Psychology and Social Sanity

by Hugo Münsterberg

Yet how one-sided would it be, if we gave attention only to the dangers which the dance may bring to a nation's mind. The credit account of the social dance is certainly not insignificant, and perhaps momentous just for the Americans of to-day. The dance is a wonderful discharge of stirred up energy; its rhythmic form relieves the tension of the motor apparatus and produces a feeling of personal comfort. The power to do this is a valuable asset, when so much emotional poverty is around us. The dance makes life smooth in the midst of hardship and drudgery. For the dancer the cup is always overflowing, even though it may be small. There is an element of relaxation and of joyfulness in the rhythm of the music and the twinkling of the feet, which comes as a blessing into the dulness and monotony of life. The overworked factory girl does not seek rest for her muscles after the day of labour, but craves to go on contrasting them in the rhythmic movements of the dance. So it has been at all times. The hardest worked part of the community has usually been the most devoted to the gayety of popular dances. The refined society has in many periods of civilization declined to indulge in dancing, because it was too widely spread among the lowest working classes in towns and in the country. The dance through thousands of years has been the bearer of harmless happiness: who would refuse a welcome to such a benefactor? And with the joyfulness comes the sociability. The dance brings people near together. It is unfair to claim that the dance is aristocratic, because it presupposes leisure and luxury. On the contrary, throughout the history of civilization the dance has been above all, democratic, and has reënforced the feeling of good fellowship, of community, of intimacy, of unity. Like the popular games which melt all social groups together by a common joyful interest, and like humour which breaks all social barriers, the love for dancing removes mutual distrust and harmonizes the masses.

This social effect has manifold relation to another aspect of the dance, which is psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an art, and as such, of deep æsthetic influence on the whole mental life. Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery of the exact rules appeared one of the most difficult parts of higher education, and as a real test of the truly cultivated gentleman and gentlewoman; scholarly books analysed every detail of the necessary forms, and the society dances in the castles of the eighteenth century were more elaborate than the best prepared ballets on the stage of to-day. But the popular dances of the really dancing nations are no less bound by traditions, and we know that even the dances of the savages are moving on in strictly inherited forms. Far from the license of haphazard movements, the self-expression of the dancer is thus regulated and bound by rules which are taken by him as prescriptions of beauty. To dance thus means a steady adjustment to artistic requirements; it is an æsthetic education by which the whole system of human impulses becomes harmonized and unified. The chance movements are blended into a beautiful whole, and this reflects on the entire inner setting. Educators have for a long time been aware that calisthenics, with its subtly tuned movements of the body, develops refinement in the interplay of mental life. The personality who understands how to live in gentle, beautiful motions through that trains his mind to beauty. In Europe, for instance in Hellerau near Dresden, they have recently begun to establish schools for young men and women in which the main, higher education is to be moulded by the æsthetics of bodily expression, and the culture of the symbolic dance.

This æsthetic character of the dance, however, leads still further. It is not only the training in beautiful expression; it is the development of an attitude which is detached from practical effects and from the practical life of outer success. The dance is an action by which nothing is produced and nothing in the surroundings changed. It is an oasis in the desert of our materialistic behaviour. From morning till night we are striving to do things, to manufacture something in the mill of the nation: but he who dances is satisfied in expressing himself. He becomes detached from the cares of the hour, he acquires a new habit of disinterested attitude toward life. Who can underestimate the value of such detachment in our American life? The Americans have always been eagerly at work, but have never quite learned to enjoy themselves and to take the æsthetic attitude which creates the wonders of beauty and the true harmonies of life. To forget drudgery and to sink into the rhythms of the dance may bring to millions that inner completeness which is possible only when practical and æsthetic attitude are blending in a personality. The one means restless change; the other means repose, perfection, eternity. This hardworking, pioneer nation needs the noisy teachings of efficiency and scientific management less than the melodious teaching of song and dance and beauty. In short, the dance may bring both treacherous perils and wonderful gifts to our community. It depends upon us whether we reënforce the dangerous elements of the dance, or the beneficial ones. It will depend on ourselves whether the dance will debase the nation, as it has so often done in the history of civilization, or whether it will help to lead it to new heights of beauty and harmony, as it has not seldom done before. Our social conscience must be wide awake; it will not be a blind fate which will decide when the door of the future opens whether we shall meet the lady or the tiger.

X

NAÏVE PSYCHOLOGY

The scientific psychologists started on a new road yesterday. For a long time their chief interest was to study the laws of the mind. The final goal was a textbook which would contain a system of laws to which every human mind is subjected. But in recent times a change has set in. The trend of much of the best work nowadays is toward the study of individual differences. The insight into individual personalities was indeed curiously neglected in modern psychology. This does not mean that the declaration of psychological independence insisted that all men are born equal, nor did any psychologist fancy that education or social surroundings could form all men in equal moulds. But as scientists they felt no particular interest in the richness of colours and tints. They intentionally neglected the question of how men differ, because they were absorbed by the study of the underlying laws which must hold for every one. It is hardly surprising that the psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it was a kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the psychology of olden times. Speculations about the soul had served for centuries. Metaphysics had reigned and the observation of the real facts of life and experience had been disregarded. When the new time came in which the psychologists were fascinated by the spirit of scientific method and exact study of actual facts, the safest way was for them to imitate the well-tested and triumphant procedures of natural science. The physicist and the chemist seek the laws of the physical universe, and the psychologist tried to act like them, to study the elements from which the psychical universe is composed and to find the laws which control them. But while it was wise to make the first forward march in this one direction, the psychologist finally had to acknowledge that a no less important interest must push him on an opposite way. The human mind is not important to us only as a type. Every social aim reminds us that we must understand the individual personality. If we deal with children in the classroom or with criminals in the courtroom, with customers in the market or with patients in the hospital, we need not only to know what is true of every human being; we must above all discover how the particular individual is disposed and composed, or what is characteristic of special groups, nations, races, sexes, and ages. It is clear that new methods were needed to approach these younger problems of scientific psychology, but the scientists have eagerly turned with concerted efforts toward this unexplored region and have devoted the methods of test experiments, of statistics, and of laboratory measurements to the examination of such differences between various individuals and groups.

But in all these new efforts the psychologist meets a certain public resistance, or at least a certain disregard, which he is not accustomed to find in his routine endeavours. As long as he was simply studying the laws of the mind, he enjoyed the approval of the wider public. His work was appreciated as is that of the biologist and the chemist. But when it becomes his aim to discover mental features of the individual, and to foresee what he can expect from the social groups of men, every layman tells him condescendingly that it is a superfluous task, as instinct and intuition and the naïve psychology of the street will be more successful than any measurements with chronoscopes and kymographs. Do we not know how the skilful politician or the efficient manager looks through the mind of a man at the first glance? The life insurance agent has hardly entered the door before he knows how this particular mind must be handled. Every commercial traveller knows more than any psychologist can tell him, and even the waiter in the restaurant foresees when the guest sits down how large a tip he can expect from him. In itself it would hardly be convincing to claim that scientific efforts to bring a process down to exact principles are unnecessary because the process can be performed by instinct. We all can walk without needing a knowledge of the muscles which are used, and can find nourishment without knowing the physiology of nutrition. Yet the physiologist has not only brought to light the principles according to which we actually eat, but he has been able to make significant suggestions for improved diet, and in not a few cases his knowledge can render services which no instinctive appetite could replace. The psychological study of human traits, too, may not only find out the principles underlying the ordinary knowledge of men, but may discover means for an insight which goes as far beyond the instinctive understanding of man as the scientific diet prescribed by a physician goes beyond the fancies of a cook. The manager may believe that he can recognize at the first glance for which kind of work the labourer is fit: and yet the psychological analysis with the methods of exact experiments may easily demonstrate that his judgment is entirely mistaken. Moreover, although such practical psychologists of the street or of the office may develop a certain art of recognizing particular features in the individual, they cannot formulate the laws and cannot lay down those permanent relations from which others may learn.

Yet even this claim of the psychological scholar seems idle pride. Had the world really to wait for his exact statistics and his formulæ of correlation of mental traits in order to get general statements and definite descriptions of the human types and of the mental diversities? Are not the writings of the wise men of all times full of such psychological observations? Has not the consciousness of the nations expressed itself in an abundance of sayings and songs, of proverbs and philosophic words, which contains this naïve psychological insight into the characters and temperaments of the human mind? We may go back thousands of years to the contemplations of oriental wisdom, we may read the poets of classic antiquity, or Shakespeare, or Goethe, we may study what the great religious leaders and statesmen, the historians and the jurists, have said about man and his behaviour; and we find an over-abundance of wonderful sayings with which no textbooks of psychology can be compared.

This is all true. And yet, is it not perhaps all entirely false? Can this naïve psychology of the ages, to which the impressionism and the wisdom of the finest minds have so amply contributed, really make superfluous the scientific efforts for the psychology of groups and correlations and individual traits? It seems almost surprising that this overwhelmingly rich harvest of prescientific psychology has never been examined from the standpoint of scientific psychology, and that no one has sifted the wheat from the chaff. The very best would be not only to gather such material, but to combine the sayings of the naïve psychologists in a rounded system of psychology. In all ages they surely must have been among the best observers of mankind, as even what is not connected with the name of an individual author, but is found in proverbs or in the folk-epics of the nations, must have originated in the minds of individual leaders. My aim here is more modest: I have made my little pilgrimage through literature to find out in a tentative fashion whether the supply of psychology, outside of science, is really so rich and valuable as is usually believed. What I wish to offer, therefore, is only a first collection of psychological statements, which the prescientific psychologists have proclaimed, and surely will go on proclaiming, and ought to go on proclaiming, as they do it so beautifully, where we scientists have nothing but tiresome formulæ.

Let us begin at the beginning. There has never been a nation whose contemplation was richer in wisdom, whose view of man was subtler and more suggestive, than those of old India. The sayings of its philosophers and poets and thinkers have often been gathered in large volumes of aphorisms. How many of these fine-cut remarks about man contain real psychology? The largest collection which I could discover is that of Boehtlinck, who translated seventy-five hundred Indian sayings into German. Not a few of them refer to things of the outer world, but by far the largest part of them speaks of man and of man's feeling and doing. But here in India came my first disappointment, a disappointment which repeated itself in every corner of the globe. After carefully going through those thousands of general remarks, I could not find more than a hundred and nine in which the observation takes a psychological turn. All those other thousands of reflections on men are either metaphors and comparisons of distinctly æsthetic intent, or rules of practical behaviour with social or moral or religious purpose. Yet even if we turn to this 1½ per cent. which has a psychological flavour, we soon discover that among those hundred and nine, more than a half are simply definitions of the type of this: “Foolish are they who trust women or good luck, as both like a young serpent creep hither and thither,” or this: “Men who are rich are like those who are drunk; in walking they are helped by others, they stagger on smooth roads and talk confusedly.” It cannot be said that any psychological observations of the fool's or of the rich man's mind are recorded here. If I sift those maxims more carefully, I cannot find more than two score which, stripped of their picturesque phrasing, could really enter into that world system of naïve psychology. And yet even this figure is still too high. Of those forty, most are after all epigrams, generalizations of some chance cases, exaggerations of a bit of truth, or expressions of a mood of anger, of love, of class spirit, or of male haughtiness. The analysis of woman's mind is typical. “Inclination to lies, falsehood, foolishness, greediness, hastiness, uncleanliness, and cruelty are inborn faults of the woman”; or “Water never remains in an unbaked vessel, flour in a sieve, nor news in the mind of women”; or “The mind of a woman is less stable than the ear of an elephant or the flash of lightning.” On the other hand we read: “True women have twice as much love, four times as much endurance, and eight times as much modesty as men”; or “The appetite of women is twice as large, their understanding four times as large, their spirit of enterprise six times as large, and their longing for love eight times as large as that of men.” Again we read: “The character of women is as changeable as a wave of the sea; their affection, like the rosy tint of a cloud in the evening sky, lasts just for a moment”; or “When women have a man's money, they let him go, as he is no longer of any use to them.”