Part IV

the question will become, how to manage these contrarieties.

As far as the case permits, this line of inquiry postpones the problems usually called metaphysical. But they will hover near our every step, and the conclusions that we reach will necessarily have a metaphysical squint. If we can respect ourselves after looking one another squarely in the face, then score one for the universe that brought us forth! It is not altogether shabby. This we could maintain even if what is found worthy of respect should be in unresolvable conflict with some negative principle either within or without. For then the world-system would bring forth tragedy, which is the opposite of littleness and meanness. Tragedy is possible only in a world that contains inherent greatness. Even if some ultimate defeat awaits us, who knows what dignity man might attain by some superior method of meeting his fate?

But if, as I hope to show in the concluding division, there are ways in which we can utilize even the contrarieties of our nature--if we can win victories even through our defeats--then this, too, will suggest something concerning our world-system. An experience like this is an experience of freedom--an _experience_ of freedom, not proof except in the sense that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Such experience would, however, become a datum for any metaphysics that fully takes in man. But all this belongs in the final section of the book.

X

“HUMAN NATURE BEING WHAT IT IS”

Two lines of thought are discernible in the minds of those who judge that human motivation is and must remain of low quality, namely, generalizations from direct observation of the life about us, and inferences from the truth that we are a part of nature and a manifestation of her unchanging laws. Both these grounds must be considered. I shall show, in the present section, what is implied as to motivation in our being enmeshed in the totality of animate nature; in the following section attention will be given to the bearing of current psychology upon our problem, and afterwards, I shall endeavor to pluck some of the fruits of direct observation.

For more than half a century, now, naturalistic views of man have had their center in the theory of evolution. We have come to know ourselves as blood relatives of the species that we call lower, and “blood relative” has come to mean not only bodily but also mental kinship. This, of itself, would scarcely argue anything as to the level of our capacities as compared with the level of the beasts, for various levels of conduct and apparently of capacity exist within our own species. It is not the fact of kinship, but the fact of law and continuity within this kinship that seems to furnish a basis for moderating our self-respect. Law is interpreted as if we were fatalistically assigned our place, and continuity is interpreted in the sense of sameness with that from which we have sprung. Hence the notion that, “human nature being what it is” by virtue of our place in the evolutionary order, our motives are only complex forms of the impulses that we find in the lower animals.

Yet the story of development is a story of variation, of variation piled upon variation, and of sudden mutations. The continuity that pervades the whole is continuity of process, not the perpetuation of sameness. The connectedness of nature’s forms is like the connectedness of a merchant’s goods--all were acquired by purchase, all will be disposed of by sale; all appear in the same inventory and upon the same ledger; they have all this in common, and there is this continuity from one piece of merchandise to another. But this says nothing as to the range of differences. It was said of one of the great London “stores” some years ago that it would accept orders for any kind of commodity known to man.

By means of natural law we can pass from any event in nature to any other event, just as by the merchant’s books he can pass--say--from a necktie to a delivery truck. But, just as unprecedented kinds of goods may be bought and sold without interrupting the system, so unprecedented natural events may occur, and unprecedented forms of life may appear, without any breach of continuity. Evolution is, indeed, not repetition of the same, but the bringing forth of that which is not the same. Expectancy is the atmosphere appropriate to it. Not that progress is implicit in evolution as such, but rather plasticity, roominess, and versatility. The fact that usually the development of new organs and new species takes place through the gradual accumulation of slight changes does not alter the logic of the situation; gradualness of change does not mean sameness. Even if it did, the fact of mutations would still confront us.

As we have bodily organs that once were non-existent anywhere in our world-system, so we perform functions that are special to us. Instances will be given in a moment; but before going on to them, it is worth remarking that the argument from kinship to sameness works just as well backward as forward. If it be maintained that the blood relationship between an Abraham Lincoln and a coyote implies that the impulsions of the two are the same, it then becomes just as legitimate--and illegitimate--to interpret the coyote by Lincoln as the reverse.

Let us now examine a case or two of our immersion within the totality of animate nature. The statement has been made that the whole of human conduct turns upon two fundamental drives, the appetite for food and the appetite for sex. The reasoning by which this broad generalization is supported starts with the assumption that survival is the all-inclusive objective of organic impulses. Survival means, however, according to circumstances, either continuance of an individual life, or maintenance of a species. Nutrition, it is said, is the basic condition of individual survival; reproduction, that of species survival. Hence the conclusion is drawn that human life is ruled by just two drives, each proliferating into many details, the drive for food and the drive for sex-intercourse.

The theory has the attractiveness of simplicity, at least apparent simplicity; but it is the simplicity of abstractions substituted for the complexity of concrete facts. First of all, “survival,” “individual,” and “species” are our after-thoughts, products of our reflection and systematization. They are not a description of the facts of animal conduct or of human conduct. We can perceive that a given act is related to survival, but this by no means proves that survival was in any sense an objective of the act.

In the second place, the two-drive theory is not fundamental in its own sense of the term “fundamental drive.” For, since sexual reproduction is known to have been preceded by a-sexual, and since a-sexual reproduction roots in cell-division as a phase of nutrition, the conclusion, upon the assumed basis, should be that there is only one basic drive, the nutritional!

In the third place, the theory confuses instead of clarifying human conduct in the sphere of sex and reproduction. Desire for sex-relations is not by any means the same as desire for offspring or for the maintenance of our species. Our race had been on the scene a long time before anybody suspected the causal relation between the sex function and the birth of babies. Desire for children does not root in sex appetite; it arises only after being with children. Desire for the maintenance of our species arises, of course, only through reflection, and its object is apprehended only through imagination. As a matter of unadorned fact, does not the sex-impulsion in human beings struggle to free itself from all necessary association with reproduction?

A fourth consideration concerns the other supposedly basic and inclusive drive, the nutritional. If we take the impulse to eat in its primary and simple sense, then we must see that a plentiful supply of food at any moment produces quiescence of food-getting activities; a full belly is, so to say, the _summum bonum_ of this branch of motivation. But the theory goes on to classify with food-getting a whole lot of other activities of getting, storing, guarding, and competing--almost the whole economic system, indeed. In subsequent chapters (15 and 16) we shall see how complicated, in fact, is the motivation of our system of production and distribution. At the present moment it is sufficient to point out how strained is the theory that all our individualistic getting is at bottom food-getting, and that all individualistic getting is directed towards the prolongation of the individual’s existence.

Thus far our considerations are negative; but there are positive ones also. For it can be shown that within these two general areas unprecedented inclinations, or likes and dislikes, have repeatedly arrived. Sex-inclinations are the most easily-read instance. Since sexual reproduction was preceded by a-sexual, the sex-appetite in its totality had a beginning; it entered into a system in which it had been non-existent; it was an utterly new attraction. Moreover, it has undergone modifications and reversals. In some species promiscuity is attractive; in others sex-inclination spontaneously selects one permanent mate--among the pigeons, for example. In the case of man, so many differentiations, and such profound ones, have taken place that we are put to it to make our terminology consistent. Shall we classify the satisfaction that personal beauty in the opposite sex gives us as sexual, esthetic, or both? Certainly there was a stage in evolution at which appreciation of beauty had nothing whatever to do with sex. And what shall we say of mental graces--of wit, humor, originality, sincerity, good taste? These attract men toward women and women toward men; somehow these primarily non-sexual mental graces become a sex bond. It is clear, then, that this drive is no single, unchanging thing; it is the scene and area of spontaneous, new, unprecedented inclinations; its first, raw stages, which chiefly attract biological interest, taken by themselves, misrepresent the truth as much as they represent it. Would it be old-fashioned, or rather merely “getting up to date,” to add that fellowship between two personal spirits, recognizing and prizing and cultivating themselves as such, and therefore placing the primary sex-relation upon a basis of mutual respect and reverence--that such fellowship must be recognized and appreciated if one is to understand the sex drive as a human desire and motive?

A similar creativeness in the realm of drives has appeared somewhere in the world in relation to every type of human desire. The interests of men do not move in any straight line; they dart and quiver; explore, discover, make new habitations, and then migrate from the homes that they have builded for themselves. There was a time, for example, when our ancestors had no taste, no drive, for artistic creation. But at last there arose--we need not stop to say by what stages--a satisfaction that was not entirely dependent upon utility or consumption. Objects began to be made for the pleasure that the mere sight of them gave. Here is the evolution of a new species of motivation. We might almost say “species” in the biological sense, for art-interests breed freely among themselves but tend to become infertile when they are crossed with other interests.

The existence of the sciences, of which the doctrine of evolution is a conspicuous part, may itself be taken as an example of the emergence of a new motive. For here bursts forth a self-sustaining impulsion to intellectual activity that is free from fear, free from authority, and free from utilitarian considerations. Here intelligence not only rises above the clod, not only disengages its interests from all the conditions of biological survival, but also reverses itself. For science is a mighty damming back of the historical momentum of mind, and the creation of new channels for its flow. Indeed, the emergence of individual and social self-criticism, whether in the scientific or the ethical sphere, would of itself be sufficient to prove that we belong to an order in which superior motivation can evolve out of inferior.

Said a youthful and inexperienced fish to an old and experienced one in the long, long ago before there were any land animals, “What fun it is to leap into the air! I wonder what it would be like to live on the land and only occasionally take a bath in water, just as we live in the water and only occasionally take a bath in air.” “Nonsense!” replied the old and experienced fish. “Nobody could enjoy living in the air. How would one breathe? Your gills would dry up, and you would suffocate. The idea is contrary to nature and perfectly preposterous!”

XI

SOME NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTIVATION

Various phases of current psychology and would-be psychology--methods, points of view, particular facts--have given an apparent color of scientific justification, as we have seen, to the popular estimate of our motivation. We have done them full justice as part causes of the tendency to disillusionment, but we have not yet asked how far they logically justify it. This is the question that we now have to consider.

The attribution to psychology of magisterial authority in the realm of the interests of life is a bit of popular superstition. Probably something of the thrill evoked by the thought of unseen ghostly forces is in it; certainly it contains an over-wrought estimate of the psychologist, as though he had something of the medicine-man in him. Psychologists themselves know better, of course. Anyone who has observed the development of the science since, say, James published his two massive and fascinating volumes knows that cross-currents and choppy seas and changeable winds prevail in this quarter. The enormous expenditure of labor and of resources is, indeed, justified by the results, partly because a substantial body of detailed facts has been ascertained, and partly because basic issues as to subject-matter, method, and interpretation have been brought to the fore. But these issues have not been settled to the satisfaction of psychologists themselves, who are divided into several apparently irreconcilable groups. And it is these basic issues that are chiefly important when we seek light upon our life-policies.

The problem of human motivation, for example--the ascertainment of both our actual motives and our capacities for motives--is not a matter of simple detail, like color-blindness or the curve of learning in typewriting. Rather, it seems as though we can scarcely touch the edges of motivation without plunging at once into the difficulties that are systemic to the science as a whole. First and foremost is the difficulty involved in the atomistic conception of analysis, a conception taken over from the physical sciences before they had reached their present insight into the all-embracing sweep of dynamic problems. It was taken for granted that to analyse mental life is to look for simple mental elements that correspond to material corpuscles characterized by what Whitehead calls “simple location.” Then it was assumed--simply assumed--that mind is an aggregate of simple elements and that mental dynamic (very little attended to until recently) corresponds to this supposed aggregate of quasi-independent elements. That is, the main tradition of scientific psychology runs to the effect that our whole behavior is actuated by particular relations of a mechanical sort between elements (psychical or psycho-physical) that are as remote from experience as atoms.

This amounted, practically, to making a concept of method--a type of analysis--guarantee a particular metaphysics. The incontinence of the thing has been repeatedly pointed out from the early days of the present psychological movement. First, all the logical objections to English associationism applied here. Next, eminent psychologists of the new type--Ladd, Münsterberg and (in a sense) James--warned us that simple sensations or other mental elements are not existing things, but only mental constructs of the psychologists, a kind of technical language, like equations or statistical curves. Finally, the physical prototypes from which the psychological assumption took its start, such as corpuscular indivisible atoms, have now been resolved by physics into systems of a dynamic sort. Whitehead maintains that the whole physical conception of elements and aggregates must now be replaced by that of organism--the parts are not before the whole, and the real wholes or organisms are dynamic, not corpuscular.

Meantime, there have been specific happenings in psychology that bear upon our quest. The chief recognition of the dynamic problem came through the theory of instincts. At first there appeared a tendency to attribute every main division of conduct to an instinct. Thus, the fact of reproduction was referred to an instinct of reproduction; moral conduct to a moral instinct; religion to a religious instinct; esthetic interests to an esthetic instinct, etc. This was, of course, a crude popular starting point, and the particulars had to be refined, but psychology did little more with mental dynamics for a long time than just reorganize or refine some old list of instincts. The number increased and the generality decreased. Instead of a social instinct, we have, it is held, a whole group of instincts that care for particular phases of our associated life--a gregarious instinct, a motherly or parental instinct, an instinct for dominance, and for submission, for example. But there never was any approximation to an accepted list, nor does there appear to be any sure way to determine the matter.

The instincts, whatever they are, have been taken, as a rule, as so many drives or impulsions not only rooted in our nature but also destined to express themselves willy-nilly; and the totality of instincts has been accepted as constituting the total drive of a man. But, over and above the fact that the list of instincts is unstable, this theory of the human drive encounters numerous obstacles.

In the _first_ place, some of the instincts apply only within situations that may or may not arise. Fear-reactions, under some circumstances, have the marks usually attributed to instinct, but it does not follow that we have any drive towards fear. Similarly, pugnacity appears when experience takes a certain form, as restraint or attack from another, but pugnacity in the sense of not being at peace with oneself unless one can fight somebody else appears to be non-existent.

In the _second_ place, habit plays an enormous rôle in the entire matter. That is, the outfit of instincts, if there is such an outfit, does not determine the configuration of the drives in any individual. Here is the general truth that underlies the possibly doubtful theory of sublimation. Apparently instincts can atrophy; certainly what are called instincts can be either active or quiescent.

_Third_, “satisfiers and annoyers,” as Thorndike calls them, are not identical with instincts in every case. There are conditions in which it is annoying not to act, and other conditions in which it is annoying to act. Further, as he likewise maintains, there are “original tendencies of the original tendencies,” as to repeat, to form habits, to organize; and, finally, there is the fact of self-criticism, with its impelling or restraining influence exercised from the standpoint of the whole rather than of any specific instinct. More of this later.

_Fourth_, further study of our drives increases the certainty of their enormous plasticity. Woodworth has maintained that any mental mechanism can become a drive, that is, that we can develop a positive interest in and tendency to repeat anything that we ever do--we can “take an interest” in anything. Watson, too, from his point of view, and with his own conception of the method, holds that a man can acquire practically any qualities. “Condition” the few original reflexes in appropriate manner, and you will make of an individual a religious devotee, a monster of vice, or what you will. Finally, the whole notion that we possess an equipment of just such and so many instincts is threatened, not only from the Watsonian angle but also from several others. Instincts, various writers point out, appear to be classificatory devices and nothing more.

For our present purpose it is not essential to forecast the ultimate outcome of researches that bear upon these points. It is sufficient to recognize the great range of human motivation, the great plasticity of it (that is, the indefinitely many possibilities of character for the same individual), and the organic character of it (that is, the capacity for action from the standpoint of a desired whole). Anyone who is interested in the future development of thought upon this matter will do well to watch the discussions of the concept of “organism” (Whitehead’s term) in the physical sciences and of “configuration” (an English translation of the German, _Gestalt_, as used by Koffka) or an equivalent in psychology.

The physics of today already has transcended the notion that bodies are aggregates of elements--transcended it, not upon speculative or metaphysical grounds alone, but also upon the basis of experiment and mathematical analysis. Throughout nature, so Whitehead says, any concrete actuality is a dynamic whole, a complex event, not a corpuscle or an aggregate of corpuscles. These are merely abstractions, useful in their way, but matter is not even the residence of energy. Further, these dynamic wholes act spontaneously, and they even transform themselves from within themselves--they do not wait to be acted upon like billiard balls; rather, initiative is everywhere present.

If this conception of physical nature should become the accepted view, it would remove at a stroke the methodological foundation of much psychology that regards itself as particularly entitled to be called scientific. In particular, the whole of psychology would become dynamic psychology, and motivation would be recognized as _in limine_ both organizing and self-transforming action. It is a safe guess that, in this case, _the self_ would be accorded a far less grudging place than it has had in the psychology of the last generation. Professor Calkins has recently pointed out, in fact, that several contemporary movements of psychology are converging in this general direction.

It is an interesting coincidence that the concept of organism should emerge in physics and the concept of configuration in psychology almost simultaneously. As far as I am aware, there has been no connection or interdependence between them. It is even more interesting that both concepts should spring directly from experimentation. Much more experimental research must be made before we shall definitely know just what truth there is in the _Gestalt_-psychology, and just how the concept of “configuration” applies, if it applies at all, at different levels of conduct. Prediction is precarious, and it is uncalled for; but again it lies upon the surface that here is a movement, experimental in method, that is destined, if it goes on, to instate the self as an actual determiner and organizer of behavior at the levels usually called social and ethical. And the self will not only not be conceived as an aggregate (even of forces); it will not be construed primarily by its antecedents of whatever sort. Adjustment, that is, will not be conceived as accommodation of a given organism to a given environment merely, but as also re-creation of both organism and environment. An entirely reasonable attitude might then be expressed as follows: “This is the sort of self, and this is the sort of society, that we want to be; let us, then, create educational, physiological, and economic conditions favorable thereto.”

The position of psychoanalysis in the total movement of psychology is somewhat ambiguous, or at least not well worked out. On the one hand, we have here a genuine attempt at a dynamic psychology. The object under contemplation is not the brain; it is scarcely psycho-physical; it is predominantly, almost exclusively, mental, and the mental is conceived of not as a perceiving, knowledge-getting function, but as overwhelmingly desire--designing, scheme-forming, outward-pressing desire. Further, the individual is treated predominantly as an individual rather than as an aggregate. The disorders of personality are the main interest, and the treatment of these disorders is directed toward a reorganization of the personality so that it shall function as a unit. On the other hand, the raw material of human nature appears to be much like a congeries of instincts, or a collection of wild animals each of which is ready to spring into action upon the slightest occasion. The endeavor to discover some central desire that uses these instincts for its own purposes is, indeed, a movement towards an organic view of the individual; but even the central desire, in the absence of help from the psychoanalyst, seems to have a substantially wild, instinctive quality.

“The Unconscious,” or desire before psychoanalysis has enabled it to understand itself, may be either a literal description of mental dynamics, or a symbol that psychiatrists find useful in their practice, a symbol that abstracts from the psychical actuality much as atoms and ethers do from physical actuality. That psychoanalytic treatments have some success does not prove the truth of the practitioner’s mental pictures. The Ptolemaic astronomy correctly predicted eclipses; the Mesmeric fluid, animal magnetism, the king’s touch, spirits of deceased Indian chiefs--all have been effective for purposes of mental healing. Recently a psychoanalyst, MacCurdy, has pointed out that the patient’s emotional reorganization and recovery may take place around a secondary or minor complex instead of the one that is the primary cause of the disturbance; the essential thing is to secure the proper attitude and procedure for reconstruction. The cure, then, does not prove that any theory of the contents or the processes of “the Unconscious” is correct.

There remains as evidence of the wild-animal-den view the fact that the patient himself accepts it as true in his own case. “Yes,” he says, “I see that I have desired to commit incest with my mother, or to murder my father. I didn’t realize it until now.” In other words, a psychoanalytic theory has been transferred to him in the course of the analysis. There is no evidence that he has become a psychologist, or that his ability at introspection has achieved a trustworthy stage. When witchcraft was believed, confessions were made, apparently sincere confessions, that one had “signed the Devil’s book,” or that one had done other monstrous deeds. Under questioning in court witnesses have recalled things that they never witnessed. A still closer parallel with psychoanalysis is the success of many a revivalist in convincing people of their utter moral worthlessness and helplessness, that they are creatures of the devil, moved solely by evil desires. In both cases the person who brings the relief is the one through whom the certainty of one’s inner baseness first arises.

The upshot of the evidence, then, is about as follows: Psychoanalysis has extended in important ways our knowledge of the ramifications of the sex impulses and of the impulse to egoistic dominance; it has increased our knowledge of the motivation of much that mistakenly, through “rationalization,” offers itself as reasonable conduct; it has put us upon our guard against a considerable range of self-deceptions; but it has not proved the actual existence of the diabolism that is pictured in “the Unconscious.” And let it be remembered that, in front of the patient whose mind is supposed to be a den of wild beasts, sits the psychoanalyst himself, a self-controlled, benevolent, and high-minded man. Over against the theoretical Unconscious let us place the certainly actual honor of the psychiatrist in his handling of his patient--scrupulous honor in a situation that brings to the fore the most enticing emotions and impulses.

A word should be said concerning the bearing of intelligence-tests upon our knowledge of the motives of men. There is a popular tendency, which is not altogether absent from academic circles, to jump at conclusions concerning motivation from the results of experiments upon something else. The adjectives “superior” and “inferior,” applied primarily to levels of intelligence, come almost insensibly to be a designation of levels of manhood or of decency in general. Now, the most that can be said as yet concerning the interrelations between the various desirable and undesirable factors of personal make-up is that, on the whole, the more desirable tend to bunch together, and the undesirable likewise tend to go in bunches. It cannot be said, however, that there is only one worthwhile type, and that the core of this type is superior intelligence. We do not yet know just what this “intelligence” that we have been measuring is, nor what it guarantees at its various levels. It is certain that achievement depends upon other qualities also, so that failure may attend a high IQ, and success may be won by steady and persistent employment of an intelligence distinctly lower. Wisdom and goodness and efficiency have other foundations in addition to some as yet undetermined degree of intelligence. Further, it appears that within the general concept, “intelligence,” we are required to distinguish between types. There is, for example, in addition to the abstract or conceptual type that is most cultivated in schools, a mechanical type of intelligence, very likely there is a social intelligence, and there may be others. We do not yet know, except in the vaguest way, how these varieties of intelligence are dynamically related to the requirements of wise living, either individual or social.

Yet bold conclusions have been drawn on this very point. Without waiting for any research upon the possible connections between different intelligence-levels, on the one hand, and different sorts of drives on the other not a few persons have somehow assured themselves that superiority of intelligence tends and must tend to create a ruling class and that this ruling class will automatically run affairs in its own interest, making other classes means thereto. There is scarcely a shadow of evidence for this view. History seems to show that superior intelligence has aspired to all kinds of power and all kinds of excellence. Further, it is notorious that the resort to force, and even to less external means of putting halter and bridle upon one’s fellows, is a second-class resource for those who lack strength to meet their fellows upon the basis of intelligent trust, good-will, and mutual sharing. Was it because William Penn lacked high intelligence that he treated the Indians in such an unconventional manner? The almost certain fact of a high average of intelligence among monarchs and high officials generally does not account for the specific principles upon which they administer government. For these principles run through the entire scale from Nero to Confucius, and from Louis XIV to Washington and Lincoln. If we were in position to measure the intelligence of rulers and heads of states through a considerable period of political history we might find--we probably should find--that the higher intelligence leans, on the whole, towards universal good according to the understanding of it that each period of culture makes possible; that it correlates with sensitiveness towards people, and in this sense makes for appreciation of others’ points of view and therefore for a common human measure of the good. Truly efficient love of one another may yet turn out to be the supremely satisfying accomplishment of the highest intelligence.

In the entire museum of misconstructions of intelligence-test results nothing, perhaps, is more grotesque than the inference, or assumption, that high intelligence will of course accept and profit by the motivation of industrialism in its present form. The average IQ of the financially successful is somewhat higher than that of the economically under-dog portion of the populace. In other words, the _degree_ of success is due _in some measure_ to this factor. In some measure only, for there is no evidence that all the more intelligent succeed and all the others fail; and the degree only, for in a general way intelligence connotes success in the pursuit of any end that it consents to serve, and moreover we know of particular circumstances that induce men to pursue wealth and the power that it brings. We know that the environmental influences of our time shunt men’s ambitions in particular directions. We are trained from infancy by an economic order that takes for granted the service of self rather than of others. Some persons who possess high native intelligence go in for the ends that this training promotes, and of course such persons have more than average success in getting what they want. Meantime, other possessors of the gift go in for other things--research, original production in literature and the fine arts, humanitarian service, the championship of unpopular causes, the development of a cooperative society, the promotion of religion.

Moreover, we have no comparative measures of the intelligence of different types of successful men of affairs. What should we find if we compared these three sorts: Men who rely upon compulsion; men who rely upon indirection or intrigue; and men who rely upon frankness, conciliation, and moderation? We do not know which of these would exhibit the highest intelligence; but it is allowable to guess!

The relation between the insight of the literary artist and that of the psychologist is sufficiently close to require a comment, finally, upon the evidential value of the literature of disillusion that was mentioned in Chapter V. Is it not the business of the imaginative writer, one may ask, to see life as it is; to be more sensitive than the common run of men to the devices and desires of the heart, and thus to reveal us to ourselves? Look in the mirror of current literature, then, and see what a rank thing your nature is! An appropriate part-reply to this would be: Why this mirror more than scores of others that literature, past and present, has held up to nature? What guarantee is there that this reflecting surface has fewer distorting curves than others that render a different image? Why accept at its own value, without analysis, the cynical “realism” of one group, or the “barbaric naturalism” of another? Their borrowings from the psychologists are mixed and partly dubious or worse, and the marks of the seer are scarcely discernible.

That some value as a revealer of ourselves to ourselves may reside in even a distorted image must be granted. The literature in question is uncovering naïve insincerities and evasions that infest our life, and it is almost compelling us to see that there are forces within and around us that require a rational control that never yet has been provided. Nevertheless, in this total phenomenon we are witnessing one of the literary fashions that have succeeded one another for thousands of years. These pictures have truth in them, but it is truth selected and isolated in accordance with a mood, a drift, a spirit of the times, and then imaginatively reorganized in the interest of composition or picture-making. The literature of tomorrow will turn to other phases of experience, other types of motivation, and it will leave a different taste in the mouth of readers and theater-goers.

It turns out, then, that the psychology of motivation, and the quasi-psychology of it, have drifted here and there into disillusioning allegations, but without definitely proving them. On the one hand we have the hang-over of an unworkable theory of instincts; a decadent atomistic point of view and method; behavioristic metaphysics based upon nothing more substantial than a preference as to what one shall attend to; hasty inferences from the results of intelligence-testing; the rough-and-ready symbols of practicing psychiatrists, and literary exploitation of the whole. On the other hand, we find failure of every theory that assimilates human motivation in its totality to either the movements of matter or the impulses of the lower animals, and instead, growth of contrary views within general science and specifically within psychology; in particular, a definite reaffirmation that the individual mind acts as a true integer, a genuine one-in-many.

This does not solve our whole problem; we still have much to learn about ourselves. But it furnishes at least a “not proved” to set against our temptation too easily to believe the loud voices of disillusionment. It furnishes, likewise, a visa for those who would travel outside of technical psychology in order to see more of humanity. We should not be surprised if we find organization of drives by some sort of ruling drive; the consequent shifting of satisfactions and dissatisfactions, approvals and disapprovals; the possible approval or disapproval of the ruling drive, with consequent redirection of the central tendency. All this implies, likewise, readiness to question the extent and significance of the term “drive.” Perhaps we are moved only in part by a _vis a tergo_; possibly man is a forward-reacher, an initiator, a creator. And perhaps this disillusionment that threatens or seems to threaten paralysis of our wants may turn out to be the vague, confused beginning of a new want, the darkness upon the face of the deep whence a new world is to appear.

Note. The authors and works referred to in this Chapter are as follows:

Calkins, M. W. “Converging Lines in Contemporary Psychology,” Brit. Jour. Psy. (Gen’l Section), Jan., 1926, pp. 171-179.

Koffka, K. Growth of the Mind. New York, 1925.

MacCurdy, J. T. Problems in Dynamic Psychology, New York, 1922.

Thorndike, E. L. The Original Nature of Man. New York, 1913.

Watson, J. B. Behaviorism. New York: People’s Institute Pub. Co.

Whitehead, A. N. Science and the Modern World. New York, 1925.

Woodworth, R. S. Dynamic Psychology. New York, 1918.

XII

CHILDHOOD AS A REVEALER OF HUMAN CAPACITIES

The attitude of disillusionment puts the mind into a prison upon whose walls hang pictures of life at which the prisoner continually gazes. Make the round of your cell, O prisoner, and tell me what stages of life you find represented. There are no children in any of the pictures!

The apparent evidence that humanity is doomed to low types of motivation is drawn from a fraction of experience at particular stages of life. None is derived from childhood, scarcely any from adolescence; nearly all of it comes from the fully adult period which, being most conventionalized and least plastic, is least able to reveal to us our unrealized possibilities.

If we desire to witness our elemental propensities, or nearly all of them, in unrestrained swing, let us observe children. Not yet encrusted with custom, not yet halter-broken to the emotional restraints of their elders, they “let go” readily. What is inside shows outwardly. At least this is relatively true as compared with us who have endured the bit so long that we take it to be a part of our nature. And a great variety, indeed, there is inside a child; in an hour you shall witness a range of motivation that you might not discover in a grown-up in a score of years. Here is nature in the raw, or nearly so. What impression, then, does childhood make upon us when we become intimate with it?

A mixed impression: Amusement at the simple, literal, and unashamed reproduction of our own foibles; something like astonishment at the (usually) easy transitions between desirable and undesirable conduct; a sort of fascination by the utter naturalness of generosity, alongside the equal naturalness of pinching self-regard; and (if we are analytic) a bit of self-searching when we realize the deep dependence of both upon conditioning circumstances as well as upon original tendencies. All this, but never disrespect--at least never after one has taken the trouble to trace the processes of children’s minds. A really understanding intimacy with the young appears invariably to produce respect for them.

The drama of disillusionment is never played upon this stage. Cynicism, depression, revolt, and either surly, regretful, or ghoulish acquiescence in mean ways of living, all are shoved aside, forgotten, made impossible when we sympathetically enter into the experiences and attitudes of dawning life. Spirits bruised by adult experience find healing in play with children; calloused minds recover their sensitiveness by merely watching them. If a small child is perceived to be in immediate peril, the most hardened adult will suddenly exhibit a glint of nobility.

All this constitutes evidence with respect to the validity of the reasoning that is offered by the current disillusionment. Evidence, not merely incitement to change of mood; though such a change may itself be evidential in some conditions. Depression of spirit can disappear under the influence of children, or under the influence of alcohol. But the difference is twofold: Alcohol dulls the edge of judgment, and it introduces us to no fresh facts, whereas acquaintance with children does not impair the judgment, and it does introduce us to pertinent facts. The fact that when original nature displays its rudiments with frankness and unrestraint we do not find confirmation for a certain view of life, but on the whole find ourselves drifting in the opposite direction, is distinctly evidential.

There is no need to be afraid that we shall yield too much to naïve impressions--at least no one who has lived through the child-study movement is likely to remain naïve. For a whole generation analytical study has consciously and of set purpose put aside the gush of parental impulse and the sentimentality of certain kindergarten traditions in a determination to be objective and to hitch up child-life with the scientific study of nature generally. Now, not only has the child-study movement not slurred over the unlovely traits of the young; it has actually picked out and emphasized every shred of evidence of irrationality, social insensitiveness, selfishness, cruelty, and whatever else might seem to reflect the drives of pre-human species.

At the outset of the child-study movement, genetic psychology enthusiastically believed that the human individual rather closely recapitulates the developmental stages of lower species, and that childhood is a genuine savagery. This was an unsentimental theory; at least it made of children creatures of instincts to which nobility could not be attributed. If science ever had an opportunity to lay the foundations of a pessimistic view of man, it was now; for its eyes were straining to see animality and irrationality wherever they could be found. Higher, more social and rational drives, it was held, appear spontaneously at adolescence, and they are consolidated in maturity. We now know that this was an exaggeration of the spontaneous values of adolescence. Suppose this exaggeration had been discovered at the time; the conditions then would have been ripe for explaining human motivation at its best as merely a set of complicated and sophisticated forms of drives that are both low and blind.

Thus, modern child-study has leaned over backward in its endeavor not to be complimentary in its interpretations of the young of the species. If an anthropoid ape should acquire ability to read English, he would not discover any race-prejudice against apes in the American publications that represented this point of view! But the point of view did not maintain itself. It rested upon three supports each of which proved to be weak. _First_, the embryological facts that formed the substructure turned out to be too few and too scattered to establish recapitulation even in pre-natal life. _Second_, the view of instinct that was employed was speculative, almost animistic. _Third_, observation of children was skewed by the theory under which it proceeded--the theory that children recapitulate savagery and barbarism. Disproportionate attention was given to conduct that is disagreeable to elders; socially neglected or mistrained youngsters were incautiously taken to be “the child”; everything obstreperous was a shining nugget. The movement actually reached the point of awakening apprehension as to the normality or sincerity of untroublesome children.

The decadence of this mode of approach, and the rise of more objective methods, have brought us insight that is of the utmost importance to anyone who desires to understand the motivation of adults. First of all, psychical continuity rather than discontinuity between childhood and maturity has been proved to exist; in the second place, the remarkable plasticity or modifiability of childhood, taken in connection with this continuity, has given us clues hitherto lacking concerning the real origin of many adult traits.

Small children can respond to nearly if not quite every sort of stimulus that adults feel. We cannot longer regard even sex as a completely delayed drive, for traces of sex-stimulation are found in infancy, and definite sex interest follows very early. Any social impulse, good or bad, that adults exhibit can be found in early childhood also under appropriate conditions of stimulation. Moreover, in respect to the employment of intelligence there is no necessary break between childhood and maturity, for rational processes mingle with impulse and emotion from infancy. In fact, old-fashioned parental authority met scarcely any obstacle greater than the capacity of children to have a reason and to stick to it. We now know that scientific attitudes and types of observation and inference no more need to be postponed than does good pronunciation, which is taking the place of the old-fashioned “baby-talk.” It is worth noting, by the way, that “baby-talk,” wherever it exists, has been learned largely from adults!

This psychical continuity between childhood and maturity vacates the notion that adulthood is a ready-made set of drives or characteristics into which we are ushered by natural laws of growth. We are what we are, not because nature acts after the manner of destiny or fate, but because some selective process has been at work in each individual case. Each of us has the capacity to be very different from what he is. It is true, of course, that there are inborn and ineradicable differences between individuals, differences in degree of energy, in degree of intellectual capacity, in degree of sensitiveness towards a given sort of stimulus, and therefore differences in emotional type. But these are entirely generic; they do not shut up an individual to just this or that occupation, social bond, way of thinking, or policy and habit of weighing values. If we desire to account for the

## particular qualities of an individual, we must look into his whole

experience from infancy onward.

This point of view is now no longer a merely general probability. Psychiatrists and experts in child-guidance are daily tracing to

## particular experiences what seem at first sight to be native and

ineradicable personal traits. Moreover, many a bound personality is being released by the interjection of new experiences and the formation of corresponding new habits. This is true of both children and adults, and it is particularly noteworthy that the release of adults often depends upon undoing a knot that was tied in childhood.

If the plasticity of childhood and the psychical continuity between maturity and immaturity are, in one aspect, portentous, they are likewise heartening. For the fine qualities that children are capable of--their spontaneity, their capacity for reversing themselves, their generosity and affection, their sense of humor, their unabashed candor, their frequently startling objectivity--we of adult years also are capable of. Childhood is not a shut-off room which we are permitted to visit now and then in order to forget the disagreeable apartment in which we are compelled to live; childhood is a part of what we still are! Plasticity, we are learning, though it may decline with the hardening of the arteries, has no dead line. Experiment has disproved the view, held as late as William James, that after adolescence we are practically incapable of learning qualitatively new habits. We can both increase already used powers by further use of them, and also bring into action neglected powers.

Anyone who can enter sympathetically into the life of another has capacity for developing in himself the qualities of this other. The fact that our cynicism, our distrust of others, and our doubt of ourselves shrink when we make ourselves companions of the young is a direct evidence of what our nature contains, in however undeveloped form. And who does not grow mellow--who does not experience a measure of regeneration (becoming “as a little child”)--upon witnessing in children such admirable graces as candor, responsiveness to affection, generosity, the habit of laughter--all spontaneous, unreserved, uncalculating? It is because there is something of the child within me that I am capable of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

At first sight, psychoanalytic studies may seem to work against the view both that childhood is so plastic and that it is so beautiful. Certainly these studies are sobering. After making due deduction for speculation that expresses itself as statement of fact, and for an almost mythological symbolism that spreads a fog of fatalistic mysticism over simple and controllable facts, there is still excellent reason for growing sober. But the reason is the one already given for regarding as portentous our new knowledge of the possibilities that reside in early mind-sets. These possibilities are both portentous and heartening, we have said, and there is nothing in the ascertained facts of psychoanalysis that goes against this statement. Sex-tangles can start in infancy, and they can persist into maturity, thwarting life at almost any point. Attitudes of dependence upon a parent may be so overwrought, or they may be continued so long, that again the mature person never quite comes to himself. But these are not fated tragedies; they are errors that can be prevented. Psychoanalysts are clear upon this point. There remains, then, no difficulty unless it be the shock that some persons experience upon hearing that small children are capable of sex response and that their sex attraction may be towards a parent. If such persons will only take notice that psychoanalysts employ the term “sex” in an exceedingly broad manner, sometimes making it as inclusive as the term “affection”; and if they will further reflect that there is nothing unclean in sex as such, so that a psychically sexless child would be no more “innocent” than one psychically sexed, the psychoanalytic view, even if it be wholly true, will be seen not to rob childhood of any spiritual beauty.

The remark was made, a little way back, that fellowship with children produces respect for their native qualities. Some evidence of the correctness or incorrectness of this statement ought to be discoverable in the attitudes of teachers and in the practices of schools. The teacher becomes acquainted with many children of different types; is less liable than a parent to be swayed by emotions that deflect the judgment; is in a situation that calls for professional study and attitudes in the matter. The trained teachers, then, and the schools that make the largest study of the problems of education may be expected to accumulate experience and views that have some significance. Now, it is safe to say that today no school that is modern or even intelligently managed is conducted upon the assumption that children at any age are merely instinctive creatures. Moreover, in the schools in which experimentation is most free and pervasive, you will find an abounding belief in children, and no spirit of disillusionment with respect to adults. You will find criticism of adult society, great dissatisfaction with it, to be sure; but on what ground? On the ground that the traditional, conventional treatment of the young represses, retards, covers up, and thus defeats the splendid capacities that are within us.

It is noteworthy that the schools and schoolmen who make this charge do thereby place themselves under obligation to make a concrete showing of what can be done by better education. What happens when schooling is guided by this glowing faith in man? Does the faith grow brighter and brighter, or does it check itself by its own failure to work? It is my opinion that the actualities of human nature are receiving more illumination at the present moment in the experimental schools than anywhere else. Let us take a glance or two, then, in this direction.

XIII

CAPACITIES REVEALED BY NEW TYPES OF EDUCATION

The same two decades that showered us with mental tests witnessed also the upspringing of many schools that are variously designated by such terms as “modern,” “experimental,” and “creative activity.” Creative

## activity, as a description of what pupils do when they are at school,

is an arresting notion. It obviously assumes with respect to pupils’ capacities something different from popular thought about them, and different, too, from the traditions of the schoolmaster. The school policy that it connotes includes provision for an unprecedented degree of both negative freedom (absence of compulsion) and positive freedom (abundance of materials with which to work and natural situations to be met by the pupils’ own initiative). Observation of pupils placed in conditions thus favorable for the showing out of what is in them may be expected to throw light upon the motives and the capacities of human beings.

The testing movement has had the effect of stressing “nature” rather than “nurture” as the great determinant of conduct--over-stressing it, indeed. But the creative type of school-experience yields data that help towards a balanced understanding of the factors. In general, this experience tends to make both nature and nurture stand out; the old bipolarity of heredity-environment, nature-nurture, remains, but both poles are illuminated. This type of school makes obvious the differences in native gifts, but it shows likewise that conditions created by adults have prevented us from knowing what gifts are there.

Whenever a given sort of conduct is oft-repeated, our first, incautious impulse is to guess that the conduct in question is produced by some specific quality or bent of one’s original nature. The absence, or even the great infrequency of anything, is taken, similarly, as evidence that there is a vacant place in one’s nature. Thus a bad mental habit, a fallacious mode of judging, gets control of us. “It’s his nature,” we say, not stopping to consider whether the whole of his capacity or only a fraction of it has been displayed. What the experimental schools are doing is to bring into action capacities that commonly are under-exercised and therefore not recognized as existing.

These schools are proving that there is more in human nature than we had dreamed of in our philosophy. The method of the proof is, in principle, simple: Make conditions favorable for the maximum voluntary exercise of any and all worth-while capacities that may possibly be there. When this is done, behold, pupils “take an interest in” many things that have been regarded as beyond their range. We are finding out that teaching of the traditional sorts has habitually aimed under the heads rather than over the heads of pupils. An intellectual springiness that teachers and parents failed to discover or produce by the methods of prescription, spontaneously appears under the new conditions. Conduct now occurs that is better by far than old-type schools ever thought of requiring or even recommending.

All this throws light upon the motives of men. In brief, this is the trend of the facts: _First_, a surprising degree of rationality has appeared. That is, children and youth are showing remarkable capacity for the apprehension of problems, the weighing of facts, the holding of judgment in suspense, caution in generalizing, readiness to revise one’s own findings, and ability to resist suggestion and external authority. _Second_, equally surprising social capacities come to the surface. Pupils show not merely ability to run the machinery of a self-government scheme devised by teachers, but also readiness to feel situations and needs, to originate solutions, to carry responsibilities, to organize and cooperate, to appreciate both justice and generosity, and to make self-corrections. _Third_, to the originality that is involved in all this there is added amazing creativeness in literature, drawing, and painting.

If this were a discussion of educational method, we should now inquire, of course, into the specific procedures of the schools and the teachers that have these effects upon pupils. But the technic of teaching is not our present concern. What is directly to our purpose is the demonstration that schools and teachers of the older, customary sort did not bring out the whole nature of their pupils. Indeed, the schools of yesterday concealed, retarded, distorted, smothered some of the most valuable gifts, thereby unwittingly contributing to the forces that have produced the present sense of disillusionment with respect to human nature.

It is worthy of particular note that the “creative activity” schools are discovering capacities other than those usually classed as intellectual. It is much that the young take an interest in abstract and bookish knowledge; it is more that they take the attitudes and employ the processes of science with reference to natural events; but beyond this, and of greatest significance, is capacity to adjust human relations in thoughtful, high-minded, and sometimes original ways. Only a few years ago an incident like the following would have astonished any teacher, but today it seems only “natural.” A group of children, engaged in play-activities that involved construction-work, discovering that merely impulsive conduct interfered with their purposes, called a meeting, devised a government, and actually administered it effectively. Not the least instructive feature of this incident is that these children, when their own information did not suffice, voluntarily sought help from a teacher.

Such fresh and keen practicality in attacking the problems of social living in the school is often extended into the problems of the larger community also. Instances are multiplying in which community service of great value has been done by the young upon their own initiative (with the constant help of teachers, of course). Not only have children shown eager willingness to relieve immediate distress; they have penetrated to the causes of one or more common infectious diseases, and have mastered some of the methods of prevention; they have worked intelligently and devotedly at the problem of parks and playgrounds; they have cooperated with police departments and fire departments. And in and through the whole there are glints of creativeness. Genuine creativeness, not merely naïveté that happens now and then to make a happy hit.

The creativeness of the young adds to our knowledge of ourselves a touch more thrilling than that of romance, and it suggests fascinating outlooks for the future. The ruts that exist almost everywhere in our conduct have heretofore constituted the staple evidence concerning the nature of man. More than once already we have noticed how prone men are to take habitual performance as a measure of possible performance. Conventionality, it seems, always claims that it is more than conventionality; it makes itself out to be a forthright utterance of original, unchangeable human nature, or even a requirement of ethical obligation and the will of God. What a happy reversal of all this might occur if schools generally should cultivate in their pupils the ability to get out of ruts as well as to get into them. It is conceivable that society might ultimately include in its regular expectations a genuinely original, self-transcending, non-conformity and re-creation.

The most astounding piece of educational literature that has appeared in many a day is Mearns’s _Creative Youth_ (New York, 1925). It is an account of the teaching of literature to pupils of high-school age through the unified experience of appreciation and creation. Yes, creation of literature, not ‘exercises in composition.’ The evidence is here in a collection of real poems thus produced. The inventiveness displayed in them is almost unbelievable; the insight into life shown by several of the young poets is a mystery that calls for solution; but the poems are undeniably poems, undeniably original, some of them worthy (literary critics being judges) to stand alongside the best that the recognized poets of our day have produced.

What is the explanation of this wonder? Mr. Mearns answers that he merely made conditions favorable for full self-expression. There was free appreciation, favorable or unfavorable, of the literature of past and present, no one’s honest judgment being rebuked or authoritatively overridden. There was a cooperative spirit that enabled the pupils to profit from the judgments that they passed upon one another’s productions--criticism did not quench the flame. There was help from the teacher in the way of information about literary technic, and in the way of encouragement to self-respect and self-confidence as well as self-judgment. Individuality, rather than conformity of any kind, received constant applause. This class had its setting in a school that favors just these things. All this Mr. Mearns makes evident, but he insists that these conditions and methods merely clear the way for a creative urge that is present, he is sure, in children and youth generally. He finds that small children make attempts at original creation, but hide the product away, and fail to develop the self-confidence and the practice that alone can bring their original powers to fruitage. The point of all this is the naturalness of free creation of beauty. Man is by nature a creator of beauty!

Parallel with Mearns’s book may be placed, as further and possibly equal evidence of creative capacity in the young, the April-May-June, 1926 issue of _Progressive Education_ (Washington, D. C.). It contains many reproductions, mostly in colors, of original pictures made by children. In these child-productions there is vastly more than imitation. One’s breath is taken away again and again, indeed, by the seizure and vivid presentation of what is characteristic in a scene or in a person; or, one is thrilled by the child-artist’s subtle realization of just where lies the beauty of the object represented. As a consequence we have here something beyond mere representation, something more significant than technic learned from a teacher. We find here insight (the product of originality in observation), and self-expression that, being neither conventional nor merely generic but individual, is truly creative.[4]

These poems and pictures are, of course, not the average productions of their young authors, and the young authors themselves probably have native talent considerably above the average. We must not make haste to infer that children in general might reach this precise level of performance. Nevertheless, we must not dismiss these unusual productions by merely muttering “IQ.” They are not to be thought of as the work of children who are freaks, or (in the biological sense) sports. This is school work, produced in the ordinary routine of the day. Schools always have had in them pupils whose intelligence-quotient was high, but somehow the schools of yesterday had no such product to show.

It is clear, then, that generation after generation can come and go without discovering its own children. Without discovering, not only what its ablest are capable of, but the others also. For it is altogether probable--the newer sorts of school are accumulating evidence all the time--that conditions that raise the performance of gifted children raise the performance, also, of the rank and file.

This ray of light, shining out of a few new-type schools, illuminates to some extent the whole problem of adult society, both its capacities and the way to bring them to fruition. There is no reason in the nature of things or in the nature of man why the creativeness that is fostered in schools should not be fostered also in the larger society. We need only make general the conditions that teachers are creating in schools. This would involve the reversal of a habit that custom transmits from age to age--a habit that I shall make bold to call the psychical inbreeding of adults. By this I mean that it is traditional for adults to segregate themselves as a supposedly self-sufficient portion of society and to draw their standards, their expectations, and their stimuli from among themselves. Through this inbreeding it comes to pass that each generation of grown-ups becomes the spiritual successor of the preceding generation of grown-ups, whereas it should be the spiritual successor and heir of its own childhood.

Perhaps the younger portion of society will yet release us from our disillusionment.

XIV

SMALLNESS IN GREAT MEN AND GREATNESS IN SMALL MEN

If your peace of mind depends upon your being able to bestow unmixed admiration upon the great men and the great deeds of our national or racial past, think twice before you read the present dominant types of history, biography, and character-delineation. For they are subjecting halos to spectrum-analysis! The result is that we are compelled, time after time, to qualify the approvals that are traditional with us, and to tone down our reverence. How “human,” after all, were these men and these deeds that we had supposed to be so far removed from mere us. How naïve or even gullible were many of our old attachments. We are tempted to become cynical and to feel ourselves disillusioned.

But it is possible, where feelings are so actively involved, to jump from the frying pan into the fire, exchanging an illusion of nothing but greatness in our heroes for an illusion of nothing but meanness. What the critical methods are showing is that motives are mixed in both the greatly good and the greatly bad, as well as in us who are neither the one nor the other. And the obverse of the discovery of smallness in great men is the clearer and clearer demonstration of greatness in small men. That is, the more objective and merciless our analysis of men is, the more do particular qualities stand out in their own light, and the more sharp become the contrasts. The lesson of the new biography is not, “All men are alike,” but “Look for the particulars.”

Until a few years ago, when researches began to be made into the psychology of “transfer of training,” we lacked means for understanding the coexistence of opposite qualities in the same personality. Worldly-wise observers knew that motives are mixed, but how they came to be mixed, how ethical contradictories can endure the presence of each other, and why the good influence of home, school, and church have such equivocal results--all this was a matter of guess-work.

Some of this guess-work, taking the form of theology, accounted for our contradictory selves by the theory that God and the devil, or the Divine Spirit and human depravity, are at war in each of us. But this did not explain the complacency with which a man can be good and bad, great and small, at the same time. The easy way for thought was to place each man in some broad category and then either ignore conduct that did not fall into it, or else find excuses or sophistical explanations. A man was either a Christian or a non-Christian _as a whole_, it was assumed. If he was a Christian, his un-Christlike conduct was assigned to a dim region of thought and then often conveniently forgotten; if he was a non-Christian, his Christlike conduct was the part assigned to this limbo and then forgotten.

Corresponding to this theology there was a naturalistic interpretation of man that ran to the effect that human nature is essentially low, or at least selfish and tricky, and that our virtues are either refined and far-seeing selfishness, or else a mere cloak of respectability. The dim region of thought in this instance, as in the theological judgment upon non-Christians, was that in which moral purity, strength, or greatness seemed spontaneously to spring from within the man.

Into this thought-situation came experimental psychology, taking to pieces these complex mental facts instead of interpreting them by broad concepts that are more or less speculative. Why, it asked, are the spelling papers of a given school pupil scrupulously neat, but his arithmetic-papers slovenly? The same pupil is actually both neat and not neat! How is it that a child humanely reared so that in his maturity he is sensitive to the pleasures and pains of his kin, his neighbors, and even the lower animals, exhibits also insensitiveness to the weal and woe of his competitors or his employes? The same man is kindly, yet cruel! How can one who has been trained to strict honesty of thought by mathematical study be evasive and untrustworthy? Nay, how is it that one can sincerely believe obviously contradictory doctrines, as that God is infinitely benevolent as well as infinitely wise and powerful, and yet sends into eternal torment persons whom He himself has created and sustained in existence up to the moment of their doom?

The upshot of research into this problem is--some technicalities omitted--the proof that training or experience can have a wider or narrower “spread” according to the components or the method of it. Training to neatness can be narrowly directed to spelling papers, or it can be so handled that some effect upon arithmetic papers also will appear. There is no general trait of neatness; there are, rather, neatnesses, though these may be brought into the unity of a common ideal and habit. Similarly, there is no general quality of kindliness or cruelty that presides over all one’s human relations. The man whom we index as humane can be hard as flint; the one whom we have set down as unfeeling can perform acts of delicate or heroic kindness. So with honesty. Pupils who habitually cheat in one subject resist temptation to cheat in other subjects or in games. What wonder, then, that sincere belief in obvious contradictories occurs? As there is no general trait of honesty, so there is no “faculty” of reason that spreads itself equally through all our intellectual activities. But more or less generalization does occur in both thought and conduct, and whether it shall be more or whether it shall be less is partly in our keeping. We can train ourselves to participate in broad issues and ideals, we can form a habit of noticing the elements in new situations so that we see what principle applies, and we can discipline ourselves into paying the price of an organized personality.

We have no reason, then, to suppose that a man who is great in one respect will be great or good in all respects, nor, conversely, to suppose that a man who is small in several ways will be small in all his ways. There is as yet no really all ’round education or all ’round experience; we do not yet know how much can be done by schools or homes to provide such education or experience.

This little excursion into the borders of psychology should enable us to render fair judgment upon current types of disillusioning biography. To the extent that a biographer burrows into weaknesses under the assumption that the worst in a man is the real clue to him--to this extent the supposedly enlightened writer reproduces the wholesale naturalism that endeavored to offset the equally wholesale theology. Such biography is pre-psychological. On the other hand, why should we object to the publication of any well-authenticated fact concerning any public character? We have every reason to expect that minute scrutiny will reveal some sort of smallness in any great man. What we should beware of is the obscuring of what is admirable by the dust that goes into the air when these smallnesses are dug out.

That hero-worship has had a setback is not a matter for regret, but rather for congratulation. For not only was it careless of historical truth, but it separated from us those who are of us, making us feel unduly inferior to good men, and (as the psychoanalyst would say with some show of reason) making a false compensation for our own defects by adulation of men who were supposed not to have them.

There are other reasons, too, for rejoicing at the growth of realistic methods in the appraisals of men. For it is not merely historical distance that creates illusion, but social distance also, and likewise interests that are served by making distances appear where they do not exist. Let me speak without reserve. The achievement of success in any commonly accepted sense of “success” ordinarily produces self-gratulation of an expansive sort. That is, one attributes to oneself admirable qualities other than those that produced the success. Jack Horner said “What a big boy am I!” Moreover, the successful man’s neighbors, too, admire the whole man instead of merely the particular acts and qualities that bring him into notice. Thus it is that practically any successful man is overestimated by both himself and his contemporaries.

In the same way, distinctions of birth, wealth, and official position automatically inflate themselves. Even in societies that count themselves democratic there is an astonishing amount of kow-towing to station. Yesterday Mr. X was nothing but a politician, a leader of a party or of a section of a party. His own maneuvers and those of his friends having secured for him nomination for a high office, he began now to be more remote from the common. Rumors that a great and wise man had been discovered blew over the land with every breeze. But even this campaign puffiness was a slight thing in comparison with the size that the man seemed to take on after he was seated in a chair of state. There was now not only deference to his office, but also breathless watching for his every next word or move, as though he were the arbiter of destiny; and this--let it be noted--was not chiefly fear of his power; it was belief in his true greatness, wisdom, and goodness. Though no act of outstanding ability or courage could be credited to him; though he had neither eloquence, nor wit, nor marked idiosyncrasy; though he lacked even the picturesqueness of the adventurer; yet was he, for the time being, taken to be one of the great characters of history. Two factors, of course, worked together to create this impression: On the one hand, politico-economic propaganda, which found it more useful to exalt a leader than to argue a policy; and on the other hand, on the part of the populace, inherited assumptions that there is a great distance between the ruler and the ruled, and that the greatness of one’s country somehow passes over to the leaders of its affairs.

What is needed here is realistic, analytic thinking upon authentic data as to the specific acts of a leader. Such thinking upon such data is bound to deflate some reputations. When we look for the

## particulars, thrones and bishoprics and large places in the sun lose

their awesomeness. To the reasonably cautious mind, common acclaim is unimpressive; one has discovered the social assumptions and influences that too often are back of it.

Nevertheless, if we are not to fall into a disillusionment that is speculative or subjective; if we are not to make sweeping generalizations from picked facts, this critical mood must not forthwith reduce the greatly good personages of history or of the present to the mean and the commonplace. They will henceforth have less mythological and legendary set-apartness; they will be more like plain us (a mixture of qualities), but we shall not have a flat landscape. Yonder researcher in science or history may be not a whit wiser in a thousand respects than his next-door neighbor; even in his laboratory and his library lower and higher motives may jostle each other, but in sheer fairness and objectivity we must perceive that a high end that he labels “truth” lures him on, restrains contrary motives, and rewards him from within itself. The artist who believes in his art against the odds of conventionalized criticism; the medical man who, as practitioner or as researcher, never swerves from the main purpose of the utmost increase of health; the social worker who really “believes in people”--in the human as such--when social prejudices make this belief costly; the religious prophet who at the expense of persecution or crucifixion calls upon us to lift up our eyes from our pettiness to the coming Kingdom of God--these are true specimens of what the human can be and sometimes is in point of motivation.

Between the more creative, or the more favorably placed, of these persons and the common run of men there is no gap or partition in the matter of motives. When we achieve a deep acquaintance with men, though we realize as never before the extent of their foibles, we come upon a residuum that evokes our respect. But deep acquaintance means something far more intimate and therefore insightful than our classifying devices. Of course, no one who exercises coercion understands those whom he coerces, and whoever exploits men is blinded by his point of view. A mere observer, moreover, an outsider standing aloof, may perceive more clearly than others do a part of what is going on in his fellows, yet his very aloofness, because it places inhibitions upon those whom he inspects, defeats his quest. Hence it is that the generalizations of the “hard-boiled” are never quite convincing to persons who live in friendly, cooperative relations with one another. The greater authorities upon what the common man is capable of wanting are those enlightened souls whose un-self-seeking unreserve and participation in the neighbor’s hopes and fears, and ups and downs, thaw out the ordinary barriers between man and man. Now, almost universally those who have had the widest experience in dealing with men on this basis of intimacy have the firmest faith in humanity. I do not mean sentimentalists who indulge humanitarian emotions at a distance, nor yet lovers who may--or may not--deceive themselves by over-idealization, but persons like some social workers whom anyone could name who unite a cool head with a warm heart. They, if anybody, should be disillusioned, for they, more often than the rest of us, witness frailty and frustration close at hand, yet they are most unshakenly respectful of the common man.

XV

THE MIXED MOTIVES OF BUSINESS

It is necessary to distinguish between the qualities of the industrial system and the qualities of the men who run it. It is true that they have created it, that they endeavor to express themselves in it, and that they interpret themselves by their own creation; but it does not follow that they have succeeded particularly well in expressing themselves, or that their interpretation of themselves is adequate.

There was a time when our ancestors expressed themselves in idols, the work of their own hands and imaginations, and interpreted themselves thereby, even offering human sacrifice as a normal part of the system. But we know that the wants of these worshippers outran the prayers that, for the time being, they were able to frame. The man was better than his religion.

May it not be that industrial man is better than industrialism? And if so, is it not conceivable that the mechanism of business that now tyrannizes over us as ancient religions tyrannized over their worshippers may yet go through transformations as profound as those that separate the Druid from the believer in ethical monotheism?

The gravitation of the _system_, we have seen, is towards a depressing view of human nature, and unquestionably the system is to some extent forming men in its own image. But even as they yield to economic custom, they make excuses for yielding, and they hunt up excuses for the system that coerces them just as the idols of old coerced our ancestors. Such a system is as imperfect an index of the nature of man as would be a motor car running away down a hill because the brakes have been allowed to get out of order. In such a car human nature is both represented and misrepresented.

If, under such terms as “love of money,” “desire for gain,” “profit motive,” or “economic motive,” we think to explain the “go” of business, we shall be caught in an abstraction or over-simplification. It is as if one were to say that the reason why any man buys an automobile is that he desires to ride rather than walk. This is not misleading, but it is abstract and inadequate. The experience of riding, it is true, may beget a desire simply to ride and ride, and similarly the experience of making money may become a source of direct satisfaction; but any concrete situation is almost certain to be far less simple than this. The motives of business--later we shall see whether the same is true of the worker--are decidedly mixed. Let us see.

The vast majority of those who employ capital for the making of profits mingle their own daily labor in an intimate way with their capital. A truck-driver who owns his own truck; a small grocer who lives at the back of his grocery; a fisherman who owns his own nets and a “one-lunger” motorboat--what is the economic motive in their case? It is scarcely distinguishable from the motives of a skilled workman who makes no profits, but receives wages only. Enough for the family to eat; a comfortable home; opportunities for the children; recognition by one’s fellows as amounting to something; a chance at amusements and recreations (to own a radio-set and a motor-car, of course), and--very important--security against sickness and old age--these are the meanings of prosperity for such small capitalists, at least the fundamental and primary meanings.

One of these meanings, as desire for security, may become dominant; or secondary meanings may arise, as wanting to outdistance a particular competitor; and the individual may so identify himself with the mechanism of his occupation that his establishment becomes practically an end in itself. So complicated, and so modifiable, is the economic drive in its more simple and human aspects.

At the higher points in the scale of possessions and of power we see the same fundamental motives at work, but in changed proportions and with different proliferations. Some drives decrease or disappear simply because there is now a regular and abundant supply for the wants involved. When wealth comes, one no longer bothers much about mere necessities; instead, one reaches out for luxuries, for variety, or for intangible goods such as “standing” in “society” or in financial circles.

The desire for security, rather paradoxically, appears to grow rather than become quiescent when insecurity of the primary type recedes. The reason is that the possessor tends to identify himself and his family with his “pile,” so that whenever the “pile” increases, not only is there more to protect against shrinkage, but there is also a bigger-seeming self to feel the loss. It is said that perhaps no other single motive plays as large a part in the minds of the financially already-strong as longing to get safely above the buffets of circumstance--to be utterly secure. But how much must one accumulate if one is to be superior to the vicissitudes of fortune? In the words of Harry Lauder, “When is a man fu’? Eh? Eh?” I protect what I have by adding a financial outpost; then this requires protection. Thus the motive of security transforms itself into the policy of increasing possessions without limit.

Oddly enough, one of the motives of religion also is desire to be safe in a changing and largely unpredictable world.

I have been young, and now am I old; Yet have I never seen the righteous man forsaken, Nor his children begging bread.

The Lord is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear Even though the earth be removed And the mountains be cast into the sea.

Be not anxious ... for your Heavenly Father understands that ye have need of these things.

All things are yours.

From facts like these some persons have drawn the conclusion that unquenchable thirst for possessions is in reality “thirst for the Infinite” mistaking its own nature.

Another factor or phase of the motivation of business is thirst for power. But this, in turn, is not a single or uniform thing; it is complex and variable. What is it to experience power and to rejoice in it? It is to be able to express oneself; to have the experience of being a cause; to exercise some specific talent; to be noticed of men, or followed by them; to construct or create something, or to cause something to grow, and to have it to contemplate and to show to others (whether as farmer, breeder, artizan, author, artist, builder of a business or of a fortune); to feel stimulated instead of depressed in the face of obstacles; to feel that what one is doing is a game, a “sporting proposition”; to be fascinated by the everlasting “beyond”; to be thrilled by such an onward pull as a mountain climber feels who cannot be satisfied with any attained peak as long as a higher one is visible. Economic power may mean any of these; it may mean, too, possessing the means to do some desired thing outside the business, as patronizing art or learning, or carrying out a pet philanthropy.

When the economic motive takes the form of thirst for power, how like some of the motives of religion it becomes!

They that trust in the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles; They shall run and not be weary: They shall walk and not faint.

I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.

On the other hand, the power-motive can include, often does include, desire for mastery over the personality of others, and pugnacity or even destructive fury when they resist or stand in the way. Desire for selfhood and for mastering and creatively reconstructing the conditions of life, taken socially (_our_ selves, _our_ world), is the heart of ethical living; but, taken egoistically, it nurtures conceit, self-will, ruthlessness, and the illusion that achieved strength can satisfy by inbreeding with itself without creating beauty, or discovering truth, or promoting fellowship.

The motivation of the economic order is related, likewise, to our consciousness of the shortness of life. I am fleeting, but my property will be here after I have disappeared; can I not put the stamp of myself upon it? A college president repeatedly remarked to a man of wealth, “Mr. M, if I were in your place, I should build myself a monument.” This, and nothing more, time and again, until the man of wealth remarked one day, “Doctor, I have decided to build myself a monument, namely a building upon your campus.” To identify myself with something that will speak in my name when I am gone, something that will act upon men so that I still count with them--this, in some cases at least, is a constituent of the desire for gain. It may take the form of ambition merely to build up a great estate that shall bear my name; to perpetuate this estate in its integrity as long as the law permits; not only to endow my children and grandchildren with wealth, but also to prevent them from dissipating it; by my beneficence to be really good for something in the long future; to cause my name to be gratefully spoken of by future generations, forever, if possible.

Again, how like religion, with its interest in survival after death!

All things are yours, whether ... life or death.

Make to yourself friends of unrighteous Mammon (said Jesus derisively) so that they may receive you into everlasting habitations!

Clearly, then, we shall only partly understand the driving power of the economic system if we fail to perceive that, like science, art, and religion, it contains aspirations to be free, to be recognized by others, to fulfil the impulses of family affection, to enthrone personality above circumstance, to be a creator, and to baffle the grim Reaper.

The industrial revolution wrought havoc within this garden of motives. Factory production separates the experience of producing from the experience of consuming, thereby concealing something of the meaning of both. Moreover, in place of face-to-face dealings between men, which keep the human factor in the foreground, we now have mass or group relations between persons who never meet one another, and these relations are mediated on the side of capital by laws, rules, standards, and officials that represent a somewhat-less-than-human interest. The dominant assumption is one that can be expressed in a balance-sheet, which is merely a summary of the non-human aspects of a business--a summary, that is to say, of that to which no _meanings_ are as yet assigned. Was there ever anything more abstract than a balance sheet? The business man, his family and friends, his employes, his country, his church, the whole human race might be blest or injured to any extent by his business, but the balance-sheet would not yield the slightest hint of the fact. Yet the balance-sheet--this abstraction--is taken as the main guide of business conduct!

The moral tragedy of industrialism lies not in the fact that we are so bent upon mastering the material resources of the world, but in the abstraction of this mastery from the motives that started it going and that give it its only meaning. But we have not quite smothered ourselves with the works of our hands; the man within the business man, fortunately, is commonly inconsistent with business philosophy. Prosperity is not the measure of his satisfactions and desires. Though surrounded by plenty, he is restless; though efficient, he has not yet expressed himself. Something greater than industrialism is struggling to be born.

The evidence of this inner struggle can be seen in Rotary clubs and similar organizations, with their effort to promote friendliness among competitors, their interest in some forms of public welfare, and their emphasis upon “service” as the test of good business management. This talk about “service” does not yet mean, of course, that Jesus’ principle has been adopted and selfish ends abandoned; it certainly means that I make the largest profits by consulting my customer’s interests as well as my own; but even so, it contains a glimmering recognition that our real interests are mutual interests. Through this recognition some warmth and enlargement are coming to the business consciousness.

But there is another side to this consciousness--a side that likewise speaks of satisfactions not yet found. When men become nervously concerned for orthodoxy, assuming that an issue is already closed and that they have the key to it, we may be sure that there is a lurking skepticism within. Orthodoxy is organized distrust not only of unbelievers but also of believers, oneself included. And business orthodoxy grows apace!

Another sign that defence mechanisms are forming in the business mind is flight into generalizations and abstractions. I have spoken already of the element of insincerity in the perennial claim that public benefits flow from any and every scheme out of which I secure private gain. But this is more than mere tactics; it is more than an economic theory now outworn; it is also a flight into generalizations and abstractions. It has become so much a habit that it has secreted from itself a sense of sincerity. The business of coal-mining is ceasing to be to the owners the particular facts of this mine and these miners; it is something larger, more general and public. I do not think we can otherwise explain the tolerance of mine-owners towards the facts revealed to a Senate committee that recently investigated the human conditions at mines in Western Pennsylvania. It is true that the stock-and-bond method of capitalizing an enterprise makes it difficult for the absentee owners, whether of a mine, a factory, or a power plant, to know what is going on. But it is not merely the absentees who escape the force of facts; managers who are close to the works do it too. In short, there is more or less shrinking on the part of business men from the literal actualities of business and industry; the motives thereof are not at peace among themselves, and the manhood of these men has not yet found the way of adequate self-expression. What the business man “really wants” he has still largely to find out.

XVI

MOTIVES OF THE WORKINGMAN

If you want to know the inside of the worker’s mind, do not ask him any generalized questions about it, for, like the capitalist, the employe has his attention fixed upon the mechanisms of industry and upon the particular things that, at the moment, he thinks will better his condition. A generalized answer from him may throw no more light upon his complex springs of action than “love of money” throws upon the conduct of captains of industry. Do not ask his employer, either, what the worker really desires, for the employer will apply to others some over-simple explanation that parallels the one that he applies to himself.

Our best sources of general information are men and women who have lived and labored side by side with the workers in an endeavor to understand and help them--persons like Carleton Parker, Helen Marot, and Whiting Williams.[5] The return from such studies is not simple. You cannot compress the soul of the workingman or of anybody else into a simple formula, nor can you explain him by naming the social or economic class to which he belongs. The pigeonholing of men, by the way, is one of the major immoralities!

What the workingman wants, first of all, is work; he wants to be sure of a job. This means, for him, his foothold upon this earth. He wants to know where the next meal is coming from, and the more thoughtful individual determines that sickness and old age must not find the cupboard empty if he can prevent it. How like his employer, who likewise is struggling to rise above the vicissitudes of existence!

The workingman wants a job that gives him standing among his fellows. High pay can give him such standing; or an occupation that requires skill, or judgment, or daring; or even connection with a renowned or admired enterprise. Thus again, employer and employe meet in a common desire for social recognition.

The worker is bent upon amusements and recreations. They occupy his mind even at his labor, especially where high subdivision of labor permits the hands to be employed almost mechanically. Moreover, with the increasing mechanization of industrial processes, which implies ever decreasing spontaneity and self-expression, and ever-deepening dulness in the routine, thought turns with ever greater insistence to amusements that promise contrasting experiences of freedom, variety, strong stimulation or excitement, and social contacts. Not so unlike the experience of the employer, for he too, as his business becomes mechanized, builds up for himself a second world in which real living is contrasted with work.

Family interests affect the worker about as they affect other persons, but with this important difference in the application: Whereas the capitalist seeks to make the future secure for his children by endowing them with property, the workingman endeavors, largely through the education of his children, to get them out of his economic status into a higher one, such as that of a “white-collar job” for the son and clerical work or school-teaching for the daughter.

Widespread, too, is “land-hunger,” particularly among agricultural workers, though not exclusively among them by any means. To have “a place that one can call one’s own”; to put thought and muscle upon a garden or a house, feeling that the results will not at once slip away out of one’s hands and sight; to express one’s very own taste without let or hindrance; to have one’s personality identified in the community with something stable, like real estate--here is one focus of the ambition of many and many a worker.

Closely related to this attachment for the land is an impulse--alas, how often thwarted--to express one’s individuality in and through one’s work. You can witness the joy of creation in a child who for the first time makes a whistle that really whistles; in a housewife who achieves a new flavor in her pickles or luxuriant blossoms upon her window-plants; in a blacksmith when he fits and tempers a piece of iron just right; in anybody who performs the whole process of creation from raw material to finished product. Even in factories which, by subdivision of tasks, make this impossible, there appears now and then a partial compensation in that workmen identify themselves imaginatively with the establishment or its products. Notice the pride in the machine that one superintends, or in a piano or a locomotive that one has helped build.

The worker wants a large wage, but it is not true that this is his sole or all-dominant concern. Time and again opportunity for larger wages is rejected in favor of opportunity for self-expression, or pride of workmanship, or social recognition. Nor is the desire for maximum wages an altogether simple motive. Increase of income may mean saving or insurance; it may mean education for the children; or more family excursions into open spaces; or a radio set in the home, or what not? The other day a gentleman remarked, “I have been amazed at the intelligence of my chauffeur who, as far as schools are concerned, is an uneducated man. The secret of it is that he has procured a radio set wherewith he listens to lectures and sermons. Every Sunday, he says, he hears a sermon by an eminent clergyman.”

It is folly to look upon the labor movement as simply organized grabbing. It may become this, of course, precisely as a corporation may become a depersonalized snatching-tool for capital. But the demand for reasonable hours of labor, for decent working conditions, for a living wage, for collective bargaining, and recently for a share in the management of industries represents a wide and deep motivation. Everything that “my family” means to a man, or social recognition, or security, or desire for individual selfhood is included in the movement.

Yet it is not possible to take a roseate view of the pressure of industrialism upon the spirit of either employe or employers and financiers. A man who was subsisting upon the borderline between worker and employer had opportunity for gain by a shady transaction. It consisted in taking surreptitious advantage of a municipality in such a way that permanent gain would accrue to a corporation with which he was “in cahoots.” He laughed at scruples, saying, “I’m going to get mine while the getting is good. They’re all doing it.” Of course it isn’t true that all are doing it, but will anyone deny that the system in which both worker and capitalist have become enmeshed exercises upon both of them a gravitational pull away from the wholesome motives that have been named in this and the preceding sections, and towards a narrow-minded policy of _getting_ simply as such?

Industrialism in its present form unquestionably pushes into the background the motives of concrete well-living, and brings into the foreground a desire for “efficiency” or “results” as measured by a mechanical or abstract standard. Both employer and employe feel impelled to get the most possible out of each other, for the system as such (and its leaders insist that its “as-suchness” is both natural and reasonable) has no inherent reference to a possible mutuality in well-living for all concerned. Well-living is not the job of business or of industry, least of all mutual well-living; instead, conflict of interests is assumed to be basic and permanent.

In this assumed conflict of interests, possession is the objective. Hence the employer, since he already has possessions, which mean power, has an advantage which the worker sees no way to offset except by arbitrary action or inaction. Hence effort to “get by” with the least exertion; mechanized listlessness; loss of heart (“I’m not going to strain myself in order to increase his profits”); the warlike strategy of the union; resentment when defeated in this game of “get”; and, when conflict reaches a climax, resort to force. And, in and through all, the Tempter whispering that class-interest is a finality in our organized life, and that force is the final arbiter of everything.

This on the side of labor; and, on the side of capital, parallel abstraction from the more vital enjoyments, parallel drying and hardening of the mental tissue, and final resort to cunning and force. There is scarcely a mean motive, apart from brutal lust, that does not now come into play upon both sides. And yet, the same men, both employers and employes, are partly actuated in their economic

## activities by motives that culminate in religion!

XVII

ECONOMIC PRODUCTION AS A MODE OF SELF-REALIZATION

Within the evolution of economic production one can read a story of the gradual molding of the human clay by human hands. Yes, _the_ story of it, for the range of the interests that enter into the day’s work is without limit, and the same interests, modified by the day’s work, radiate outward into all phases of culture.

Hunting makes a hunter; fishing makes a fisherman; when man achieved the domestication of animals, he achieved likewise some taming of himself. When seeds began to be planted, and fixed dwellings to be built, then seed-thoughts were sown in the mind, and he who erected a roof “built better than he knew,” for an advance took place in the structure of domestic society. In our own country we have seen the frontier produce the frontiersman, and industrialism a vastly different type of personality. Slave labor in the south created one sort of capitalist, free labor in the north another sort. The economic process and its economic product--whether weapon, tool, commodity of any sort--makes the man as truly as the man makes the product. The story of the day’s work is the story of man, discovering himself, changing and diversifying himself, sometimes maiming his mind as well as his members with tools, weapons, and machines of his own devising, but again recovering himself and going forward.

In this sense an economic interpretation of history is possible; but it means, not that the whole of culture is controlled by “desire for gain” or any other narrow (and indeed abstract) spring of action, but that what we do with natural resources influences all sides of human nature and capacity. The new history, employing the polarizing lenses of psychology, reveals everywhere and at all periods unbroken continuity between, on the one hand, men’s daily occupation of transforming raw materials, of getting and spending, of buying and selling, of employing and being employed, and, on the other hand, the substance of the social life and of the political order, literature and the fine arts, religion, science, and philosophy.

The economic order, that is to say, is not a thing _per se_. If church worship, or the goings-on at an amusement park make a strong appeal because they are different from the daily grind, even here we see the continuity. It is the man, the personal self, that has gone into the grind and that has come out of it seeking something specifically different. The personal self, though it has remarkable capacity for inconsistency and forgetfulness, contains no really watertight compartments. A point of view, or an attitude, that has become habitual in any sphere of life can control us in subtle as well as overt ways. For example, the laymen who most strenuously insist that ministers should attend to “spiritual” affairs, letting business alone, represent in their own persons, and that vividly, the impossibility of a real separation of religious experience from economic experience.

Production and distribution of economic goods at its best--nay, why should we not say at its normal point--is, then, a working together with God in the creation, not so much of plants and fruits and domestic animals and structures of wood, stone, and steel, as man himself. The economic order is a chief sphere, if not the chief one, for the realization of personal selves.

This is the only coherent meaning that we can give to it. Therefore, whenever we find it turning out undeveloped, depressed, or distorted personalities, they must not be taken as by-products or incidents; they are the main concern, and therefore the system is here sick and self-defeating. To say that we are engaged in making goods and not men is in any case simply not so. We actually do make men of one sort or another in all our sowing and reaping, mining and smelting, manufacture, commerce, and finance. For better or for worse this is so; there is no escaping it.

But our modern world deludes itself on this point by endeavoring to maintain and cultivate a spiritual life _alongside_ the economic. By “spiritual” life I mean the only thing that it can signify to us moderns, namely, regard for personal selves, all selves within our purview. This concept of the spiritual includes a scale of attitudes long enough to reach all the way from comforting a frightened child to worshipping God. We are self-deceived in that we have turned over the making of selves to schools, homes, and churches as their specialty, for the making of selves takes place just as truly and not less effectively in and through the economic order. We have rather lazily assumed, too, that the superior personal relations experienced or talked about in home, school, and church will somehow--rarely does anyone even attempt to say just how--pass over into the field, the factory, the market, and the financial institution.

Undoubtedly considerable seepage into economic relations does occur. For, even where the system is most mechanized, it is not quite shameless, and the sporadic cases of concern for human values are neither few nor insignificant in quality. Nevertheless, on the whole, we undertake to base our economic conduct upon economic principles that are supposed (though mistakenly) to be self-sustaining or even self-evident, and our ethical and religious life upon a contrasting set of principles, supposed (though mistakenly) to be likewise self-sustaining. The result in multitudes of instances is a dual life; always it is confusion, blurring, and relative inefficiency in the human concerns that most count.

In fact, the seepage from our spiritual life into the economic is large or fully offset by a reverse penetration of depersonalized economic principles and practices into the very citadels of spirituality. Consider, for example, the prerogatives assumed by and commonly granted to “the man who pays the bill.” Does the entirely unspiritual fact of carrying the purse give one a preferred position with respect to spiritual relations within the family? Yes or no? Does economic power, or does it not, either intentionally or by mere drift, determine what shall be soft-pedaled in schools, colleges, and theological seminaries? No one takes the trouble to deny that laymen of means have influence in the churches altogether out of proportion both to their number and to their religious intelligence, and no one questions that this influence colors the teachings called religious.

The spiritual does not succeed in maintaining itself alongside the economic. In the nature of the case, it cannot do so; the economic experience is bound, for good or for ill, to be the area in which some of the chief character-forming forces are generated.

The present partition of ourselves into secular and religious, industrial and cultural, practical and idealistic is deceptive and ruinous. It results in half-conscious gropings, tangled purposes, self-defeating self-assertions, fallacious self-justifications, and diluted standards of spirituality. In consequence of it the economic order lacks definite meaning. It should mean production for use and for the enlargement of life all along the line, but instead it is not unambiguously directed towards any human good whatsoever. It feeds the hungry (some of them), but it also exploits their hunger. It indirectly supports education, science, art, philanthropies, and religion; but at the same time it promotes senseless luxury, conspicuous spending, a commercialized amusement fever, political corruption, and the kind of national economy that makes for war. If it has sharpened the wits of many, and opened to them wider vistas, it has likewise made multitudes of minds hard, materialistic, mechanical. It has produced class consciousness and class conflict so general and so acute that sober observers are wondering whether the system is not bound to destroy itself by its internal friction.

We shall not recover from this sickness by developing more spiritual life alongside an industrialism that treats persons as means rather than as ends, but only by spiritualizing the industrial system itself. The obvious necessity, the only way to spiritualize industrialism, is to develop through the entire range of its personnel the joy of being a producer, as distinguished from the satisfaction of receiving wages or making profits. When motives focus upon wages and profits, which are extraneous both to the thing produced and to the persons who use the product, the realization of one’s self in one’s work is squeezed out, and the realization of other selves as benefited by us is squelched. Moreover, when the motives for production become thus uncreative, the goods produced convey to the consumer little or no ethical meaning; he procures and uses them as mere things, ignoring the human life that has gone into them, and therefore realizing no spiritual relationship by means of them.

If men are to be religious in any deep sense _within_ the economic experience, the raw materials and the finished products that pass from hand to hand, and the machinery for manufacture and distribution, must acquire something of a sacramental character, becoming outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. To make a button, or to buy and sell one is, in reality, to participate in a great complex of personal relationships, whether high or low; right here we determine, in part, the level of our common life.

On the other hand, when the massive walls, arches, and towers of a magnificent house of worship arise upon some lofty point in a great center of population, what spiritual significance can one see therein? You answer that multitudes will worship God inside this structure. But what of the structure itself as an _economic fact_? Human life, the life of persons to whom Jesus attributed value beyond measure, went into the quarrying of these stones, the smelting of this metal, the mixing of this mortar, the financing of a multitude of major and minor operations. What happened to this life of persons through its

## participation in the making of a sanctuary? Did men find God, and one

another as sons of God, here? What is the spiritual significance, moreover, of the contribution that I make for the erection of this towering monument to our faith? How did this money come into my keeping? That is, what human relationships, what makings or marrings of personality, what wages of bitterness or hardenings of heart have gone thus indirectly into the edifice that is meant to signify divine fatherhood and human brotherhood?

Is our religious thinking so feeble that we actually expect to solve the problem of worship by saying and singing within the sanctuary sentiments that are contradicted by the very walls and roof that shelter the congregation? On the other hand, is our economic thinking to be so abstract as to go on assuming that the aspirations of the heart of man are for the inside of the sanctuary, and not equally for quarry, mine, mill, and banking house? The unstable state of both organized religion and the industrial and economic structure at the present time suggests that we are in the grip of an inevitable issue. It is not over-rash to surmise that we are going to have a spiritualized industrial and economic order, or else a pseudo-spiritual and actually degraded religion. Degraded, that is, by increasing subservience to an unspiritual system of dealing with the material resources of nature.

That there is any inescapable drag in the direction of such a fatal system does not appear from any broadly objective scrutiny of the motives of either capitalist or worker. On both sides mixed motives are the rule, and the two mixtures largely coincide. On either side one or another motive gains or loses influence by the shifting of conditions that are within our power. It is as if the ancient word had been spoken to our generation: “I have laid before you life and death; choose life.”

After three years’ experience as a worker in mines and factories, Whiting Williams declares that the mainspring of the worker--we have seen that this is true also of the employer--is the wish for worth, the wish to be a person, to realize that he counts and that others recognize the fact; and, Williams adds, “through our work, if anywhere in all the universe, we may hope to become a person, meaningful and valuable--aye, indispensable--to others.”[6]

XVIII

THE MOTIVE THAT IS IN ALL AND THROUGH ALL

The lines of our inquiry converge upon the following conception of the motives of men: Rooted in the conditions of individual and racial life are various “drives” that are related to nutrition, sex, avoidance of discomfort and danger, activity and repose, and the presence or conduct of other members of the species. But these are not elementary units that in their aggregate constitute human motivation. For, in and through them, using them, giving meaning to them, and creating new meanings through them, is the affirmation of a personal self, and the coordinate and equally inevitable affirmation of other selves. And this affirmation of selves does not consist in sucking at the breast of Nature, but in reconstructing the gifts of Nature, and in constructing and reconstructing ourselves and society to suit ourselves as our experiences, desires, and insights evolve.

There is an old distinction, which is both useful and necessary though it frequently is ignored, between two senses of the term “motive.” This term sometimes signifies psychic pressure in one direction or another without forethought or consideration of results--what one may call a _vis a tergo_ or “push from behind.” In this sense, thirst for water, or sex-hunger, or spontaneous liking or disliking counts as a motive. On the other hand, an end-in-view, something that awakens desire when we think about it, a “pull from in front,” likewise goes under the name of motive.

The difference between a psychic push and a psychic pull is not merely that between immediate and postponed fulfillment of action or of satisfaction, nor yet this plus the difference between simple and complicated drives. There is a further and even more important distinction to be made. Consider, for example, the following series of cases:

1--The reaction of a carnivore upon smelling raw flesh.

2--The conduct of an acquaintance of mine who, when sugar grew scarce during the War, seized an opportunity to buy a barrel of it for the use of his family.

3--In a canyon not far from where these words are being written, a county is building a great and costly dam in order to control the flood waters of the surrounding mountain slopes. Control of these waters means safety for life and property, irrigation for orange groves, and a supply of water for domestic use.

4--An acquaintance of mine worked hard and spent little in order that a son, still a small boy, might have a college education. Meantime the state in which they lived taxed itself heavily on behalf of a system of education that reaches from the kindergarten to the university.

An intimate history of the conduct of the individuals concerned in each of these cases would reveal primitive urges, as those for food, for escape from peril, for care of offspring; but in all instances except the first it would reveal also something more than just a summation of such rudimentary drives. Even in case 2 they are redirected, canalized, weighed against one another, dovetailed together, related to the whole significance of the family for its members. In cases 3 and 4 it is still more obvious that work has been done _upon_ the primitive drives, not merely by them, for there is organization of selves and organization of society that are not at all predictable from any scrutiny of raw drives; indeed, here power over conduct flows out of valuations that, a little way back in our history, could not have been felt or understood. We have reached a point where we are able to say what sort of selves we want to be; we have begun to have preferences concerning types of society; already, through law, education, religion, and eugenics we are upon the edge of deliberate control of the evolution of our species.

Thus far, for the sake of convenience in dealing with a complicated matter, I have spoken of primitive or raw drives or pushes, for the most part, as though they were so many separate and distinct actualities. In fact, however, hunger, sex-attraction, and all the rest are generalizations. In the human species at least each actual instance of hunger is less simple than mere hunger; each instance of sex-attraction requires, if we are to describe it completely, something more than an isolated instinct. With man, an instinctive satisfaction is not the terminus of a railroad but an intermediate station through which as well as to which he moves. The whole truth is that, though the raw material of our personal selves is given to or thrust upon us, just as sap is given to or thrust upon a tree, nevertheless it is from the beginning human material; within it from the beginning personal selves are in process of forming themselves, and society is in process of forming itself. This motive is in all and through all the dynamics of human conduct.

You can stop mere hunger by filling the stomach, but by no stuffing process can you appease the life-urge that is human. Much of the devastating irony that Plato’s Socrates directs against the Sophists is based upon this truth. Gautama saw the merely negative aspect of it, but he did not perceive, as Jesus did, that creative self-activity--ethical love, for example--contains a satisfaction of its own--a satisfaction, too, that is by no means to be equated with other satisfactions, since it bestows value upon them or withholds it from them. Self-discipline is a fact; so is voluntary acceptance of work, and even of pain and loss and obloquy. If men revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, still you are blessed or happy if this experience comes because you are loyal to “the ever-coming Kingdom of God.” It is partly by this transvaluation of values, this conversion of our native drives, that men now and then transmute both their environment and themselves into forms that yield unprecedented beauty, and truth, and fellowship. In human experience, I repeat, the motive of being a personal self among personal selves is in all and through all. It may be weak or retarded, or it may become distorted, yet even in conditions most unpropitious we find the spark not quite extinguished.

A few years ago, a one-act play, a curtain-raiser, entitled “A Morality Play for the Leisured Class,”[7] was given at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. There were two characters, a modern man who had just been killed in an automobile smash-up, and an experienced inhabitant of the other world. The deceased, gradually coming to himself, and wondering where he is, calls out in the misty twilight that surrounds him,

“Is anybody there?”

The mist clears away, revealing a shining Presence with wings. The Presence asks,

“Can I do anything for you, Sir?”

The deceased wants to know what’s to be had here.

“Anything you like,” is the reply. “Anticipating your desires, I have already taken thirty years from your age.”

“Perpetual youth, eh?” exclaims the newcomer. “It looks as if I’d come to the good place, after all. But what about the golden crown?”

“You can have one if you like,” comes the answer, and presto! a starry golden crown encircles the stranger’s brow.

“Exactly according to the specifications,” says he. “And now, what else have you got here?”

“Anything you like,” replies the angel.

“I can have everything I desire? Absolutely everything?” asks the soul excitedly.

“Subject only to certain restrictions imposed by the nature of the place,” is the reply. “There is neither pain, nor suffering, nor struggle here. Anything else that you desire I will procure for you.”

There follows a succession of requests and realizations: The best of things to eat and drink; luxurious living quarters; “period” furniture and decorations; masterpieces of painting and statuary; the society of beauteous women (Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and others). But each of these exalted experiences proves to be insufficient and finally cloying, and the experimenter demands a change. “This everlasting perfection palls,” he says. “The sights are too uniformly beautiful, the ladies too uniformly clever, charming, and obliging.... I know what I want! I want some work.” But he discovers that, since work implies wanting something that one cannot have by merely wanting it, whereas here one gets a thing by merely asking for it, the satisfaction of work is out of the question.

He and his obliging attendant ransack their minds to think of something that might possibly relieve the tedium. The attendant, at his wits’ end and discouraged, turns to go, saying, “I don’t know what to propose, Sir. But if anything occurs to you,” ...

“Hold on!” cries the seeker; “I’ve got it! I want some pain; that’s it.”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” comes the polite answer, “but no one is allowed to have any pain in this place. You’ll get used to the restriction after you’ve been here a few thousand years. They all feel as you do at first, but they all get accustomed, after a while, to this mode of existence.”

“But,” ejaculates the neophyte, “I can’t stand this damned everlasting bliss! I’d rather be in hell.”

The Presence, stepping back and looking at him in astonishment, asks, “And wherever do you think you _are_, Sir?”

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