Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with surprising ease.
The conflicts of life are generally conscious conflicts, in my experience. Desires and lusts that one does not know of do no harm; it is the conflict which we cannot settle, the choice we cannot make, the doubt we cannot resolve, that injures. It is not those who find it easy to inhibit a desire or any impulse that are troubled, though they may and do grow narrow. It is those whose unlawful or discordant desires are not easily inhibited who find themselves the theater of a constant struggle that breaks them down. The uneasiness of a desire that arises from the activity of the sex organs is not a manifestation of a subconscious personality, unless we include in our personality our livers, spleen and internal organs of all kinds. Such an uneasiness may not be clearly understood by the individual merely because the uneasiness is diffuse and not localized. But there is no personality, Do will, wish or desire in that uneasiness; it may and does cause to arise in the conscious personality wills and wishes and desires against which there is rebellion and because of which there is conflict.
Upon the issue of the conflicts within the personality hangs the fate of the individual. Race-old lines of conduct are inhibited by custom, tradition, teaching, conformity and the social instinct and its allies. Here is a subject worthy of extended consideration.
Freud has done the thought of our times a great service in emphasizing conflict. From the earliest restriction laid by men on his own conduct, wrestling with desire and temptation has been the greatest of man's struggles. Internal warfare between opposing purposes and desires may proceed to a disruption of the personality, to failure and unhappiness, or else to a solidified personality, efficient, single-minded and successful. Freud's work has directed our attention to the thousand and one aberrant desires that we will hardly acknowledge to ourselves, and he has forced the professional worker in abnormal and normal mental life to disregard his own prejudices, to strip away the camouflage that we put over our motives and our struggles. Together with Jung and Bleuler, he has helped our science of character a great deal through no other method than by arousing it to action against him. In order to fight him, our thought has been forced to arm itself with the weapons that he has used.
CHAPTER VI. EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL
In a preceding chapter we discussed man as an organism reacting against an outside world and spurred on by internal activities and needs. We discussed stimulation, reflexes, inhibition, choice and the organizing activity, memory and habit, consciousness and subconsciousness, all of which are primary activities of the organism. But these are mere theories of function, for the activities we are interested in reside in more definite reactions, of which the foregoing are parts.
We see a dreaded object on the horizon or foresee a calamity,—and we fear. That state of the organism (note I do not say that STATE OF MIND) resulting from the vision is an emotion. We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run, hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if cornered. "What shall I do—what shall I do? finds no conscious answer if the emotion is overwhelming or the instinctive flight a pell-mell affair; but ordinarily memories of other experiences or of teaching come into the mind and some effort is made to meet the situation in an "intelligent" manner.
Here, then, is a response in which three cardinal reactions have occurred and are blended,—the emotion, the instinctive action, and the intelligent action; or to make abstractions, emotion, instinct and intelligence. (Personally, I think half the trouble with our thought is that, we abstract from our experiences a common group of associations and believe that the abstraction has some existence outside our thoughts.) Thus there arise in us, as a result of things experienced, curious feelings and we speak of the feelings as emotions; we make a race-old response to a situation,—an instinctive reaction; our memories, past experiences and present purposes are stirred into activity, and we plan and scheme, and this is an intelligent reaction, but there is in reality no metaphysical entity Emotion, Instinct, Intelligence. I believe that here the philosophers whose mental activities are essentially in the direction of forming abstract ideas have misled us.
What I wish to point out is this: that to any situation all three reactions may take place and modify one another. We are insulted—some one slaps our face—the fierce emotion of anger arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing, perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. But no,—the situation has aroused certain memories and certain inhibitions: the one who struck us has been our friend and we can see that he is acting under a mistaken impression, or else we perceive that he is right, that we have done him a wrong for which his blow is a sort of just reaction. We are checked by these cerebral activities, we choose some other reaction than fight; perhaps we prevent him from further assault, or we turn and walk away, or we start to explain, to mollify and console, or to remonstrate and reprove. In other words, "intelligence" steps in to inhibit, to bring to the surface the possibilities, to choose, and thus overrides the emotional instinctive reaction. It may not succeed in the overriding; we may hesitate, inhibit, etc., for only a second or so, before hot anger overcomes us, and the instinctive response of fight and retaliation takes place.
These examples might be multiplied a thousandfold. Every day of our lives situations come up in which there is a blending or an antagonism between emotional, instinctive and intelligent responses. In fact, very few acts of the organized human being are anything else. For every emotion awakens memories of past emotions and the consequences; every instinct is hampered by other instincts or by the inhibitions aroused by obstacles; and intelligence continually struggles against emotion and blind instinct. Teaching, experience, knowledge, all modify emotional and instinctive responses so that sometimes they are hardly recognizable as such. On the other hand, though intelligence normally occupies the seat of power, it is easily ousted and in reality only steers and directs the vehicle of life, choosing not the goal but the road by which the goal can safely be reached.