iv
He had always been interested in genetics—beginnings. His psychology, as it matured in a long lifetime of study and reflection, is different from the psychology of other men chiefly in this respect. The one word of science which always had the power to fire Dr. Hall’s imagination is “evolution.” Let not the fundamentalist rage, at this point of this chapter, nor the reader imagine a vain thing. It is greatly doubtful if, deep in his heart, G. Stanley Hall cared two sticks about Darwinian evolution as such. But evolution as an idea was to him a psychic reality.
Let me explain, as well as I can, in the simplest terms.
A psychic reality is something in which one’s faith is so strong that one neither needs nor wishes proofs. It is what you firmly believe; what you believe in so firmly that, so far as you are concerned, it exists. The thing may not exist, but if it did you would order your life just as you do now. Those who live under the shadow of such a belief need no umbrella of evidence spread over them.
To take an important and timely instance: One of the main points in Dr. Hall’s work, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917) bears directly on the controversy now active between the fundamentalists and the liberals. That dispute has been hottest on two points: the virgin birth of Christ and the Resurrection. Dr. Hall holds that both sides are living and disputing in a pre-psychological age; that they are both right in all that they affirm, wish and mean, and are both wrong in all that they deny. He says that both the virgin birth and the Resurrection are psychic realities to great numbers of people. He believed in both himself. As a scientist familiar with physiology, the issues offered as many obstacles to his mind as they can possibly offer to any human mind. Nevertheless, he believed; to him the virgin birth and the Resurrection are both psychic realities. “There are psychic realities that are truer than fact, and I wonder if it would not degrade rather than spiritualize faith if we were to discover a motion picture of the Resurrection.”
Now whether Darwin was right or not, whether the law of natural selection is true, false or meaningless, “evolution” is the word to cover Dr. Hall’s idea of what has happened and what is happening to the spirit of man. Although he studied under Wundt, he thought it unfortunate that one whose influence has been so farreaching was trained in physics and physiology chiefly. Biology, says Dr. Hall, would have given Wundt and his disciples less positiveness; they would have been less set on explaining all things of the spirit by occurrences in and to the body; and the idea of growth and change would have been more elastic and more hopeful. Again, Dr. Hall was one of the few American psychologists of standing who had gone deeply and impartially into the discoveries of Freud and the whole field of modern psychoanalysis. What are his conclusions on this fascinating development of science?
Freud has himself said that there are three great culture epochs marked for us, so far, by what we call science. The first dawned with Copernicus’s discovery that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The second was initiated by Darwin. The third is Freud’s own work. Dr. Hall was by no means an extreme or convinced Freudian, but seemed inclined to believe that Freud’s estimate of his work may not be much out of the way. Copernicus revolutionized our ideas of space; Darwin transformed the concept of time; Freud is dealing with our idea of eternity. For the world that Freud may be said to have discovered, the world of the unconscious, is a piece of eternity and the only piece that science can lay claim to having captured. If it exists at all, it exists and has existed forever.
In the main the Freudian theories seemed to Dr. Hall “genetic and vital.” They put beginnings farther back than we have been used to put them; many of the explanations really do explain, and Dr. Hall was convinced that they saved several of the most gifted of his pupils from mental wreck. “If the Freudian claims of the all-dominance of sex were excessive, as they certainly seem to me to be, it was only a natural reaction to the long taboo and prudery that would not look facts in the face. If the gross and morbid phenomena here were taken as the point of departure, the conclusions here drawn were from a solid and wide basis of clinical facts which no one could dispute, however much they might criticize the methods and interpretations.” There was, however, always the danger of measuring the normal mind and spirit by standards got from studying abnormal minds. And Dr. Hall did not believe in the methods of healing practised by Freudian physicians. Such psychoanalytic treatment, he thought, leaves the patient often unduly sexually-minded. Where a cure or real benefit results, he believed, it is not the result of a confession of dreams, etc., tortured into this or that meaning. It is because the patient has come to the conclusion that he is a dead giveaway, that everybody sees in him what the psychoanalyst sees; shame, dread, and modesty assert themselves and make him do better.
But the emphasis of Freud’s teachings is on feeling. It is not a psychology of muscular twitchings as that of Wundt and his followers tended to be. There is a theory, brilliantly expounded by William James and called the Lange-James theory, which explained that we feel sorry because we cry. There is also what is called the psychophysic law, which says that a sensation is increased by a constant amount when the stimulus is increased by a constant multiplication. But the psychophysic law broke down at extremes. For example, a very slight increase in tickling doubles and redoubles the sensation felt; it almost seems as if the law were then the other way about. And the sorry-because-we-cry theory cannot be proved where thoughts only are in question. A. murders B. Very likely he murders him in thought before he does so in fact. Now possibly the murder-in-thought is preceded by some microscopic or passing changes in A.’s brain. But it is yet to prove, and it is very likely unprovable. In the same way, men are now engrossed with their dawning discoveries about the glands of the human body. As Dr. Hall pointed out, the attempt is now well under way to make psychology a mere matter of secretions. The thyroid gland does this, the pituitary gland controls that. The thing will be carried too far and we shall have to retrace many of our steps and, to some extent, start all over again toward fresh conclusions.
We make these mistakes, said Dr. Hall, because we are too eager to find a solution for the mystery of the soul. We want to believe that the mind can be understood from the body. But the explanation of the mind must be sought in the things of the mind. It is likely that history, for example, with its record of human institutions, throws at least as much light on the human mind that made the institutions as anything we can get in a dissecting room. Like James Harvey Robinson, Dr. Hall was unhappy over the increasing tendency of psychologists and other students to go off in a corner and never thereafter to relate what they are doing to the rest of knowledge. The genetic nature of everything bearing on the mind is constantly overlooked. Why? Well, men have fallen into a habit of thinking that psychology must be handled as fossil bones are handled. From a thigh bone found in the ground we can reconstruct, perhaps, the entire skeleton of some prehistoric animal. It is not possible, however, from this experiment or that to reconstruct, infer or measure the mind. This is because the mind is creative, or, at least, reproductive. It can only be studied from what it begets. The child’s revolt from the parent both explains and is explained by the historic revolutions and revolts against authority. Hysteria is an escape from some intolerable reality. Certain men have a dread of being shut in by beliefs and opinions because earliest man had a dread of being shut in his cave in the rocks. But every man must have something to believe in, though it change from time to time, because his remote ancestor, when challenged, sought a wall at his back. What, then, is the hope of being exact or final in psychology? None. Would it be desirable to be exact or final? No.
The reader may inquire: What about the tests that are increasingly popular for everything from marriage to hunting the proper job? Dr. Hall refrained from using the short and ugly word. I will use it for him: they are bunk. But I will quote his own recorded experience with them.
“Some fifty years ago as an impecunious student I paid $5 to have my bumps charted at the Fowler and Wells phrenological institute, then on lower Broadway. Mr. Sizer, who did the job, told me that he would rather feel for five minutes through a cat-hole the skull of a girl he thought of marrying than court her five years. His findings were so pleasing to my self-esteem that two or three years later I went again, with even more satisfaction, so that I had the exhilarating sense that in the interim I had ‘every day and in every way’ been growing wiser and abler.
“Some thirty years later I chanced to meet the great Cheiro, handsome, magnetic, and in his day the pet of the New York ‘Four Hundred,’ and I submitted my palm to him. But this time with very depressing results. He found my life-line so broken that I should have been dead about that time; the line of intellect was very faint, indicating low mentality; by my wealth line I ought to be rich (and from his fee he probably thought me so). I was an incorrigible bachelor[59] and my character was a complex of incongruities. In a word, my hand gave the flat lie to what my bumps had said.
“Lombroso has several score of physical and psychic traits which he deems characteristic of criminals, and of these I was found to have seven more or less well developed. At the Bernheim Institute in Paris I had my finger-tips taken and interpreted. Later yet a Blackfordist tested me on all the, I think, twenty-one points in that system and at the close asked me if it was worth $10. It was. In Portland, Oregon, I found an expert who had worked years with the MacAuliffe-Sorel group of anthropologists. I began to psychoanalyze myself but, finding the task too hard, called in an expert to finish the work, with results which nothing would ever tempt me to tell.
“Still far too ignorant of the one I ought to know best, I took all the Yerkes army tests and the dozen or so shorter series devised for adults, and even put myself through the Binet-Simon series and their modifications by Terman; also the de Sanctis fool-finding series and at least a score of the tests for special avocations. In fact my friends have spoken rather slightingly of my passion for collecting and trying out tests, of which I have some hundreds. Judged by the Edison stunts, I was a near-moron, and in the Stenquist series much below the average; while I cannot even yet understand the Royce Ring. Some college entrance tests would bar me from entering the freshman class, while in many of the simpler ones my intelligence quotient indicated a mental age of at least 100.
“In Harman’s test of the higher mental processes and the Bonser reasoning test, for example, I was surpassed by a girl of eleven. The results of all seem, thus, so confusing that I recall the chameleon which, when placed on a red cloth turned red, on blue, green and yellow, turned these colors, but when placed on a bit of Scotch plaid died trying to make good.”
Time-limit tests are not only the hardest but tend to discredit the slow-but-sure type of person who really does so much of the world’s best work. The tests merely test a kind of superficial mental quickness. They do not, and cannot be made to, exclude accidental advantages due to special experience or special knowledge. We have no way of testing the testers, some of whom have only enough brains to ask questions and write down other people’s answers. There is no way of testing native ability. Persons old enough to take the tests have acquired much of their abilities from experience; and there is no way of separating what they were born with from what they have learned or acquired.
Dr. Hall says, on the other hand, that the tests he found trustworthy in estimating a young man’s chances for success are these:
1. Health. It is true that Darwin fought neurasthenia all his life, that Nietzsche was always fighting megalomania, that Spencer was everlastingly coddling himself, that Stevenson contended with tuberculosis. But health was required to make the fight—great, excessive vital force—and particularly was the psychic health exceptional and the psychic force strong so to have held off the bodily enemy while great work was done. “The study of 200 biographies shows that the list of great original minds who were supernormal in health is about fourteen times as large as the list of great invalids.”
2. Second breath. Corresponds to “second wind” in athletics. A state of mental exaltation, inspiration or ease, often coming after we have worked long and hard and past our usual hour of sleep at night. No one is likely to succeed who does not learn while young to tap this mental reservoir.
3. The ability to pass quickly and easily from one extreme of feeling to the other. What is called the “pleasure-pain scale” extends all the way from despair and suicide up to the most transcendent happiness. Settled moods of long duration are bad. If the soul cannot run up and down the scale frequently, swiftly and flexibly it will have its pressures relieved in some other way, usually by setting up a dual personality—jekyll-hydeism, insanity, etc.
4. Sympathy. Confucius called it “reciprocity”; Buddha, pity; Aristotle, friendship; Plato, friendship; Jesus, love; Paul, charity; Adam Smith and Darwin, sympathy; Comte, altruism; Renan, the enthusiasm of humanity; Kropotkin, mutual aid; Matthew Arnold, humanism; Giddings, consciousness of mankind; Trotter, the herd instinct. It is a power to feel for others and must be sufficiently strong to influence action at times.
5. Love of nature. This is the root. There are many flowers—poetry, music, literature, art of whatever form, religion. The mind first feels love and awe, then worship, then a desire for cold, outward study—the order is always the same. But in spite of the mind’s insistence on going to extremes, the feeling must be kept alive and must be adequately fed.
6. Sublimation. Teeth, lips and tongue were created or developed to eat with; we have made them serve us to speak with, also. The senses first served to warn us of danger and to find and test food; we now use them in a thousand ways. Anger began as blind rage, but we have gone some way to control and direct it. We cannot be too angry if we are angry aright. As for love, which began on the physical plane, “every real interest sets a back-fire to lust.”
7. Activity as against passivity. Although a given person or nation may be predominantly active or passive, doers or knowers, leaders or led, the two forces must be controlled and balanced for success. Do not make the mistake of thinking that activity is all to the good; energy without intelligence is worthless.
8. Loyalty or fidelity. In the first instance, this is loyalty to oneself, creating self-respect. The various loyalties to parents, husband or wife, children, friends, country, etc., follow.
These tests cannot be applied to large groups. They are tests of the individual. They cannot be made within set time limits. They cannot be made by asking a man or woman questions and writing down the answers. They require observation in favorable circumstances and these cannot always be secured by prearrangement. But they are the only tests worth making. They require in the tester something which psychology requires very much, in Dr. Hall’s estimation, in many psychologists—common sense.