In the normal mind the emotional or feeling accompaniment of thought and action is proportionate and adequate to the circumstances, i. e., there is a certain feeling, of a certain strength, natural to every thought and act; and when only that strength, not more or less, accompanies the thought or the act, we say, “That man is emotionally stable. His mind is normally balanced.”
Joy naturally follows some stimuli; sorrow others. Disappointment or loss, shock, failure, death of loved ones, illness in ourselves or others, do not normally bring joy. A keen sense of suffering, temporarily, perhaps, of numbness; the inability to grasp the calamity; or flowing tears, an aching heart, or the stress of willed endurance, are natural, and normal reactions to such stimuli.
A developed will may refuse indulgence in the outward expression of the normal feeling of shock, grief, and loss; and this may be normal. But normal volition does not force us to laugh and dance and be wildly merry in the face of grief and loss and pain. It only suggests the adequate, reasonable acceptance of the facts that cannot be changed—the acceptance of love, faith, and hope that sees in present suffering a means of consecration to service; it does not convert the emotion of sorrow and loss into a pleasurable one. Normal reason does not suggest that will force the reactions to loss and suffering that belong by nature to attainment and success.
Nor does reason suggest the long face, the bitter tears, a storm of anger, in response to comedy and farce, in the face of a good joke, or to meet success; and normal will puts reason’s counsel into effect.
Normal Emotional Reactions
Some emotions, that seem exaggerated at first thought, may be normal under the circumstances. For no one can know the whole background for emotional response in the life of another. After being long shut up in a darkened room, with bandaged eyes and aching head and sick body, the first visit to the bit of woods back of the house—when all the pains have gone—may bring almost delirious joy. The green of the foliage, the blue of the sky, the arousing tang of the air, the birds, the sense of freedom—all go to the head like new wine. The abandon of joy is a normal response under the circumstances, now. It would hardly be normal to one whose habit it is to visit this same bit of woods every day, to one who loved it, but for whom it had lost the force of newness.
To the child, who has never in all his little life had a wish not gratified, the denial of a desired stick of candy is as great a calamity as is the loss of a fortune to the grown man. And the child reacts to feeling equally intense. These are normal reactions to stimuli—normal, under the circumstances.
The Normal Mind
The normal mind reasons clearly with the best data at hand to results that will stand the test of conformity to reality; the normal mind uses reason and feeling, guided by reasonable attitude; in the normal mind reason advises action and will brings it about; in the normal mind feeling proportionate to the circumstances accompanies every thought and every action. And in the well-balanced man or woman every function of the mind leads to action as its final end.
But man only approximates the normal. The perfectly balanced man or woman is so rare as to be a marked person. The average intelligent individual only in general approximates this standard. He goes beyond it in spurts of untrammeled genius, to wrench lightning from the heavens, and to send his trains through the air; or he allows his feelings to dictate to his reason, and much of the time so exaggerates or depreciates the simple facts of life that the results of his reasoning no longer conform sufficiently to reality as to be thoroughly dependable.