The Foundations of Personality

by Abraham Myerson

[2] See his book "Genius."

This means that in studying character and personality, we must start with an analysis of the physical make-up of the individual. We are not yet at the point in science where we can easily get at the activities of the endocrinal glands in normal mentality. We are able to recognize certain fundamental types, but more we cannot do; nor are we able to measure nervous energy except in relatively crude ways, but these crude ways have great value under certain conditions.

When there has been a change in personality, the question of bodily disease is always paramount. The first questions to be asked under such circumstances are, "Is this person sick?" "Is the brain involved?" "Are endocrinal glands involved?" "Is there disease of some organ of the body, acting to lower the feeling of well-being, acting to slacken the purposes and the will or to obscure the intelligence?"

There are other important questions of this type to answer, some of which may be deferred for the time. Meanwhile, the next equally fundamental thesis is on the effect of the environment upon mind, character and personality.

CHAPTER II. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS OF CHARACTER

From the time any one of us is born into the world he is subject to the influences of forces that reach backwards to the earliest days of the race. The "dead hand" rules,—yes, and the dead thought, belief and custom continue to shape the lives and character of the living. The invention and development of speech and writing have brought into every man's career the mental life and character of all his own ancestors and the ancestors of every other man.

A child is not born merely to a father and a mother. He is born to a group, fiercely and definitely prejudiced in custom, belief and ideal, with ways of doing, feeling and thinking which it seeks to impose on each of its new members. Family, tribe, race and nation all demand of each accession that he accept their ideals, habits and beliefs on peril of disapproval and even of punishment. And man is so constituted that the approval and disapproval of his group mean more to him even than his life.

The social setting into which each one is born is his social heredity. "The heredity with which civilization is most supremely concerned," says Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, "is not that which is inborn in the individual. It is the SOCIAL inheritance which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress."[1] It is this social inheritance which shapes our characters, rough-hewn by nature. It is by the light of each person's social inheritance that we must also judge his character.

[1] The Eugenists fiercely contest this statement, and rightly, for it is extreme. Society is threatened at its roots by the present high birth rate of the low grade and the low birth rate of the high grade. Environment, culture, can do much, but they cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Neither can heredity make a silk purse out of silk; without culture and the environmental influences, without social heredity, the silk remains crude and with no special value. The aims of a rational society, which we are born a thousand years too soon to see would be twofold: to control marriage and birth so that the number of the unfit would be kept as low as possible, and then to bring fostering influences to bear on the fit.

"Education," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places!" And education is merely social inheritance organized by parents and teachers for the sake of molding the scholar into usefulness and conformity to the group into which he is born. There may be in each individual an innate capacity for this ability or that, for expressing and controlling this or that emotion, for developing this or that purpose. Which ability will be developed, which emotion or purpose will be expressed, is a matter of the age in which a man is born, the country in which he lives, the family which claims him as its own. In a warrior age the fighting spirit chooses war as its vocation and develops a warlike character; in a peaceful time that same fighting spirit may seek to bring about such reforms as will do away with war.[1] When the world said that a man might and really ought now and then to beat his wife and rule her by force, the really conformable man did so, while his descendant, living in a time and country where woman is the domestic "boss," submits, humorously and otherwise, to a good-natured henpecking. And in the times where a woman had no vocation but that of housewife, the wife of larger ability merely became a discontented, futile woman; whereas in an age which opens up politics to her, the same type of person expands into a vigorous, dominating political leader. Though the force of the water remain the same, the nature of the land determines whether the water shall collect as a river, carrying the produce of the land to the sea, or as a stagnant lake in which idlers fish. Time, social circumstances, education and a thousand and one factors determine whether one shall be a "Village Hampden," quarreling in a petty way with a petty autocrat over some petty thing, or a national Hampden, whose defiance of a tyrannical king stirs a nation into revolt.