An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 23: Personality Development Through the Indirect Imitation of Ideal Persons

Luther Lee Bernard

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THE INADEQUACY OF ACTUAL MODELS— In the preceding chapter we discussed the imitation of concrete actual persons serving as models for the building up of personality in the child. These models are the people with whom he comes in contact in his everyday life and activity. He himself becomes a socialized adjusted human being through his growth in understanding of them. He isolates their traits and copies them into his own personality in so far as he understands them and to the extent that they fit his needs. We saw that the child advances from one model to another in his unconscious search for new experiences by which to grow in personality content and adjustment to his environment. For the most part this growth is good, especially if there is proper collective supervision in providing him with models and if he is properly guided in the organization of his imitation processes. Much naturally depends upon whether the child is provided with a good and intelligent mother, father, brothers and sisters, playmates, teachers, and associates on the playground and in clubs and gangs.

But in spite of all the efforts that may be made for the proper selection of models and for the guidance of the child in his imitation of these, there will inevitably come a time, if he continues to grow in personality, when the actual people he knows will no longer suffice in all respects as models for him to imitate. They lose their novelty. They cease to offer him a sufficient amount of new and compelling experience. Their imperfections become all too manifest even to the child. He is disillusioned with respect to his immediate world. He yearns for something more absolute and flawless of its kind,

(362) whether good or bad. The limitations of the mother and father as all-sufficing models become apparent when the delivery man, fireman, policeman, taxicab driver, and others come on the scene with their different types of activity, informal personalities, and romantic appeal. Even older brothers and sisters, whom at first he so greatly admires, finally lose their fascination. The teachers and other intellectual and moral leaders or models to a considerable extent bore him, and their abstractions do not appear so very real to his mind which is striving after the concrete and immediately practical and the concretely romantic content of life.

WHY GANGS AND CLUBS DECAY— Even the peerless leader of the gang in the course of time loses much or all of his charm, if the child follower continues to grow. The leader himself may tire of the game and relax in his inventiveness or become unable to inspire in others those illusions of romance which he can no longer inspire in himself. Perhaps some other boy, a later comer, takes from him the leadership or he turns to other interests. What is worse, he and his followers, in order to keep up their flagging spirits and find new adventures, embark in ever more exciting and ethically questionable enterprises. Criminals as well as good citizens come out of boys' gangs, and girls' clubs may train in sex delinquency as well as in the domestic virtues. But sooner or later every leader must fall from his pedestal, giving way to some one else who has more of the enthusiasm of illusion and the thirst for experiences which have not in a measure been exhausted. The gang or club itself may be disintegrated because too many of the members go away to school or seek some other field for the exploitation of their energies. If the gang continues on into adulthood it is likely to lose its constructive experience-giving function and to become either formal or boresome or to be perverted to some secondary function, good or bad, like a civic organization, a card or poker club, a drinking club, an athletic or musical club, etc. The main business of life now ceases to be the gaining of random acid assimilable experiences and becomes a serious occupational or homemaking interest. Clubs can be of only secondary or residual, perhaps recreational, importance. The normal thing for boys' and girls' clubs to do, when

( 363) they have ceased to perform the great random experience-giving functions, is to die and give place to other forms of personality building agencies.

IDEAL MODELS IN CHILDHOOD— With the decay of prestige of the actual models due to their experience-giving insufficiency, ideal models tend normally to take their place. This substitution does not in practice await the final disillusionment which comes with the decay or disintegration of the gang organization. It is rather one of the chief causes contributing to this dissolution. It begins to function, under normal conditions of opportunity and stimulation, as soon as disappointment with actual living models has accumulated sufficient volume, provided the child has access to a story-teller or can read. His disillusionment with the real need not even be verbally formulated to be effective. When the mother shows herself to be irritable or does not provide the expected pleasurable experiences without the after-taste of penalty, or when the father is seen not to be all wise or all powerful, and is discovered as even capable of being unkind, the child begins to imagine or wish for other parents who have not these defects of character. Or he may believe that the parents of his playmates are perfect in all of these respects, because he sees them only when they are on their good behavior and are making particular efforts to be nice to him as a guest. He may even wish that he was their little boy. This is perhaps his first excursion into the world of wish projection or day-dreaming as it concerns the creation of ideal personalities. If be does not build up within himself antagonism and resentment as a result of this disillusionment and compensation in wish projection, he may copy in himself a type of response which is unconsciously modeled after the ideal personalities which he sets up or imagines other parents to be, rather than after the actual ones. Many a disillusioned little boy or girl has grown in moral idealism and sweetness of character as the result of finding that others did not measure up to his or her belief in them. But many other children on the other hand have developed resentment and antagonism because of their disillusionment and have organized in themselves mean and spiteful attitudes, untruthfulness and unkindness, or even cruelty, as a result. They become child

( 364) cynics. The only way to avoid cynicism at any age, when the models of imitation and personality building fail— and fail they must in some degree, sooner or later— is to have substitute models ready at hand. If these substitute models are actual personages they will possess the advantages of concreteness and give conviction and a sense of reality. But ideal or imaginary personalities will also serve the purpose.

EARLY IDEAL PERSONALITIES AS MODELS— The ideal personalities which serve as personality building models are ordinarily not wholly unreal. In some cases, however, they are mere fancies or wish creations. From the earliest times when man's imagination began to revolt against or regret the imperfections of the visible world, he has created supernatural beings to compensate in their power, goodness, kindness, or justice for the absence of such qualities in the actual men of the visible world. Perhaps the most effective personalities of this type for children have been fairies. Fairies are usually conceived as kindly, lovely, transcending all limitations of natural powers, able to transform themselves and others at will into any form or to transport those they favor to any place, according to their convenience. Nothing could be more delightful to childhood, which has not yet been sufficiently mastered by the physical and personal worlds as to bear with patience their limitations upon conduct or their actual prohibitions upon the will. To children the concept of God is essentially that of a great good fairy. Santa Claus is another fairy who enables them to transcend reality.

Grateful as are unreal personalities to the child imagination, their gifts can no more last than can the imputed but unreal perfections of parents, playmates, and teachers. Sooner or later the test of actuality will come and the child will know that Santa Claus and the fairies do not exist and that he must turn elsewhere for the moral support which he needs, if indeed he can secure it at all. Yet, so long as they survive in his imagination, they may contribute something to his character development. Since he projects into them those traits of personality which he misses most in his actual world he thereby elaborates models for his own imitation which, if he responds, cause him to grow in depth and breadth of character. But the

( 365) dangers arising from disillusionment here are the same as those already mentioned in connection with the failure of the parent ideals. The child is of all people the most addicted to idealism, although of a relatively concrete sort. He fights against a recognition of the world as it is and he creates every device he is able to, in order to escape from that bitter reality, or rather to perpetuate the protective mother and father attitude which he knew in infancy. To fail completely at any point would be fatal to his idealism and power of resistance. Consequently, when one illusion is smashed or weakened, he turns hopefully and with the enthusiasm so characteristic of childhood and youth to another.

OTHER TYPES OF STORIES PROVIDING IDEAL MODELS— One of the most valuable supplementary sources of constructive illusion in early childhood is the type of stories told him about good boys and girls and kind parents and friends. These are mainly in the nature of fables or fictitious stories, but they have the advantage of involving nothing of the unreality of the fairy stories. If they are not real, they are at least realizable, and to the child they carry all the semblances of reality. It is doubtful whether the encouragement of childish phantasies regarding such unreal supernatural beings as fairies is ever justifiable. While some of their imputed characteristics are capable of imitation by the actual child, tradition has assigned to them other powers which are so wholly unrealizable that it is a question if the child's future disillusionment with regard to them is not too great and disruptive to be compensated by any good which may arise. But the stories of good boys and girls and men and women dispense with these impossible elements and, if the characters are not so good as to produce an inferiority feeling in the child or so good-goody as to arouse his contempt, they may be made valuable vehicles for valid personality integration through his imitation of these projected models. It is interesting to note that even adults often have not lost their feeling of reality for the behavior recounted in these stories told at the parents' knees or read in the story books.

Another kind of moralizing story, which purports to give an account of the behavior and conversations and sentiments of animals or even of flowers, are even more pernicious, if

( 366) possible, than those of fairies. The use of animals in this respect may have been legitimate in the past when Aesop wrote his fables. But now, when we want people to see animals as they are, as animal psychology shows them to be, such use is not advisable. It tends to foster sentimental attitudes towards animals, and as a consequence movements like the antivivisection agitation. Not even the child takes the fairies with complete seriousness, at least in all cases, for he has not seen them. But the animals he does know and they will continue to be in his environment long after he has learned that the absurd things he has heard about them are not true. Consequently, the task of breaking the old conditioned responses and reconditioning new ones on the basis of fact is more difficult in the case of the animals which are present as stimuli than in that of the fairies who are not present. The only possible justification for such stories is that they are the vehicles for useful lessons, but this is not a valid justification, since there are other and sounder vehicles available.

IDEALIZING DISTANT PERSONALITIES— The stories of good boys and girls and men and women constitute a form of the idealization of distant personalities, for the persons of the stories are never represented as present. But these stories are not about real persons. Consequently they are liable to lack, as the fairy tales may also lack, something of the power to give a sense of reality, at least to more matter-of-fact children. Biography and history fortunately come to the rescue about the time that the fairy stories and the tales of the good boys and girls have completed their major contributions. History cannot of course be read as the philosophy of history or even as collective behavior of a more or less abstract type at this stage of development. It must be the history of personalities in action. People must stand out as individuals or in small groups, such as those which have come within the observation and experience of the child. As yet, states, codes, traditions, constitutions, revolutions, nationalities, popular movements, and the like, are no more to him than so many names, and frequently he has not heard the terms. But he does know people in personal relationships and he has seen them behaving in a limited range of collective relationships.

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History must, therefore, be presented to him as the actions, emotions, and simple ideas or thoughts of these men. The discovery of America, for instance, is an expedition by Columbus and his companions in three ships across the Atlantic Ocean, undertaken with the permission and aid of the queen of Spain. The child can understand the dangers from storms, the fears of the men, the fortitude and determination of Columbus, the surprise of the natives, the interest of the Castilian court in the returned voyagers and their captives. The subject matter is to him primarily a moral lesson, dealing with the personality traits and emotions of concrete individuals. Of the struggle for national supremacy, commerce, religious proselytism and the like, he knows nothing as yet. These are abstractions which he will be able to integrate only later, when his experience with abstract ideas is much greater. But these concrete persons, with their persistence and warmth of character, these heroes of history, fire him and become to him effective models. He longs to be like them. And, if conditions are favorable, he succeeds in some degree.

AN ILLUSTRATION— As an illustration of the tendency to see the heroes of history in the most idealistic light possible we may take almost any historical personage. No American sees George Washington or the signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Patriots of the Revolutionary Army as ordinary men. In the process of idealization, of which we spoke earlier, they have lost their shortcomings and imperfections and have become men of great idealism and probity and consecration of purpose with respect to a great cause. It is very difficult to think of them as men with selfish interests and as behaving in petty ways like ordinary human beings. In this way also one is apt to think about the founders of his religion, or of his political party, or the members of his family, unless he has been disillusioned. What happens in regard to the idealization of the leaders or concrete actors in history also occurs with reference to the processes or movements, as we call them, of history. If we are Protestant we see with difficulty evil or error in the leaders and the causes and the management of the Reformation. Catholics are as slow to recognize anything to criticize in the Mother Church. Republicans,

(368) Democrats, and all other parties, see their party history as a succession of events which were always for the best. Our country has invariably been right and our religious leaders consecrated. Of such is the idealistic nature of patriotism. When this idealization takes the form of picturing men and movements in history as better than they were it has much justification and least harm for the process of character building in the individual. It provides a better model to imitate and in some degree, for the present at least, spares the imitator the necessity of cynicism. But the difficulty lies primarily in the fact that such false or mistaken idealization prevents the individual from seeing things as they are and from adjusting himself to reality as such. The more abstract understanding and imitation of history will be considered in the following chapter.

BIOGRAPHICAL PERSONALITIES AS MODELS— As we have seen in connection with the previous discussion of the value of historical personages as models for imitation, biography is particularly valuable as a source of models in the form of ideal personalities. The biography professedly centers the narrative upon the individual rather than upon the abstract event or process which becomes central in the case of history. This gives to biography the maximum advantage in the matter of displaying concrete personality models. It also has a great advantage over any other method of presenting ideal personality models, because it affords a sense of reality which cannot ordinarily be experienced from fiction or art. The biography is here referred to as presenting an ideal personality as a model for imitation because of the tendency already mentioned to isolate and overemphasize good and bad qualities in those we like or dislike and recognize as identified with us in interests or as opposed to our interests and personalities. Washington is not the only person whom history has given more than his due. All the great and honored characters have benefited from such selective admiration. Nor is any one of the evil characters of history so bad as the passage of time has made him appear to be. But the greater number of these men and women were at heart actually as fine as we have seen them and perhaps they would have been even better and finer if they could have lived

( 369) up to their own conceptions of what they wished to be and do.

Those interested in the character education and training of childhood and youth could not do better, at one stage of the process, than provide them with a well selected and edited series of biographies of great men and women, which would thus furnish a well graded series of models for their imitation as a means to character building. Perhaps the series of biographies should consist of fifty or one hundred titles and these should be read from about the fourth grade through the second year of high school, or possibly even beyond this period. It is at about the beginning of the fourth grade that the child is sufficiently prepared by previous reading and experience to understand and assimilate all aspects of a fairly simple life history. Up to that time he should find his ideal personality models in stories of good and efficient boys and girls and men and women which do not represent their lives as wholes but which select out those episodes and adjustments which are particularly valuable for teaching the lesson which the child needs to learn and for furnishing him a stimulus to imitate which will extend his personality development in the proper direction for the time being. To attempt a life history as a whole before this time would probably tax the sustained interest of the child beyond its capacity. These selected stories may be of real or imaginary persons. There is no especial disadvantage in using fiction if the imaginary persons in the stories act naturally. Ordinarily youths beyond the second or fourth years of the high school would not derive the same proportion of benefit from reading biographies as models as in earlier years, for they are then equipped for the more socialized function of appreciating collective processes or movements in history and they should have the impulse to identify themselves with these collective movements. Consequently, the reading of history and the descriptive social sciences should form the basis of their personality building interests and adjustment training during the high school period. However, this latter type of reading should begin in some elementary form far down in the grades. The reading of biography and history and the descriptive social sciences, and finally of the

( 370) abstract social sciences, should supplement each other in the order here mentioned, each new form of reading gradually growing in importance in comparison with the one immediately preceding it.

THE GRADING of BIOGRAPHIES— The biographies should be carefully graded and arranged in several classes, possibly somewhat as follows: explorers and men of action, great national heroes, soldiers and sailors of the type who defended their country rather than those who engaged in conquests, should come first. Such personalities as Columbus, the Cabots, Vasco da Gama, George Washington, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain Cook, and Sun Yat Sen, might be utilized for this earliest section of the series. After these perhaps the great physical inventors should be included because their results, like those of the preceding type, can be grasped concretely by children even of younger years. Among these might be found such names as those of Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Robert Fulton, George Stephenson, Marconi, Cyrus Field, Eli Whitney, and others whose productions have the romantic appeal of having helped to transform our world. Captains of industry, railroad builders, etc., with their relatively concrete and spectacular achievements might well follow these. Next, perhaps, should come the statesmen who have identified themselves conspicuously with their country's welfare during great crises. Cromwell, Lincoln, R. E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, would serve in part for this group. A fifth group might properly include the lives of men and women who have devoted themselves to great concrete reforms, such as the abolition of slavery, the improvement of working conditions, the great sanitarians who have made war on disease, those who have fought the battles of civilization against vice and crime. Possibly this group should come before the preceding one, if sufficiently simple and concrete reform activities were selected. Next. a group of great scientists, who have made contributions of the first importance to the older and simpler sciences. These could be followed by the moral philosophers, and these in turn by the social scientists. Perhaps other groups should be included to supplement these. In each group there should be

( 371) five or ten biographies, in order to give the child volume as well as variety of contacts with several types of ideal personalities.

The grading of the works apparently should lie according to two principles. First, those biographies which deal with the simplest and most concrete materials should come first, both in the series, and in the several groups. Second, the groups themselves should be arranged in the series in the order of both the relative ease of understanding and of the psychological and moral fitness of the topics for the several ages at which they would be read. It was the intention to arrange the groups suggested above on this double basis, for the two criteria of psychological adaptability and moral and social fitness will usually coincide. Within each group the same criterion of grading should be employed. In this way a series of fifty or one hundred volumes of biography may be arranged in such a manner that each succeeding volume will make somewhat greater demands upon the child's or youth's intellectual capacity and at the same time give him more stimulating material for an adventure in vicarious elaboration or character building by imitation. Not only will he be developing personality content and ideals from the reading of such a graded series, but he may also by this means supplement effectively his other and more formal studies and his everyday activities. He may learn history, science, ethics, politics, economics, sociology, and other subjects in a concrete way while he is developing his own personality and learning to apply what he learns from reading about others to his own problems of adjustment. Each successive class and volume in the series will, if properly written and graded, lead a little further in abstract analysis and synthesis.

Of course these biographies should be written with this special educational purpose in mind and edited in such a way as to fit to the greatest extent possible the powers and needs of the child and youth. Such editing may involve a certain amount of selection of data for presentation acid therefore of idealization of the characters of the men and women selected for this purpose. But all biographies are subject to such selection, whether it is done consciously or unconsciously, and

( 372) it will do no harm in such a series as is here proposed unless the selection and elimination are carried to the point of willful distortion and sentimental prevarication.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY is in many ways more vivid and compelling than biography, but ordinarily it could not be used for the purposes here indicated. Only living men could write for such a series and even they would probably not be able to write successfully from the viewpoint of the series. But autobiography might very well be used as a basis for critical reading and discussion late in the high school period and even in the first year of college. In such cases the student should be encouraged to react freely and constructively, as well as abstractly, to the model before him.

The reading of biography and autobiography, as well as of history and the social sciences, is valuable for character building and character renewal at all ages after sufficient maturity has been reached that such materials can be understood. Biography and autobiography especially have in them a dynamic power which is well calculated to quicken the impulses to self-perfection and social or collective adjustment. They should be made a regular part of the reading of every one throughout life because of their therapeutic and prophylactic effects.

FICTIONAL CHARACTERS AS MODELS FOR IMITATION AND SUGGESTION STIMULI— While biography is the preferable source of models for personality imitation, because of the conviction of reality and the relative feasibility of copying, which it offers, fiction can present the greater variety of types. Any type of personality whatever can be created by the fiction writer and it is certain to be used consciously or unconsciously (usually the latter) as a model by the readers of novels and romances generally. Much or most of this fiction is deliberately created with reference to the expected market demand. Not a great many successful writers produce solely from the inner urge to create or to objectify what is in them. Even when they do so, what is in them is generally in large degree a reflection of popular wishes and prejudices. The fact that most fiction is produced for a market therefore means that there is a great demand for the sort of characters that are produced in fiction. This demand is, to be sure, largely uncon-

( 373) -scious on the part of the readers of fiction. They go to fiction to find the adventure and express the desires which limitations of their powers or conventional repressions prevent them from realizing in their own actual lives. Even if they live at times as the novels describe, they nevertheless resort to the novels either for more adventure and expression of that same sort, or for the sake of seeing themselves mirrored in the authors' eyes or to see themselves objectified, or finally in order that they may receive further stimulation and confirmation in organizing personality of this type. Such seeking need not be conscious, and indeed it will usually be denied altogether, the seeker offering some other relatively meaningless explanation of his interest in fiction, such as that he wishes to be amused. But amusement is as much related to the functional aspects of life as any other activity in the adjustment process, if we can only analyze the relationship.

FICTION AS A RELEASE FOR WISHES— What is said here about the tendency to go to fiction for the purpose of finding expression of unrealized impulses, thus resulting in the building up of similar personality content through imitation, applies to both social and anti-social models and to the building of approved social and of anti-social characters. Perhaps nothing of the concrete, impulse-driving, wish-releasing fiction which is read is without some effect upon the personalities of those who read it. The images are so concrete and the emotional quality of the situations and of the language is so powerful that it is almost certain to condition responses in kind by similarity or analogy. Fiction belongs to that type of writing which, as Ross has pointed out and as we have emphasized above, is most easily grasped and responded to, because its subject matter is almost wholly overt behavior or action and the expression of emotion. All that enters into the neuro-psychic mechanisms, whether as concrete behavior material of the sort dealt in by fiction or of a more abstract symbolic kind, is raw material for the future behavior of the reader. It may lie dormant as raw material for action and he used at any time. The more concrete it is and the more easily it is conditioned to stimuli to which the organism is susceptible (and the fact that fiction is sought or chosen by the reader

( 374) shows that there is such ready facility of conditioning here), the more likely this content stored in the neuro-psychic mechanisms is to go over into overt responses or into postulates and presuppositions of thinking, when the proper stimulus occurs. It becomes response material for suggestion and is easily released into action upon the occurrence of the properly conditioned stimuli. The characters of fiction are so easily conditioned to our previous experience that often they scarcely need to be imitated. They may merely be conditioned for suggested responses.

SERIOUS FICTION COMPARED— But other more abstract types of fiction may appeal to us, because they open up new avenues of thought and present new problems for intellectual solution. Our response to this type of characters and situations is more likely to be that of rational imitation, for here there is a real problem of character building. Such fiction more nearly approximates to case material in ethics or sociology. The works of Sinclair Lewis illustrate this type of fiction. But comparatively few people read fiction of this kind, because it makes greater demands upon their attention than they are prepared to give. The popular works in fiction are little more than large masses of stimuli well adapted to touch off our ready made responses of an overt behavior type, or at least to give us vicarious images of such responses, especially those of sex, action, fear, love, hate, and other strong emotions and adventurous aptitudes. The average novel or play is ordinarily popular in the degree to which it serves as a make-believe release to that behavior, overt and emotional, which we are not able to indulge ourselves in publicly in ordinary life. Its chief function, therefore, is that of the vicarious release of wish mechanisms and its chief method of releasing these is that of suggestion.

SOCIAL AND ANTI-SOCIAL EFFECTS OF FICTION— Consequently, fiction is capable of much that is anti-social as well as constructively social in its influence upon character building. It not only releases responses already conditioned to such stimuli as the fiction offers, but it establishes new associations of stimuli to responses which might not otherwise be stimulated into action. And, thirdly, it also performs the office

( 375) of suggestion, it reinforces responses already habituated or in process. Fiction can be used to aid a good cause or it may prostitute itself to the lowest types of behavior. This is often done under the hypocritical — sometimes mistaken— plea of devotion to art. Such solicitude for the freedom of art not infrequently develops into a commercial motive. The greatest danger from fiction and in fact from all art lies in its commercialization. In such commercialization the content of art is often little more than effective releases to powerful impulses, some good and some bad, skillfully organized. This is, in fact, true of all art. But if fiction is not commercialized there is greater likelihood that only stimuli for good responses will be presented or that those for anti-social responses will be presented in such a way as in large measure to neutralize their power.

All that has here been said concerning characters in fiction applies equally if not more strongly to characters in moving pictures. The mannerisms, gestures, manner of dress, etc., of the popular movie queen or hero are reproduced by millions of girls and boys daily throughout the country. The very fact that their behavior is recognized through concrete perception of pictorial representations on the screen while fiction must be apprehended through abstract word symbols, makes the power of the movie in suggesting responses much greater than that of fiction. In their concreteness of imagery largely lies their strength. It is interesting to note, however, that movies which reënforce pictorial suggestion with verbal explanations and condensations are most successful. This is explained on the principle that the reënforcement of one type of sensory perception by another is always telling.

ART AS A MEANS OF SUGGESTION— What has been said of fiction may be predicated of other forms of art, with such modifications of statement as are required by the differences in form which the arts take. The fine arts are either helpful or harmful to social ideals and character, according as they are used for constructive social or anti-social purposes. The fine arts offer us models for rational imitation, but popular art belongs primarily in the field of suggestion, where our responses are already largely conditioned to their stimuli.

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Art is one of the great major fields of suggestion, and in this respect it differs greatly from science. Art must above all things be suggestive. It must "release the imagination," we say. In other words, it must be a skillful organization of esthetic stimuli which can call forth a vast number of vaguely defined and emotional responses. Art is a form of emotional catharsis and a method of sublimation. It can be so only to the degree to which it is suggestive. Only when the esthetic stimuli of the fine arts condition effective responses in us do they acquire meaning for us; and the more responses these abbreviated stimuli can call forth, the more meaning the art has for us. In brief, the more suggestive the esthetic stimulus, the more effective it is as art. The responses which the conventional artistic stimuli produce are limited and circumscribed by laws, rules, habits, and customs. To the man with an untutored ear, Beethoven is accepted as great art, not because it is suggestive to him, but because of the authority of critics. Jazz may seem greater art to him. To the sophisticated musician, however, the works of Beethoven are a never ending source of suggested responses, and jazz has only a crude and insipid emotional significance.

We usually judge art according to the type of responses it suggests. If these are vulgar, we rule it out of the category of legitimate art entirely. Matthew Arnold gave as among the criteria of true poetry, high purpose and sublimity. Legitimate art must suggest social responses. Greek and Gothic architecture, truly great poetry and prose, music, painting, dancing, statuary, drama, all the fine arts, in fact— are agencies of social control by virtue of their power of suggestion. They perform a great social function as such. Legitimate art exalts because it affords stimuli for social behavior. It is inspirational in the most fundamental meaning of the term.

ART AND SCIENCE CONTRASTED— Science, on the other hand, must never be merely vaguely suggestive. It must leave no room for doubt. Both the stimulus and, the response must always be sharply and clearly defined. Otherwise confusion results; responses differ each time the experiment is performed or the observation is made, and no generalizations will remain

(377) constant. The artist and the scientist in describing or representing the same facts frequently produce widely different results. The sun, moon, stars, planets, nebulae, etc., gave rise to a system of mythology to the early Greeks, who were in the artistic stage of thinking. To the scientists, they are definite, impersonal organizations of elements and forces. The only abbreviation of stimuli permissible in science is in the form of language symbols, — which tend to become definite and quantitative; and these must be standardized, as we have seen, to produce universally identical responses. Art may use any form of abbreviation it wishes, provided it is adequate to produce a stimulating response. The greater the diversity, the less the standardization of the response, the more successful it is as recreative art. The swift and skillful method of art is often contrasted with the pedestrian and labored method of science. The artist who "sees truths intuitively" in his childish conceit often laughs at the scientist who plods along diligently examining the minutest details.

THE EDUCATIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF ART— Nevertheless, the educative value of art has been overestimated. It is an easy means of transmitting personality values and of inciting to social adaptation within the range of its possibilities, but the kind of values and the types of personalities which it can represent are relatively simple and emotional rather than complex or abstract and intellectual. The symbolism of art is comparatively concrete. In the non-literary types of art it has almost the significance of gesture representation and the picturization of the facial expression of the emotions. This is true in pictures of groups and portraits and of sculpture, which are apprehended visually. Dancing, which employs the kinesthetic as well as the visual senses, is gesture, not merely its representation. Music employs emotional holophrastic symbols, which are primarily to be interpreted by each one according to his own mood or experience. In the literary arts where verbal symbols are used, the words are nearly always concrete. Nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs are more frequent and of a more sensuous quality than in scientific or philosophic language. The imagery evoked by the hearing or reading of literary art is mainly concrete and overt rather than abstract

( 378) and verbal. Only in the higher forms of literary art, such as philosophic poetry and drama and essays, which are obviously philosophic material, does the abstract element play any considerable rôle; and even these do not dispense with concrete imagery. Only the meaning is abstract, not the behavior symbols through which the meaning is expressed. Even essays, if they are true literary art as this term is usually understood, are built around the description or hypothecation of relatively concrete behavior, and not based on the abstract logic of principles, as is the case with philosophy and science, properly speaking.

ART IS RELATIVELY PRIMITIVE— As a consequence the types of models which may be set up by art for imitation are almost as concrete as those which one meets in actual human intercourse. For this reason art is within the mental reach of a vast number of imitators. It requires but little training in perception to grasp the meaning of the kinesthetic and visual arts, and only slightly more to respond to the emotional urges of music. The literary arts, however, can be understood only as one masters the language, and verbal symbols are always in a measure abstract. The use of concrete nouns and other sensuous verbal material, many figures of speech, rhythm, etc., however, keeps lyric poetry pretty close to the plane of music. The poetry of Walt Whitman and some of the modern free verse poets introduced a more abstract and intellectual element into poetry, although much free verse is a sort of phrase punning not unlike the simpler word punning and is consequently a very low and unintellectual type of art. Oratory, although sometimes used to carry weighty intellectual content, is in its ordinary form designed to appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect and is closely allied to poetry in its imagery and technique.

Children can get much personality building material from the simpler forms of art before they develop the power of appreciating the more abstract literary forms of art and philosophic and scientific writing. The use of art as a means to indirect imitation is a bridge between the direct imitation of people and the indirect imitation or embodiment of character and social adjustment values expressed through intellectual symbols. Art belongs primarily to childhood and to the child-

(379) -hood of the race. If it continues to be the chief cultural interest of adults in a mature civilization it is so because either these adults are on a low cultural level (intellectually, not necessarily emotionally) or they are pursuing art from recreational motives rather than as a means to personality building. This somewhat archaic significance of art in a highly developed civilization is illustrated by the fact that the types which are meant for adult appreciation are more largely traditional than are science or philosophy. Only the unusual or more or less freakish "modernist" types of art have broken with the primitive themes and technique of traditional art and have attempted to become intellectual. But they do not attract large numbers of followers. Children's art keeps up to date because it is definitely functional as a means of personality development.

ART AND CENSORSHIP— This archaic character of art shows up particularly in the sex, fighting, fear, food, and various other types of appetitive appeal which are still emphasized. Because its imagery is concrete it does not often get far away from nature, and sometimes its idealism is more esthetic than ethical in character. The fundamental appetites find easier expression in the concrete symbolism of art than does ethical idealism, of which the symbolism is comparatively abstract. This fact tempts to the economic exploitation of the simpler, and sometimes even the anti-social, models and appeals in art. It is because of this fact that censorship or some other form of control in art publication has been demanded by those who have keener ethical appreciation. While often this censorship has been demanded on the basis of partisan or biased motives and is therefore not always scientific as urged, there is no reason to suppose that a completely laissez-faire policy can be tolerated in art any more than in industry and commerce, finance, government, or elsewhere. But the control of art should probably be confined to its publication rather than to its individual production. The same sort of need of control has always been recognized in connection with philosophic and scientific writing. However, control is less necessary here, because usually those who are able to understand a philosophic or scientific composition are also capable of criticizing it. If

( 380) every one were given a sound set of standards by which he could criticize art, there would be less need for external censorship. If every one, in short, were able to judge intelligently, the anti-social manifestations in art would tend to die of inanition. Also the scientific and philosophic types of literary production are intellectual and do not ordinarily release strong impulses to overt behavior, while art is emotional and has strong impulsive force. Being intellectual, science and philosophy are subject to logical analysis. Therefore the best control for them would probably be to require that they should be logically consistent with the facts which they propose to interpret.

ART AS STIMULI FOR RECREATION— We have already spoken of the recreational value or significance of art. It is recreational because of its high suggestive power. It releases a great variety of responses readily. These responses may be highly fixed and conventional or they may be random and analogical and vaguely emotional, thus leading to a variety of new experiences. We usually think of the artist as preferring this type of behavior, disliking to be tied down to sameness of experience or even to set values in conduct. The artistic temperament is said to be impatient of restraint and responsibility. But this attitude is not characteristic of the great artist in all phases of his behavior, for he must be responsible for definiteness of procedure in his technique and for lofty conceptions in his themes, if he is truly great. But there is undoubtedly a strong tendency in almost every one to escape from too much reality or sense of responsibility through daydreaming or by letting things take care of themselves, through the enjoyment of phantasy or fantastic themes in art, and the like. The soulful love story, wild west fiction, melodrama, and sex appeal in art generally, represent persistent, if very crude and simple, attempts to get away from reality in life. There is another motive in art, that of relaxing and letting things take their course, as in crying or laughing, which perhaps has not been sufficiently recognized. Some of the anarchic music of recent times, much of jazz anti free verse, and of some "modernist" discordant art, is apparently of this type. It is truly pathological, as is hysterical crying or laughter, but, like them,

( 381) is a negative form of catharsis in the midst of an overwrought and too complex world of environmental pressures.

SUMMARY— The description of models for the development of personality through imitation given in this and the preceding chapters has been, of necessity, an ideal or generalized one. No child actually does develop through all of these stages of model imitation in a uniform manner. Many, in fact, never get beyond direct and immediate personality imitation. Many skip various types of models. Others imitate one or two types to the exclusion of all others. But, in general, the order of development is one of ( I ) direct personality imitation, or the personal contact stage, (2) the indirect or ideal personality imitation stage which we might call the artistic stage, and finally (3) the imitation of abstract models, or the scientific stage. This last step is radically different from the preceding ones. Relatively few people ever attain to it. 'Most people stop in personality growth at earlier stages of imitation, and thereafter rely on habit or self-imitation for future adjustments. But since the abstracted or scientific model is of increasing importance, it is necessary that we study the social function it performs and its relation to the other types of models. This we shall do in the next chapter.

The pathological forms of development in personality building have not been taken up in this study. So-called Oedipus complexes, Electra complexes, inferiority complexes, distorted compensations, repressions and conflicts of all types, etc., while of great importance in certain cases, are not the normal and usual course of events, at least in the exaggerated forms which these names indicate. It should be remembered, however, that these pathological manifestations are but extreme types of normal behavior, and that normal development includes them in mild degree.

MATERIALS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING

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