 CHAPTER VIII. INSTINKT Nothing is more wonderful than nature's method of endowing each individual at the beginning with all the impulses, tendencies, and capacities that are to control and determine the outcome of the life. The acorn has the perfect oak tree in its heart. The complete butterfly exists in the grub, and man at his highest powers is present in the babe at birth. Education adds nothing to what heredity supplies, but only develops what is present from the first. We are a part of a great unbroken procession of life, which began at the beginning and will go on till the end. Each generation receives through heredity the products of the long experience through which the race has passed. That generation receiving the gift today lives its own brief life, makes its own little contribution to the sum total, and then passes on as millions have done before. Through heredity, the achievements, the passions, the fears, and the tragedies of generations long since moldered to dust, stir our blood and tone our nerves for the conflict of today. 1. THE NATURE OF INSTINKT Every child born into the world has resting upon him an unseen hand, reaching out from the past, pushing him out to meet his environment, and guiding him in the start upon his journey. This impelling and guiding power from the past we call instinct. In the words of Masso, instinct is the voice of past generations reverberating like a distant echo in the cells of the nervous system. We feel the breath, the advice, the experience of all men, from those who lived on acorns and struggled like wild beasts, dying naked in the forests, down to the virtue and toil of our father, the fear and love of our mother. The Babes' Dependence on Instinct The child is born ignorant and helpless. It has no memory, no reason, no imagination. It has never performed a conscious act and does not know how to begin. It must get started, but how? It has no experience to direct it, and is unable to understand or imitate others of its kind. It is at this point that instinct comes to the rescue. The race has not given the child a mind ready-made, that must develop, but it has given him a ready-made nervous system, ready to respond with the proper movements when it receives the touch of its environment through the senses. And this nervous system has been so trained during a limitless past that its responses are the ones which are necessary for the welfare of its owner. It can do a hundred things without having to wait to learn them. Burdette says of the newborn child. Nobody told him what to do. Nobody taught him. He knew. Placed suddenly on the guest list of this old care of answering, he knew his way at once to two places in it—his bedroom and the dining room. A thousand generations of babies had done the same thing in the same way, and each had made it a little easier for this particular baby to do his part without learning how. Definition of Instinct Instincts are the tendency to act in certain definite ways, without previous education and without a conscious end in view. They are a tendency to act, for some movement or motor adjustment is the response to an instinct. They do not require previous education, for none is possible with many instinctive acts. The duck does not have to be taught to swim or the baby to suck. They have no conscious end in view, though the result may be highly desirable. Says James. The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns, fire and water, etc. Not because he has any notion either of life or death or of self or of preservation. He has probably attained to know one of these the conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon it. He acts in each case separately, and simply because he cannot help it. Being so framed that when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision, he must pursue, and that when particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears, he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by. That he must withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His nervous system is to a great extent a pre-organized bundle of such reactions. They are as fatal as sneezing, and exactly correlated to their special excitance as it to its own. You ask, why does the lark rise on the flash of a sunbeam from his meadow to the morning sky, leaving a trail of melody to mark his flight? Why does the beaver build his dam, and the aurel hang her nest? Why are myriads of animal forms on the earth today doing what they were countless generations ago? Why does the lover seek the maid, and the mother cherish her young? Because the voice of the past speaks to the present, and the present has no choice but to obey. Instincts are racial habits. Instincts are the habits of the race which it bequeaths to the individual. The individual takes these for his start, and then modifies them through education, and thus adapts himself to his environment. Through his instincts the individual is enabled to shortcut racial experience and begin at once on life activities which the race has been ages in acquiring. Instinct preserves to us what the race has achieved in experience, and so starts us out where the race left off. Unmodified instinct is blind. Many of the lower animal forms act on instinct blindly, unable to use past experience to guide their acts, incapable of education. Some of them carry out seemingly marvelous activities, yet their acts are as automatic as those of a machine, and as devoid of foresight. A species of mud wasp carefully selects clay of just the right consistency, finds a somewhat sheltered nook under the eaves, and builds its nest, leaving one open door. Then it seeks a certain kind of spider, and, having stung it so as to be numb without killing, carries it into the new-made nest, lays its eggs on the body of the spider, so that the young wasps may have food immediately upon hatching out, then goes out and plasters the door over carefully to exclude all intruders. Wonderful intelligence? Not intelligence at all. Its acts were dictated not by plans for the future, but by pressure from the past. Let the supply of clay fail, or the race of spiders become extinct, and the wasp is helpless, and its species will perish. Likewise, the race of bees and ants have done wonderful things, but individual bees and ants are very stupid and helpless when confronted by any novel conditions to which their race has not been accustomed. Man starts in as blindly as the lower animals, but thanks to his higher mental powers, this blindness soon gives way to foresight, and he is able to formulate purposeful ends and adapt his activities to their accomplishment. Possessing a larger number of instincts than the lower animals have, man finds possible a greater number of responses to a more complex environment than do they. This advantage, coupled with his ability to reconstruct his experience in such a way that he secures constantly increasing control over his environment, easily makes man the superior of all the animals, and enables him to exploit them for his own further advancement. 2. Law of the Appearance and Disappearance of Instincts No child is born with all its instincts ripe and ready for action, yet each individual contains within his own inner nature the law which determines the order and time of their development. Instincts appear in succession as required. It is not well that we should be started on too many different lines of activity at once, hence our instincts do not all appear at the same time. Only as fast as we need additional activities do they ripen. Our very earliest activities are concerned chiefly with feeding, hence we first have the instincts which prompt us to take our food and cry for it when we are hungry. Also, we find useful such abbreviated instincts, called reflexes, as sneezing, snuffling, gagging, vomiting, starting, etc. Hence we have the instincts enabling us to do these things. Soon comes the time for teething, and to help the matter along the instinct of biting enters and the rubber ring is in demand. The time approaches when we are to feed ourselves, so the instinct arises to carry everything to the mouth. Now we have grown strong and must assume an erect attitude. Hence the instinct to sit up and then to stand. Locomotion comes next and with it the instinct to creep and walk. Also a language must be learned and we must take part in the busy life about us and do as other people do, so the instinct to imitate arises that we may learn things quickly and easily. We need a spur to keep us up to our best effort, so the instinct of emulation emerges. We must defend ourselves, so the instinct of pugnacity is born. We need to be cautious, hence the instinct of fear. We need to be investigative, hence the instinct of curiosity. Much self-directed activity is necessary for our development, hence the play instinct. It is best that we should come to know and serve others, so the instincts of sociability and sympathy arise. We need to select a mate and care for offspring, hence the instinct of love for the other sex and the parental instinct. This is far from a complete list of our instincts, and I have not tried to follow the order of their development, but I have given enough to show the origin of many of our life's most important activities. Many instincts are transitory. Not only do instincts ripen by degrees, entering our experience one by one as they are needed, but they drop out when their work is done. Some, like the instinct of self-preservation, are needed our lifetime through, hence they remain to the end. Others, like the play instinct, serve their purpose and disappear or are modified into new forms in a few years or a few months. The life of the instinct is always as transitory as is the necessity for the activity which it gives rise. No instinct remains wholly unaltered in man, for it is constantly being made over in the light of each new experience. The instinct of self-preservation is modified by knowledge and experience, so that the defense of the man against threatened danger would be very different from that of the child. Yet the instinct to protect oneself in some way remains. On the other hand, the instinct to romp and play is less permanent. It may last into adult life, but few middle-aged or old people care to race about as new children. Their activities are occupied in other lines, and they require less physical exertion. Contrast with these two examples such instincts as sucking, creeping, and crying, which are much more fleeting than the play instinct even. With dentition comes another mode of eating, and sucking is no more serviceable. Walking is a better mode of locomotion than creeping, so the instinct to creep soon dies. Speech is found a better way than crying to attract attention to distress, so this instinct drops out. Many of our instincts not only would fail to be serviceable in our later lives, but would be positively in the way. Each serves its day and then passes over into some modified form as not to be recognized, or else drops out of sight altogether. Seemingly useless instincts. Indeed it is difficult to see that some instincts serve a useful purpose at any time. The pugnacity and greediness of childhood, its foolish fears, the bashfulness of youth, these seem to be either useless or detrimental to development. In order to understand the workings of instinct, however, we must remember that it looks in two directions, into the future for its application, and into the past for its explanation. We should not be surprised if the experiences of a long past have left behind some tendencies, which are not very useful under the vastly different conditions of today. Nor should we be too sure that an activity whose precise function in relation to development we cannot discover has no use at all. Each instinct must be considered, not alone in the light of what it means to its possessor today, but of what it means to all his future development. The tale of a Pollywog seems a very useless appendage, so far as the adult frog is concerned, yet if the Pollywog's tail is cut off, a perfect frog never develops. Instincts to be utilized when they appear. A man may set the stream to turning his mill wheels today, or wait for twenty years. The power is there ready for him when he wants it. Instincts must be utilized when they present themselves else they disappear, never in most cases to return. Birds kept cage past the flying time never learned to fly well. The hunter must train his setter when the time is ripe, or the dog can never be depended upon. Ducks kept from the water until full grown have almost as little inclination for it as chickens. The child whom the pressure of circumstances or unwise authority of parents keeps from mingling with playmates and participating in their plays and games when the social instinct is strong upon him, will in later life find himself a hopeless reckless, to whom social duties are abhor. The boy who does not hunt and fish and race and climb at the proper time for these things will find his taste for them fade away and he will become wedded to a sedentary life. The youth and maiden must be permitted to dress up when the impulse comes to them, or they are likely ever after to be careless in their attire. Instincts as starting points. Many of our habits have their rise in instincts, and all desirable instincts should be seized upon and transformed into habits before they fade away. Says James in his remarkable chapter on instinct. In all pedagogy the great thing is to strike while the iron is hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil's interest in each successive subject, before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got at a habit of skill acquired. A headway of interest, in short, secured on which afterwards the individual may float. There is a happy moment for fixing skill in drawing, for making boys collectors in natural history, and presently disectors and botanists, then for initiating them into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders of physical and chemical law. Later, introspective psychology and the metaphysical and religious mysteries take their turn, and last of all the drama of human affairs and worldly wisdom in the widest sense of the term. In each of us, a saturation point is soon reached in all these things. The impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless the topic is associated with some urgent personal need that keeps our wits constantly wedded about it, we settle into an equilibrium, and live on what we've learned when our interest was fresh and instinctive, without adding to the store. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. The more important instincts. It will be impossible in this brief statement to give a complete catalog of the human instincts, much less to discuss each in detail. We must content ourselves therefore with naming the more important instincts, and finally discussing a few of them. Sucking, biting, chewing, clasping objects with the fingers, carrying to the mouth, crying, smiling, sitting up, standing, locomotion, vocalization, imitation, emulation, pugnacity, resentment, anger, sympathy, hunting and fighting, fear, acquisitiveness, play, curiosity, sociability, modesty, secretiveness, shame, love, and jealousy may be said to head the list of our instincts. It will be impossible in our brief space to discuss all of this list, only a few of the more important will be noticed. No individual enters the world with a large enough stock of instincts to start him doing all the things necessary for his welfare. Instinct prompts him to eat when he is hungry, but does not tell him to use a knife and fork and spoon. It prompts him to use vocal speech, but does not say whether he shall use English, French or German. It prompts him to be social in his nature, but does not specify that he shall say please and thank you and take off his hat to ladies. The race did not find the specific modes in which these and many other things are to be done of sufficient importance to crystallize them in instincts. Hence the individual must learn them as he needs them. The simplest way of accomplishing this is for each generation to copy the ways of doing things which are followed by the older generation among whom they are born. This is done largely through imitation. Nature of imitation Imitation is the instinct to respond to a suggestion from another by repeating his act. The instinct of imitation is active in the year old child. It requires another year or two to reach its height. Then it gradually grows less marked, but continues in some degree throughout life. The young child is practically helpless in the matter of imitation. Instinct demands that he shall imitate, and he has no choice but to obey. His environment furnishes the models which he must imitate, whether they are good or bad. Before he is old enough for intelligent choice, he has imitated a multitude of acts about him, and habit has seized upon these acts, and is weaving them into conduct and character. Older grown we may choose what we will imitate, but in our earlier years we are at the mercy of the models which are placed before us. If our mother tongue is the first we hear spoken, that will be our language, but if we first hear Chinese, we will learn that with almost equal facility. If whatever speech we hear is well spoken, correct, and beautiful, so will our language be. If it is vulgar, or incorrect, or slangy, our speech will be of this kind. If the first manners which serve us as models are coarse and boorish, ours will resemble them. If they are cultivated and refined, ours will be like them. If our models of conduct and morals are questionable, our conduct and morals will be of like type. Our manner of walking, of dressing, of thinking, of saying our prayers even originates in imitation. By imitation we adopt ready made our social standards, our political faith, and our religious creeds. Our views of life and the values we set on its attainments are largely a matter of imitation. Individuality and Imitation Yet given the same model no two of us will imitate precisely alike. Your acts will be yours and mine will be mine. This is because no two of us have just the same heredity and hence cannot have precisely similar instincts. There reside in our different personalities different powers of invention and originality, and these determine by how much the product of imitation will vary from the model. Some remain imitators all their lives, while others use imitation as a means to the invention of better types than the original models. The person who is an imitator only lacks individuality and initiative. The nation which is an imitator only is stagnant and unprogressive. While imitation must be blind in both cases at first, it should be increasingly intelligent as the individual or the nation progresses. Conscious and Unconscious Imitation The much quoted dictum that all consciousness is motor has a direct application to imitation. It only means that we have a tendency to act on whatever idea occupies the mind. Think of yawning or clearing the throat, and the tendency is strong to do these things. We naturally respond to smile with smile and to frown with frown, and even the impressions coming to us from our material environment have their influence on our acts. Our response to these ideas may be a conscious one, as when a boy purposefully stutters in order to mimic an unfortunate companion. Or it may be unconscious, as when the boy unknowingly falls into the habit of stammering from learning this kind of speech. The child may consciously seek to keep himself neat and clean so as to harmonize with a pleasant and well-kept home. Or he may unconsciously become slovenly and cross-tempered from living in an ill-kept home where constant bickering is the rule. Often we deliberately imitate what seems to us desirable in other people, but probably far the greater proportion of the suggestions to which we respond are received and acted upon unconsciously. In conscious imitation we can select what models we shall imitate, and therefore protect ourselves in so far as our judgment of good and bad models is valid. In unconscious imitation, however, we are constantly responding to a stream of suggestions pouring in upon us hour after hour and day after day, with no protection but the leadings of our interests as they direct our attention, now to this phase of our environment, and now to that. Influence of Environment No small part of the influences which mold our lives comes from our material environment. Good clothes, artistic homes, beautiful pictures in decoration, attractive parks and lawns, well-kept streets, well-bound books. All these have a direct moral and educative value. On the other hand, squalor, disorder, and ugliness are an incentive to ignorance and crime. Hawthorne tells us in The Great Stoneface of the boy Ernest, listening to the tradition of a coming wise man, who one day is to rule over the valley. The story sinks deep into the boy's heart, and he thinks in dreams of the great and good man, and as he thinks in dreams he spends his boyhood days gazing across the valley at a distant mountain side, whose rocks and cliffs nature had formed into the outlines of a human face, remarkable for the nobleness and benignity of its expression. He comes to love this face and looks upon it as the prototype of the coming wise man, until though, as he dwells upon it in dreams about it, the beautiful character which its expression typifies grows into his own life, and he himself becomes the long-looked-for wise man. The Influence of Personality More powerful than the influence of material environment, however, is that of other personalities upon us, the touch of life upon life. A living personality contains a power which grips hold of us, electrifies us, inspires us, and compels us to new endeavor, or else degrades and debases us. None has failed to feel at some time this life-touch, and to bless or curse the day when its influence came upon him. Either consciously or unconsciously, such a personality becomes our ideal and model. We idolize it, idealize it, and imitate it, until it becomes a part of us. Not only do we find these great personalities living in the flesh, but we find them also in books, from whose pages they speak to us, and to whose influence we respond. And not in the great personalities alone does the power to influence reside. From every life which touches ours, a stream of influence great or small is entering our life and helping to mold it. Nor are we to forget that this influence is reciprocal, and that we are reacting upon others up to the measure of the powers that are in us. 4. The Instinct of Play Small use to be a child unless one can play, says Carl Gruz. Perhaps the very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play. The animal does not play because he is young, but he is young because he must play. Play is a constant factor in all grades of animal life. The swarming insects, the playful kitten, the frisking lambs, the racing colt, the darting swallows, the maddening aggregation of blackbirds. These are but illustrations of the common impulse of all the animal world to play. Wherever freedom and happiness reside, their play is found. Wherever play is lacking, there the curse has fallen, and sadness and oppression reign. Play is the natural role in the paradise of youth. It is childhood's chief occupation. To toil without play places man on a level with the beasts of burden. 5. The Necessity for Play But why is play so necessary? Why is this impulse so deep-rooted in our natures? Why not compel our young to expend their boundless energy on productive labour? Why all this waste? Why have our child labour laws? Why not shut recesses from our schools and so save time for work? Is it true that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? Too true. For proof we need but gaze at the dull and lifeless faces of the prematurely old children as they pour out of the factories where child labour is employed. We need but follow the children who have had a playless childhood into a narrow and barren manhood. We need but to trace back the history of the dull and brutish men of today and find that they were playless children of yesterday. Play is as necessary to the child as food, as vital as sunshine, as indispensable as air. The keynote of play is freedom, freedom of physical activity, and mental initiative. In play the child makes his own plans, his imagination has free reign. Originality is in demand and constructive ability is placed under tribute. Here are developed a thousand tendencies which would never find expression in the narrow treadmill of labour alone. The child needs to learn to work, but along with his work must be the opportunity for free and unrestricted activity, which can come only through play. The boy needs a chance to be a barbarian, a hero, an Indian. He needs to ride his broomstick on a dangerous raid and to charge with lathe sore the redo of a stubborn enemy. He needs to be a leader as well as a follower. In short, without it in the least being aware of it, he needs to develop himself through his own activity. He needs freedom to play. If the child be a girl there is no difference except in the character of the activities employed. Play in development and education. And it is precisely out of these play activities that the later and more serious activities of life emerge. Play is the gateway by which we best enter the various fields of the world's work, whether our particular sphere be that of a pupil or teacher in the schoolroom, of man in the busy marts of trade or in the professions, or of farmer or mechanic. Play brings the whole self into the activity. It trains to habits of independence and individual initiative, to strenuous and sustained effort, to endurance of hardship and fatigue, to social participation and the acceptance of victory and defeat. And these are the qualities needed by the man of success in his vocation. These facts make the play instinct one of the most important in education. Frable was the first to recognize the importance of play, and the kindergarten was an attempt to utilize its activities in the school. The introduction of this new factor into education has been attended, as might be expected, by many mistakes. Some have thought to recast the entire process of education into the form of games and play, and thus lead the child to possess the promised land through aimlessly chasing butterflies in the pleasant fields of knowledge. It is needless to say that they have not succeeded. Others have mistaken the shadow for the substance, and introduced games and plays into the school room which lack the very first element of play, namely freedom of initiative and action on the part of the child. Educational theorists and teachers have invented games and occupations and taught them to the children, who go through with them as much as they would with any other task, enjoying the activity, but missing the development which would come through a larger measure of self-direction. Work and play are compliments. Work cannot take the place of play, neither can play be substituted for work. Nor are the two antagonistic, but each is the compliment of the other, for the activities of work grow immediately out of those of play, and each lends zest to the other. Those who have never learned to work and those who have never learned to play are equally lacking in their development. Further, it is not the name or character of an activity which determines whether it is play for the participant, but his attitude toward the activity. If the activity is performed for its own sake, and not for some ulterior end, if it grows out of the interest of the child and involves the free and independent use of his powers of body and mind, if it is his and not someone's else, then the activity possesses the chief characteristics of play. Lacking these it cannot be play, whatever else it may be. Play, like other instincts, besides serving the present, looks in two directions, into the past and into the future. From the past come the shadowy interest which, taking form from the touch of our environment, determine the character of the play activities. From the future come the premonitions of the activities that are to be. The boy adjusting himself to the requirements of the game, seeking control over his companions or giving in to them, is practicing in miniature the larger game which he will play in business or profession a little later. The girl in her playhouse, surrounded by a non-descript family of dolls and pets, is unconsciously looking forward to a more perfect life, when the responsibility shall be a little more real. So let us not grudge our children the play day of youth. Five. Other Useful Instincts Many other instincts ripen during the stage of youth and play their part in the development of the individual. Curiosity It is inherent in every normal person to want to investigate and know. The child looks out with wonder and fascination on a world he does not understand, and at once begins to ask questions and try experiments. Every new object is approached in a spirit of inquiry. Interest is omnivorous, feeding upon every phase of environment. Nothing is too simple or too complex to demand attention and exploration, so that it vitally touches the child's activities and experience. The momentum given the individual by curiosity toward learning and mastering his world is incalculable. Imagine the impossible task of teaching children what they had no desire or inclination to know. Think of trying to lead them to investigate matters concerning which they felt only a supreme indifference. Indeed, one of the greatest problems of education is to keep curiosity alive and fresh, so that its compelling influence may promote effort and action. One of the greatest secrets of eternal youth is also found in retaining the spontaneous curiosity of youth after the youthful years are passed. Manipulation This is the rather unsatisfactory name for the universal tendency to handle, do, or make something. The young child builds with its blocks, constructs fences and pens and caves and houses, and a score of other objects. The older child supplied with implements and tools enters upon more ambitious projects and revels in the joy of creation as he makes boats and boxes, soldiers and swords, kites, playhouses and whatnot. Even as adults we are moved by a desire to express ourselves through making or creating that which will represent our ingenuity and skill. The tendency of children to destroy is not from wantonness, but rather from a desire to manipulate. Education has but recently begun to make serious use of this important impulse. The success of all laboratory methods of teaching, and of such subjects as manual training and domestic science, is abundant proof of the adage that we learn by doing. We would rather construct or manipulate an object than merely learn its verbal description. Our deepest impulses lead to creation rather than simple mental appropriation of facts and descriptions. The Collecting Instinct The words my and mine enter the child's vocabulary at a very early age. The sense of property ownership and the impulse to make collections of various kinds go hand in hand. Probably there are few of us who have not at one time or another made collections of autographs, postage stamps, coins, bugs, or some other thing of as little intrinsic value. And most of us, if we have left youth behind, are busy even now in seeking to collect fortunes, works of art, rare volumes, or other objects on which we have set our hearts. The collecting instinct and the impulse to ownership can be made important agents in the school. The child, who in nature study, geography, or agriculture, is making a collection of the leaves, plants, soils, fruits, or insects used in the lessons, has an incentive to observation and investigation impossible from book instruction alone. One who in manual training or domestic science is allowed to own the article made will give more effort and skill to its construction than if the work be done as a mere school task. The Dramatic Instinct Every person is, at one stage of his development, something of an actor. All children like to dress up and impersonate someone else, in proof of which witness the many play scenes in which the character of nurse, doctor, pirate, teacher, merchant, or explorer is taken by children, who under the stimulus of their spontaneous imagery and as yet untrammeled by self-consciousness, freely enter into the character they portray. The dramatic impulse never wholly dies out. When we no longer aspire to do the acting ourselves, we have others do it for us in the theaters or the movies. Education finds in the dramatic instinct a valuable aid. Progressive teachers are using it freely, especially in the teaching of literature and history. Its application to these fields may be greatly increased and also extended more generally to include religion, morals, and art. The Impulse to Form Gangs and Clubs Few boys and girls grow up without belonging at some time to a secret gang, club, or society. Usually, this impulse grows out of two different instincts, the social and the adventurous. It is fundamental in our natures to wish to be with our kind, not only our humankind but those of the same age, interests, and ambitions. The love of secrecy and adventure is also deep seated in us. So we are clannish and we love to do the unusual. To break away from the common place and routine of our lives there is often a thrill of satisfaction, even if it be later followed by remorse, in doing the forbidden or the unconventional. The problem here, as in the case of many other instincts, is one of guidance rather than of repression. Out of the gang impulse we may develop our athletic teams, our debating and dramatic clubs, our tramping clubs, and a score of other recreational, benevolent, or social organizations. Not repression, but proper expression should be our ideal. 6. Fear Probably in no instinct more than in that of fear can we find the reflections of all the past ages of life in the world with its manifold changes, its dangers, its tragedies, its sufferings, and its deaths. Fear Heredity The fears of childhood are remembered at every step, and so are the fears through which the race has passed, says Chamberlain. Every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long. The bravest old soldier, the most daring young reprobate, is incapable of forgetting them all. The masks, the bogies, ogres, hobgoblins, witches and wizards, the things that bite and scratch, that nip and tear, that pinch and crunch. The thousand and one imaginary monsters of the mother, the nurse, or the servant, have had their effect, and hundreds of generations have worked to denaturalize the brains of children. Perhaps no animal, not even those most susceptible to fright, has behind it the fear heredity of the child. President Hall calls attention to the fact that night is now the safest time of the twenty-four hours. Serpents are no longer our most deadly enemies. Strangers are not to be feared. Neither are big eyes or teeth. There is no adequate reason why the wind or thunder or lightning should make children frantic as they do. But the past of man forever seems to linger in his present, and the child in being afraid of these things is only summing up the fear experiences of the race and suffering all too many of them in his short childhood. Fear of the Dark Most children are afraid in the dark. Who does not remember the terror of a dark room through which he had to pass, or worse still, in which he had to go to bed alone, and there lie in cold perspiration, induced by a mortal agony of fright? The unused doors which would not lock, and through which he expected to see the goblin come forth to get him. The dark shadows back under the bed where he was afraid to look for the hidden monster, which he was sure was hiding there and yet dare not face. The lonely lane through which the cows were to be driven late at night, while every fence corner bristled with shapeless monsters lying and wait for boys. And that hated dark closet where he was shut up until he could learn to be good, and the useless trapdoor in the ceiling. How often have we lain in the dim light at night, and seen the lid lift just a peep for ogre eyes to peer out, and when the terror was growing beyond endurance closed down, only to lift once and again, until from sheer weariness and exhaustion we fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed of the hideous monster which inhabited the unused garret? Tell me that the old trapdoor never bent its hinges in response to either man or monster for twenty years. I know it is true, and yet I am not convinced. My childish fears have left a stronger impression than proof of mere facts can ever overrule. Fear of being left alone And the fear of being left alone. How big and dreadful the house seemed with all the folks gone. How we suddenly made close friends with the dog or the cat even, in order that this bit of life might be near us. Or failing in this, we have gone out to the barn among the chickens and the pigs and the cows, and deserted the empty house with its torture of loneliness. What was there so terrible in being alone? I do not know. I know only that to many children it is a torture more exquisite than the adult organism is fitted to experience. But why multiply the recollections? They bring a tremor to the strongest of us today. Who of us would choose to live through those childish fears again? Dream fears, fears of animals, fears of furry things, fears of ghosts and of death, dread of fatal diseases, fears of fire and of water, of strange persons, of storms, fears of things unknown and even unimagined, but all the more fearful. Would you all like to relive your childhood for its pleasures if you had to take along with them its sufferings? Would the race choose to live its evolution over again? I do not know. But for my own part I should very much hesitate to turn the hands of time backward in either case. Would that the adults at life's noonday in remembering the childish fears of life's mourning might feel a sympathy for the children of today who are not yet escaped from the bonds of the fear instinct. Would that all might seek to quiet every foolish childish fear instead of laughing at it or enhancing it? Seven other undesirable instincts. We are all provided by nature with some instincts which, while they may serve a good purpose in our development, need to be suppressed or at least modified when they have done their work. Selfishness. All children, and perhaps all adults, are selfish. The little child will appropriate all the candy and give none to his playmate. He will grow angry and fight rather than allow brother or sister to use a favorite plaything. He will demand the mother's attention and care even when told that she is tired or ill and not able to minister to him. But all of this is true to nature, and though it needs to be changed to generosity and unselfishness, is, after all, a vital factor in our nature. For it is better in the long run that each one should look out for himself rather than to be so careless of his own interests and needs as to require help from others. For it is better in the long run that each one should look out for himself rather than to be so careless of his own interests and needs as to require help from others. The problem in education is so to balance selfishness and greed with unselfishness and generosity that each serves as a check and a balance to the other. Not elimination but equilibrium is to be our watchword. Pugnacity or the fighting impulse. Almost every normal child is a natural fighter, just as every adult should possess the spirit of conquest. The long history of conflict through which our race has come has left its mark in our love of combat. The pugnacity of children, especially of boys, is not so much to be deprecated and suppressed as guided into right lines and rendered subject to right ideals. The boy who picks a quarrel has been done a kindness when given a drumming that will check this tendency. On the other hand, one who risks battle and defense of a weaker comrade does no ignoble thing. Children need very early to be taught the baseness of fighting for the sake of conflict and the glory of going down to defeat fighting in the righteous cause. The world could well stand more of the spirits among adults. Let us then hear the conclusion of the whole matter. The undesirable instincts do not need encouragement. It is better to let them fade away from disuse or in some cases even by attaching punishment to their expression. They are echoes from a distant past and not serviceable in this better present. The desirable instincts we are to seize upon and utilize as starting points for the development of useful interests, good habits, and the higher emotional life. We should take them as they come, for their appearance is a sure sign that the organism is ready for and needs the activity they foreshadow. And furthermore, if they are not used when they present themselves, they disappear, never to return. 8. Problems in Observation and Introspection 1. What instincts have you noticed developing in children? What ones have you observed to fade away? Can you fix the age in both cases? Apply these questions to your own development as you remember it, or can get it by tradition from your elders. 2. What use of imitation may be in teaching, one literature, two composition, three music, four good manners, five morals? 3. Should children be taught to play? Make a list of the games you think all children should know and be able to play. It has been said that it is as important for a people to be able to use their leisure time wisely as to use their work time profitably. Why should this be true? 4. Observe the instruction of children to discover the extent to which use is made of the constructive instinct, the collecting instinct, the dramatic instinct. Describe a plan by which each of these instincts can be successfully used in some branch of study. 5. What examples can you recount from your own experience of conscious imitation, of unconscious imitation, of the influence of environment? What is the application of the preceding question to the aesthetic quality of our school buildings? 6. Have you ever observed that children under a dozen years of age usually cannot be depended upon for team work and their games? How do you explain this fact? End of Chapter 13, Recording by Lawrence Trask, Mount Vernon, Ohio, interfaceaudio.com Chapter 14 of The Mind and Its Education by George Herbert Betts This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Karima Ridout, Feeling and Its Functions. In the secular world as well as the physical, we must meet and overcome inertia. Our lives must be compelled by motive forces strong enough to overcome this natural inertia and enable us, besides to make headway against many obstacles. The motive power that drives us consists chiefly of our feelings and emotions. Knowledge, cognition, supplies the rudder that guides our ship, but feeling and emotion supply the power. To convince one's head is therefore not enough. His feelings must be stirred if you would be sure of moving him to action. Often we have known that a certain line of action was right, but failed to follow it because feeling led in a different direction. When decision has been hanging in the balance, we have piled on one side obligation, duty, sense of right, and a dozen other reasons for action. Only to have them all outweighed by one single, it is disagreeable. Judgment, reason and experience may unite to tell us that a contemplated course is unwise and imagination may reveal to us its disastrous consequences, and yet its pleasures so appeal to us that we yield. Our feelings often prove a stronger motive than the knowledge and will combined. They are a factor constantly to be reckoned with among our motives. 1. The nature of feeling It will be our purpose in the next few chapters to study the effective content of consciousness, the feelings and emotions. The present chapter will be devoted to the feelings and the one that follows to the emotions. 2. The different feeling qualities At least six, some writers say even more, distinct and qualitatively different feeling states are easily distinguished. These are pleasure, pain, desire, repugnance, interest, apathy. 3. Pleasure and pain and desire and repugnance are directly opposite or anti-agnostic feelings. Interest and apathy are not opposites in a similar way, since apathy is but the absence of interest and not its antagonist. In place of the terms pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the unpleasant or the agreeable and the disagreeable are often used. Aversion is frequently employed as a synonym for repugnance. It is somewhat hard to believe on first thought that feeling comprises but these classes given. For have we not often felt the pain from a toothache, from not being able to take a long planned trip, from the loss of a dear friend? Surely these are very different classes of feelings. Likewise, we have been happy from the very joy of living, from being praised for some well-doing, or from the presence of a friend or lover, and here again we seem to have widely different classes of feelings. We must remember, however, that feeling is always based on something known. It never appears alone in consciousness as mere pleasures or pains. The mind must have something about which to feel, the what must proceed the how. What we commonly call a feeling is a complex state of consciousness in which feeling predominates, but which has nevertheless a basis of sensation or memory or some other cognitive process. And what so greatly varies in the different cases of the illustrations just given is precisely this knowledge element and not the feeling element. A feeling of unpleasantness is a feeling of unpleasantness, whether it comes from an aching tooth or from the loss of a friend. It may differ in degree, and the entire mental states of which the feeling is a part may differ vastly, but the simple feeling itself is of the same quality, feeling always present in mental content. No phase of our mental life is without the feeling element. We look at the rainbow with its beautiful and harmonious blending of colors, and a feeling of pleasure accompanies the sensation. Then we turn and gaze at the glaring sun, and a disagreeable feeling is the result. A strong feeling of pleasantness accompanies the experience of the voluptuous warmth of a cozy bed on a cold morning, but the plunge between the icy sheets on the preceding evening was accompanied by the opposite feeling. The touch of a hand may occasion a thrill of ecstatic pleasure, or it may be accompanied by a feeling equally disagreeable, and so on through the whole range of sensation. We not only know the various objects about us through sensation and perception, but we also feel while we know. Cognition, or the knowing process, gives us our what's, and feeling, or the effective process, gives us our how's. What is yonder object, a bouquet? How does it affect you, pleasurably? If instead of the simpler sensory processes which we have just considered, we take the more complex processes, such as memory, imagination, and thinking, the case is no different. Who has not reveled in the pleasures accompanying the memories of past joys? On the other hand, who is free from all unpleasant memories? From regrets? From pangs of remorse? Who has not dreamed away an hour in pleasant anticipation of some desired object, or spent a miserable hour in dreading some calamity which imagination pictured to him? Feeling also accompanies our thought processes. Everyone has experienced the feeling of pleasure of intellectual victory over some difficult problem which had baffled the reason, or over some doubtful case in which our judgment proved correct. And likewise, none has escaped the feeling of unpleasantness which accompanies intellectual defeat. Whatever the contents of our mental stream, we find in them everywhere present a certain color of passing estimate, an immediate sense that they are worth something to us at any given moment, or that they have an interest to us. The Seeming Neutral Feeling Zone It is probable that there is so little feeling connected with many of the humdrum and habitual experiences of our everyday lives that we are, but slightly, if at all, aware of a feeling state in connection with them. Yet a state of consciousness with absolutely no feeling side to it is as unthinkable as the obverse side of a coin without the reverse. Some sort of feeling tone or mood is always present. The width of the effective neutral zone, that is, of a feeling state so little marked as not to be discriminated as either pleasure or pain, desire or aversion, varies with different persons, and with the same person at different times. It is conditioned largely by the amount of attention given in the direction of feeling, and also on the finesse of the power of feeling discrimination. It is safe to say that the zero range is usually so small as to be negligible. 2. Mood and Disposition The sum total of all the feeling accompanying the various sensory and thought processes, at any given time, results in what we may call our feeling tone or mood. How Mood is Produced During most of our waking hours and indeed during our sleeping hours as well, a multitude of sensory currents are pouring into our cortical centers. At the present moment we can hear the rumble of a wagon, the chirp of a cricket, the chatter of distant voices, and a hundred other sounds besides. At the same time, the eye is appealed to by an infinite variety of stimuli in light, color, and objects. The skin responds to many contacts and temperatures, and every other type of end organ of the body is acting as a sender to telegraph a message into the brain. Add to these the powerful currents which are constantly being sent to the cortex from the visceral organs, those of respiration, of circulation, of digestion, and assimilation. And then finally add the central processes which accompany the flight of images through our minds, our meditations, memories, and imaginations, our cogitations and volitions. Thus we see what a complex our feelings must be, and how impossible to have any moment in which some feeling is not present as a part of our mental stream. It is this complex, now made up chiefly on the basis of the sensory currents coming in from the end organs, or the visceral organs, and now on the basis of those in the cortex connected with our thought life, which constitutes the entire feeling tone or mood. Mood colors all our thinking. Mood depends on the character of the aggregate of nerve currents entering the cortex, and changes as the character of the current varies. If the currents run on much the same from hour to hour, then our mood is correspondingly constant. If the currents are variable, our mood also will be variable. Not only is mood dependent on our sensations and thoughts for its quality, but in turn colors our entire mental life. It serves as a background or setting whose hue is reflected over all our thinking. Let the mood be somber and dark, and all the world looks gloomy. On the other hand, let the mood be bright and cheerful, and the world puts on a smile. It is told of one of the early circuit riders among the New England Ministry that he made the following entries in his diary, thus well illustrating the point. Wednesday evening, arrived at the home of Bro Brown. Late this evening, hungry and tired, after a long day in the saddle, had a bountiful supper of cold pork and beans, warm bread, bacon and eggs, coffee and rich pastry. I go to rest feeling that my witness is clear, the future is bright, I feel called to a great and glorious work in this place. Bro Brown's family are good people. The next entry was as follows. Thursday morning, awakened late this morning after a troubled night, I am very much depressed in soul. The way looks dark. Far from feeling called to work among this people, I am beginning to doubt the safety of my own soul. I am afraid the desires of Bro Brown and his family are set too much on carnal things. A disceptic is usually a pessimist, and an optimist always keeps a bright mood. Mood influences our judgment and decisions. The prattle of children may be grateful music to our ears when we are in one mood, and excruciatingly discordant noise when we are in another. What appeals to us as a good practical joke one day may seem a piece of unwarranted impertinence on another. A proposition which looks entirely plausible under the sanguine mood induced by a persuasive orator may appear wholly untenable a few hours later. Decisions which seemed warranted when we were in an angry mood often appear unwise or unjust when we have become more calm. Motives which easily impel us to action when the world looks bright fail to move us when the mood is somber. The feeling of impending peril and calamity which are an inevitable accompaniment of the blues are speedily dissipated when the sun breaks through the clouds and we are ourselves again. Mood influences effort. A bright and hopeful mood quickens every power and enhances every effort, while a hopeless mood limits power and cripples effort. The football team which goes into the game discouraged never plays to the limit. The student who attacks his lesson under the conviction of defeat can hardly hope to succeed while the one who enters upon his work confident of his power to master it has the battle already half won. The world's best work is done not by those who live in the shadow of discouragement and doubt but by those in whose breast hope springs eternal. The optimist is a benefactor of the race, if for no other reason than the sheer contagion of his hopeful spirit. The pessimist contributes neither to the world's welfare nor its happiness. Youth's proverbial enthusiasm and dauntless energy rests upon the supreme hopefulness which characterizes the mood of the young. For these reasons, if for no other, the mood of the schoolroom should be one of happiness and good cheer. Disposition A resultant of moods The sum total of our moods gives us our disposition. Whether these are pleasant or unpleasant, cheerful or gloomy, well depend on the predominating character of the moods which enter into them. As well expect to gather grapes of thorns or figs or thistles as to secure a desirable disposition out of undesirable moods. A sunny disposition never comes from gloomy moods nor a hopeful one out of the blues. And it is our disposition more than the power of our reason which after all determines our desirability as friends and companions. The person of surly disposition can hardly make a desirable companion, no matter what his intellectual qualities may be. We may live very happily with one who cannot follow the reasoning of a Newton, but it is hard to live with a person chronically subject to black moods. Nor can we put the responsibility for our disposition off on our ancestors. It is not an inheritance, but a growth. Slowly, day by day and mood by mood, we build up our disposition until finally it comes to characterize us. Temperament Some are, however, more predisposed to certain types of mood than our others. The organization of our nervous system which we get through heredity undoubtedly has much to do with the feeling tone in which we most easily fall. We call this predisposition temperament. On the effects of temperament, our ancestors must divide the responsibility with us. I say, divide the responsibility. For even if we find ourselves predisposed towards a certain undesirable type of moods, there is no reason why we should give up to them. Even in spite of hereditary predispositions, we can still largely determine for ourselves what our moods are to be. If we have a tendency toward cheerful, quiet, and optimistic moods, the psychologist names our temperament sanguine. If we are tense, easily excited and irritable with a tendency towards sullen or angry moods, the choleric. If we are given two frequent fits of the blues, if we usually look on the dark side of things and have a tendency toward moods of discouragement and the dumps, the melancholic. If hard to rouse and given to indolent and indifferent moods, the phlegmatic. Whatever be our temperament, it is one of the most important factors in our character. Three, permanent feeling attitudes or sentiments. Besides the more or less transitory feeling states which we have called moods, there exists also a class of feeling attitudes, which contain more of the complex intellectual element, are with all of rather a higher nature and much more permanent than our moods. We may call these our sentiments or attitudes. Our sentiments comprise the somewhat constant level of feeling combined with cognition, which we name sympathy, friendship, love, patriotism, religious faith, selfishness, pride, vanity, etc. Like our dispositions, our sentiments are a growth of months and years. Unlike our dispositions however, our sentiments are relatively independent of the physiological undertone and depend more largely upon long continued experience and intellectual elements as a basis. A sluggish liver might throw us into an irritable mood and, if the condition were long continued, might result in a surly disposition, but it would hardly permanently destroy one's patriotism and make him turn traitor to his country. One's feeling attitude on such matters is too deep seated to be modified by changing whims. How sentiments develop. Sentiments have the beginning in concrete experiences in which feeling is a predominant element and grow through the multiplication of these experiences much as the concept is developed through many percepts. There is a residual element left behind each separate experience in both cases. In the case of the concept, the residual element is intellectual and in the case of the sentiment, it is a complex in which the feeling element is predominant. How this comes about is easily seen by means of an illustration or two. The mother feeds her child when he is hungry and an agreeable feeling is produced. She puts him into the bath and snuggles him in her arms and the experiences are pleasant. The child comes to look upon the mother as one whose a special function is to make things pleasant for him. So he comes to be happy in her presence and long for her in her absence. He finally grows to love his mother, not alone for the countless times she has given him pleasure, but for what she herself is. The feelings connected at first wholly with pleasant experiences coming through the ministrations of the mother strengthened no doubt by instinctive tendencies toward affection and later enhanced by a fuller realization of what a mother's care and sacrifice mean grow at last into a deep forceful abiding sentiment of love for the mother, the effect of experience. Likewise, with the sentiment of patriotism, insofar as our patriotism is a true patriotism and not a noisy clamor, it had its rise and feelings of gratitude and love when we contemplated the deeds of heroism and sacrifice for the flag and the blessings which come to us from our relations as citizens to our country. If we have had concrete cases brought to our experience, as for example, our property saved from destruction at the hands of a mob or our lives saved from a hostile foreign foe, the patriotic sentiment will be all the stronger. So we may carry the illustration into all the sentiments. Our religious sentiments of adoration, love, and faith have their origin in our belief in the care, love, and support from a higher being, typified to us as children by the care, love, and support of our parents. Pride arises from the appreciation or over appreciation of oneself, his attainments or his belongings. Selfishness has its genesis in the many instances in which pleasure results from ministering to self. In all these cases it is seen that our sentiments develop out of our experiences. They are the permanent but ever-growing results which we have to show for experiences which are somewhat long-continued and in which a certain feeling quality is a strong accompaniment of the cognitive part of the experience. The influence of sentiment. Our sentiments, like our dispositions, are not only a natural growth from the experiences upon which they are fed, but they in turn have large influence in determining the direction of our further development. Our sentiments furnish the soil which is either favorable or hostile to the growth of new experiences. One in whom the sentiment of true patriotism is deep rooted will find it much harder to respond to a suggestion to betray his country's honor on a battlefield in legislative hall or in private life than one lacking in this sentiment. The boy who has a strong sentiment of love for his mother will find this a restraining influence in the face of temptation to commit deeds which would wound her feelings. A deep and abiding faith in God is fatal to the growth of pessimism, distrust and a self-centered life. One sentiments are a safe gauge of his character. Let us know a man's attitude or sentiments on religion, morality, friendship, honesty, and the other great questions of life, and little remains to be known. If he is right on these, he may well be trusted in other things. If he is wrong on these, then there is little to build upon. Literature has drawn its best inspiration and choicest themes from the field of our sentiments. The sentiment of friendship has given us our David and Jonathan, our Daemon and Pytheas, and our Tennyson and Hallam. The sentiment of love has inspired countless masterpieces. Without its aid, most of our fiction would lose its plot, and most of our poetry its charm. Religious sentiment inspired Milton to write the world's greatest epic, Paradise Lost. The sentiment of patriotism has furnished an inexhaustible theme for the writer and the orator. Likewise, if we go into the field of music and art, we find that the best efforts of the masters are clustered around some human sentiment, which has appealed to them, and which they have immortalized by expressing it on canvas or on marble, that it may appeal to others and cause the sentiment to grow in us. Sentiments as Motives The sentiments furnished the deepest, most constant, and the most powerful motives which control our lives. Such sentiments as patriotism, liberty, and religion have called a thousand armies to struggle and die on ten thousand battlefields, and have given martyrs courage to suffer in the fires of persecution. Sentiments of friendship and love have prompted countless deeds of self-sacrifice and loving devotion. Sentiments of envy, pride, and jealousy have changed the boundary lines of nations, and have prompted the committing of ten thousand unnameable crimes. Slowly, day by day, from the cradle to the grave, we are weaving into our lives the threads of sentiment, which has at last become so many cables to bind us to good or evil. Problems in Observation and Introspection 1. Are you subject to the blues or other forms of depressed feeling? Are your moods very changeable or rather constant? What kind of a disposition do you think you have? How did you come by it? That is, in how far is it due to hereditary temperament, and in how far to your daily moods? 2. Can you recall an instance in which some undesirable mood was caused by your physical condition? By some disturbing mental condition. What is your characteristic mood in the morning after sleeping in an ill-ventilated room, after sitting for half a day in an ill-ventilated school room, after eating indigestible food before going to bed? 3. Observe a number of children or your classmates closely, and see whether you can determine the characteristic mood of each. Observe several different schools and see whether you can note a characteristic mood for each room. Try to determine the causes producing the differences noted, physical conditions in the room, personality of the teacher, methods of governing, teaching, etc. 4. When can you do your best work? When you are happy or unhappy, cheerful or blue, confident and hopeful or discouraged, in a spirit of harmony and cooperation with your teacher or anti-agnostic. Now, relate your conclusions to the type of atmosphere that should prevail in the school room or the home. Formulate a statement as to why the spirit of the school is all important. Effect on effort, growth, disposition, sentiments, character, etc. 5. Can you measure, more or less accurately, the extent to which your feelings serve as motives in your life? Are your feelings alone a safe guide to action? Make a list of the important sentiments that should be cultivated in youth. Now, show how the work of the school may be used to strengthen worthy sentiments. End of Chapter 14, Recording by Karima Redout Chapter 15. The Emotions Feeling and emotion are not to be looked upon as two different kinds of mental processes. In fact, emotion is but a feeling state of a high degree of intensity and complexity. Emotion transcends the simpler feeling states, whenever the exciting cause is sufficient to throw us out of our regular routine of effective experience. The distinction between emotion and feeling is a purely arbitrary one, since the difference is only one of complexity and degree, and many feelings may rise to the intensity of emotions. A feeling of sadness on hearing the number of fatalities in a railway accident may suddenly become an emotion of grief if we learn that a member of our family is among those killed. A feeling of gladness may develop into an emotion of joy, or a feeling of resentment be kindled into an emotion of rage. 1. The producing and expressing of emotion Nowhere more than in connection with our emotions are the close interrelations of mind and body seen. All are familiar with the fact that the emotion of anger tends to find expression in the blow, love in the caress, fear in flight, and so on, but just how our organism acts in producing an emotion is less generally understood. Professor James and Professor Lang have shown us that emotion not only tends to produce some characteristic form of response, but that the emotion is itself caused by certain deep-seated physiological reactions. Let us seek to understand this statement a little more fully. 2. Physiological Explanation of Emotion We must remember first of all that all changes in mental states are accompanied by corresponding physiological changes. Hard concentrated thinking quickens the heartbeat. Keen attention is accompanied by muscular tension. Certain sights or sounds increase the rate of breathing. Offensive odors produce nausea, and so on. So complete and perfect is the response of our physical organism to mental changes that one psychologist declares it possible, had we sufficiently delicate apparatus, to measure the reactions caused throughout the body of a sleeping child by the shadow from a passing cloud falling upon the closed islands. The order of the entire event resulting in an emotion is as follows. One, something is known. Some object enters consciousness coming either from immediate perception or through memory or imagination. This fact or thing, known, must be of such nature that it will, too, set up deep-seated and characteristic organic response. Three, the feeling, accompanying and caused by these physiological reactions constitutes the emotion. For example, we may be passing along the street in a perfectly common, equitable state of mind, when we come upon a teamster who was brutally beating an exhausted horse because it is unable to draw an overloaded wagon up a slippery incline. The facts grasped as we take in this situation constitute the first element in an emotional response developing in our consciousness. But instantly our muscles begin to grow tense, the heart beat and breath quicken, the face takes on a different expression, the hands clench the entire organism is reacting to the disturbing situation. The second factor in the rising emotion, the physiological response, thus appears. Along with our apprehension of the cruelty and the organic disturbances which result, we feel waves of indignation and anger surging through us. This is the third factor in the emotional event, or the emotion itself. In some such way as this, are all of our emotions aroused. Origin of Characteristic Emotional Reactions Why do certain facts or objects of consciousness always cause certain characteristic organic responses? In order to solve this problem, we shall have first to go beyond the individual and appeal to the history of the race. What the race has found serviceable, the individual repeats. But even then it is hard to see why the particular type of physical response such as shrinking, pallor, and trembling, which naturally follows stimuli threatening harm, should be the best. It is easy to see however that the feeling which prompts to flight or serves to deter from harm's way might be useful. It is plain that there is an advantage in the tense muscle, the set teeth, the held breath, and the quickened pulse which accompany the emotion of anger, and also in the feeling of anger itself which prompts to the conflict. But even if we are not able in every case to determine at this day why all the instinctive responses and their correlate of feeling were the best for the life of the race, we may be sure that such was the case, for nature is inexorable in her dictates that only that shall persist which has proved serviceable in the largest number of cases. An interesting question rises at this point, as to why we feel emotion accompanying some of our motor responses, and not others. Perceptions are crowding in upon us hour after hour, memory, thought, and imagination are in constant play, and a continuous motor discharge results each moment in physical expressions great or small. Yet in spite of these facts, feeling, which is strong enough to rise to an emotion is only an occasional thing. If the emotion accompanies any form of physical expression, why not all? Let us see whether we can discover any reason. One day I saw a boy leading a dog along the street. All at once the dog slipped the string over its head and ran away. The boy stood looking after the dog for a moment, and then burst into a fit of rage. What all had happened? The moment before the dog broke away, everything was running smoothly in the experience of the boy. There was no obstruction to his thought or his plans. Then in an instant the situation changes. The smooth flow of experience is checked and baffled. The discharge of nerve currents, which meant thought, plans, action, is blocked. A crisis has arisen which requires readjustment. The nerve currents must flow in new directions, giving new thought, new plans, new activities. The dog must be recaptured. It is in connection with this damning up of nerve currents from following their wanted channels that the emotion emerges. Or putting it into mental terms, the emotion occurs when the ordinary current of our thought is violently disturbed, where we meet with some crisis which necessitates a readjustment of our thought, relations, and plans, either temporarily or permanently. The duration of an emotion. If the required readjustment is but temporary, then the emotion is short-lived. While if the readjustment is necessarily of longer duration, the emotion also will live longer. The fear which follows the thunder is relatively brief, for the shock is gone in a moment, and our thought is but temporarily disturbed. If the impending danger is one that persists, however, as of some secret assassin threatening our life, the fear also will persist. The grief of a child over the loss of someone dear to him is comparatively short, because the current of the child's life has not been so closely bound up in the complexity of experiences with the lost object as in the case of an older person. And hence the readjustment is easier. The grief of an adult over the loss of a very dear friend lasts long for the object grieved over has so become a part of the bereaved one's experience that the loss requires a very complete readjustment over the whole life. In either case, however, as this readjustment is accomplished, the emotion gradually fades away. Emotions accompanying crises and experience. If our description of the feelings has been correct, it will be seen that the simpler and milder feelings are for the common run of our everyday experience. They are the common valuers of our thought and acts from hour to hour. The emotions, or more intense feeling states, are, however, the occasional high tide of feeling which occurs in crises or emergencies. We are angry on some particular provocation. We fear some extraordinary factor in our environment. We are joyful over some unusual good fortune. 2. The control of emotions. Dependence on expression. Since all emotions rest upon some form of physical or physiological expression primarily, and upon some thought back of this secondarily, it follows that the first step in controlling an emotion is to secure the removal of the state of consciousness which serves at its basis. This may be done, for instance, with a child, either by banishing the terrifying dog from his presence or by convincing him that the dog is harmless. The motor response will then seize and the emotion pass away. If the thought is persistent, however, through the continuance of its stimulus, then what remains is to seek to control the physical expression, and in that way suppress the emotion. If instead of the knit brow, the tense muscles, the quickened heartbeat, and all the deeper organic changes which go along with these, we can keep a smile on the face, the muscles relaxed, the heartbeat steady, and a normal condition in all the other organs. We shall have no cause to fear and explosion of anger. If we are afraid of mice and feel an almost irresistible tendency to mount a chair every time we see a mouse, we can do wonders in suppressing the fear by resolutely refusing to give an expression to these tendencies. Inhibition of the expression inevitably means the death of the emotion. This fact has its bad side, as well as it's good in the feeling life, for it means that good emotions as well as bad will fade out if we fail to allow them expression. We are all perfectly familiar with the fact in our own experience that an interest which does not find means of expression soon passes away. Sympathy, unexpressed, ere long passes over into indifference. Even love cannot live without expression. Religious emotion which does not go out in deeds of service cannot persist. The natural end and aim of our emotions is to serve as motives to activity, and to missing this opportunity. They have not only failed in their office, but will themselves die of inaction. Relief through expression. Emotional states not only have their rise in organic reactions, but they also tend to result in acts. When we are angry or in love or in fear, we have the impulse to do something about it, and while it is true that emotions may be inhibited by suppressing the physical expressions on which it is founded, so many a state of emotional tension be relieved by some forms of expression. None have failed to experience the relief which comes to the overcharged nervous system from a good cry. There is no sorrow so bitter as a dry sorrow when one cannot weep. A state of anger or annoyance is relieved by an explosion of some kind, whether in a blow or its equivalent in speech. We often feel better when we have told a man what we think of him. At first glance this all seems opposed to what we have been laying down as the explanation of emotion, yet it is not so if we look well into the case. We have already seen that emotion occurs when there is a blocking of the usual pathways of discharge for the nerve currents, which must then seek new outlets, and thus result in the setting up of new motor responses. In the case of grief, for example, there is a disturbance in the whole organism. The heartbeat is deranged, the blood pressure diminished, and the nerve tone lowered. What is needed is for the currents which are finding an outlet in directions resulting in these particular responses to find a pathway of discharge which will not produce such deep-seated results. This may be found in crying. The energy thus expended is diverted from producing internal disturbances. Likewise the explosion in anger may serve to restore the equilibrium of disturbed nerve currents. Relief does not follow if image is held before the mind. All this is true, however only when the expression does not serve to keep the idea before the mind which was originally responsible for the emotion. A person may work himself into a passion of anger by beginning to talk about an insult, and, as he grows increasingly violent, bringing the situation more and more sharply into his consciousness. The effect of terrifying images is easily to be observed in the case of ones starting to run when he is afraid after night. There is probably no doubt that the running would relieve his fear providing he could do it and not picture the threatening something as pursuing him, but with his imagination conjuring up dire images of frightful catastrophes, at every step all control is lost, and fresh waves of terror surge over the shrinking soul. Growing Tendency Toward Emotional Control Amongst civilized peoples there is a constantly growing tendency toward emotional control. Primitive races express grief, joy, fear, or anger much more freely than do civilized races. This does not mean that primitive man feels more deeply than civilized man, for as we have already seen the crying, laughing, or blustering is all but a small part of the whole physical expression, and one's entire organism may be stirred to its depths without any of these outward manifestations. Man has found it advisable, as he has advanced in civilization, not to reveal all he feels to those around him. The face, which is the most expressive part of the body, has come to be under such perfect control that it is hard to read through it the emotional state, although the face of civilized man is capable of expressing far more than is that of the savage. The same difference is observable between the child and the adult. The child reveals each passing shade of emotion through his expression, while the adult may feel much that he does not show. 3. Cultivation of the Emotions There is no other mental factor which has more to do with the enjoyment we get out of life than our feelings and emotions. The emotions and enjoyment. Few of us would care to live at all if all feelings were eliminated from human experience. True feeling often makes us suffer, but in so far as life's joys triumph over its woes, do our feelings minister to our enjoyment. Without sympathy, love, and appreciation, life would be barren indeed. Moreover, it is only through our own emotional experience that we are able to interpret this feeling side of the lives about us. Failing in this, we miss one of the most significant phases of social experience, and are left with our own sympathies undeveloped and our life by so much impoverished. The interpretation of the subtler emotions of those about us is in no small degree in art. The human face and form present a constantly changing panorama of the soul's feeling states to those who can read their signs. The ability to read the finer feelings which reveal themselves in expression, too delicate to be read by the eye of the gross or unsympathetic observer, lies at the basis of all fine interpretation of personality. Feelings are often too deep for outward expression, and we are slow to reveal our deepest selves to those who cannot appreciate and understand them. How emotions develop. Emotions are to be cultivated, as the intellect or the muscles are to be cultivated, namely through proper exercise. Our thought is to dwell on those things to which proper emotions attach, and to shun lines which would suggest emotions of an undesirable type. Emotions which are to be developed must, as has already been said, find expression. We must act in response to their leadings, else they become but idle vaporings. If love prompts us to say a kind word to a suffering fellow mortal, the word must be spoken, or the feeling itself fades away. On the other hand, the emotions which we wish to suppress are to be refused expression. The unkind and cutting words to be left unsaid when we are angry, and the fear of things which are harmless left unexpressed and thereby doomed to die. The emotional factor in our environment. Much material for the cultivation of our emotions lies in the everyday life all about us if we can but interpret it. Few indeed of those whom we meet daily, but are hungering for appreciation and sympathy. Lovable traits exist in every character, and will reveal themselves to the one who looks for them. Miscarriages of justice abound on all sides, and demand our indignation and wrath and the effort to right the wrong. Evil always exists to be hated and suppressed, and dangers to be feared and avoided. Human life and the movement of human affairs constantly appeal to the feeling side of our nature if we understand at all what life and action mean. A certain blindness exists in many people, however, which makes our own little joys or sorrows or fears the most remarkable ones in the world, and keeps us from realizing that others may feel as deeply as we. Of course this self-centered attitude of mind is fatal to any true cultivation of the emotions. It leads to an emotional life which lacks not only breadth and depth, but also perspective. Literature and the cultivation of the emotions. In order to increase our facility in the interpretation of the emotions through teaching us what to look for in life and experience, we may go to literature. Here we find life interpreted for us, in the ideal, by masters of interpretation, and looking through their eyes we see new depths and breaths of feeling which we had never before discovered. Indeed, literature deals far more in the aggregate with the feeling side than with any other aspect of human life, and it is just this which makes literature a universal language, for the language of our emotions is more easily interpreted than that of our reason. The smile, the cry, the laugh, the frown, the caress, are understood all around the world among all peoples. They are universal. There is always this danger to be avoided, however. We may become so taken up with the overwrought descriptions of the emotions as found in literature, or on the stage, that the common humdrum of everyday life around us seems flat and stale. The interpretation of the writer or the actor is far beyond what we are able to make for ourselves. So we take their interpretation rather than trouble ourselves to look in our own environment for the material which might appeal to our emotions. It is not rare to find those who easily weep over the woes of an imaginary person in a book or on the stage, unable to feel sympathy for the real suffering which exists all around them. The story is told of a lady at the theatre who wept over the suffering of the hero in the play, and at the moment she was shedding the unnecessary tears, her own coachman, whom she had compelled to wait for her in the street, was frozen to death. Our seemingly prosaic environment is full of suggestions to the emotional life, and books and plays should only help to develop in us the power rightly to respond to these suggestions. Harm in emotional over-excitement. Danger may exist also in still another line, namely that of emotional over-excitement. There is a great nervous strain in high emotional tension. Nothing is more exhausting than a severe fit of anger. It leaves its victim weak and limp. A severe case of fright often incapacitates one for mental or physical labour for hours, or it may even result in permanent injury. The whole nervous tone is distinctly lowered by sorrow, and even excessive joy may be harmful. In our actual, everyday life, there is little danger from emotional over-excitement unless it be in the case of fear in children, as was shown in the discussion on instincts, and in that of grief over the loss of objects that are dear to us. Most of our childish fears we could just as well avoid if our elders were wiser in the matter of guarding us against those that are unnecessary. The griefs we cannot hope to escape, although we can do much to control them. Long continued emotional excitement, unless it is followed by corresponding activity, gives us those who weep over the wrongs of humanity but never do anything to right them, who are sorry to the point of death over human suffering but cannot be induced to lend their aid to its alleviation. We could very well spare a thousand of those in the world who merely feel for one who acts, James tells us. We should watch then that our good feelings do not simply evaporate as feelings, but that they find some place to apply themselves to accomplish good, that we do not, like Hamlet, rave over wrongs which need to be righted but never bring ourselves to the point where we take a hand in their writing. If our emotional life is to be rich and deep in its feeling and effective in its results on our acts and character, it must find its outlet in deeds. Four, emotions as motives. Emotion is always dynamic, and our feelings constitute our strongest motives to action and achievement. How our emotions compel us? Love has often done in the reformation of a fallen life what strength of will was not able to accomplish. It has caused dynasties to fall and has changed the map of nations. Hatred is a motive hardly less strong. Fear will make savage beasts out of men who fall under its sway, causing them to trample helpless women and children under feet, whom in their saner moments they would protect with their lives. Anger puts out all the light of reason, and prompts peaceful and well-meaning men to commit murderous acts. Thus feeling. From the faintest and simplest feeling of interest, the various ranges of pleasures and pain, the sentiments which underlie all of our lives, and so on to the mighty emotions which grip our lives with an overpowering strength, which is constantly urging us on to do and dare. Hence it is important from this standpoint also that we should have the right type of feelings and emotions well developed, and the undesirable ones eliminated. Emotional habits. Emotion and feeling are partly matters of habit. That is, we can form emotional as well as other habits, and they are as hard to break. Anger allowed to run uncontrolled leads into habits of angry outbursts, while the one who habitually controls his temper finds it submitting to the habit of remaining within bounds. One may cultivate the habit of showing his fear on all occasions, or of discouraging its expression. He may form the habit of jealousy or of confidence. It is possible even to form the habit of falling in love, or of so suppressing the tender emotions that love finds little opportunity for expression. And here is elsewhere habits are formed through performing the acts upon which the habit rests. If there are emotional habits we are desirous of forming, that we have to do is to indulge the emotional expression of the type we desire, and the habit will follow. If we wish to form the habit of living in a chronic state of the blues, then all we have to do is to be blue and act blue sufficiently, and this form of emotional expression will become a part of us. If we desire to form the habit of living in a happy, cheerful state, we can accomplish this by encouraging the corresponding expression. 5. Problems in Observation and Introspection 1. What are the characteristic bodily expressions by which you can recognize a state of anger? Fear, jealousy, hatred, love, grief. Do you know persons who are inclined to be too expressive emotionally? Who show too little emotional expression? How would you classify yourself in this respect? 2. Are you naturally responsive to the emotional tone of others? That is, are you sympathetic? Are you easily affected by reading emotional books, by emotional plays, or other appeals? What is the danger from overexciting the emotions without giving them a proper outlet in some practical activity? 3. Have you observed a tendency among adults not to take seriously the emotions of a child? For example, to look upon childish grief as trivial, or fear as something to be laughed at. Is the child's emotional life as real as that of the adult? Parenthetically, see Chapter 9, Bets, Fathers and Mothers. 4. Have you known children to repress their emotions for fear of being laughed at? Have you known parents or others to remark about childish love affairs to the children themselves in a light or joking way? Aught this ever to be done? 5. Note certain children who give way to fits of anger. What is the remedy? Note other children who cry readily. What would you suggest is a cure? Why should ridicule not be used? 6. Have you observed any teacher using the lesson in literature or history to cultivate the finer emotions? What emotions have you seen appealed to by a lesson in nature's study? What emotions have you observed on the playground that needed restraint? Do you think that on the whole the emotional life of the child receives enough consideration in the school?