The Story of the Mind · Part 14

First, there is the idiot. He is not available, from a social point of view, because he varies too much on the side of defect. He shows from infancy that he is unable to enter into the social heritage because he is unable to learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection, and puts him away in an institution. So of the insane, the pronounced lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of social relationships which society requires of each individual. Either he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing that wanders among us like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. He is not a factor in social life; he has not come into the inheritance.

Then there is the extraordinary class of people whom we may describe by a stronger term than those already employed. We find not only the unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom society puts away with pity in its heart; there are also the antisocial, the class whom we usually designate as criminals. These persons, like the others, are variations; but they seem to be variations in quite another way. They do not represent lack on the intellectual side always or alone, but on the moral side, on the social side, as such. The least we can say of the criminals is that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to violate the rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the general security of men living together in the enjoyment of the social heritage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of destruction; enemies of the social progress which proceeds from generation to generation by just this process of social inheritance. So society says to the criminal also: "You must perish." We kill off the worst, imprison the bad for life, attempt to reform the rest. They, too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the past.

So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. The instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some insight into the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, and the way he comes to live it.

Passing on to take up the second of the informal topics suggested, we have to find the best description that we can of the social man--the one who is fitted for the social life. This question concerns the process by which any one of us comes into the wealth of relationships which the social life represents. For to say that a man does this is in itself to say that he is the man society is looking for. Indeed, this is the only way to describe the man--to actually find him. Society is essentially a growing, shifting thing. It changes from age to age, from country to country. The Greeks had their social conditions, and the Romans theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn differently, somewhat, here and there; and in a low stage of civilization a man may pass for normal who, in our time, would be described as weak in mind. This makes it necessary that the standards of judgment of a given society should be determined by an actual examination of the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of variation which society in general will tolerate must be this or that.

We may say, then, that the man who is fit for social life must be born to learn. The need of learning is his essential need. It comes upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social function which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of verbal accomplishment--reading and writing. This brings to the front the great method of all his learning--imitation. In order to be social he must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must realize for himself by action the forms, conventions, requirements, co-operations of his social group. All is learning; and learning not by himself and at random, but under the leading of the social conditions which surround him. Plasticity is his safety and the means of his progress. So he grows into the social organization, takes his place as a Socius in the work of the world, and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis of which his own contributions--if he be destined to make contributions--to the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This great fact that he is open to the play of the personal influences which are about him is just the "suggestibleness" which we have already described in an earlier chapter; and the influences themselves are "suggestions"--social suggestions. These influences differ in different communities, as we so often remark. The Turk learns to live in a very different system of relations of "give and take" from ours, and ours differ as much from those of the Chinese. All that is characteristic of the race or tribe or group or family--all this sinks into the child and youth by his simple presence there in it, with the capacity to learn by imitation. He is suggestible, and here are the suggestions; he is made to inherit and he inherits. So it makes no difference what his tribe or kindred be; let him be a learner by imitation, and he becomes in turn possessor and teacher.

The case becomes more interesting still when we give the matter another turn, and say that in this learning all the members of society agree; all must be born to learn the same things. They enter, if so be that they do, into the same social inheritance. This again seems like a very commonplace remark; but certain things flow from it. Each member of society gives and gets the same set of social suggestions; the differences being the degree of progress each has made, and the degree of variation which each one gives to what he has before received. This last difference is treated below where we consider the genius.

There grows up, in all this give and take, in all the interchange of suggestions among you, me, and the other, an obscure sense of a certain social understanding about ourselves generally--a Zeitgeist, an atmosphere, a taste, or, in minor matters, a style. It is a very peculiar thing, this social spirit. The best way to understand that you have it, and something of what it is, is to get into a circle in which it is different. The common phrase "fish out of water" is often heard in reference to it. But that does not serve for science. The next best thing that I can do in the way of rendering it is to appeal to another word which has a popular sense, the word Judgment. Let us say that there exists in every society a general system of values, found in social usages, conventions, institutions, and formulas, and that our judgments of social life are founded on our habitual recognition of these values, and of the arrangement of them which has become more or less fixed in our society. For example, to be cordial to a disagreeable neighbour shows good social judgment in a small matter; not to quarrel with the homoeopathic enthusiast who meets you in the street and wishes to doctor your rheumatism out of a symptom book--that is good judgment. In short, the man gets to show more and more, as he grows up from childhood, a certain good judgment; and his good judgment is also the good judgment of his social set, community, or nation. The psychologist might prefer to say that a man "feels" this; perhaps it would be better for psychological readers to say simply that he has a "sense" of it; but the popular use of the word "judgment" fits so accurately into the line of distinction we are now making that we may adhere to it. So we reach the general position that the eligible candidate for social life must have good judgment as represented by the common standards of judgment of his people.

It may be doubted, however, by some of my readers whether this sense of social values called judgment is the outcome of suggestions operating throughout the term of one's social education. This is an essential point, and I must just assume it. It follows from what we said in an earlier chapter to be the way of the child's learning by imitation. It will appear true, I trust, to any one who may take the pains to observe the child's tentative endeavours to act up to social usages in the family and school. One may then actually see the growth of the sort of judgment which I am describing. Psychologists are coming to see that even the child's sense of his own personal self is a gradual attainment, achieved step by step through his imitative responses to his personal environment. His thought of himself is an interpretation of his thought of others, and his thought of another is doe to further accommodation of his active processes to changes in his thought of a possible self. Around this fundamental movement in his personal growth all the values of his life have their play. So I say that his sense of truth in the social relationships of his environment is the outcome of his very gradual learning of his personal place in these relationships.

We reach the conclusion, therefore, from this part of our study, that the socially unfit person is the person of poor judgment. He may have learned a great deal; he may in the main reproduce the activities required by his social tradition; but with it all he is to a degree out of joint with the general system of estimated values by which society is held together. This may be shown to be true even of the pronounced types of unsocial individuals of whom we had occasion to speak at the outset. The criminal is, socially considered, a man of poor judgment. He may be more than this, it is true. He may have a bad strain of heredity, what the theologians call "original sin"; he then is an "habitual criminal" in the current distinction of criminal types; and his own sense of his failure to accept the teachings of society may be quite absent, since crime is so normal to him. But the fact remains that in his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not society's normal. He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his fellows, however besides and however more deeply he may have failed. Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simply because he is carried away in an eddy of good companionship, which represents a temporary current of social life; or his nervous energies may be overtaxed temporarily or drained of their strength, so that his education in social judgment is forgotten: he is then the "occasional" criminal. It is true of the man of this type also that while he remains a criminal he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has gratified private impulse at the expense of social sanity; all this shows the lack of that sustaining force of moral consciousness which represents the level of social rightness in his time and place. Then, as to the idiot, the imbecile, the insane, they, too, have no good judgment, for the very adequate but pitiful reason that they have no judgment at all.

This, then, is the doctrine of Social Heredity; it illustrates the side of conformity, of personal acquiescence on the part of the individual in the rules of social life. Another equally important side, that of the personal initiative and influence of the individual mind in society, remains to be spoken of in the next chapter. Social Heredity emphasizes Imitation; the Genius, to whom we now turn, illustrates Invention.

CHAPTER X.

THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT.

The facts concerning the genius seem to indicate that he is a being somewhat exceptional and apart. Common mortals stand about him with expressions of awe. The literature of him is embodied in the alcoves of our libraries most accessible to the public, and even the wayfaring man, to whom life is a weary round, and his conquests over nature and his fellows only the division of honours on a field that usually witnesses drawn battles or bloody defeats, loves to stimulate his courage by hearing of the lives of those who put nature and society so utterly to rout. He hears of men who swayed the destinies of Europe, who taught society by outraging her conventions, whose morality even was reached sometimes by scorn of the peccadilloes which condemn the ordinary man. Every man has in him in some degree the hero worshipper, and gets inflamed somewhat by reading Carlyle's Frederick the Great.

Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong. The genius does accomplish the world movements. Napoleon did set the destiny of Europe, and Frederick did reveal, in a sense, a new phase of moral conduct. The truth of these things is just what makes the enthusiasm of the common man so healthy and stimulating. It is not the least that the genius accomplishes that he thus elevates the traditions of man and inspires the literature that the people read. He sows the seeds of effort in the fertile soil of the newborn of his own kind, while he leads those who do not have the same gifts to rear and tend the growing plant in their own social gardens. This is true; and a philosophy of society should not overlook either of the facts--the actual deeds of the great man with his peculiar influence upon his own time, and his lasting place in the more inspiring social tradition which is embodied in literature and art.

Yet the psychologist has to present just the opposite aspect of these apparent exceptions to the Canons of our ordinary social life. He has to oppose the extreme claim made by the writers who attempt to lift the genius quite out of the normal social movement. For it only needs a moment's consideration to see that if the genius has no reasonable place in the movement of social progress in the world, then there can be no possible doctrine or philosophy of such progress. To the hero worshipper his hero comes in simply to "knock out," so to speak, all the regular movement of the society which is so fortunate, or so unfortunate, as to have given him birth; and by his initiative the aspirations, beliefs, struggles of the community or state get a push in a new direction--a tangent to the former movement or a reversal of it. If this be true, and it be farther true that no genius who is likely to appear can be discounted by any human device before his abrupt appearance upon the stage of action, then the history of facts must take the place of the science or philosophy of them, and the chronicler become the only historian with a right to be.

For of what value can we hold the contribution which the genius makes to thought if this contribution runs so across the acquisitions of the earlier time and the contributions of earlier genius that no line of common truth can be discovered between him and them? Then each society would have its own explanation of itself, and that only so long as it produced no new genius. It may be, of course, that society is so constituted--or, rather, so lacking in constitution--that simple variations in brain physiology are the sufficient reason for its cataclysms; but a great many efforts will be made to prove the contrary before this highest of all spheres of human activity is declared to have no meaning--no thread which runs from age to age and links mankind, the genius and the man who plods, in a common and significant development.

In undertaking this task we must try to judge the genius with reference to the sane social man, the normal Socius. What he is we have seen. He is a person who learns to judge by the judgments of society. What, then, shall we say of the genius from this point of view? Can the hero worshipper be right in saying that the genius teaches society to judge; or shall we say that the genius, like other men, must learn to judge by the judgments of society?

The most fruitful point of view is, no doubt, that which considers the genius a variation. And unless we do this it is evidently impossible to get any theory which will bring him into a general scheme. But how great a variation? And in what direction?--these are the questions. The great variations found in the criminal by heredity, the insane, the idiotic, etc., we have found excluded from society; so we may well ask why the genius is not excluded also. If our determination of the limits within which society decides who is to be excluded is correct, then the genius must come within these limits. He can not escape them and live socially.

The Intelligence of the Genius.--The directions in which the genius actually varies from the average man are evident as a matter of fact. He is, first of all, a man of great power of thought, of great "constructive imagination," as the psychologists say. So let us believe, first, that a genius is a man who has occasionally greater thoughts than other men have. Is this a reason for excluding him from society? Certainly not; for by great thoughts we mean true thoughts, thoughts which will work, thoughts which will bring in a new area in the discovery of principles, or of their application. This is just what all development depends upon, this attainment of novelty, which is consistent with older knowledge and supplementary to it. But suppose a man have thoughts which are not true, which do not fit the topic of their application, which contradict established knowledges, or which result in bizarre and fanciful combinations of them; to that man we deny the name genius; he is a crank, an agitator, an anarchist, or what not. The test, then, which we bring to bear upon the intellectual variations which men show is that of truth, practical workability--in short, to sum it up, "fitness." Any thought, to live and germinate, must be a fit thought. And the community's sense of the fitness of the thought is their rule of judgment.

Now, the way the community got this sense--that is the great result we have reached above. Their sense of fitness is just what I called above their judgment. So far, at least, as it relates to matters of social import, it is of social origin. It reflects the outcome of all social heredity, tradition, education. The sense of social truth is their criterion of social thoughts, and unless the social reformer's thought be in some way fit to go into the setting thus made by earlier social development, he is not a genius but a crank.

I may best show the meaning of the claim that society makes upon the genius by asking in how far in actual life he manages to escape this account of himself to society. The facts are very plain, and this is the class of facts which some writers urge, as supplying an adequate rule for the application of the principles of their social philosophy. The simple fact is, say they, that without the consent of society the thoughts of your hero, whether he be genius or fool, are practically valueless. The fulness of time must come; and the genius before his time, if judged by his works, can not be a genius at all. His thought may be great, so great that, centuries after, society may attain to it as its richest outcome and its profoundest intuition; but before, that time, it is as bizarre as a madman's fancies and as useless. What would be thought, we might be asked by writers of this school, of a rat which developed upon its side the hand of a man, with all its mechanism of bone, muscle, tactile sensibility, and power of delicate manipulation, if the remainder of the creature were true to the pattern of a rat? Would not the rest of the rat tribe be justified in leaving this anomaly behind to starve in the hole where his singular appendage held him fast? Is such a rat any the less a monster because man finds use for his hands.

To a certain extent this argument is forcible and true. If social utility be our rule of definition, then certainly the premature genius is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put in another way which renders it still more plausible. The variations which occur in intellectual endowment, in a community, vary about a mean; there is, theoretically, an average man. The differences among men which can be taken account of in any philosophy of life must be in some way referable to this mean. The variation which does not find its niche at all in the social environment, but which strikes all the social fellows with disapproval, getting no sympathy whatever, is thereby exposed to the charge of being the "sport" of Nature and the fruit of chance. The lack of hearing which awaits such a man sets him in a form of isolation, and stamps him not only as a social crank, but also as a cosmic tramp.

Put in its positive and usual form, this view simply claims that man is always the outcome of the social movement. The reception he gets is a measure of the degree in which he adequately represents this movement. Certain variations are possible--men who are forward in the legitimate progress of society--and these men are the true and only geniuses. Other variations, which seem to discount the future too much, are "sports"; for the only permanent discounting of the future is that which is projected from the elevation of the past.

The great defect of this view is found in its definitions. We exclaim at once: who made the past the measure of the future? and who made social approval the measure of truth? What is there to eclipse the vision of the poet, the inventor, the seer, that he should not see over the heads of his generation, and raise his voice for that which, to all men else, lies behind the veil? The social philosophy of this school can not answer these questions, I think; nor can it meet the appeal we all make to history when we cite the names of Aristotle, Pascal, and Newton, or of any of the men who single-handed and alone have set guide-posts to history, and given to the world large portions of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations--that is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is genius; the greater, the more rare. As to the rat with the human hand, he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he would teach to the wise biologist would be that here in this rat Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow processes of evolution!

It is, indeed, the force of such considerations as these which have led to many justifications of the positions that the genius is quite out of connection with the social movement of his time. The genius brings his variations to society whether society will or no; and as to harmony between them, that is a matter of outcome rather than of expectation or theory. We are told the genius comes as a brain-variation; and between the physical heredity which produces him and the social heredity which sets the tradition of his time there is no connection.

But this is not tenable, as we have reason to think, from the interaction which actually takes place between physical and social heredity. To be sure, the heredity of the individual is a physiological matter, in the sense that the son must inherit from his parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain parents are his parents, we may ask how these two certain parents came to be his parents. How did his father come to marry his mother, and the reverse? This is distinctly a social question; and to its solution all the currents of social influence and suggestion contribute. Who is free from social considerations in selecting his wife? Does the coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith the clergyman's daughter? Do we find inroads made in Newport society by the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk? And are not the inroads which we do find, the inroads made by the counts and the marquises, due to influences which are quite social and psychological? Again, on the other hand, what leads the count and the marquis, to lay their titles at Newport doors, while the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk keep away, but the ability of both these types of suitors to estimate their chances just on social and psychological grounds? Novelists have rung the changes on this intrusion of social influences into the course of physical heredity. Bourget's Cosmopolis is a picture of the influence of social race characteristics on natural heredity, with the reaction of natural heredity again upon the new social conditions.

A speech of a character of Balzac's is to the point, as illustrating a certain appreciation of these social considerations which we all to a degree entertain. The Duchesse de Carigliano says to Madame de Sommervieux: "I know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the discretion of a too superior man. You should know that one may allow them to court one, but marry them--that is a mistake! Never--no, no. It is like wanting to find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions." To be sure, we do not generally deliberate in this wise when we fall in love; but that is not necessary, since our social environment sets the style by the kind of intangible deliberation which I have called judgment and fitness. Suppose a large number of Northern advocates of social equality should migrate to the Southern United States, and, true to their theory, intermarry with the blacks. Would it not then be true that a social theory had run athwart the course of physiological descent, leading to the production of a legitimate mulatto society? A new race might spring from such a purely psychological or social initiation.

While not agreeing, therefore, with the theory which makes the genius independent of the social movement--least of all with the doctrine that physical heredity is uninfluenced by social conditions--the hero worshipper is right, nevertheless, in saying that we can not set the limitations of the genius on the side of variations toward high intellectual endowment. So if the general position be true that he is a variation of some kind, we must look elsewhere for the direction of those peculiar traits whose excess would be his condemnation. This we can find only in connection with the other demand that we make of the ordinary man--the demand that he be a man of good judgment. And to this we may now turn.