[Footnote 1: We have already noted the danger of too complete a commitment of science to immediately practical results. This narrows instead of broadening possibility. As Mr. F. P. Keppel points out in a recent article, "Scholarship in War" (Columbia University Quarterly, July, 1919), some of the most important and immediately practical contributions during the Great War came from the ranks of those who would be regarded as "pure theorists.">[
CHAPTER XV
MORALS AND MORAL VALUATION
The pre-conditions of morality—Instinct, impulse, and desire. In Art and Science, man attempts to transform the world of nature into conditions more in conformity with his desires. In the enterprise of Morals, man attempts to discover how to control his own nature in the attainment of happiness. We have already had occasion to see that Art, in the broad sense of human contrivance, is made necessary by the incongruity between nature and human nature. We shall examine now the conditions which make it necessary and make it possible for man to consider and to control those elementary impulses with which he is endowed.
The origin of the moral problem will become clearer after a brief recapitulation of those elements of original nature which form the basis of all human action. We have seen that human beings are equipped, apart from education or training, with certain tendencies to act in certain definite ways, given certain definite stimuli. Any single activity of an average human being in a modern civilized community is compounded of so many modifications of original tendencies to action that these latter seem often altogether obliterated. The conditions of civilized life, moreover, place continual checks on the free activity of any given impulse, and there are so many stimuli playing upon an individual at once that the responses called out tend to inhibit each other. The particular thing we say to an acquaintance we happen to meet is not determined by a single original impulse, by love or hate, fear or sympathy, pugnacity or pity. It is a compound of some or of most of these. On the other hand, no matter how complicated or sophisticated human action becomes, it is built out of these same impulses, which were operative when human beings had not yet passed out of savagery. We may check and control our responses through habitual repressions, through deliberate forethought, through conscious or mechanical acquiescence in the ways of the group among which we live. But these original impulses are still the mainspring of our activities.
The complex, highly artificial character of our civilization often obscures the presence of these powerful instinctive tendencies, but that they are present and powerful several facts bear witness. They manifest themselves, as the newer psychology of the subconscious has repeatedly pointed out, in roundabout ways; they are, in the technical phrase, sublimated. Instincts find, as it were, substitute realizations. This process of sublimation of unfulfilled desire has been noted particularly with regard to the sex instinct, but the principle applies to the others.
The continual suppression of instincts results in various forms of morbidity, in what Graham Wallas calls "baulked dispositions." To say that instincts are repressed, is to say there is a maladjustment between the individual as he comes into the world, and the world as he finds it. This maladjustment may vary in intensity. It may be exhibited in nothing more serious than boredom, or petulance, or hyper-sensitiveness. It may be a chronic sense of not fitting in, of being lost in a blind alley. One has but to review one's list of acquaintances to see how many people there are who feel somehow frustrated in the work they happen to be doing, who feel themselves inexplicably at odds with the world. Graham Wallas well describes the situation when he writes:
For we cannot in Saint Paul's sense mortify our dispositions. If they are not stimulated, they do not therefore die, nor is the human being what he would be if they had never existed. If we leave unstimulated, or, to use a shorter term, if we "baulk" any one of our main dispositions, Curiosity, Property, Trial and Error, Sex, and the rest, we produce in ourselves a state of nervous strain. It may be desirable in any particular case of conduct that we should do so, but we ought to know what we are doing.
The baulking of each disposition produces its own type of strain; but the distinctions between the types are, so far, unnamed and unrecognized, and a trained psychologist would do a real service to civilized life if he would carefully observe and describe them.[1]
[Footnote 1: Wallas: The Great Society, p. 65.]