Part 3 (1/2)

From etiquette and social distinction, from formalities of conversation and correspondence, of greeting and farewell, of condolence and congratulation to the most important ”customs of the country,” with respect to marriage, property, and the like, ways of acting are maintained by the mechanism of habit rather than by arbitrary law or equally arbitrary instinctive caprice.

DISSERVICEABLE HABITS IN THE INDIVIDUAL. Habitual behavior which can become so completely controlling in the lives of so many people is not without its dangers. The nervous system is originally neutral, and can be involved on the side either of good or evil. A human born with a plastic brain and nervous system must acquire habits, but that he will acquire good habits (that is, habits serviceable to his own happiness and to that of his fellows) is not guaranteed by nature. Habits are indeed more notorious than famous, and examples are more frequently chosen from evil ones than from good. Promptness in the performance of one's professional or domestic duties, care in speech, in dress and in demeanor, are, once they are acquired, permanent a.s.sets. But if these fail to be developed, dishonesty or superficiality, slovenliness in dress and speech, and surliness in manner, may and do become equally habitual. The significance of this has been eloquently stated at the close of James's famous discussion:

The h.e.l.l to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the h.e.l.l we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fas.h.i.+oning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ”I won't count this time!” Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it, but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 127.]

SOCIAL INERTIA. If the acquisition of bad, that is, disserviceable habits, is disastrous to the individual, it is in some respects even worse in the group. The inertia of the nervous system, the tendency to go on repeating connections that have once been made is one of the strongest obstacles to change, however desirable. It is not only that habits of action have been established, but that with them go deep-seated habits of thought and feeling. The repression of people's accustomed ways of doing things may bring with it a sense of frustration almost as complete and painful as if these obstructed activities were instinctive. This is not true merely in the melodramatic instances of drug addicts and drunkards.

It is true in the case of social habits which have become established in a large group. Any Utopian that dreams of revolutionizing society overnight fails to take into account the enormous control of habits over groups which have acquired them, and the powerful emotions, amounting sometimes to pa.s.sion, which are aroused by their frustration.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEARNING HABIT. That habit is at once the conserver and the petrifier of society has long been recognized by social philosophers. There is one habit, however, the acquisition of which is itself a preventive of the complete domination of the individual or the group by hard and fast routine. This is the habit of learning, which is necessary to the acquisition of any habits at all. Man in learning new habits, ”learns to learn.” This ability to learn is, of course, correlated with a plasticity of brain and nerve fiber which is most present in early youth. The disappearance of this capacity is hastened by the pressure which forces individuals in their business and professional life to cling fast to certain habits which are prized and rewarded by the group. A sedulous cultivation on the part of the individual of the habit of open-minded inquiry, of the habit of learning, and the encouragement of this tendency by the group are the only antidotes that can be provided against this marked physiological tendency to fossilization and the frequent social tendencies in the same direction.

Whether habits shall master us, or whether we shall be their masters, depends also on the method by which they were acquired. If they were learned merely through mechanical drill, they will be fixed and rigid. If they were learned deliberately to meet new situations, they will not be retained when the conditions they were acquired to meet are utterly changed.

THE SPECIFICITY OF HABITS. One important consideration, finally, that must be brought to consideration is that habits are, like instincts, specific. They are not general ”open sesames”

which, learned in one situation, will apply with indiscriminate miraculousness to a variety of others. Just as an instinct is a definite response to a definite stimulus, so is a habit. The chief and almost only observable difference is that the former is unlearned, while the latter is learned or acquired.

But while habits are specific, they are within limits transferable.

Such is the case when a situation which calls out a certain habitual response is paralleled in significant points by another. Thus the situation, one's-room-at-home-cluttered-up-with-a-miscellany-of-books-papers-tennis-apparatus-and-clothing, has sufficiently similar significant points to the situation, one's-office-littered-with-doc.u.ments-old-letters-ma.n.u.scripts-blueprints-and-proofs, to call forth, if the habit has been established in one case, the identical response of ”tidying up” in the other. But unless there are marked points of similarity between two different sets of circ.u.mstances, specific habits remain specific and non-transferable. There is in the laws of habit no guarantee that an industrious application to the batting averages of the major league on the part of an alert twelve-year-old will provoke the same a.s.siduous a.s.similation of the facts of the American Revolution; that a boy who works hard at his chemistry will work equally hard at his English, or that one who is careful about his manners and p.r.o.nunciation in school will display the slightest heed to them among his companions on the ball-field. One of the most cogent arguments against the stereotyped teaching of Latin and Greek has been the serious doubt psychologists have held as to whether four years' training in Latin syntax will develop in the student general mental habits which will be applicable or useful outside the Latin cla.s.sroom.

The older ”faculty” psychologists presumed that different subjects trained various so-called ”faculties” of ”memory,”

”imagination,” and ”intellect.” It has now become clear on experimental evidence that in education we are training no isolated faculties, but are training the individual to certain specific habits. The more widely applicable the habits are, obviously the more valuable or dangerous will they be in the conduct of life. But when habits do become general, such as a habit of promptness, honesty, and regularity, not in one situation but ”in general,” it is because they are something more than habits in the strict physiological sense. They are intellectual as well as merely motor in character; they are deliberate and conscious methods rather than mechanical rules of thumb. Habits that have been drilled into an individual will appear only when the situation very closely approximates the one in which the drill has been performed.

The cat that has learned to get out of a certain type of cage by pressing a b.u.t.ton will be utterly at a loss if the familiar features of the cage are changed. The intelligent human will detect and take pains to detect among the minor differences of the situation some significant fact which he has met in another setting, and he will apply a habit useful in this new situation despite the slightly changed accompanying circ.u.mstances.

The man who can drive an automobile with reflective appreciation of the processes involved, who knows, as we say, what he is doing, will not long be baffled by a car with a slightly different arrangement of levers and steering-gear, nor be completely frustrated when the car for some reason fails to move. As happened in many notable instances during the World War, trained executives were not long at a loss when they s.h.i.+fted from the management of a steel plant to a s.h.i.+pyard, or from large-scale mining operations in Montana to large-scale relief work in Belgium.

THE CONSCIOUS TRANSFERENCE OF HABITS. When habits are consciously acquired, they may be consciously transferred with modifications to situations slightly different from those in which they were first learned. Merely mechanical habits are a hindrance in any save the most mechanical work. An alert and conscious method of learning, which means the development of habits _as_ methods of control, will enable the individual to modify habits acquired in slightly different circ.u.mstances to new situations where the major conditions remain the same. To be merely habitual is to be at best an efficient machine, utterly unable to do anything except to run along certain grooves, to respond like an animal trained to certain tricks. It means, moreover, a loss of richness in experience. When a profession becomes routinated it becomes meaningless; a mere making of the wheels go round.

The spirit of alert and conscious inquiry must be maintained if life is not to become a mere repeated monotony.

An alert and conscious adjustment of habits to a changing environment const.i.tutes intelligence. The technique of this adjustment is the technique of thinking or of reflective behavior, which we shall examine in more detail in the following chapter.

EMOTION. All human action, whether on the plane of instinct, habit, or reflection, is, to a lesser or greater degree, accompanied by emotion. While there is considerable controversy among psychologists as to the precise nature of emotion, and the precise conditions of its causation, its general features and significance are fairly clear. Emotion may be most generally defined as an awareness or consciousness on the part of the individual of his experiences, both those in which he is the actor and those in which he is being pa.s.sively acted upon. This awareness or consciousness is not detached intellectual perception, but is accompanied by, as it is by some held to be merely the consciousness of, certain specific bodily disturbances. Thus the emotions of fear and grief are not cold and abstract perceptions of situations that belong in the cla.s.ses dangerous or deplorable, respectively. The awareness of these situations by the individual is intimately and invariably connected with certain outward bodily manifestations and certain inner organic disturbances. Fear, rage, pity, and the like are not unimpa.s.sioned judgments, but highly charged physical changes. So close, indeed, is the connection between specific bodily conditions and the subjective or inner consciousness that we call emotion, that James and Lange simultaneously came to the conclusion that emotions are nothing more nor less than the blending of the complex organic changes that occur in any given emotional state.

Thus James:

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is impossible for me to think. Can anyone fancy the state of rage, and picture no ebullition in the chest, no flus.h.i.+ng of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensations of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold blooded and dispa.s.sionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastis.e.m.e.nt for their sins. In like manner of grief; what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?

A feelingless cognition that certain circ.u.mstances are deplorable, and nothing more.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 452.]

Indeed, so completely did James think the emotions were explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations which go to make up each of them that he did not think it misleading to say ”we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.”

Whether or not emotions are completely to be explained as the inner or subjective aspect of the complex of organic disturbances which accompany fear, rage, and the like, and which are caused immediately by the perception of the appropriate objects of these emotions, it is certainly true that emotional awareness and bodily disturbances are very closely connected.[1]

[Footnote 1: Recent experiments by Dr. Cannon at Harvard have shown the specific bodily disturbances which accompany anger, fear, etc. In particular, Dr.

Cannon, and others, have noted that in the emotional conditions of fear and anger the glands, located near the kidneys, discharge a fluid into the blood stream, which fluid stimulates the heart to activity, constricts the blood vessels of the internal organs, causes the liver to pour out into the blood its stores of sugar, and affects in one way or another all the organs of the body.

The general effect is to put the body into a state of preparedness for the activities connected with the emotion, whether flight in the case of fear, attack as in the case of anger. This has led Professor Woodworth to define emotion as, at least in part, ”the way the body feels when it is prepared for a certain reaction.” See the latter's _Dynamic Psychology_, pp. 51-59.]