We have found that the mind’s chief end is action, of itself, or of its
body. But what are its incentives to action?
We see the very young baby giving evidences of an emotional life, living
in an affective, or feeling environment, leading a pleasure-pain
existence, from the first. He acts as desire indicates. But from the
very moment of his birth he performs actions with which he cannot as yet
have a sense-memory connection, because he is doing them for the first
time. How can he know how to respond to stimuli from the very beginning?
No other possible explanation offers itself than that he is born with
certain tendencies to definite action. These we call instincts—man’s
provision to keep him going, as it were, till reason develops. Instincts
are handed down from all the past. Definite tendencies, they are, to
certain specific reflex actions in response to certain sensations. These
responses, from the very beginning of animal life, have been toward
avoiding pain, and toward receiving pleasure. It is as though the
stimulus presses the trigger—instinct—and the muscle responds
instantly with reflex action. This mechanism is the means of protection
and advancement, and takes largely the place of intelligence in all
animal life. It is what makes the baby suck and cry, clutch and pull,
until a sense memory is established. So instinct is really race memory.
We call instinctive those immediate, unthought reactions which are the
same with all mankind.
The pugnacious instinct—the desire to fight—is the natural reaction of
every human being of sane mind to attack. The inner necessity of
avenging is so strong in the child or man of untrained mind or soul that
he acts before he thinks. He strikes back, or shoots, or plots against
his enemies. Only rare development of spirit or the cautious warning of
reason which foresees ill consequences, or a will trained to force
control, can later make the instinct inactive.
Where instinct ends and sense memory, imitation, and desire step in is
difficult to determine. Later in life probably most of what we consider
instinctive action is simply so-called reflex action, depending on sense
memory, action learned so young that it is difficult to distinguish it
from the true reflex action, which is due only to race memory.
James, in his Talk to Teachers, gives us a partial list of the
instincts. Thus:
| Fear | Ownership | Shyness |
| Love | Constructiveness | Secretiveness |
| Curiosity | Love of approbation | The ambitious impulses:
- Imitation,
- Emulation,
- Pride,
- Ambition,
- Pugnacity
|
To this partial list we would add self-preservation, reproduction, etc.
But instincts conflict with each other, and man carries about with him
in babyhood many of them which may have been very useful to his
prehistoric ancestors, but which only complicate things for him. Fear
and curiosity urge opposite lines of conduct. Love of approbation and
shyness are opposed. Love and pugnacity are apt to be at odds. So,
gradually, as intelligence increases, the child refuses to allow such
impulses to lead him to action. When fear-instinct and love-instinct are
at war, reason is provided to come to the rescue.
Instincts are racial tendencies of sensational or emotional states to
determine action.
Instincts are the germs of habit, and when instinct would give rise to a
reaction no longer useful, reason, abetted by new habit formation, in
the normal mind, weakens instinct’s force; and the habit is discarded
and the instinct gradually declines.
In prehistoric times when food was scarce, and man had not learned the
art of tilling the soil, hunger forced him to fight for what he got to
eat. As there was often not enough to go around, he maimed or killed
his fellow-man that he might have all he wanted, obeying the instinct to
survive. So, now, the baby instinctively clutches for all that appeals
to him. But an abundance of food for all, or the intelligent realization
that co-operation brings more to the individual than does fighting, and
a developed sense of responsibility toward others; or merely the fear of
the scorn of fellow beings, or the desire to be protected by the love of
his kind; perhaps a genuine love of people, acquired by spiritual
development, puts the primitive habit of food-grabbing into the discard.
Finally, the very instinct of self-preservation may be transformed into
desire to serve others. No better illustration of this can ever be
offered than the sacrifices of the World War.
No mind retains consciously everything that has ever impressed it. It is
necessary that it put aside what ceases to be of importance or value and
make way for new impressions. We found early in our study that the
subconscious never forgets, but harbors the apparently forgotten
throughout the years, allowing it to modify our thinking, our reactions.
But the conscious mind cannot be cluttered with the things of little
importance when the more essential is clamoring. So there is a
forgetting that is very normal. We forget numberless incidents of our
childhood and youth; we may forget the details of much that we have
learned to do automatically; but the subconscious mind is attending to
them for us.
Do you know how to skate? and if so, do you remember just how you did it
the first time? Probably all you recall is that you fell again and again
because your feet would slip away from where you meant them to be. When
you glide over the ice now it is as natural as walking, and as easy. You
cannot remember in detail at all how you first “struck out,” nor the
position of your feet and arms and legs, which you felt forced to
assume. At the time there was very real difficulty with every
stroke—each one was an accomplishment to be attempted circumspectly, in
a certain definite way. All you remember now is, vaguely, a tumble or
two, soreness, and lots of fun.
We forget details we have intrusted to others as not a part of our
responsibility. We forget the things which in no way concern us, in
which we have no interest and about which we have no curiosity. And it
is well that we do so. If it were not for the ability to forget, our
minds would be like a room in which we have lived a lifetime, where we
have left everything that has been brought into it since our birth. It
would be piled ceiling high, with no room for us, and with difficulty
only could we find what we want. As we grow from babyhood to childhood,
from childhood to youth, from youth to maturity the room changes with
us. We put off childish things. They are stored away somewhere, in an
attic or basement, or destroyed. And day after day something new is
added, displacing something else. In the case of the mind all these
things are stored and cataloged in the subconscious, and forgotten,
until some need causes us to look into our catalog-index and see the
experience again, or some association calls it back, relating it to
something new. So our discussion of the subconscious involved also a
discussion of memory.
But what of the things we must use frequently and cannot find in our
minds? What of absent-mindedness and faulty memory? In such cases our
minds might be compared to a cluttered room full of things we need and
want to use every day, but in confusion. We know where many of them are,
the ones we care most about; but we have to rummage wildly to find the
rest. We have no proper system of arrangement of our belongings. You
laid down that book somewhere, absent-mindedly, and now you cannot tell
where. You were thinking of something else at the time, and inattention
proves a most common cause of poor memory. Perhaps you simply have more
books than the room can hold in an orderly way, and so you crowded that
one in some corner, and now have no recollection of where you put it.
Poor memory is the result of lack of attention, or divided attention at
the time the particular attention-stimulus knocked. You asked me to buy
a ribbon of a certain shade and a certain width when I went to town. I
was thinking of my dentist appointment. However, I heard your request,
answered it graciously, took the money you offered, still wondering if
the dentist would have to draw that tooth. And the chances are that I
forgot your ribbon. I was giving you only a passive and divided
attention.
Or I have more to do than I can possibly accomplish in the next six
hours. You ask me to buy the ribbon. I attend accurately for the moment,
think distractedly, “How can I do it all?—but I will”—and crowd the
intention into an already overburdened corner of my mind, fail to
associate it with the other thoughts already there, and return six hours
later without the ribbon. My sense of hurry, of stress, of the more
important thing to be done, or a reaction of impatience at the request,
forced back the ribbon thought and allowed it to be hidden by others. I
was really giving you only partial attention, or an emotion interfered
with attention; and I forgot.
Hence we find that a faulty memory may exist in an otherwise normal mind
when poor attention, or divided attention due to emotional stress or to
an overcrowded mind, which makes it impossible to properly assort its
material, interferes.
Again, we forget many things because they are unpleasant to remember. We
have no desire, no emotional stimulus to make us remember; or because
some of the associations with the forgotten incident are undesirable.
We forget many things because if we remembered them we would feel called
upon to do some unpleasant duty. You forgot your tennis engagement with
B, perhaps, because you were so engrossed in a pleasure at hand, or in
your work, that anything which interrupted was, under the circumstances,
undesirable. You may have wanted very much to play with him, but some
more pressing desire—to care well for your patient, or to continue the
present amusement—was stronger. Or you forgot because you did not want
to play with him and had no excuse to offer at the time. You wished to
forget. Perhaps he does not play a good game, or you do not like him, or
at least you like some one else much more, and he happened along; so you
forgot B. The unconscious mind saw to it that something else was kept so
prominently before your attention that it could not return to the less
desired.
Thus a forgetting may be purely the result of an emotional interference
which makes it, all in all, more pleasant to forget than to remember. If
we would help ourselves or our patients whose memories are faulty, and
who make them worse by their continual fretting over their disability,
we must train ourselves to be willing to forget all that does not in the
least concern our interests or those of the people about us, and does
not add anything desirable to our knowledge. Thus we may avoid
overcrowding the mind. But when we would remember let us give our whole
active attention at the moment of presentation of the new stimulus, and
immediately tie it up with something in past experience; let us
recognize what it is that we should remember, and call the reinforcement
of will, which demands that we remember whether we want to or not.
Sincere desire to remember will inspire early and frequent recalling,
with various associations, or hooks, until the impression becomes
permanent. The average patient’s poor memory is made worse by his
agitation and attention to it, and his conviction that he cannot
remember. The fear of forgetting often wastes mental energy which might
otherwise provide keenness of memory. If the nurse ties up some pleasant
association with the things she wants the sick man to remember, and
disregards his painful effort to recall other things, then—unless the
mind is disordered—he will often find normal memory reasserting itself.
We shall consider this question of memory in more detail in a later
chapter of practical suggestions for the nurse.
Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Thinking.—Emotion we found the
constant accompaniment of every other mental activity. It is first on
the stage of consciousness and, in the normal mind, last to withdraw.
When I am working at a problem in doses or solutions, trying to learn my
materia medica, or wrestling with the causes of disease in my
medical nursing, or thinking how I can eke out my last ten dollars
till I get some more, I am pursued with some vague or well-defined
feeling of annoyance or satisfaction, of displeasure or pleasure. If all
goes well, the latter; if not, the former.
Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Will.—I cannot will without a
feeling accompaniment, pleasant or unpleasant. I may be using my will
only in carrying out what intellect advises. But we found that
intellect’s operations are always affective, i. e., have some feeling
of pleasure or pain. And the very act of will itself is a
pleasant one and much easier if it is making me do what I want to do; it
is a vaguely or actively unpleasant one if it is making me act against
desire. In the end, however, if I act against desire in pursuance of
reason or a sense of duty, the feeling of pleasure in the victory of my
better self is asserted. And feeling cannot be separated from will.
Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Action.—I cannot do anything without
a feeling of comfort or discomfort, happiness or unhappiness. Try it for
yourself when you are feeding a patient, making a bed, giving a bath or
massage, preparing a hypodermic. Other things being normal, if you are
performing the task perfectly, the feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure,
of the very ability to work effectively, with speed and accuracy and
nicety, comes with the doing. If you are bungling, there is a pervading
sense of dissatisfaction, of unpleasantness. In the automatic or
semi-automatic action a great economy of nature has conservatively put
feeling at the absolute minimum; but it has not eradicated it. As you
walk across the ward, though your predominating thought and feeling may
be elsewhere, there is a sense of pleasure or displeasure in the very
movement. If your body is fresh and you are of an energetic type and in
happy frame of mind, a pervasive feeling of satisfaction is experienced.
If tired or discouraged or sore from unaccustomed exercise, every step
registers protest.
Thus we find by experiment that there is no thought we have, no single
conscious movement or action, nor any expression of the will, but is
accompanied with what the psychologist broadly terms pleasure or
pain. So emotion, the first expression of mentality, is never absent
from any mental or physical act. It permeates all we do, as well as all
we think and will, with the partial exception of automatic action, above
indicated.
We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in
babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result
of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion’s bidding. But very
early the baby’s experience operates as a partial check to feeling’s
exclusive sway. It keeps him from touching the fire, no matter how its
brightness attracts. It may be merely the sense memory of hurt when
fingers and that bright thing came together; and one such impression
will probably prevent him from ever again touching it. Or it may be the
brain-cell’s retention of the painful feeling of slapped hands when the
fingers reaching out to the flame had not yet quite touched. These
punishment experiences are only effective in many children after more or
less repetition has set up an automatic prohibition from brain to motor
nerves; but right here intellect begins to assert itself in the form of
sense memory. The baby does not reason about the matter. His nerve-cells
simply remember pain, and that particular brightness and glow, and
finger touch—or that reaching out to the glow—and slapped hands, as
occurring together. In the same way he early connects pleasure with the
taste of certain forbidden things. He does not know they are sweet. He
only knows “I want.” Even here his desire to taste may be checked in
action by a vivid memory of what happened when he tasted that other
time, and was spanked or put in his little room all alone with only milk
and bread to eat for a long time.
Later on the child may think, from cause to effect, thus: “Sweet, good,
want, taste, spank, hurt (or no dinner, all by self, lonely), spank hurt
more than sweets good. Not taste.” But long before he can work this out,
consciously, two distinct memories, one of pleasure and one of pain, are
aroused by the sight of the sweet. And what he will do with it depends
upon which memory is stronger. In other words, his action is governed
altogether by his feeling, though memory, which is an intellectual
factor, supplies the material for feeling.
Later still, when the child is older, we may have somewhat the following
mechanism: “Sweets, good, want, taste; spank, hurt; don’t care, spank
not hurt much, maybe never found put, sweets very good.”
Now the child is reasoning and choosing between two courses of action,
don’t and do. His decision will depend upon whether immediate
satisfaction of desire is stronger than the deferred satisfaction of
being good, and the fear of punishment. He probably prefers to take a
chance, and even if the worst comes, weighs it with the other worst, not
having the sweet—and takes the “bird in the hand.” He has reasoned, and
has chosen between two emotions the one which his judgment says is the
more desirable; and his will carries out the decision of his reasoning.
His chief end in life is still to get the most immediate pleasure. Still
later in child-life, much later, perhaps, his decision about the jam is
based on neither love of it nor fear of punishment, but—despite his
still sweet tooth—on a reasoned conclusion that if he eats jam now he
may be sick, or he may spoil his appetite for dinner; or on a
consideration that sweets between meals are not best on dietetic
principles; and will very readily backs up the result of his
reasoning. Though his determination is largely based upon feeling,
reason has chosen between feelings, between immediate desire to have,
and desire to avoid future discomfort. Reason is triumphant over present
desire.
The conclusion or decision that reason has reached we call a judgment.
The youth who decides against the sweet between meals, we say, has good
judgment. And we base our commendation on the proved fact that sweets
are real fuel, giving abundantly of heat and energy, and are not to be
eaten as mere pastime when the body is already fully supplied with
high calorie food not yet burned up; that if sweets are eaten at
irregular intervals and at the call of appetite, and not earned by an
adequate output of physical work, the digestive apparatus may become
clogged, and an overacid condition of the entire intestinal tract
threaten. We call judgment good, then, when it is the result of
reasoning with correct or logical premises which correspond with the
facts of life. We call it bad when it is the conclusion of incorrect or
partial or illogic premises.
A premise “is a proposition laid down, proved, supposed, or assumed,
that serves as a ground for argument or for a conclusion; a judgment
leading to another judgment as a conclusion” (Standard Dictionary).
Let us illustrate good and bad judgment by following out two lines of
reasoning, each quite accurate as such.
I want sweets. Sweets are good for people. They give heat and energy,
and I need that, for I am chilly and tired. People say “Don’t eat sweets
between meals.” But why? They contain just what I need and the sooner I
get them the better.
So I have sweets when I want them. The judgment to take the sweets as
desire indicates is entirely logical if we accept all the premises as
correct. And they are, so far as they go; but they are partial; and so
cannot altogether correspond with the facts of life. Sweets are good for
people who expend much physical energy. They prove injurious in more
than limited amounts to the bed-ridden, the inactive, or the sluggish.
Hence this premise is partial and so far incorrect. Sweets do give heat
and energy, true. I am chilly and tired, also true. But why? Because I
am already toxic from the sweets and meats I have had throughout my
sedentary years. The question is, Do I need any more energy-producing
food when I am not burning up what I have? So again the premise is
partial. I do need heat and energy, but I already have the material for
it, and my mode of life has disorganized my system’s capacity to utilize
these foods normally. So now sweets have become a detriment to my
well-being. The judgment which determines me to the habit of eating
sweets between meals is the result of logic, but of logic spent on tying
up premises which do not fit the facts of the case.
One of the most prevalent defects of judgment is illustrated in this
common disability to select premises which fit the facts. Ignorance,
emotional reasoning, and a defective critical sense probably explain
most poor judgments.
The other judgment illustrates the logic of correct, provable premises.
“No, I shall wait until dinner-time. I have no need of so rich a food,
for I had an adequate meal at the usual time and have not worked hard
enough to justify adding this burden to my digestive apparatus; besides
only hard workers with their muscles can afford to eat many sweets. They
cause an overacid condition when taken in excess; and any except at
mealtimes would be excess for me, with my moderate physical exercise.”
This judgment we call good. Its premises correspond to scientific facts.
But much reasoning must always be done with probable premises, ones
which seem to correspond to the facts, but which have yet to be proved.
And our judgment from such suppositions cannot be final until we see if
it works.
Some few centuries ago supposedly wise men called Christopher Columbus a
fool. Of course the world was flat. If it were round man would fall off.
It was all spread out and the oceans were its limits. If it should be
round, like a ball, as that mad man claimed, then the waters must reach
from Europe ’round the sphere and touch Asia; or there might be land
out there beyond the ocean’s curve. But it wasn’t round, and the idea of
finding a new way to Asia by sailing in the opposite direction was a
fool’s delusion.
Their logic was perfect. If the earth was flat, and Asia lay east of
Europe, it was madness to sail west to reach it. But they argued from a
wrong premise, so their judgment was imperfect—for they did not yet
know the facts.
The result of all reasoning is judgment. And judgment is good as the
materials of the reasoning process correspond to facts, or are in line
with the most probable of the yet unknown. It is poor as the reasoning
material fails to meet the facts, or is out of harmony with the most
probable of the yet unproved.
It is of no avail, then, to attempt to improve our final judgments as
such. We must examine the materials we reason with, then learn to group
and compare them logically. And in the very separating of true premises
from false, we use and train the judgment we would improve. And this the
normal mind can do.
In the normal mind the emotional or feeling accompaniment of thought and
action is proportionate and adequate to the circumstances, i. e.,
there is a certain feeling, of a certain strength, natural to every
thought and act; and when only that strength, not more or less,
accompanies the thought or the act, we say, “That man is emotionally
stable. His mind is normally balanced.”
Joy naturally follows some stimuli; sorrow others. Disappointment or
loss, shock, failure, death of loved ones, illness in ourselves or
others, do not normally bring joy. A keen sense of suffering,
temporarily, perhaps, of numbness; the inability to grasp the calamity;
or flowing tears, an aching heart, or the stress of willed
endurance, are natural, and normal reactions to such stimuli.
A developed will may refuse indulgence in the outward expression of the
normal feeling of shock, grief, and loss; and this may be normal. But
normal volition does not force us to laugh and dance and be wildly merry
in the face of grief and loss and pain. It only suggests the adequate,
reasonable acceptance of the facts that cannot be changed—the
acceptance of love, faith, and hope that sees in present suffering a
means of consecration to service; it does not convert the emotion of
sorrow and loss into a pleasurable one. Normal reason does not suggest
that will force the reactions to loss and suffering that belong by
nature to attainment and success.
Nor does reason suggest the long face, the bitter tears, a storm of
anger, in response to comedy and farce, in the face of a good joke, or
to meet success; and normal will puts reason’s counsel into effect.
Some emotions, that seem exaggerated at first thought, may be normal
under the circumstances. For no one can know the whole background for
emotional response in the life of another. After being long shut up in a
darkened room, with bandaged eyes and aching head and sick body, the
first visit to the bit of woods back of the house—when all the pains
have gone—may bring almost delirious joy. The green of the foliage, the
blue of the sky, the arousing tang of the air, the birds, the sense of
freedom—all go to the head like new wine. The abandon of joy is a
normal response under the circumstances, now. It would hardly be normal
to one whose habit it is to visit this same bit of woods every day, to
one who loved it, but for whom it had lost the force of newness.
To the child, who has never in all his little life had a wish not
gratified, the denial of a desired stick of candy is as great a calamity
as is the loss of a fortune to the grown man. And the child reacts to
feeling equally intense. These are normal reactions to stimuli—normal,
under the circumstances.
The normal mind reasons clearly with the best data at hand to results
that will stand the test of conformity to reality; the normal mind uses
reason and feeling, guided by reasonable attitude; in the normal mind
reason advises action and will brings it about; in the normal mind
feeling proportionate to the circumstances accompanies every thought
and every action. And in the well-balanced man or woman every function
of the mind leads to action as its final end.
But man only approximates the normal. The perfectly balanced man or
woman is so rare as to be a marked person. The average intelligent
individual only in general approximates this standard. He goes beyond it
in spurts of untrammeled genius, to wrench lightning from the heavens,
and to send his trains through the air; or he allows his feelings to
dictate to his reason, and much of the time so exaggerates or
depreciates the simple facts of life that the results of his reasoning
no longer conform sufficiently to reality as to be thoroughly
dependable.
