An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 5: The Organic Bases of Behavior

Luther Lee Bernard

Table of Contents | Next | Previous

THE NATURE OF THE ORGANISM— The individual animal organism is the primary unit mechanism of social as well as of individual behavior. There are more complex units of collective behavior, consisting of groups and associations of all kinds, but these are always either multiples of individual organisms or some other combination, in a more or less complex ratio, of individuals. These complex and multiple units in social behavior patterns will be discussed later. In this chapter it will be our task to sketch some of the more important traits of the individual organism in so far as they are significant for the problem of social or collective behavior.

All animal organisms are constituted of protoplasms. These protoplasms are in general similar for all of the organs and tissues of the body, but they differ sufficiently in chemical composition and structure as to be distinguished functionally, at least in some measure. The most obvious distinctions in protoplasms are, perhaps, between those of the nervous system, the muscles, the glands, the osseous system, and the blood or lymph. Each of these, and each other type of protoplasm, has its own specific set of functions to perform. The psychologist is of course interested especially in the nervous system, the business of which is to be susceptible to stimuli sources in the environment and to transmit the impulses thus received and to mediate a partial or total response of the organism to its environment. The nervous system is a special protoplasmic mechanism developed in connection with the other protoplasms of the organism for the purpose of securing a more rapid and economical and accurate adjustment of the organism to its environment than would be possible without such an adjusting mechanism.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF PROTOPLASM— All protoplasm

(52) possesses the quality known as irritability. It receives and retains and transmits impressions. The types of stimuli to which it is originally sensitive are sometimes stated as mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, or even photal. The quality of retaining impressions is the basis of organic and associative, and later of conscious, memory, which is so important a factor in orienting the organism with reference to its past as well as its present environments. Its transmissive power enables it to serve as a "telegraphic" system for turning stimuli into appropriate responses and thus secures for the organism an effective adjustment to its environment. These qualities are of course best developed in neural protoplasm, which is particularly specialized for retentive and transmissive functions.

Protoplasm is also highly metabolic, and the nerve cells are said to explode their protein under certain conditions. This high rate of metabolism of nervous protoplasm gives to it the advantage which Child so well describes in his work on The Physiological Foundations of Behavior when discussing gradients and dominants. Gradients are established between protoplasms of higher and lower metabolism qualities, and those with the higher metabolism assume dominance in determining the axes of organismic integration and behavior. Thus the development and responsiveness of the organism depend upon its gradients. And these, in turn, are set or determined on the one hand by the rates of metabolism of its protoplasms and on the other hand by the reception of the environmental pressures or stimuli through its sense organs.

DOMINANCE OF THE NEURAL PROTOPLASM— The nervous system, after it once appears, sets the gradients and dominates the development of the rest of the organism because of its higher rate of metabolism. Likewise, the anterior portions of the nervous system dominate the posterior portions, and therefore, once these anterior portions of the nervous system have been developed, they dominate the development of the whole organism. But just as muscular protoplasm appeared phylogenetically before nervous protoplasm, so have the anterior portions of the nervous system, especially the cerebral cortex, appeared after the posterior and lower spinal portions. Thus we may say that nervous control came after muscle control

(53) and brain control after nervous control in general, while intelligent cortical control of the organism came last of all.

And now to intelligent cortical control of the organism the human species is adding control through externally stored neuro-psychic symbols, such as language and value symbols of all sorts. With the appearance of each of these new controls, it has subordinated the previously dominant controls and has assumed functional direction of the organism. The development of each of the new supreme controls, except the last, was apparently due to the appearance of a new variety or organization of protoplasm possessing a higher rate of metabolism and greater retentive and transmissive powers than the protoplasms which preceded it possessed. But the last type of control, that of the neuro-psychic storage symbols, is not protoplasmic or biological, but is psycho-social, and the coming of its dominance in molding and directing the individual organism represents the coming of the supremacy of the social factors over the organic in collective and individual behavior.

ADJUSTMENT THE FUNCTION OF NERVOUS PROTOPLASM —  Protoplasm is of course living matter and before it can serve any other function it must replenish itself. The primary and almost the exclusive function of the lower forms of protoplasm appears to remain permanently that of self-maintenance or replenishment. The lower organisms, like the amoeba, in which there is apparently little specialization of protoplasm, do little more than ingest food, assimilate it and excrete the indigestible portions. In addition it has some mechanisms of motion by which it comes in contact with food objects or escapes from dangerous situations. As the protoplasms of organisms become more specialized, muscles and other tissues, like the circulating medium, secretions possessing behavioristic significance, and finally neural tissues, are developed. These specialized forms of protoplasm must still maintain themselves, and even in the highly specialized nerve cells we find tissue material devoted primarily to the nutritive function. But the primary function of the specialized protoplasm ceases to be nutritive and becomes something else. That of muscular protoplasm is contraction, while the primary functions of nervous protoplasm are retention and transmission. Secondarily it

( 54) dominates the direction of development or growth of the other parts of the organism, as indicated above; and tertiarily it replenishes itself. But the great primary and general function of the nervous tissues is to facilitate the adjustment of the organism to its environment.

This general quality of the irritability of protoplasm enables the organism to respond to pressures or stimuli in a differential manner instead of merely as a mass. It is this quality, extended and specialized in the various specific structures of the body— particularly of the nervous system— which differentiates the behavior of the animal organism from that of bodies of a more homogeneous sort. It enables the animal to act on the two higher planes of responses to stimuli mentioned in Chapter III, instead of being moved by direct impact.

COMPLEXITY AND ADJUSTMENT— Man is motile to a particularly high degree. This fact increases the range and completeness and effectiveness of his adjustments. Man adjusts himself more completely to his environment than any other organism, except possibly the parasites. This is because of the great degree of specialization and organization of his protoplasms, especially of his nervous system, on the one hand, and of his development of a super organic or an externalized neuro-symbolic technique of control, on the other hand. His superior rate of metabolism, especially in his higher protoplasmic organizations, and the retentive and transmissive powers of his neural protoplasm, bring him in touch with an almost infinite range of stimuli, both past and present, and render him capable of responding to almost any type of environment. With his external storage symbols he is enabled to store or deposit "memories" far in excess of what his protoplasmic organization could carry and make these available for his adjustment tasks at a later date or even to preserve them in this superorganic memory for future generations.

There is a close correlation between the complexity of the organism— especially of its nervous organization— and the complexity of the adjustment which it must make to its environments. Simple organisms adjust themselves by means of relatively simple mechanisms to relatively few environmental pressures or stimuli. These pressures may be summed up

(55) under such general terms as food, sex, dangerous objects, and protective or sustaining factors in the environment. The lower life forms often react directly to a food object by enveloping it and later disgorging the indigestible portions. Frequently sex responses are in the nature of a direct discharge of reproductive cells upon an appropriate stimulus regardless of the coöperation or lack of it of an organism of the opposite sex.

But as the environment to which the organism can respond becomes much more highly differentiated and the organism multiplies its organs of adjustment, especially its nervous technique and organization, the response processes also become vastly complicated and highly differentiated. The processes themselves cease to be exclusively direct and are frequently indirect, even abstract and symbolic in character. That is, much adjustment of the human organism in our complicated society takes place not merely through the protoplasmic neural mnemic and transmissive processes, but is mediated through verbal or written, symbolic language mechanisms, some of which are even of a mathematical or other super-lingual character. In such cases, of course, the adjustment of the organism to its environment is on a mental, often an intellectual, plane and is organized upon the organic protoplasmic bases out of which it has arisen.

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM— The organism can exist only if it maintains a functional adjustment to its environments. The process of living is itself a process of adjustment continually developing and changing. This adjustment the complex organism is able to maintain only by virtue of the sensitivity and differentiation of its protoplasms. The lowest organisms make their adjustments to some extent through the power of responding directly to stimuli transmitted through undifferentiated protoplasm. But the higher animals, as we have seen, make use of a highly differentiated form of protoplasm, the nervous system, for the purpose of transmitting stimuli into effective and rapid responses. The more highly developed and differentiated the organism is, and the more complex the environment to which it finds it necessary to adjust itself, the more complicated and highly organized is the nervous system which serves the function of mediating the adjustment proc-

( 56) -esses. In man, this nervous system has become extremely complicated and specialized. Special sensory organs of some twenty-two separate types have developed as a phase of this mechanism which promotes a more highly functional and specialized adjustment. It is desirable that we have before us a brief description of the nervous system and its mechanisms as an aid to a clear understanding of its services in adjusting the organism to its environment.

Herrick divides the nervous system into two great branches "the central nervous system, or axial nervous system, comprising the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, including the cranial and spinal nerves, their ganglia and peripheral end-organs, and the sympathetic nervous system." These two phases of the nervous mechanism dominate the adjustment of the organism to its environment, but on the whole in somewhat dissimilar ways. Parts of the central nervous system are the seat of the higher, or conscious and rational, adjustment mechanisms. Here are elaborated the verbal and other language symbols which earlier we termed super-organic and which function in the more complex and long-time or distance adjustments. It is also the seat of the conscious control of the organism, both in its development and in its adjustment. Through its consciousness and its external storage of language symbols the pressures of the environment are brought to bear upon the actual life adjustment processes of individuals.

THE RECEPTOR AND EFFECTOR SYSTEMS— The organism of course is integrated or lives and functions in environments. That is to say, it must make adjustments to other objects like and unlike itself. This adjustment is effected by means of two processes closely connected with each other functionally. These are called stimulation and response. The stimulus process is the process of making a contact with another object, or the environment, which sets up retentive and transmissive processes in the nervous system and normally leads over to the overt response. The overt response is muscular or glandular. If it is muscular it functions by moving a part or the whole of the organism directly with reference to its environment. If it

( 57) is glandular it sets up some internal chemical change in the body as the direct result. In turn it tends to produce a muscular movement or adjustment as the final or indirect result of the transmission of an impulse from the point of stimulation by way of the glandular responses. The stimulation from the contact with external or internal environment (for some stimuli proceed from within the body) is made effective by means of sense organs, sometimes called end-organs. These are of many kinds, considered both as to structure and as to function. It is not necessary to describe the structure of these sense organs, since we are here concerned primarily with function. Good accounts of their structure can be found in any competent text book on neurology or psychology.[1]

THE SENSE ORGANS are divided into three great classes.

(1) Those which make contacts through the nervous system for the organism with the outside world. These may be further divided into the contact and the distance receptors. Together they are called the organs of the exteroceptive senses. Herrick classifies them as follows

1. Organs of touch and pressure. These are numerous, widely distributed (both superficially and deep), and of very diverse form.

2.End-organs for sensibility to cold.

3.End-organs for sensibility to heat.

4. End-organs for pain.

5.End-organs for general chemical sensibility.

6. Organs of hearing.

7. Organs of vision.

8. Organs of smell.

The first five are contact receptor types and the last three are distance receptor types.

(2) The second group of sense organs are called the proprioceptive and are located in the muscles and joints and in other parts of the body. They appear to be more directly connected with the effector apparatus and function rather imme-

(58) -diately in the orientation of the body. They are, in Herrick's terminology,

1. End-organs of muscular sensibility.

2. End-organs of tendon sensibility.

3. End-organs of joint sensibility.

4. Organs of postural and equilibratory sensations in the labyrinth of the internal ear.

(3) The visceral group of receptors are those which function in the viscera or internal cavities and organs of the body and are connected with the vital processes rather than with those of external adjustment. They also function in the emotions, in so far as they are concerned with the mental life of the organism. They are (following Herrick, again) as follows

General visceral group:

1. Organs of hunger. The stimulus is strong periodic contractions of the muscles of the stomach.

2. Organs of thirst. The stimulus is probably drying of mucous membrane of the pharynx, together with more general conditions.

3. Organs of nausea. The stimulus is probably an antiperistaltic reflex in the digestive tract.

4. Organs of respiratory sensations, suffocation, etc. Organs not well known.

5. Organs of circulatory sensations, flushing, heart panics, etc.

6. Organs of sexual sensations.

7. Organs of sensations of distention of cavities.

8. Organs of visceral pain.

9. Organs of obscure abdominal sensations associated with strong emotion, characterized (probably correctly) by the ancients by such expressions as "yearning of the bowels," etc.

Special visceral group:

10. Organs of taste.

11. Organs of smell. Smell is both a visceral and a somatic sense; its organs are both interoceptors and exteroceptors in Sherrington's sense.

(59)

The effectors, as already intimated, are the muscles and the glands. These are put into active operation through the impulses reaching them over the efferent nervous processes, which connect indirectly with the sense organs that receive the stimuli.

THE NEURONS are the nerve cells which receive stimuli and transmit impulses to the effectors. They also apparently retain impressions which serve to influence behavior at some future time. The neuron consists of three relatively distinct parts: the nucleus, which apparently serves largely the function of storing and dispensing nutriment to the cell as a whole, the dendritic filaments, and the axone. The dendritic portion of the neuron receives the stimulus as end-organ or takes over the transmitted impulses from an axone, which in turn delivers the impulse to another dendritic process or to an effector, that is, to a muscle or gland. In afferent neurons— those located at the stimulus receiving end of the behavior pattern or mechanismthe dendritic processes serve as sensory end-organs.

Nervous impulses travel in one direction only— from sense organ to effector, through dendrite, past the nucleus, to the axone in one neuron, and from the axone of that cell to the dendrites of another cell or neuron, or to the terminals of the neurons in the muscle or gland.

THE BEHAVIOR PATTERN— This discussion implies that neurons do not occur singly, and this is true in so far as higher animals are concerned. A number of neurons, usually three or more, are grouped together in a chain which connects the sense organs with the effectors. This chain of three or more neurons is called a behavior pattern, and as a pattern it may be inherited or acquired. That is, the connection of one neuron with another in the chain, or the stringing together to form a behavior medium or pattern may have occurred so early in the development of the individual organism that we are inclined to speak of it as inherited. But, on the other hand, many of these connections are not male even at birth and have to be completed weeks or months or even years afterwards. In fact, in some cases the dendritic and axonal processes are not themselves mature at the time of the birth of the organism. They attain

(60) their maturity and make structural and functional connections with each other under the pressure of physiological stimuli of some sort. The organization of behavior patterns connected up in this way may certainly be said to be acquired. A very large number of our behavior patterns, and perhaps all of those most basic to our modern civilization, are thus acquired under the influence of environmental pressures.

The neurons in such a behavior pattern, whether inherited or acquired, may in general be said to be of three kinds. The afferent or receiving neurons and the efferent or effector neurons have already been described briefly. They differ from each other primarily in their respective functions and positions and in the relative length of their dendrites and axones. Dendrites are relatively longer in the former and shorter in the latter, and just the reverse is true of the axones. They do not appear to differ very greatly if at all in chemical organization or in structure. The connecting or association neurons are located in the ganglia (including cortexes), are shorter, often have their dendritic processes highly developed, sometimes to the extent of possessing sixty or more branches, and they serve the function of transmitting the impulse from the receiving neuron to the effector neuron. There may be more than one such connecting neuron in the larger ganglia or cortexes, especially in the cerebrum. In these higher centers the multiplicity of dendritic processes and of connecting neurons probably greatly facilitates modifications and the redistribution of impulses, with the result that new behavior patterns are set up and habits are constantly being formed. It is probably in such differentiation and redifferentiation processes as these that consciousness appears in the cerebral cortex. By means of such modification and redistribution of impulses in man, the human behavior patterns may be multiplied indefinitely and the action system become complicated almost beyond estimation. This is undoubtedly the mechanism by which choice and voluntary control of conduct are effected.

THE SYNAPSE— The mechanism by which the axone of one neuron connects with the dendrites of another is called the synapse. The exact nature of this contact is not definitely known. "Some claim that there is actual fusion of the protoplasms of

( 61) the neurons and passage of neurofibrils across the junction; others maintain that there is a membrane separating the neurons," says Herrick, who is inclined to accept the latter view. "At the synapse there is a contact of two dissimilar protoplasms, with resulting profound modification of the conduction at the opposed surface." There is a resistance to conduction at the synapse which prevents indiscriminate formation of behavior patterns, or rather uncorrelated and uncontrolled responses without the formation of any definite pattern whatever. It is at the synapses apparently that redifferentiation and distribution of nervous impulses occur, with the result that habits are formed and broken and reformed. And out of this modifiability comes the richness of human behavior under the pressures of manifold and changing environmental conditions or stimuli.

THE AUTONOMIC SYSTEM— Primarily within the peripheral nervous system, functions what has been called the autonomic nervous system, so much stressed recently by those who have just come to realize the great importance of the second general type of action mentioned in Chapter III— the unconscious adjustment processes. This system is concerned with the vital or lower organic adjustments of the organism, especially with those connected with nutrition, reproduction, and escape from danger. It came into existence early as a means of aiding the organism to make direct and immediate adjustments to its environment, especially adjustments of the lower and simpler types, such as those to food, sex, danger, protection, and organic well-being, as mentioned above. Because of its primary character as an adjustment mechanism, fitted to deal with the fundamental and primitive relationships between the organism and its environment, it has sometimes been called the vegetative system.

The autonomic system is the seat of the truly instinctive processes and out of these native adjustment mechanisms are developed many of the more basic organic habits which function on a low psychic level. Respiration, fond getting anti taking, excretion, circulation of the blood and lymph, reproduction, the activities of the glands, and similar organic processes, are so primitive and so relatively fixed, even when modi-

( 62) -fied into a low level of habit for purposes of mediating slightly modified adjustments, that they require little or no conscious or subconscious oversight. This is particularly true of adjustments under primitive conditions of life. However, with the coming of civilization and greater complexity of environment and adjustment technique to correspond to the increased complexity of the organism, a rate of change in adjustment greater than that made possible by the autonomic nervous system becomes necessary. Hence the growth of the dominance of the central nervous system with its powers of conscious and unconscious or subconscious adaptation.

CORTICAL DOMINANCE IN HUMAN ADJUSTMENT— Although Kempf's contention that the autonomic or vegetative nervous system dominates the adjustment processes and uses even the higher sensory processes for its own ends may be true of the lower organisms and to some extent perhaps of the lowest types of human beings, it does not seem to hold, at least universally, for men living in civilized society. It may even be true that the higher sensory processes and the brain, which correlates the sensory functioning, grew up in the service of the autonomic or vegetative nervous apparatus. It would not do violence to our understanding of evolutionary logic to find that all animal life has been most concerned functionally with processes of nutrition, reproduction and avoidance of danger. It is only very recently, and in the life of a single species— the human— that there has been any concern about the esthetic, the moral, and the civic. Beauty, rightness, and the social values are the creation of man's self and social consciousness, which are no older than his civilization.

Eyes and ears, to say nothing of the lower exteroceptive senses, and even the cortex, possibly did come into being to serve the existence and persistence adjustments of life. But we have already seen that as each new type of protoplasm or each new organization of the neural protoplasm appeared, at first in the service of an older adjustment mechanism, and became perfected, it established new gradients and new axes of development. Thereby it became dominant in the control of the organism. In this way the human cortex came to take charge of higher organic adjustment processes and even to

( 63) mold the development of the organism itself in no small degree. The cortex works primarily through its power of integration of nervous processes coming from the sense organs and from the lower centers, which it correlates and brings into cooperative functioning for the higher adjustments of the organism as a whole. Through its highly developed retentive functions it is able to integrate past neural processes-stimuli and responses— with those arising in the present. The adjustment of the organism thus secured transcends merely the present moment and is in fact more inclusive even than the life of any one man or of any one succession of men. Such long time and inclusive adjustments as these, occurring through the integrative functions of the cerebral cortex, we call rational. They are also usually conscious, but apparently they may be subconscious or unconscious.

It is in this way that the cortical organization has come to dominate the autonomic mechanisms in whose service it grew up. At an earlier date the vegetative neural processes, which had developed in the service of the existence and persistence functions of the organism, probably were similarly integrated into the autonomic system with the result that a better correlation of and dominance over the hitherto poorly integrated vital organic functions as a whole were secured.

SOCIAL RESULTS OF CORTICAL DOMINANCE— As the result of the dominance of the cortical correlation or integrative system, what we sometimes call the aims of life have been greatly modified. We have introduced new interests into the living process. We have come to live in a moral and esthetic world. We no longer strive merely for the satisfaction of what we now call the animal impulses or for the satisfaction of these in purely animal ways. We have invented a new set of values which we call culture and civilization. The very senses which once served to indicate the presence of animal satisfactions or of bodily dangers have now been converted largely to the function of providing us with perceptions of those relationships which we call beauty and goodness and the fitness of things. This new outlook upon our world we sometimes call philosophical and esthetic.

The lower impulses have been transformed into the higher

( 64) with the growth of a mechanism for handling the higher perceptions and for the control of those relationships which exist between man and his environment and promote or hinder the realization of the cultural values. But the lower or animal impulses, which still strive for realization through the autonomic system, cannot be ignored. In the first place, the efficient functioning of the organism and the perpetuation of the race depend upon their normal exercise. And in the second place, if they are neglected or unduly repressed, they still have such an effective neural organization at their disposal that they are able to break through the cortically organized coating of culture and bring to the surface in us and expose to full view all of our animal and savage drives with unexpected frankness and vividness. So striking are such irruptions at times that we have a saying that civilization is but a thin veneer of culture and that if we scratch through the surface we come upon the tiger.

CORTICAL SELECTION AND SUBLIMATION— The cortically controlled culture is constantly striving through sublimations and wisely directed and measured repressions to keep the more primitive impulses regulated by the autonomic system under control and to harness them to the chariot of civilization itself. Thus man has developed art, in its various forms, as a means to symbolic and substitute expression of the cruder animal impulses. The drama gives us the battle and intrigue, the tragedy and the comedy of life in action, segregated upon the stage which merely pictures life and does not live it. Here death is but mimicry and the dagger as well as the crown is of pasteboard. We release our violent emotions upon a screen or in the pages of a vivid historical romance or problem novel, without doing much damage to others. We can be brave with our heroes and go with them to slaughter on the printed page or we can be bad with the heroines of the silver screen and no one else be the wiser or necessarily the worse for our psychic indiscretions. Even much of the love-making of youth can be corralled iii the reading of poetry or in the tense agony of suspense of the movie fan. The older and more sobered spirits may even turn to philosophy and the social sciences as a form of sublimation in which they are able to see in clearer and more logical light,

( 65) and withal abstracted far away from the stress of concrete reality, the meaning of things, the struggles and wishes and fears of life. In practice also we have learned to make the more rational choices. We have developed play at the expense of battle. We limit the population, though as yet imperfectly; and we do not consume to-day all of our substance, but preserve the surplus for to-morrow and use it as capital in the service of the future. The cortex is ever striving to intellectualize and acculturate man. And, if we view clearly that from which he came, we must admit that, in spite of many failures and hindrances, it has succeeded remarkably well.

DOMINANCE OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT— But with all that has been accomplished through the growth and the establishment of successive organic spheres of dominance, ending in the lodgment of supreme organic control in the cerebral cortex, an even greater result has been achieved for culture and civilization by the creation of a social environment to serve as an external control. As we shall see in the following chapter this environment is the creation of man himself and is the product of his efforts to make collectively ever more successful adjustments to his natural environments. Its most important phase is the psycho-social environment, which consists very largely of externally stored organized symbols of internal or neuro-psychic behavior processes and meanings. These symbols have the power when perceived or recognized to reinstate in the behavior of individuals those actions or thought processes which they symbolize. In addition to these, and of earlier origin in the history of the race, are certain collective behavior patterns which arise in society and come to be symbolized by such terms and phrases as customs, traditions, conventions, beliefs, public opinion, fads, fashions, and the like. These latter have no visible or tangible existence apart from the uniform or similar responses of individuals to uniform environmental or reciprocal stimuli. They exist as behavior wholly in the organisms of individuals. But the mind can project these conceptually acid verbally as objective realities of collective or uniform social behavior. And among civilized people this is exactly what is done. The behavior of others thus designated serves as stimuli to condition in ourselves like

(66) responses. A third phase of this social environment which reacts back upon men through their cerebral cortexes to condition more advanced forms of behavior in them is their physical inventions and the bio-social environment below man.

The symbolic psycho-social controls in particular have become so important in our complex civilization that we store them in vast numbers in books and libraries, in art and architecture, in fact, in all the places which can serve as carriers of symbolic values. They originated as verbal or other neuro-psychic symbolic content in the cortical processes of ourselves and others, and they were carried through long periods of time as gesture and vocal language symbols and used by men to stimulate one another to action, and they are still carried and used in these ways in vast numbers. But since the content of thought has become so great that it can no longer be carried exclusively in memory, these controls have been objectified in large numbers into literate symbols outside of human action and transferred to the printed page, to phonograph records, to pictures, statuary, films, curios, relics, and similar containers. Here they lie, especially in the printed page, in storage in any conceivable quantity and serve as stimuli sources to all the population for as many present and future generations as care to learn the keys (language forms) which will unlock them.

SYMBOLIC CONTROLS DOMINATE THROUGH THE CORTICAL ORGANIZATION— Even as externally stored symbols these social control phenomena do not divorce themselves completely from our organic or cortical control processes. It is only through these latter that their meaning can be perceived, and through these cortical processes all stimuli from the stored symbol complexes must flow in order to condition responses in the behavior of the organism. The cortex, through its mnemic functions, holds the keys to release the stimuli of the objectivated symbols, and finally they can operate only as they are distributed through the cortex into overt action. Yet the body of these external symbols and projected organizations has become so vast that now they practically dominate the functioning of the cortical processes in adjusting the individual organism to its world. It is another instance of the creation by the organism of some sort of extension mechanism to the point where it

( 67) comes itself to dominate the whole organism which has created it. But in this case the newly created supplementary device, which has come to dominate the adjustment process, is not organic but is psycho-social. And with the coming of this new form of dominance our world ceased to be primarily organic and passed under the reign of the social.

THE LEVELS OF THE CONTROL OF BEHAVIOR— The most significant fact about the organism for the social psychologist is its behavior, and the most important type of behavior to the sociologist is what we call rational or intelligent behavior. It is probably at the level of rational behavior that the most significant changes and inventive redirections of individual and collective behavior occur. But there are other levels of behavior which also play significant parts in the control of the individual organism in a social situation. We may summarize and systematize the discussion of the earlier part of this chapter by presenting a brief account of the levels of behavior as they operate in the organism. This outline of the levels may be stated as follows

Autonomic control levels dominant

Interoceptive or visceral senses functioning

Proprioceptive senses functioning

Lower exteroceptive senses functioning

Higher exteroceptive senses beginning to function

Cortical control levels dominant

Exteroceptive senses functioning rationally

Mechanical extensions of the exteroceptive senses

Verbal and symbolic levels dominant

Storage symbols operate through the exteroceptive senses

This classification is constructed from the dual standpoint of the general type of nervous mechanism dominant in the control of the organism and of the types of sensory stimuli which are available for purposes of initiating responses of the nervous mechanisms The arrangement of the sensory processes involved is not necessarily chronological, although there is doubtless some degree of sequence in the order here presented. The autonomic nervous control employs all types of

(68) sensory processes, and especially those of the interoceptive and proprioceptive systems. The exteroceptive senses may be divided into two orders: the lower, including the various tactual, temperature and surface pain organs, and taste, and the higher, including the senses of smell, hearing and sight. Both of these orders of sensory processes are operative while the autonomic nervous system is still dominant. But the exteroceptive senses, especially those of smell, hearing and sight, are largely contemporaneous in their growth with the growth of the brain, and when conscious cortical processes finally come to dominate the behavior of the human organism, the sensory instruments by which data for consciously directed adjustments are obtained are primarily sight and hearing.

MATERIALS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Notes

  1. The following classification of sense organs is adapted from C. J. Herrick, The Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior (Henry Holt and Company, New York).

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict Valid CSS2