Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

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.