CHAPTER III

DR. McDOUGALL’S X

1. AT THE BECK OF THIRTEEN MASTERS

Dr. William McDougall, once of Oxford and Harvard, now of Duke University in North Carolina, came to America as one of England’s leading psychologists. If he is less well known to the public than some other psychologists, it is because he is less eminently “verbalized” along the lines of gripping, every-day speech. As an example of his literary style, as well as of his philosophy, take his definition of Instinct.

“An inherited or innate psycho-physical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or, at least, to experience an impulse to such action.”

McDougall is nothing if not cautious. His subtile mind foresees every objection which can be made, and tries to forestall it. The result is a labyrinth in which even a professor, lacking a golden thread from the head of Ariadne to guide him, must--and does--frequently get lost. And yet all that this famous definition actually means is that we are born in such a way that we act in such a way.

As to whether the way is marked by physical roads or by roads which are something else; as to whether these roads are bequeathed to us by our ancestors, or whether we just have them, McDougall does not commit himself. But he implies that there is something in us which pays attention or does not pay attention, and that this something does not always follow a road even if it sees it. Sometimes it merely wants to follow, but forbears. Each road, we learn as we continue to read from this, his “Outline of Psychology,”[32] has a lure of its own--as roads are apt to have--something which he calls the “hormic impulse,” or “hormic faculty.” And sometimes, instead of having it always acting from the roads themselves and moving us with a pull, he seems to think of it as in or behind us and giving us a push. In its latter position it can easily be mistaken for a will--even for a free will. To experience an impulse to act, and then not to act as the impulse would have you--is not that to be free to act as you like?

Yes; but what determines the like? Has the slave-driver gone, or has he merely stepped into the background?

A hormic impulse is a “striving” impulse. We are born with these impulses, therefore they are “instincts.” William James gave us twenty-four--the instincts of climbing, imitation, emulation, rivalry, pugnacity, anger, resentment, sympathy, hunting, fear, approbation, acquisitiveness, kleptomania, constructiveness, play, curiosity, sociability, shyness, cleanliness, modesty, shame, love, jealousy, parental love. Dr. Watson says he has been able to find none of them. Dr. McDougall rejects some and discovers several new ones, leaving thirteen in all--which was for him an unlucky number.

Instead of being free, we have now thirteen masters, always wrangling among themselves, it is true, but never consulting us about their decisions. If we hesitate to obey one of them it is only because some other happens for the moment to be stronger. Or we are mastered by a combination; by a bloc. If we decide to move from the city to the country, it is probably a farm bloc. According to this theory, a sufficiently knowing person could calculate your conduct in advance.

Draw two straight lines of the same length, or of different lengths, as you prefer, from a single point; call that point yourself; let the direction of the lines represent the direction of the instincts, and let the relative lengths of the lines represent the relative strength of the instincts. If you then draw two other lines, each one parallel to one of the first two, and if you finally draw a diagonal from the original point to the opposite corner of the parallelogram you have just constructed, this diagonal will represent the action you will take when played upon by two hormic impulses at the same time.

But is this not free will, to do as you are moved to do? It was Schopenhauer, I think, who said that if a stone thrown through the air could be conscious, it would imagine that it was free; would translate gravity, momentum, resistance and the like into terms of personal desire. And it was Will Durant who, in his “Story of Philosophy,” said that Schopenhauer was right. This, of course, is but another way of saying that free will is an illusion. It seems to come from within us, but in reality comes from without. And so it must be if we are the playthings of these hormic, instinctive impulses with which we are said to be born.

McDougall has specifically repudiated this interpretation of his theory. He calls himself a “Vitalist”; a believer in an active “life-principle,” in something which, if not an actual soul, is at least a mind. But being an eminently fair-minded gentleman, he has been at pains to marshal together all the objections to his own views which he can think of, and he has proven himself to be a better enemy propagandist than defender of his own territory.

Thus C. E. M. Joad, a British writer, author of “The Babbitt Warren,” in his essay, “The End of Ethics,”[33] compared McDougall to Watson and to Freud, and finds that one and all “preclude free will.” And he adds: “Whether ... the conscious will overcomes the unconscious desire, or whether the unconscious desire overcomes the conscious will, is a matter which appears to lie outside our control.”

Mr. Joad does not go half far enough. Under the McDougall hypothesis, the conscious will overcoming the unconscious desire is a matter which can never happen. Will is merely the conscious result of a war of unconscious impulses. But he is quite right in believing that it makes no difference whether a striving be called an “instinct,” as by McDougall; an “emotion-reflex,” as by Watson; or a “libido,” with or without a “complex,” as by Freud. If we were born with it, or found it innate within us, or acquired it through circumstances not of our making, then we are its puppets or the puppets of its fellows. So Mr. Joad quite logically groups McDougall, Watson and Freud together as determinists, all the protests of the eminent English professor to the contrary notwithstanding.

McDougall nevertheless is possessed by an idea which negatives such a conclusion, negatives his whole philosophy; but he has never let it possess him wholly. That is why he has become so subtile, so difficult to read. Among those objects “of a certain class” which his thirteen innate or inherited instincts have moved him to pay attention to, is the materialistic physical science of the nineteenth century. And the conclusions of that science emphatically forbid the conclusion which he longs to arrive at in his own particular sphere. He wants to be free; to have a soul. And this old science tells him that he can’t be free, nor have anything of the sort.

The trouble, of course, comes from the “law” of the Conservation of Energy--the idea that force is incapable of being either increased or diminished; that the amount of power which enters into anything is the amount of power which eventually issues from it, no more and no less. If will be anything but the net result of a group of pushes and pulls, it obviously contravenes this law by “creating” enough force to upset the balance--that is, unless we interpret the law very liberally and take it to mean that the sum total of the force of the entire universe alone is constant. In that case, if the will can smuggle in a little energy without having to pay for it, so to speak, it could be free to that extent.

The nineteenth century provided against this catastrophe by making matter indestructible. No particle of it was to be permitted to give up the ghost--a ghost which might be snatched by the will and used to wreck the materialistic machine. So even if matter had some energy locked up in it somehow, it was going to stay locked up. Those were the days of a static universe; of a world completely finished, set going and deserted by a God who had gone out of business and was never expected to return. And to prove it, scientists devised instruments, measured the energy--income and output, found that the two balanced, and boldly announced that they always “must” balance.

Naturally, McDougall is not so crude as to accept either those experiments or those theories today. It takes a popular author to do that--one whose reading stopped or was curtailed many years ago. After saying that the only ground for doubting the freedom of the will is that offered by the strict determinists who contend for the universality of the Law of Causation--a dependent brother of the Law of Conservation,--after saying this, he boldly adds that this law “is not susceptible of being proved”; has “had its day”; and “is merely a clog on speculation.”

Nothing could be more hopeful. We seem to be setting out on a magnificent, unincumbered highway. But McDougall is a born reconciler of irreconcilables. He can not abandon Conservation even after having repudiated it. Earlier predilections, no doubt, bar the way. So he seeks to retain both his Will and the Law which forbids it. Fit successor to James and to Santayana, he presents the spectacle of a house divided against itself. Yet he lacks the wistful melancholy of the unbelieving Catholic, who found the intellect so hard and dry and useless when made supreme over all, but strove faithfully to worship it nevertheless. Nor has he the reckless inconsistency of the unbelieving Protestant, James, who could say one thing heartily, and then, in another mood, say something quite the opposite--no less heartily.

McDougall is neither hearty nor melancholy. He has partially accepted Freud, and has worked in the same clinic with Jung. He is a psychiatrist. His important contributions to knowledge all deal with the abnormal. He has studied insects and animals. But such thirst for the human as he owns to has been largely satisfied by his practical ministrations to the sick and semi-demented. Therefore he is able to weave his intricate patterns of words about the incompatible presumptions of his argument with a certain appearance of enjoyment, and seems to fancy that when the thread of the discourse has become sufficiently tangled it will have brought the incompatibles together.

“Resolutions of the will are not bolts from the blue,” he asserts.[34] And he does not see that this commits him hopelessly to the mechanistic camp. For resolutions of the will must be bolts from the blue--just that, exactly--or they do not transcend the law of the Conservation of Energy. And if they do not add a jot or tittle by way of effect to what is already found in the cause, they are not free.

“Shall we say that Divine [clearly he means ‘human’] Reason sits at the head, controlling the fierce passions that reside in the belly as a charioteer controlls a team of savage steeds?” asks McDougall.[35]

“Aye!” cried the great Aristotle, centuries ago.

“Hardly!” exclaims our Carolina professor. “Reason is not a conative [i. e. striving] energy that may be thrown on this side or that in our moral conflicts.”[36] “Reason is not that X of which we are in search, though it plays an important part in bringing that X to bear.”[37]

It begins to have the interest of a detective story. X marks the spot where the Will is to be found--and if X is something superior to Reason, all the better. But it is clearly asserted here that the Will is not the Reason; that Reason merely plays a part in bringing the Will to bear. That is, Reason guides, directs, aims the Will? No; for in such a case Reason would be the master, the mysterious Mr. X after all--which is contrary to the hypothesis. Is Reason, then, a channel of information, an open book where the Will reads the latest returns from the environment, so that there may be no action without knowledge? It looks that way for the moment. But McDougall goes on: “The X of which we are in search is always an impulse awakened within the sentiment of self-regard. It is the desire that I, the precious self ... shall realize in action the ideal of conduct which it has formulated and accepted.”[38]

So X is an impulse wakened within a sentiment, which[39] he tells us is the “most general term to denote all acquired conative (i. e. striving) trends.” This makes X an impulse wakened within an acquired striving trend. And if we turn back to the definition of instinct we are reminded that a disposition to experience an impulse is an instinct, and therefore not acquired. So the impulse must have slumbered in a disposition before the sentiment within which it eventually woke had been acquired. X is also a desire belonging to an “I” which has formulated and accepted an ideal of conduct. Are we ringing the changes upon an octave of bells, or are we trying to say something?

[Illustration: PROFESSOR WILLIAM MCDOUGALL

Are we trying to say something?]

Here we have Reason, Desire, Impulse, Instinct and Sentiment, not to mention Trend, all getting together and trying to make a Will with the help of an X and an I. We were out fishing, and just when the prospect seemed encouraging for a bite of something edible, we catch a wad of verbal flounces, beneath which if anything be concealed it looks strangely like a gudgeon in the shape of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” rechristened as the Sentiment of Self-Regard. Or it may be the “libido” of Freud, or the “egotistic impulse” of Dr. Alfred Adler, of Vienna, which even Freud has denounced as “founded entirely upon the impulse of aggression,” leaving “no place at all for love.” It is a Will such as Dr. Watson might have made, had he been making one. But at least, you will say, it is a Will. Yet is it?

A Will must have power, else it cannot move at all. And it must have the direction of that power, else it has no choice as to the way in which it shall move. X, being an impulse and a desire, may be said to have power. But McDougall puts it within an acquired striving trend, and my dictionary tells me that a trend is an inclination to move in a particular direction--which is precisely what an instinct is. The channel, you will note, has already been dug. Whatever was acquired was foredoomed to be acquired. The ideal of conduct which the “I” formulated and accepted lay hidden from the first, with no possibility of its being rejected in favor of some other ideal. The “balance sheet” of the Law of Conservation has been retained, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

McDougall has also attempted to make a Will out of attention.

Now attention is probably the slightest piece of luggage of all our inner impedimenta. It is such a little thing. It weighs almost nothing. Can’t we get at least “attention” past the old-fashioned scientific custom-house without paying duty under the Conservation law? This looks at first like a feasible scheme. But the customsmen are lynx-eyed. Once we submit to their jurisdiction they will let nothing pass, though it weigh less than the tiniest bit of fuzz off the end of a feather boa. Thus far McDougall has been held up as an undesirable citizen by these hoary custodians, and not allowed to land in Mechanistia. They have been alarmed by the suspicious manner of the traveler. But in thinking that he has any free will hidden in his theoretical baggage they are deceived.

This “interest” or “attention” with which we have to deal, is “conative.”[40] And conation is “a convenient Latin word ... to denote the striving aspect of the mental processes.”[41] I am afraid that it is all it is, a convenient Latin word. For “instinct” too is a “direct conative trend.”[42] Here we have two kinds of striving, only one of which is said to be direct, that is to have a direction. But this directed striving comes first; it is in-born, instinctive. Naturally so is instinct, “a disposition which determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class.” But in trying to find a Will it is precisely this determining which we are interested in. We don’t care what makes the water run in the ditch, we want to know what digs the ditch. In McDougall it is always instinct. He has studied insects too much. He has seen too many lunatics whose wills were paralyzed. “Instinctively” he gives us only the mechanisms which he thinks he finds in grasshoppers.

Once, indeed, he does get up to the level of birds. On page 255 of the book[43] which contains the most complete expression of his theories, he says: “The only instance of pure cognition, as distinct from recognition, are those in which a creature is confronted for the first time with an object of the kind that evokes an instinctive reaction.... As when the hen nightingale hears for the first time the song of the male.”

We are back to a first time, so for the moment are freed from habit. But “instinctive reaction” evoked by an object in the environment promptly takes us in charge. If the hen nightingale has no X, neither have we. She is merely a concrete example of the class “creature,” to which we unquestionably belong. And obviously the hen can pay no attention to objects in which she has no instinctive interest, since it is instinct which “determines” the disposition to attend.

But what if the hen sees a snake as well as hears a song? Can reason dig a channel for her striving which will lead her to make a detour on her way past snake towards song? Is Reason the X? Impossible. “Reason is not a conative [striving] energy.” Then it has no power, it cannot dig ditches.

It cannot even control attention, since that is the yes-man of instinct, the only thing having power which we have yet encountered. So if the hen nightingale decides to risk the possibility of laying unfertilized eggs rather than the possibility of making a snake’s dinner--if she turns a deaf ear to the song of the male and simply goes away from there, it will be because her instinct of self-preservation proved a stronger and a quicker ditch-digger and trend-giver for her hormic impulses than did her sexual or maternal instincts. Or perhaps it was her instinct of self-regard which led her to take wing.

No doubt it will be argued that it was Reason which put before her the probable consequences of coming too close to a snake, reason based on experience or observation. Let us suppose that Reason did have this information--though I don’t see how a powerless reason could acquire anything,--what is it going to do with it? Call it to the hen’s attention? It cannot. Her attention wears the shackles of instinct. She moves without waiting to know. Moving without knowing why is the very core of instinctive behavior.

And yet McDougall assures us[44] that “conative [striving] behavior is indicative of an energy that works teleologically [i. e. purposefully] and which is therefore radically different from the energies which physical science conceives as working always mechanistically.” He loves to console himself with sentences like this one. We grow more rational and less instinctive as we grow older. How perfectly true. But McDougall brings it about by having Reason “waken” in a world where no energy is required to amass and classify data and then bring them to the attention of an X in the face of thirteen instincts which among them possess all the power there is.

If Reason only were a bolt from the blue! Or if X were such a bolt and could lend Reason a little current! But X itself wakens in a particular instinct, self-regard, and it is wakened by nothing. X does not mark the place where the will is to be found, it marks the place where the _body_ is to be found. And what is McDougall’s conclusion of the whole matter? What one might expect. “The stallion arches his thick neck ... the bull bellows; the lion roars; the cat caterwauls; and the young man curls his mustache.”

2. PSYCHE WIELDS THE BROOM

In an unclaimed desert anyone may erect fences, but it is difficult to see how fences, especially when they are only imaginary, can earn dividends if they enclose no cattle. McDougall introduces us to a region where there is not even sand--only words. And nothing is required of these words, whether they be conveniently Latin or less conveniently English, except that they follow one another in grammatical order. He makes distinction after distinction; and as they are verbal distinctions merely, all that ensues when they contradict each other is a conflict like that of several contending currents of air.

We see now why Dr. Watson so much objected to the introspective method. In truth, “introspective” is an unhappy term. We may note what goes on inside of our bodies, and even of our brains to a certain extent; and give names to various thoughts, feelings and sensations, or to what we take to be such. We can tell in what order they occur. But this is not introspection in any literal sense, it is simply paying attention to things which are intimate and near. Actually to try to look inside of “ourselves,” implies that “we” are standing outside and looking in--an impossible situation. Its physical counterpart is the attempt to roll the eyeballs so as to get a view of the interior of the skull--a performance not to be recommended.

The outer world, physicists tells us, is a “continuum,” something all of a piece. A chair and the air around it are not so separate as one might suppose. It is the sense of touch and the sense of sight which distinguish so sharply between one and the other. Make the chair of glass, and the eye is not so certain. Lenses and mirrors can be so arranged as to project a visible chair which the hand cannot feel. Make the chair of aromatic wood and the sense of smell will perceive it as pervasively emanating from a vague center yet permeating the whole room.

But in dividing such a continuum we have at least the warrant of our senses. We remain practical. When we attempt to divide up the continuum perceived only by the inner self, such guides are lacking. We have to depend upon psychologists. And if we try to go further and cut the inner self, itself doing the cutting, we only commit subjective _hari-kari_, the sensation of which is very uncomfortable. This is the sort of metaphysics which is indeed but methodical befuddlement. Yet it is practiced, not by metaphysicians but by men calling themselves scientists; men who profess for the most part to despise both metaphysics and philosophy--dogmatic men, who never lose an opportunity for expressing their horror of dogma. Such misbehavior entitles anyone to the title “misbehaviorist,” whether he be a Watsonian or a Freudian, and McDougall, for all his agreeable manners, will have to be convicted.

R. H. Hingley, B.A., who signs himself a “research student in psychology, Edinburgh University,” picking and choosing such verbalization as pleases him, even attempts to reconcile McDougall with the impalpable Boris Sidis. Hingley writes as a friend of the accused, and in his book, “Psycho-Analysis,” proves it by defining “self-consciousness” as “a recognized and acknowledged synthesis of ... impulses.”[45] If that is all self-consciousness is, it is this same familiar nothing with which we have already had so much to do. Can you imagine a “synthesis” as existing by itself? In the case of gin, perhaps, for the atoms in synthetic gin are real atoms in good standing in their several communities brought together by no fault of their own. Nor even yet do they exist as gin except as there is something outside of themselves capable of conceiving of them as gin. They belong to the physical continuum--and generally it is safer to leave them where they belong.

I won’t ask what is to be expected of a synthesis of McDougallian hormic impulses. Another verbal whirlwind threatens to blow, and it will be better to keep out of it. But let us make a synthesis of matches.

Arrange a number of matches on the table before you so that they form a cross, a star, or any other geometrical figure. Then sweep them up in your hand and forget all about it. Where is the figure now? What has become of it? Have you at last succeeded in defying “natural law,” and annihilated something? No; the figure did not exist, as a figure, except in you. And if some trace of it be not in you now, as an “unconscious idea” or what not, it can be nowhere. It was only a form, and form is an entity only by grace of the perceiver of form.

It was you who perceived certain relations among the matches. The relations were not in the matches. Unless the matches managed somehow to get outside of themselves, they had no idea that they were parts of a cross, a star, or a triangle. And when this form is “destroyed” they are conscious of no loss. Now a self, or a self-consciousness which is only a form made out of the things which constitute it and not perceived by anything else, is less a self than a piece of bread rubbed on the outside of an empty closet door is a cheese sandwich.

This habit of playing with words signifying a multitude of things conceived of as a unit, is evident in all the literature of mechanist thinking. As soon as such a word is found, the group of things is treated as if it were a force, an entity, or even an intelligent creature standing on its own legs. And usually the things in the groups are also but words.

Dr. McDougall, for instance, says that a man in the presence of a great work of art is being played upon by a “fusion” of the “instincts” of “curiosity” and “wonder,” fused in their turn with the instinct of “submission.” It is a predicament in which no one should lightly wish to find even an art critic.

But if we have thirteen instincts, why not fourteen? Why not the whole twenty-four listed by James? Why not twenty-five? If I can be played upon by a fusion of curiosity, wonder and submission, all instinctive, why cannot I be played upon by the instinct to light my pipe at three o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, the Thirteenth of January? Think of a self-conscious synthesis of unconscious impulses being played upon by a fusion of unconscious determining impulses wakened in an innate psycho-physical disposition to pay attention!

But let us abandon the materialistic hypothesis, however disguised. Let us say that it was Psyche who built her house, not the house which built Psyche--and how the situation changes! She cannot have built it out of nothing, it is true. So let Dr. Watson give her a dwelling with only the foundation reflex courses laid, or let Dr. McDougall escort her into a completely and instinctively furnished apartment. In either case, she begins at once to make alterations, for she is a “choosy” woman, this Psyche of ours. She has power in her right arm, and does not care a tinker’s dam about the conservation of energy.

So she proceeds in her disposition to pay attention to objects “of a certain class,” and totally to ignore others. Things progress from a “predominantly mechanical to a predominantly teleological determination.” Pure instincts, the original furnishings of the flat, become modified by experience and rational reflection. Dr. Watson[46] says “there is no mystery in building the human being into as complicated an organism as he is.” Avowed mechanists are never tired of telling us this, and they are right. There is no mystery at all--save in Psyche herself. And she is all mystery. I would no sooner think of trying to explain her than I would think of explaining myself. For she _is_ myself. And she and I, like Drs. Watson and McDougall, are totally inexplicable. Not even we understand in the least.

What is explanation? Let us explain a sunset. It is caused, we will say, by the earth turning upon its axis, so that the sun, which at noon was overhead, seems to sink to the horizon. Actually, it is the horizon which rises and obscures the sun--no matter. The rays which were perpendicular, become slant. They encounter drops of water in the atmosphere--encounter too the laws of refraction, and break up into gorgeous yellows and purples. Follow the rays in one direction, and you come to the “rods” in the eye; the optic nerve; the brain; and to Something which translates the result into the color sensations, and these, perhaps, into a fusion of wonder, curiosity and submission--and these into a lot of theories.

Follow the rays in the other direction, and you arrive at the sun, and are tempted to construct various theories of light. Whence came the sun? Whence came these primal particles or protons of which it is theoretically composed? We know of the sun’s existence only from what Psyche perceives--through her senses or otherwise. Imagine that neither Psyche nor the sun exists. Start now and try to imagine yourself creating either or both. Why, you cannot even make a beginning. You have nothing to imagine with. You are lost between the impossibility of existence and the impossibility of non-existence. Did you ever stop to think how utterly impossible is either of these two opposite impossibilities? And yet--here we are!

Explanation, then, consists in nothing but the addition to one mysterious experience of Psyche certain other mysterious experiences which precede, accompany or follow it. And as they usually precede, accompany or follow in much the same order, we call them causes, controlling circumstances, and effects. But instead of explaining the mystery away, we have merely heaped Pelions and Ossas of mystery all about it. And so we often manage to hide it, and to fancy that there is no mystery at all. Would it not be wholesome exercise occasionally to admit openly that we do not know what we are talking about? Why not for once exclaim with Dr. Bertry, in “_L’évasion_,” by Brieux, “_On ’s imagine savoir des millions de choses!--on veut formuler les lois de la vie--et l’on assiste impuissant à sa propre agonie!--Nous ne comprenons rien à tout ce qui se passe autour de nous, rien à ce que se passe en nous_”?

So far as the mind is concerned, this is undoubtedly true. The mind can know nothing of the proper essence of that which surrounds us. The mind, says Newman, cannot comprehend even its own activities to the full. So we “do but assist at our own agony.... Why is it that I die? The scelerose invades the arteries. Why? What is the scelerose?” And Dr. Bertry continues: “Do you wish me to tell you? We know nothing about it--nothing! We have found nothing about it--but words.”

That is no reason, however, why we should use yet other words to create mysteries of our own--like the unconscious emotions of Dr. Watson, or the enslaved freedom of Dr. McDougall. And this is my answer to those who will object that my explanation, too, is incomprehensible. Its incomprehensibility comes from the facts, not from my contrivance. The metaphor of Psyche grants the natural mystery by making our inner self a human being, which, after all, is what it is. And with this for a start, the reason can work--at the only job for which it is fitted.

It does not follow that Psyche discovers nothing which is of any use. Knowledge is relative, but Truth is not--Pragmatism or no Pragmatism. And she soon discovers, let William James have said what he may have said, that it makes a great difference whether her approximations are more or less wide of the mark. Which is to say that she profits by experience. Her original house does not suit her. She makes certain rearrangements. They suit her better, but not to perfection. She continues to rearrange and to build, with such material as life affords her. That, I fancy, is what she is here for--to learn how to keep house. For though the house be not Psyche, any more than your house or your body is you, do not think for a moment that it is useless. As well say that the parallel bars in the gymnasium are of no use to the athlete for whom they afford the opportunity of exercise.

Scientists at one time used to exercise--not their powers of observation, but their verbal ingenuity--upon a set of bars of their own which they called the psycho-neural parallel, saying that inasmuch as two parallel lines can never touch, so neurology and psychology, nerves and mind, matter and the immaterial, can never influence one another. According to this theory, there were two eternally separate twins dancing along, each on its own line of the parallel, forever aping each other as our reflections ape us in a mirror. And it was strictly forbidden to cross the track!

The materialists have repealed this “law,” on the ground that there is no psychic rail out of which to make the right hand parallel. Others would repeal it, saying that there is no left-hand rail. The rails are there, nevertheless. What is not there nor anywhere is the prohibition against crossing. The idea that the immaterial cannot influence the material because spirit and matter are things of different orders comes from the same sort of logic as would maintain that waves cannot rock a boat because wood and water, too, are of different orders of things.

But, think you, this is merely human experience and common sense, not science? That there is no Scientific Psyche? That the idea of there being somebody at home within us is a sweet but forbidden doctrine; something forever outlawed by the experimental method? On the contrary, it was the experimental method which first made us aware of this state of things. And the experimental method in its most modern, scientific form, politely lifts its hat to the Housekeeper whenever she appears. It was only during a decade or two--the decade or two when most of our psychologists were young and learned all they ever did learn of physics--that science forgot her manners. If you want to be in style, do not continue to wear your hat in the house. In the best circles it is no longer done.

We are not ready yet, however, to enter the best circles. We have first to pass through the fires of passion, of madness and dreams.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] My quotations are from the edition of 1925.

[33] _Harper’s Magazine_, August, 1927.

[34] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 446.

[35] _Ibid._, p. 439.

[36] _Ibid._, p. 446.

[37] _Ibid._, p. 440.

[38] “Outline of Psychology,” pp. 140 and 141.

[39] _Ibid._, p. 418.

[40] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 274.

[41] _Ibid._, p. 418.

[42] _Ibid._, p. 418.

[43] _Op. cit._

[44] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 317.

[45] “Outline of Psychology,” p. 18.

[46] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July, 1927.