institutions, 9, 80, 102, 111, 166 Intelligence, 10, 13, 51, 299, 312; place of, in conduct, 172-277; relation to habits, 172-180, 228; and desire, 248-264, 276 Interpenetration of habits, 37- 39 Intuitions, 33, 188 James, Wm., 112, 179, 195 Justice, 18, 52, 198 Kant, 44, 49, 55, 245 Knowledge, moral, 181-188; see Conscience, Intelligence Labor, 121, 144 Language, 58, 79, 95 INDEX 335 Le Bon, 61 Liberalism, 305 Locke, 106 Marx, 154, 273, 300 Magic, 20, 26 Meaning, 37, 90, 151, 207, 262, 271, 280 Means, 20; relation to ends, 25- 36, 218-220, 251; see Habit Mechanization, 28, 70, 96, 144 Mediation, 197 Mind, 61, 95; and habit, 175- 180 Mind and body, 30, 67, 71 Mitchell, W. C., 213 Moore, G. E., 241n Morals, introduction, 40; con- clusion, as objective, 52; of art, 167; scope, 278-281 Motives, 43-45, 118-122, 213, 231, 329 Natural law and morals, 296- 300 Necessity, 312 Nirvana, 175, 286 Non-moral, 8, 27, 40, 188, 230 Occult, 11 Oligarchy, 2-3 Optimism, 286-288 Organization, 306 Passion, 9, 193-196 Pathology, 4, 50 Perfection, 173-175, 223, 282 Pessimism, 286 Phantasies, 158, 164, 236 Plato, 50, 78, 134, 290 Play, 159-164 Pleasure, 158, 200-205, 250 Posture, 32 Potentiality, 37 Power, will to, 140-142 Pragmatic knowing, 181-188 Principles, 2; and tendencies, 49; nature of, 238-247 Private, 9, 16, 43, 85 Process and product, 142-143, 280 Progress, 10, 21, 93, 96, 101, 105n; in science, 149; nature of, 281-288 Property, 116-118; see Eco- nomics Psycho-analysis, 34, 86, 133, 153, 252 Psychology and moral theory, 12, 46, 91; social, 60-63, 84- 88; current, 118, 135, 147, 155; and scientific method, 150, 322-324 Punishment, 18 Puritanism, 5, 157 Purpose, see Ends Radicalism, 168 Reactions, 157 Realism, 176, 256, 298 Reason, pure, 31 ; reasonable- ness, .67. 77, 193-198, 215 RebellJon7T86- Reconstruction, 164 Religion, 5, 263, 330-332 Responsibility, 315 Revolution, 10, 108 Right, 324-328 Romanticism, 6, 100, 166, 256 Routine, 42, 66, 70, 98, 211, 232, 238 Satisfaction, 140, 158, 175, 210, 213, 265, 285 Savagery, 93, 101, 103 Science of morals, 3, 11-12, 18, 56, 224, 243, 296, 321 Self, 16, 55, 85-87, 136-139, 217, 292, 314 Self-deception, 152, 252 Self-love, 134-139, 293 Sensations, 18, 31, 189 Sentimentalism, 17 Sex, 133, 150, 153, 164-165 Social, see Environments Social mind, 60-63 336 INDEX Socrates, 56 Soul, 85, 94, 138, 176 Spencer, 175, 297 Standards, 75-82, 241 Stimulation, 157 Stimulus and response, 199-207 Stuart, H. W., 218 Subjective, 16, 22, 27, 52, 54, 85, 202; see Dualism Sublimation, 141, 156, 164, 194 Success, 6, 173, 254 Sumner, 77 Suppression. 156, 166 Synthesis, 183-184 Tendency, 49 Thought. 30, 67, 98, 108, 171, 190, 200, 222, 258; vices of, 197 Tolstoi, 285, 312 Tools, 25, 32; intellectual, 244 Transcendentalism, 50-52, 54, 81 Universality, 245-247 Utilitarianism, 50, 189, 199-209, 211, 221-222, 291 Virtues, 4, 16, 22; see Goodness War, 110-115 Westermarck, 76 Will, and habits, 25, 29, 40-44, 259; will to power, 140-143; freedom of, 9 Williams, M., 273n UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. I JAN 2i OlM 06T011990 3 115801058 6492 ,,1?, ,? T ? . EG'ONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 001420994 4