Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to what he
would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively possessed him
from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations. Your born
gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being
than your "Crump, with his grunting resistance to his native devils,"
even though in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic theologians
say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.'
Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid
under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that
something else is good. He who habitually acts _sub specie mali_, under
the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by
Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives
the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of
your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the
notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much
through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their
enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty
by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's
inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than
the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social
miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in
lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound
blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the
morning sun and air and dew will daily come as sufficiently powerful
intoxicants.
I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I have said
seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may appear less so
when, in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves noticing and
apperceiving events in the schoolroom a little differently, in
consequence of some of the conceptions I have tried to make more clear.
I cannot but think that to apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive,
impulsive, associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly
free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand
him, then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. And if, in
addition, you can also see him _sub specie boni_, and love him as well,
you will be in the best possible position for becoming perfect teachers.
#TALKS TO STUDENTS#
I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and
show their practical applications to mental hygiene,--to the hygiene of
our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic
circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great
expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by
showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.
The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions,
commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James
theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those
organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus
of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or
surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind,
but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which
the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion
suppressed, we should not so much _feel_ fear as call the situation
fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the
object was indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to
say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid
it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may perhaps
be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration
may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself
whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main
core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example,
or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment
in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is,
accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the
moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that
which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not
to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse
in time, for example, or if we only _don't_ strike the blow or rip out
with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action
seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and
by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the
will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous
cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully,
and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such
conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that
occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we _were_ brave, use all our
will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of
fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have
been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to
make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of
heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental
demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins
our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas,
if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon
folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.
The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim
that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In
an admirable and widely successful little book called 'The Christian's
Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this
lesson on almost every page. _Act_ faithfully, and you really have
faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "It is your
purpose God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, "not your feelings about that
purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need
attend to.... Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God
pleases, and make no account of them either way.... They really have
nothing to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your
spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of
your present physical condition."
But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on
your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring
currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to
moment what our inner states shall be: that is a fundamental law of
psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.
* * * * *
A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written
about the _Binnenleben_, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.
No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations
with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
_Binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his
consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This
inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe
articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are
often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic
quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it
consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the
sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are
not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists
in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
anaesthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to
be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary,
there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour
in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of
security and readiness for anything that may turn up.
Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned _motor-apparatus_,
nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the
sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in
Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by
the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the _ski_, or
long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women
acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than
the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of
femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence'
sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have
been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who
are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and
delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and
tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly
extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going
also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its
tonic breath through all our American life.
I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained
and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the
well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher
education for men and women alike. The strength of the British Empire
lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken
all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially
nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in
which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.
I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on
hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have
forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful
prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system.
Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the
environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power
from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will
cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and
more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
of energy on his own account. So that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the
future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we
not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of
beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man'
direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form
from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or