The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

might come to realize and even admit that social existence is already cleaner, easier, happier, and better than it has ever been before.

The movement towards frankness, which marks the new confidence in reality that has been diffused throughout the modern community by scientific progress, is still only in its opening phase. Great sections of the human population remain untouched by it and whole regions of the world. So far the main initiatives of the dawning scientific period (for we are still only in its dawn) have produced little more than a conspicuous abundance of mechanisms, a more efficient hygiene, and these new qualities of the persona that are spreading so rapidly about the world. The exterior things were the easiest to achieve, steam and electric mechanisms, ships of steel, great guns, chemical dyes, aeroplanes, submarines. It is more difficult to undermine and replace mental organizations. They live out their lives, will neither change nor die, and offer great individual and collective resistances. ‘They insist therefore upon a slower rate of progressive change.

Tt is easier to scrap a stage-coach than a public school, and to cover the world with a network of wireless messages than to change the framework of a system of ideas. The bitter experiences of great wars and much waste and suffering seem to mark an unavoidable phase in the adjustment of such serviceable ideas of the past as patriotism and loyalty to the ever-broadening necessities of the coming years. In social and political questions, and in particular in our loyalties and patriotisms, we are still terribly insincere and repressed. There remains far more political than sexual repression. ‘The affairs of this swiftly developing world of mankind are now being conducted, obstinately and tenaciously, in accordance with traditional pictures of the universe that are anything from fifty to a

5 thousand years out of date.

§ 6 Restraint and Poise

We have shown that the contemporary mind is a mind that has been throwing off traditional repressions to an enormous extent. The conscious life has descended into the Unconscious and flung open the gates of repression. Among the younger generation nothing seems to be hidden and nothing forbidden. But having established _ this

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 8

wide liberty, the problems of the balance of motives and decision to act return in the new daylight and demand an open and conscious solution.

Nobody—the young least of all—wants a mere life of immediate impulses. Living for the moment brings its punishments swiftly. Some selection of impulses is unavoidable, some hierarchy of purposes and motives. Every generation in its turn seeks that definitive element for the persona that our Victorian ancestors used to call ““a purpose in life,” a conception of our general aim by which all our other impulses can be measured and to which they can be adjusted. To-day there is as urgent a need as ever for that guiding outline and framework of the persona, and the great advances that are being made in the clarity and reality of our psychological ideas make it far more possible than it has ever been before to effect an adjustment.

The first, most imperative needs of our organism have first to be assuaged. There is no possibility of a general scheme of conduct when one’s mind is obsessed by overpowering hunger or thirst or fear. Until these are assuaged the rest of life’s problems are in suspense. These provided for, we have next to consider our sexual urgencies. To multitudes of people and to most of the young, morality is little more than a feverish struggle for sexual adjustment. In the everyday use of the word in English a moral man is a man who is sexually correct in his behaviour. Many people never get past this intense preoccupation with sex to any more general moral concepts.

The sexual life of a human being is a retarded one. It is thrusting to the surface of consciousness against many retarding and repressive forces from a very early age. There may even be innate restraining influences. It can be evoked prematurely and inconveniently, and there lies one of the most difficult of modern social problems ; the protection of the immature from unnecessary stimulation. That is the reason for public decency. The sexual possibilities of the young may lead them to a concentration upon sensuous and crude emotional reactions, too vivid, exacting and exhausting to permit full mental growth. ‘They can be “used up” by sex. But on the other hand excessive concealment and a decency carried to the pitch of inquisition and exaggerated horror may drive the young into secret cults and practices and may impose upon them quite monstrous suppressions. It is a pity that sexual curiosities should have

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