The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, S. 819

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

general ideas of a child or animal are of an altogether different order ; they are vague unanalysed ideas due to a want of discrimination. They are a lower grade of grouped associations altogether.

Out of the general ideas which words enable men to use, they weave a coherent picture of the whole world about them and develop a consciousness of themselves in definite relationship to it. They find themselves with standards. From such abstractions as “good” or “bad” they can classify things into a system of values. They can attain to the idea of “truth” and of knowledge or delusion. They can frame their thoughts so that they seem to mirror the whole possible universe. They can make a picture of the universe which is generally valid.

So far as habit and custom rule the lives of men, they are all very much alike, but within they may have developed the most extraordinary differences. The natural aptitude of human beings to use general terms and to apprehend and react clearly to circumstances varies widely ; their acquired aptitudes vary still more widely, both in extent and nature. The mental differences among men in range, depth, sensory quality and arrangement are as wide as the differences of one animal phylum from another. There are men with minds like earthworms and men with minds like soaring eagles. A great number, perhaps a majority of human beings, seem hardly to think at all, except in the vaguest way, of anything outside individual concerns. Others think occasionally of more general things. Some think continuously as far as thought will take them. Some mentalities are no more than the picture of a few squalid relationships to which the sky and stars play the part of a theatre backcloth. Some mirror the whole of being. There seems to be no internal limit to the infinite patterning of associations that are possible. But as a controlling power there is the limiting influence of natural selection which will not tolerate a picture of the universe that betrays its possessor to danger, injury, and destruction. But any picture that works will be tolerated. Subject to that limitation of survival, nature will permit a man to develop whatever picture and map of the universe may shape itself in his mind.

Education (using the word in its widest sense) plays a very large part in determining the form and layout of the widening general ideas of the expanding human mind. The education of a human being comes mostly from the human beings about him, and so we

find most human communities have distinctive pictures of the universe as the common basis of their moral culture and general conduct. No two languages have identically the same general terms and their grammatical structure also gives a preference to this or that method of grouping and correlating words. There is no such thing as exact translation, and so the framework of the mind of an adult Frenchman or German is subtly different from that of an English speaker. Every language and every tradition carries its distinctive tendencies towards this picture of the universe or that. These pictures evolve from age to age, they come into contact and react upon one another. When we discuss conduct we shall have more to say of the réle of this picture of the universe in Mr. Everyman’s life. This work, The Science of Life, is an attempt to give some of the most important aspects of the Picture of the universe as Science is redrawing it to-day.

§ 3 Emotion and Urge

The older psychology, psychology before experiment, had much more to say and said it more connectedly, about ideas and the association of ideas, than about the phenomena of feeling, emotion, urgency, and willing. What it had to say may conceivably have been erroneous or misleading, but it did have a certain system and order. The passage from perception to urge and initiative remained, however, an uncultivated jungle of difficulties. The older textbooks degenerated into a discursive description of the expression of the emotions and suchlike subjects. The study of dreams under the old regime also remained slight, disconnected, anecdotal, and unilluminating. Until the present century there was an extraordinary ineffectiveness before the facts of hypnotism, mediumistic seances, and mental aberration. Mental disorder was left to the doctors and hypnotists were treated as charlatans.

It would be outside our scope here even to attempt to trace the story of how psychology has broadened its contacts with reality during the past half-century. We will not even attempt a complete list of such names as Wundt, Fechner, Ebbinghaus, Brentano, H6ffding, and the like, who played significant roles in this renaissance.

One dominant liberating personality was William James. His animated catholic receptivity did much to draw the diverse phenomena of hypnosis, mediumistic phenomena, and psychotherapy towards conver-

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