Human Nature And Conduct - Part 1, The Place of Habit in Conduct — 6: Habit and Social Psychology

VI

The prior discussion has tried to show why the psychology of habit is an objective and social psychology.

Settled and regular action must contain an adjustment of environing conditions; it must incorporate them in itself.

For human beings, the environing affairs directly important are those formed by the activities of other human beings.

This fact is accentuated and made fundamental by the fact of infancy--the fact that each human being begins life completely dependent upon others.

The net outcome accordingly is that what can be called distinctively individual in behavior and mind is not, contrary to traditional theory, an original datum.

Doubtless physical or physiological individuality always colors responsive activity and hence modifies the form which custom assumes in its personal reproductions.

In forceful energetic characters this quality is marked.

But it is important to note that it is a quality of habit, not an element or force existing apart from adjustment of the environment and capable of being termed a separate individual mind.

Orthodox psychology starts however from the assumption of precisely such independent minds.

However much different schools may vary in their definitions of mind, they agree in this premiss of separateness and priority.

Hence social psychology is confused by the effort to render its facts in the terms characteristic of old psychology, when the distinctive thing about it is that it implies an abandonment of that psychology.

The traditional psychology of the original separate soul, mind or consciousness is in truth a reflex of conditions which cut human nature off from its natural objective relations.

It implies first the severance of man from nature and then of each man from his fellows.

The isolation of man from nature is duly manifested in the split between mind and body--since body is clearly a connected part of nature.

Thus the instrument of action and the means of the continuous modification of action, of the cumulative carrying forward of old activity into new, is regarded as a mysterious intruder or as a mysterious parallel accompaniment.

It is fair to say that the psychology of a separate and independent consciousness began as an intellectual formulation of those facts of morality which treated the most important kind of action as a private concern, something to be enacted and concluded within character as a purely personal possession.

The religious and metaphysical interests which wanted the ideal to be a separate realm finally coincided with a practical revolt against current customs and institutions to enforce current psychological individualism.

But this formulation (put forth in the name of science) reacted to confirm the conditions out of which it arose, and to convert it from a historic episode into an essential truth.

Its exaggeration of individuality is largely a compensatory reaction against the pressure of institutional rigidities.

Any moral theory which is seriously influenced by current psychological theory is bound to emphasize states of consciousness, an inner private life, at the expense of acts which have public meaning and which incorporate and exact social relationships.

A psychology based upon habits (and instincts which become elements in habits as soon as they are acted upon) will on the contrary fix its attention upon the objective conditions in which habits are formed and operate.

The rise at the present time of a clinical psychology which revolts at traditional and orthodox psychology is a symptom of ethical import.

It is a protest against the futility, as a tool of understanding and dealing with human nature in the concrete, of the psychology of conscious sensations, images and ideas.

It exhibits a sense for reality in its insistence upon the profound importance of unconscious forces in determining not only overt conduct but desire, judgment, belief, idealization.

Every moment of reaction and protest, however, usually accepts some of the basic ideas of the position against which it rebels.

So the most popular forms of the clinical psychology, those associated with the founders of psycho-analysis, retain the notion of a separate psychic realm or force.

They add a statement pointing to facts of the utmost value, and which is equivalent to practical recognition of the dependence of mind upon habit and of habit upon social conditions.

This is the statement of the existence and operation of the "unconscious," of complexes due to contacts and conflicts with others, of the social censor.

But they still cling to the idea of the separate psychic realm and so in effect talk about unconscious consciousness.

They get their truths mixed up in theory with the false psychology of original individual consciousness, just as the school of social psychologists does upon its side.

Their elaborate artificial explanations, like the mystic collective mind, consciousness, over-soul, of social psychology, are due to failure to begin with the facts of habit and custom.

What then is meant by individual mind, by mind as individual?

In effect the reply has already been given.

Conflict of habits releases impulsive activities which in their manifestation require a modification of habit, of custom and convention.

That which was at first the individualized color or quality of habitual activity is abstracted, and becomes a center of activity aiming to reconstruct customs in accord with some desire which is rejected by the immediate situation and which therefore is felt to belong to one's self, to be the mark and possession of an individual in partial and temporary opposition to his environment.

These general and necessarily vague statements will be made more definite in the further discussion of impulse and intelligence.

For impulse when it asserts itself deliberately against an existing custom is the beginning of individuality in mind.

This beginning is developed and consolidated in the observations, judgments, inventions which try to transform the environment so that a variant, deviating impulse may itself in turn become incarnated in objective habit.

PART TWO

THE PLACE OF IMPULSE IN CONDUCT

I

Habits as organized activities are secondary and acquired, not native and original.

They are outgrowths of unlearned activities which are part of man's endowment at birth.

The order of topics followed in our discussion may accordingly be questioned.

Why should what is derived and therefore in some sense artificial in conduct be discussed before what is primitive, natural and inevitable?

Why did we not set out with an examination of those instinctive activities upon which the acquisition of habits is conditioned?

The query is a natural one, yet it tempts to flinging forth a paradox.

In conduct the acquired is the primitive.

Impulses although first in time are never primary in fact; they are secondary and dependent.

The seeming paradox in statement covers a familiar fact.

In the life of the individual, instinctive activity comes first.

But an individual begins life as a baby, and babies are dependent beings.

Their activities could continue at most for only a few hours were it not for the presence and aid of adults with their formed habits.

And babies owe to adults more than procreation, more than the continued food and protection which preserve life.

They owe to adults the opportunity to express their native activities in ways which have meaning.

Even if by some miracle original activity could continue without assistance from the organized skill and art of adults, it would not amount to anything.

It would be mere sound and fury.

In short, the _meaning_ of native activities is not native; it is acquired.

It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.

In the case of a tiger or eagle, anger may be identified with a serviceable life-activity, with attack and defense.

With a human being it is as meaningless as a gust of wind on a mud puddle apart from a direction given it by the presence of other persons, apart from the responses they make to it.

It is a physical spasm, a blind dispersive burst of wasteful energy.

It gets quality, significance, when it becomes a smouldering sullenness, an annoying interruption, a peevish irritation, a murderous revenge, a blazing indignation.

And although these phenomena which have a meaning spring from original native reactions to stimuli, yet they depend also upon the responsive behavior of others.

They and all similar human displays of anger are not pure impulses; they are habits formed under the influence of association with others who have habits already and who show their habits in the treatment which converts a blind physical discharge into a significant anger.

After ignoring impulses for a long time in behalf of sensations, modern psychology now tends to start out with an inventory and description of instinctive activities.

This is an undoubted improvement.

But when it tries to explain complicated events in personal and social life by direct reference to these native powers, the explanation becomes hazy and forced.

It is like saying the flea and the elephant, the lichen and the redwood, the timid hare and the ravening wolf, the plant with the most inconspicuous blossom and the plant with the most glaring color are alike products of natural selection.

There may be a sense in which the statement is true; but till we know the specific environing conditions under which selection took place we really know nothing.

And so we need to know about the social conditions which have educated original activities into definite and significant dispositions before we can discuss the psychological element in society.

This is the true meaning of social psychology.

At some place on the globe, at some time, every kind of practice seems to have been tolerated or even praised.

How is the tremendous diversity of institutions (including moral codes) to be accounted for?

The native stock of instincts is practically the same everywhere.

Exaggerate as much as we like the native differences of Patagonians and Greeks, Sioux Indians and Hindoos, Bushmen and Chinese, their original differences will bear no comparison to the amount of difference found in custom and culture.

Since such a diversity cannot be attributed to an original identity, the development of native impulse must be stated in terms of acquired habits, not the growth of customs in terms of instincts.

The wholesale human sacrifices of Peru and the tenderness of St. Francis, the cruelties of pirates and the philanthropies of Howard, the practice of Suttee and the cult of the Virgin, the war and peace dances of the Comanches and the parliamentary institutions of the British, the communism of the Southsea islander and the proprietary thrift of the Yankee, the magic of the medicine man and the experiments of the chemist in his laboratory, the non-resistance of Chinese and the aggressive militarism of an imperial Prussia, monarchy by divine right and government by the people; the countless diversity of habits suggested by such a random list springs from practically the same capital-stock of native instincts.

It would be pleasant if we could pick and choose those institutions which we like and impute them to human nature, and the rest to some devil; or those we like to our kind of human nature, and those we dislike to the nature of despised foreigners on the ground they are not really "native" at all.

It would appear to be simpler if we could point to certain customs, saying that they are the unalloyed products of certain instincts, while those other social arrangements are to be attributed wholly to other impulses.

But such methods are not feasible.

The same original fears, angers, loves and hates are hopelessly entangled in the most opposite institutions.

The thing we need to know is how a native stock has been modified by interaction with different environments.

Yet it goes without saying that original, unlearned activity has its distinctive place and that an important one in conduct.

Impulses are the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality.

Consequently whenever we are concerned with understanding social transition and flux or with projects for reform, personal and collective, our study must go to analysis of native tendencies.

Interest in progress and reform is, indeed, the reason for the present great development of scientific interest in primitive human nature.

If we inquire why men were so long blind to the existence of powerful and varied instincts in human beings, the answer seems to be found in the lack of a conception of orderly progress.

It is fast becoming incredible that psychologists disputed as to whether they should choose between innate ideas and an empty, passive, wax-like mind.

For it seems as if a glance at a child would have revealed that the truth lay in neither doctrine, so obvious is the surging of specific native activities.

But this obtuseness to facts was evidence of lack of interest in what could be done with impulses, due, in turn, to lack of interest in modifying existing institutions.

It is no accident that men became interested in the psychology of savages and babies when they became interested in doing away with old institutions.

A combination of traditional individualism with the recent interest in progress explains why the discovery of the scope and force of instincts has led many psychologists to think of them as the fountain head of all conduct, as occupying a place before instead of after that of habits.

The orthodox tradition in psychology is built upon isolation of individuals from their surroundings.

The soul or mind or consciousness was thought of as self-contained and self-enclosed.

Now in the career of an individual if it is regarded as complete in itself instincts clearly come before habits.

Generalize this individualistic view, and we have an assumption that all customs, all significant episodes in the life of individuals can be carried directly back to the operation of instincts.

But, as we have already noted, if an individual be isolated in this fashion, along with the fact of primacy of instinct we find also the fact of death.

The inchoate and scattered impulses of an infant do not coordinate into serviceable powers except through social dependencies and companionships.

His impulses are merely starting points for assimilation of the knowledge and skill of the more matured beings upon whom he depends.

They are tentacles sent out to gather that nutrition from customs which will in time render the infant capable of independent action.

They are agencies for transfer of existing social power into personal ability; they are means of reconstructive growth.

Abandon an impossible individualistic psychology, and we arrive at the fact that native activities are organs of re-organization and re-adjustment.

The hen precedes the egg.

But nevertheless this particular egg may be so treated as to modify the future type of hen.

II

In the case of the young it is patent that impulses are highly flexible starting points for activities which are diversified according to the ways in which they are used.

Any impulse may become organized into almost any disposition according to the way it interacts with surroundings.

Fear may become abject cowardice, prudent caution, reverence for superiors or respect for equals; an agency for credulous swallowing of absurd superstitions or for wary scepticism.

A man may be chiefly afraid of the spirits of his ancestors, of officials, of arousing the disapproval of his associates, of being deceived, of fresh air, or of Bolshevism.

The actual outcome depends upon how the impulse of fear is interwoven with other impulses.

This depends in turn upon the outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social environment.

In a definite sense, then, a human society is always starting afresh.

It is always in process of renewing, and it endures only because of renewal.

We speak of the peoples of southern Europe as Latin peoples.

Their existing languages depart widely from one another and from the Latin mother tongue.

Yet there never was a day when this alteration of speech was intentional or explicit.

Persons always meant to reproduce the speech they heard from their elders and supposed they were succeeding.

This fact may stand as a kind of symbol of the reconstruction wrought in habits because of the fact that they can be transmitted and be made to endure only through the medium of the crude activities of the young or through contact with persons having different habits.

For the most part, this continuous alteration has been unconscious and unintended.

Immature, undeveloped activity has succeeded in modifying adult organized activity accidentally and surreptitiously.

But with the dawn of the idea of progressive betterment and an interest in new uses of impulses, there has grown up some consciousness of the extent to which a future new society of changed purposes and desires may be created by a deliberate humane treatment of the impulses of youth.

This is the meaning of education; for a truly humane education consists in an intelligent direction of native activities in the light of the possibilities and necessities of the social situation.

But for the most part, adults have given training rather than education.

An impatient, premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits of thought and affection has been desired.

The combined effect of love of power, timidity in the face of the novel and a self-admiring complacency has been too strong to permit immature impulse to exercise its re-organizing potentialities.

The younger generation has hardly even knocked frankly at the door of adult customs, much less been invited in to rectify through better education the brutalities and inequities established in adult habits.

Each new generation has crept blindly and furtively through such chance gaps as have happened to be left open.

Otherwise it has been modeled after the old.

We have already noted how original plasticity is warped and docility is taken mean advantage of.

It has been used to signify not capacity to learn liberally and generously, but willingness to learn the customs of adult associates, ability to learn just those special things which those having power and authority wish to teach.

Original modifiability has not been given a fair chance to act as a trustee for a better human life.

It has been loaded with convention, biased by adult convenience.

It has been practically rendered into an equivalent of non-assertion of originality, a pliant accommodation to the embodied opinions of others.

Consequently docility has been identified with imitativeness, instead of with power to re-make old habits, to re-create.

Plasticity and originality have been opposed to each other.

That the most precious part of plasticity consists in ability to form habits of independent judgment and of inventive initiation has been ignored.

For it demands a more complete and intense docility to form flexible easily re-adjusted habits than it does to acquire those which rigidly copy the ways of others.

In short, among the native activities of the young are some that work towards accommodation, assimilation, reproduction, and others that work toward exploration, discovery and creation.

But the weight of adult custom has been thrown upon retaining and strengthening tendencies toward conformity, and against those which make for variation and independence.

The habits of the growing person are jealously kept within the limit of adult customs.

The delightful originality of the child is tamed.

Worship of institutions and personages themselves lacking in imaginative foresight, versatile observation and liberal thought, is enforced.

Very early in life sets of mind are formed without attentive thought, and these sets persist and control the mature mind.

The child learns to avoid the shock of unpleasant disagreement, to find the easy way out, to appear to conform to customs which are wholly mysterious to him in order to get his own way--that is to display some natural impulse without exciting the unfavorable notice of those in authority.

Adults distrust the intelligence which a child has while making upon him demands for a kind of conduct that requires a high order of intelligence, if it is to be intelligent at all.

The inconsistency is reconciled by instilling in him "moral" habits which have a maximum of emotional empressment and adamantine hold with a minimum of understanding.

These habitudes, deeply engrained before thought is awake and even before the day of experiences which can later be recalled, govern conscious later thought.

They are usually deepest and most unget-at-able just where critical thought is most needed--in morals, religion and politics.

These "infantalisms" account for the mass of irrationalities that prevail among men of otherwise rational tastes.

These personal "hang-overs" are the cause of what the student of culture calls survivals.

But unfortunately these survivals are much more numerous and pervasive than the anthropologist and historian are wont to admit.

To list them would perhaps oust one from "respectable" society.

And yet the intimation never wholly deserts us that there is in the unformed activities of childhood and youth the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there.

This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.

For with all its extravagancies and uncertainties, its effusions and reticences, it remains a standing proof of a life wherein growth is normal not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrinkage.

Habit and impulse may war with each other, but it is a combat between the habits of adults and the impulses of the young, and not, as with the adult, a civil warfare whereby personality is rent asunder.

Our usual measure for the "goodness" of children is the amount of trouble they make for grownups, which means of course the amount they deviate from adult habits and expectations.

Yet by way of expiation we envy children their love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting the last drop of significance from each situation, their vital seriousness in things that to us are outworn.

We compensate for the harshness and monotony of our present insistence upon formed habits by imagining a future heaven in which we too shall respond freshly and generously to each incident of life.

In consequence of our divided attitude, our ideals are self-contradictory.

On the one hand, we dream of an attained perfection, an ultimate static goal, in which effort shall cease, and desire and execution be once and for all in complete equilibrium.

We wish for a character which shall be steadfast, and we then conceive this desired faithfulness as something immutable, a character exactly the same yesterday, today and forever.

But we also have a sneaking sympathy for the courage of an Emerson in declaring that consistency should be thrown to the winds when it stands between us and the opportunities of present life.

We reach out to the opposite extreme of our ideal of fixity, and under the guise of a return to nature dream of a romantic freedom, in which _all_ life is plastic to impulse, a continual source of improvised spontaneities and novel inspirations.

We rebel against all organization and all stability.

If modern thought and sentiment is to escape from this division in its ideals, it must be through utilizing released impulse as an agent of steady reorganization of custom and institutions.

While childhood is the conspicuous proof of the renewing of habit rendered possible by impulse, the latter never wholly ceases to play its refreshing rôle in adult life.

If it did, life would petrify, society stagnate.

Instinctive reactions are sometimes too intense to be woven into a smooth pattern of habits.

Under ordinary circumstances they appear to be tamed to obey their master, custom.

But extraordinary crises release them and they show by wild violent energy how superficial is the control of routine.

The saying that civilization is only skin deep, that a savage persists beneath the clothes of a civilized man, is the common acknowledgment of this fact.

At critical moments of unusual stimuli the emotional outbreak and rush of instincts dominating all activity show how superficial is the modification which a rigid habit has been able to effect.

When we face this fact in its general significance, we confront one of the ominous aspects of the history of man.

We realize how little the progress of man has been the product of intelligent guidance, how largely it has been a by-product of accidental upheavals, even though by an apologetic interest in behalf of some privileged institution we later transmute chance into providence.

We have depended upon the clash of war, the stress of revolution, the emergence of heroic individuals, the impact of migrations generated by war and famine, the incoming of barbarians, to change established institutions.

Instead of constantly utilizing unused impulse to effect continuous reconstruction, we have waited till an accumulation of stresses suddenly breaks through the dikes of custom.

It is often supposed that as old persons die, so must old peoples.

There are many facts in history to support the belief.

Decadence and degeneration seems to be the rule as age increases.

An irruption of some uncivilized horde has then provided new blood and fresh life--so much so that history has been defined as a process of rebarbarization.

In truth the analogy between a person and a nation with respect to senescence and death is defective.

A nation is always renewed by the death of its old constituents and the birth of those who are as young and fresh as ever were any individuals in the hey-day of the nation's glory.

Not the nation but its customs get old.

Its institutions petrify into rigidity;

there is social arterial sclerosis.

Then some people not overburdened with elaborate and stiff habits take up and carry on the moving process of life.

The stock of fresh peoples is, however, approaching exhaustion.

It is not safe to rely upon this expensive method of renewing civilization.

We need to discover how to rejuvenate it from within.

A

normal perpetuation becomes a fact in the degree in which impulse is released and habit is plastic to the transforming touch of impulse.

When customs are flexible and youth is educated as youth and not as premature adulthood, no nation grows old.

There always exists a goodly store of non-functioning impulses which may be drawn upon.

Their manifestation and utilization is called conversion or regeneration when it comes suddenly.

But they may be drawn upon continuously and moderately.

Then we call it learning or educative growth.

Rigid custom signifies not that there are no such impulses but that they are not organically taken advantage of.

As matter of fact, the stiffer and the more encrusted the customs, the larger is the number of instinctive activities that find no regular outlet and that accordingly merely await a chance to get an irregular, uncoordinated manifestation.

Routine habits never take up all the slack.

They apply only where conditions remain the same or recur in uniform ways.

They do not fit the unusual and novel.

Consequently rigid moral codes that attempt to lay down definite injunctions and prohibitions for every occasion in life turn out in fact loose and slack.

Stretch ten commandments or any other number as far as you will by ingenious exegesis, yet acts unprovided for by them will occur.

No elaboration of statute law can forestall variant cases and the need of interpretation _ad hoc_.

Moral and legal schemes that attempt the impossible in the way of definite formulation compensate for explicit strictness in some lines by implicit looseness in others.

The only truly severe code is the one which foregoes codification, throwing responsibility for judging each case upon the agents concerned, imposing upon them the burden of discovery and adaptation.

The relation which actually exists between undirected instinct and over-organized custom is illustrated in the two views that are current about savage life.

The popular view looks at the savage as a wild man;

as one who knows no controlling principles or rules of action, who freely follows his own impulse, whim or desire whenever it seizes him and wherever it takes him.

Anthropologists are given to the opposed notion.

They view savages as bondsmen to custom.

They note the network of regulations that order his risings-up and his sittings-down, his goings-out and his comings-in.

They conclude that in comparison with civilized man the savage is a slave, governed by many inflexible tribal habitudes in conduct and ideas.

The truth about savage life lies in a combination of these two conceptions.

Where customs exist they are of one pattern and binding on personal sentiment and thought to a degree unknown in civilized life.

But since they cannot possibly exist with respect to all the changing detail of daily life, whatever is left uncovered by custom is free from regulation.

It is therefore left to appetite and momentary circumstance.

Thus enslavement to custom and license of impulse exist side by side.

Strict conformity and unrestrained wildness intensify each other.

This picture of life shows us in an exaggerated form the psychology current in civilized life whenever customs harden and hold individuals enmeshed.

Within civilization, the savage still exists.

He is known in his degree by oscillation between loose indulgence and stiff habit.

Impulse in short brings with itself the possibility but not the assurance of a steady reorganization of habits to meet new elements in new situations.

The moral problem in child and adult alike as regards impulse and instinct is to utilize them for formation of new habits, or what is the same thing, the modification of an old habit so that it may be adequately serviceable under novel conditions.

The place of impulse in conduct as a pivot of re-adjustment, re-organization, in habits may be defined as follows: On one side, it is marked off from the territory of arrested and encrusted habits.

On the other side, it is demarcated from the region in which impulse is a law unto itself.

[5] Generalizing these distinctions, a valid moral theory contrasts with all those theories which set up static goals (even when they are called perfection), and with those theories which idealize raw impulse and find in its spontaneities an adequate mode of human freedom.

Impulse is a source, an indispensable source, of liberation; but only as it is employed in giving habits pertinence and freshness does it liberate power.

[5] The use of the words instinct and impulse as practical equivalents is intentional, even though it may grieve critical readers.

The word instinct taken alone is still too laden with the older notion that an instinct is always definitely organized and adapted--which for the most part is just what it is not in human beings.

The word impulse suggests something primitive, yet loose, undirected, initial.

Man can progress as beasts cannot, precisely because he has so many 'instincts' that they cut across one another, so that most serviceable actions must be _learned_.

In learning habits it is possible for man to learn the habit of learning.

Then betterment becomes a conscious principle of life.

III

Incidentally we have touched upon a most far-reaching problem: The alterability of human nature.

Early reformers, following John Locke, were inclined to minimize the significance of native activities, and to emphasize the possibilities inherent in practice and habit-acquisition.

There was a political slant to this denial of the native and a priori, this magnifying of the accomplishments of acquired experience.

It held out a prospect of continuous development, of improvement without end.

Thus writers like Helvetius made the idea of the complete malleability of a human nature which originally is wholly empty and passive, the basis for asserting the omnipotence of education to shape human society, and the ground of proclaiming the infinite perfectibility of mankind.

Wary, experienced men of the world have always been sceptical of schemes of unlimited improvement.

They tend to regard plans for social change with an eye of suspicion.

They find in them evidences of the proneness of youth to illusion, or of incapacity on the part of those who have grown old to learn anything from experience.

This type of conservative has thought to find in the doctrine of native instincts a scientific support for asserting the practical unalterability of human nature.

Circumstances may change, but human nature remains from age to age the same.

Heredity is more potent than environment, and human heredity is untouched by human intent.

Effort for a serious alteration of human institutions is utopian.

As things have been so they will be.

The more they change the more they remain the same.

Curiously enough both parties rest their case upon just the factor which when it is analyzed weakens their respective conclusions.

That is to say, the radical reformer rests his contention in behalf of easy and rapid change upon the psychology of habits, of institutions in shaping raw nature, and the conservative grounds his counter-assertion upon the psychology of instincts.

As matter of fact, it is precisely custom which has greatest inertia, which is least susceptible of alteration; while instincts are most readily modifiable through use, most subject to educative direction.

The conservative who begs scientific support from the psychology of instincts is the victim of an outgrown psychology which derived its notion of instinct from an exaggeration of the fixity and certainty of the operation of instincts among the lower animals.

He is a victim of a popular zoology of the bird, bee and beaver, which was largely framed to the greater glory of God.

He is ignorant that instincts in the animals are less infallible and definite than is supposed, and also that the human being differs from the lower animals in precisely the fact that his native activities lack the complex ready-made organization of the animals' original abilities.

But the short-cut revolutionist fails to realize the full force of the things about which he talks most, namely institutions as embodied habits.

Any one with knowledge of the stability and force of habit will hesitate to propose or prophesy rapid and sweeping social changes.

A

social revolution may effect abrupt and deep alterations in external customs, in legal and political institutions.

But the habits that are behind these institutions and that have, willy-nilly, been shaped by objective conditions, the habits of thought and feeling, are not so easily modified.

They persist and insensibly assimilate to themselves the outer innovations--much as American judges nullify the intended changes of statute law by interpreting legislation in the light of common law.

The force of lag in human life is enormous.

Actual social change is never so great as is apparent change.

Ways of belief, of expectation, of judgment and attendant emotional dispositions of like and dislike, are not easily modified after they have once taken shape.

Political and legal institutions may be altered, even abolished;

but the bulk of popular thought which has been shaped to their pattern persists.

This is why glowing predictions of the immediate coming of a social millennium terminate so uniformly in disappointment, which gives point to the standing suspicion of the cynical conservative about radical changes.

Habits of thought outlive modifications in habits of overt action.

The former are vital, the latter, without the sustaining life of the former, are muscular tricks.

Consequently as a rule the moral effects of even great political revolutions, after a few years of outwardly conspicuous alterations, do not show themselves till after the lapse of years.

A new generation must come upon the scene whose habits of mind have been formed under the new conditions.

There is pith in the saying that important reforms cannot take real effect until after a number of influential persons have died.

Where general and enduring moral changes do accompany an external revolution it is because appropriate habits of thought have previously been insensibly matured.

The external change merely registers the removal of an external superficial barrier to the operation of existing intellectual tendencies.

Those who argue that social and moral reform is impossible on the ground that the Old Adam of human nature remains forever the same, attribute however to native activities the permanence and inertia that in truth belong only to acquired customs.

To Aristotle slavery was rooted in aboriginal human nature.

Native distinctions of quality exist such that some persons are by nature gifted with power to plan, command and supervise, and others possess merely capacity to obey and execute.

Hence slavery is natural and inevitable.

There is error in supposing that because domestic and chattel slavery has been legally abolished, therefore slavery as conceived by Aristotle has disappeared.

But matters have at least progressed to a point where it is clear that slavery is a social state not a psychological necessity.

Nevertheless the worldlywise Aristotles of today assert that the institutions of war and the present wage-system are so grounded in immutable human nature that effort to change them is foolish.

Like Greek slavery or feudal serfdom, war and the existing economic regime are social patterns woven out of the stuff of instinctive activities.

Native human nature supplies the raw materials, but custom furnishes the machinery and the designs.

War would not be possible without anger, pugnacity, rivalry, self-display, and such like native tendencies.

Activity inheres in them and will persist under every condition of life.

To imagine they can be eradicated is like supposing that society can go on without eating and without union of the sexes.

But to fancy that they must eventuate in war is as if a savage were to believe that because he uses fibers having fixed natural properties in order to weave baskets, therefore his immemorial tribal patterns are also natural necessities and immutable forms.

From a humane standpoint our study of history is still all too primitive.

It is possible to study a multitude of histories, and yet permit history, the record of the transitions and transformations of human activities, to escape us.

Taking history in separate doses of this country and that, we take it as a succession of isolated finalities, each one in due season giving way to another, as supernumeraries succeed one another in a march across the stage.

We thus miss the fact of history and also its lesson; the diversity of institutional forms and customs which the same human nature may produce and employ.

An infantile logic, now happily expelled from physical science, taught that opium put men to sleep because of its dormitive potency.

We follow the same logic in social matters when we believe that war exists because of bellicose instincts; or that a particular economic regime is necessary because of acquisitive and competitive impulses which must find expression.

Pugnacity and fear are no more native than are pity and sympathy.

The important thing morally is the way these native tendencies interact, for their interaction may give a chemical transformation not a mechanical combination.

Similarly, no social institution stands alone as a product of one dominant force.

It is a phenomenon or function of a multitude of social factors in their mutual inhibitions and reinforcements.