Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many
American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they
should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their
unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still?
Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex
influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension,
over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national
harm.
I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps
you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the beginning of
a better set of personal ideals.[B]
[B] See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in
this volume.
* * * * *
To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and
final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: _Keep the
faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
day._ That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do
every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so
that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not
unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is
like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does
him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But,
if the fire _does_ come, his having paid it will be his salvation from
ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the
blast.
* * * * *
I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old
habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly
anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by
my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for
sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do
occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have
laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of
character. New habits _can_ be launched, I have expressly said, on
condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. Now life
abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary
experiences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of
ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and,
if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up
in him a new or regenerate 'nature.'
All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of habit are
no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental
conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of
hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology
tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by
habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young
but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little
scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself
for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well,
he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being
counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in
strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become
permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in
the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific
spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have
any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it
may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may
safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty
count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the
competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have
singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the
_power of judging_ in all that class of matter will have built itself up
within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people
should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably
engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking
on arduous careers than all other causes put together.
IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our _motor_
habits,--habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling
processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result
of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the
association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects,
feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that its phases or
pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having
usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the
most prominent object in our thought, while all around this lies a
margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of
emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. Describing the
mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. At
first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive
waves, everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave
has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the
constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the
wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental 'laws of
association,' so-called, of which the first is named the Law of
Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.
The _Law of Contiguity_ tells us that objects thought of in the coming
wave are such as in some previous experience were _next_ to the objects
represented in the wave that is passing away. The vanishing objects were
once formerly their neighbors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet
or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name,
or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of
contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind.
The _Law of Similarity_ says that, when contiguity fails to describe
what happens, the coming objects will prove to _resemble_ the going
objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In
our 'flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case.
If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question,
"How came we to be thinking of just this object now?" we can almost
always trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced
it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. The entire
routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of
nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of
trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things,
are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which
cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one
part reminds us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the
mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition
and suggestion.
In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken
through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will
suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human
thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually
some _analogy_ between the objects successively thought of,--an analogy
often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty
analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine
in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or
where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat,
another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow.
* * * * *
Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what
the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show
that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but
that either presupposes the presence of the other. I myself am disposed
to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral
constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational
beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits,
it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws.
These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope
that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is
the _fact_ of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds
be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be
reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they
are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery. Their
education consists in the organizing within them of determinate
tendencies to associate one thing with another,--impressions with
consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on
indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer
the individual's adaptations to the world.
The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in terms of
'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' It
is mainly that of _building up useful systems of association_ in the
pupil's mind. This description sounds wider than the one I began by
giving. But, when one thinks that our trains of association, whatever
they may be, normally issue in acquired reactions or behavior, one sees
that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both
formulas.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have
once grasped the principles of association. The great problem which
association undertakes to solve is, _Why does just this particular field
of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before
my mind?_ It may be a field of objects imagined; it may be of objects
remembered or of objects perceived; it may include an action resolved
on. In either case, when the field is analyzed into its parts, those
parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts of fields previously
before consciousness, in consequence of one or other of the laws of
association just laid down. Those laws _run_ the mind: interest,
shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention, as we shall
later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a course.
To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple
understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature,' the
'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form
of his associations. To break up bad associations or wrong ones, to
build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most
fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task. But here, as with
all other simple principles, the difficulty lies in the application.