An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 24: Personality Development Through the Projective Imitation and Assimilation of Principles and Concepts
Luther Lee Bernard
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LIMITATIONS UPON DIRECT PERSONALITY IMITATION — Useful as personality imitation is in the personality building process it has certain limitations which prevent it from being the sole method by which we get our adjustment to society. Its concreteness and directness are entirely in its favor. The fact that models are always present in direct personality imitation is also decidedly important, especially for the young. However, here also is to be found one of the chief objections to direct personality imitation as an exclusive method of personality development. The type of model which one finds through actual contact may easily be inferior to the type which one may discover in literature and the other fine arts. That is why in literate countries the education of the child by direct imitation of adjacent models is very early supplemented by literary and artistic instruction. The literary model, especially such as is provided in well selected and properly prepared biographies, is much superior to the adjacent models with whom most children can have contact. The model in fiction may be even more perfect, but it is likely to be inferior in the sense of reality which it gives. Also, the use of ideal and idealized personalities, selected from biography and fiction, offers a greater range and variety of models. Finally, these ideal personalities can be employed as the need for them arises. They can be taken up or left off, multiplied and intensified or diminished ill their influence upon the individual in ways which are not so easily possible for real and adjacent personalities. Altogether, although not for all purposes or in all connections, the ideal personality is superior to the actual per-
(384) -sonality as a model for personality imitation. But since the newborn infant and the child during the first years of his life cannot read or understand stories of model behavior he must begin his personality imitation from actual people who are within the range of his senses.
LIMITATIONS UPON THE USE Oh HISTORIC MODELS— Even the ideal personalities are not adequate as models for the completest development of personality elaboration. If they are taken from history they are subject to the limitations of actual growth and development. No man is perfect in character, and much less is he equally perfect in all the aspects of his character development. Yet, in biography his story must be told as a whole. Whatever imperfections or irregularities there are in his personality to unfit him for service as a perfect model for imitation can be, and usually are, removed by the selective action of an admiring public or biographer. But, besides being sometimes a questionable procedure, this selection may leave the character somewhat negative at points instead of well rounded and aggressive. Another, and perhaps a greater, difficulty in ideal personality imitation arises from the fact that a historical or distant personality, however adequate it may have been for meeting the adjustment demands of its own time and circumstances, may not equally well serve as a model for the same purposes in our time or under our circumstances. For instance, we would scarcely be justified in selecting George Washington as a model in making all of our adjustments to life in our day, however adequate his behavior was for his day and needs and for those with whom he had relationships. Some of his views would seem very foreign to us. We perhaps should be more democratic, less inclined to tolerate slavery, more skeptical of the use of alcoholic liquors, although not more honest in financial matters, nor more patriotic. Each generation and each environment must develop in large measure their own types of personality and their own models for imitation. But the great historical models, by a certain amount of correction and supplementation and elaboration in the process of imitation, can be used as models to the greatest advantage to ourselves.
LITERARY AND OTHER MODELS MUST BE SUPPLEMENTED
(385) BY ABSTRACT PRINCIPLES— This difficulty as to time and place applies with less cogency to current literary or artistic models. Our artists, if they are persons of true inspiration, can create models wholly in touch with the spirit of the age, or even measurably in advance of it. And if we can free ourselves from the menace of the commercialization of art and literature and in some way compensate for the feeling of unreality which attaches to fictional art of any sort, models of this type should almost perfectly serve our purposes, in so far as personality models can serve that end. Literature and art creations of the past and of other lands, however, are open to much the same criticisms as are biographical personalities. They picture types more or less out of touch with our own needs. This fact becomes especially apparent when we are asked to imitate the personalities which secured a strong emotional or religious sanction in earlier ages. Much of the backwardness of China during the past thousand or more years has been due to the imitation of the thoughts and precepts of great philosophers who were of the utmost value in their day, but whose words in new times come to be more or less in the nature of chains of custom and tradition binding their followers on a Procrustean bed of conformity. Yet, on the other hand, the imitation of their conduct and the acceptance of their wisdom in many of its aspects gave great strength to character and stability to their collective behavior.
We should not discard the imitation of historical personalities and the assimilation of the values of past art and literature, but we should learn to modify the imitation process by the utilization of logically and scientifically determined principles. We should study the collective behavior of society and generalize from it abstract principles of conduct, and learn to assimilate our conduct to these collective ideas in addition to the imitation of personalities. For this purpose we need to study history and contemporary society, as well as biography and fiction and art.
INTEGRATING AND IDEALIZING COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR AS MODELS AND STIMULI— History as personalities acting develops gradually into collective behavior in which the concrete deeds of particular men tend to merge into abstract processes
( 386) or movements which seem to occur more or less in general. It is not that men drop out or cease to function, but that many men acting coöperatively lose their separateness when viewed objectively and merge their personalities into events. When the child advances to the stage of development that he can see history in this way, the trees are giving way to the forest, metaphorically speaking. In early childhood he is so near to men that he cannot get the perspective of mankind, because the men themselves intervene. But as he grows older and objectifies and symbolizes his experiences more, or detaches himself from his contacts for the sake of a better analysis, he at the same time learns to see men collectively and to see their deeds more or less abstractly and somewhat symbolically. This is the personification of collective behavior to which we referred earlier. He probably no longer visualizes primarily the progress of armed hosts across Persian plains in picturing the conquests of Alexander, or sees the founders of our government sitting in Independence Hall, although such visualization does occur and is important for a concrete understanding of the historical events. But he learns to think of these and similar things largely in terms of symbols or verbally. To be sure the symbolic representation of history is never far removed from the concrete imagery of it in the mind of the child and youth. But there is a gradual development away from the separate and relatively concrete imagery of men acting as individuals over to the more abstract pictures of men acting in groups or coöperatively, and finally to the point of view of seeing history in terms of verbal symbols and as occurring in abstract or logical processes. At this last stage, which probably rarely comes before the 'teens and is not well developed until the middle or late 'teens, the boy and girl have come to see integrated sections of the behavior of mankind instead of the isolated, or even the collective, behavior of individual men. This abstracting of the processes of history, and in a certain degree their depersonalization, is effected as a method of comprehending more of history at a single glance than can be grasped when it is viewed in all its personality details.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF HISTORICAL AB-
(387) -STRACTION— In learning to view history in this collective or even abstract manner there are both advantages and disadvantages. It is the only way in which a perspective of the whole of human history, or even of any large sections of it, can be obtained. If one attempted to image all of the concrete acts of behavior of all of the men participating in human events he would never be able to encompass intellectually even a small portion of history. The synthetic and abstract integration of historical processes, by which they are conditioned to symbols and thus unified in consciousness, is necessary as a means of comprehending and comparing the whole. In this way the student gradually learns to concentrate the essence of historical behavior until at last he can see it in perspective. Such abstraction and condensation have their uses for purposes of comparing and measuring social processes, but they are the work of the scientist rather than of the child.
The great disadvantage of abstraction in history is that it removes the concrete imagery of the details which serve as strong stimuli to arouse lagging impulses to imitation. Even the imagery of collective behavior in history, which is semi-symbolic in character, has not the driving power as model which inheres in the concrete deeds of individual men, who can be seen in all the vividness of the emotional expression which accompanies their behavior and who can be idealized into a degree of perfection which renders them the most desirable models for imitation. Imagery dealing with collectivities must dispense with the dynamic and exciting quality of emotional expression to just that degree in which it dispenses with personality, and this may be in any degree from the most concrete to the most abstract representation of historical events.
THE URGE FOR IDENTIFICATION WITH HISTORICAL MOVEMENT — The desire of the youth to identify himself with the movements of history continues to be strong, even after the concrete personalities are in considerable degree merged into the collective historical process. This desire is maintained as the result of Conditioning 1115 responses to the symbols and part symbols through which the concrete historical events are abstracted and integrated. He grasps the process of collective behavior, in the past as well as in the present, as was shown
( 388) in a preceding chapter, and this understanding and recognition of others behaving collectively is in large degree the result of having previously recognized or perceived his own participation in the behavior of the group. In this way all group or collective behavior has some power, either directly or by analogy, to condition his sympathetic and overt responses and thus to impel him to act in a similar manner or to merge himself in the collective movement or process in the way in which his symbolization of the process of history, or of contemporary affairs, has merged and consolidated other personalities and their behavior.
The normal urge of the child, in reading history, is to be like the great heroes of history, to act as they have acted, to be the subject of their grand emotions and the emulator of their great deeds. That of the youth is to identify himself with, to merge himself in, the great cause, to be a part of the movement. The difference of interest and motivation is dependent upon a growth in the personality of the youth himself. With this growth of his power to understand human events collectively and abstractly, his own self and social consciousness have become increasingly abstracted and he as a concrete highly individual personality begins to merge himself into the collective whole. Consequently his desires for imitation and self-realization are correspondingly transformed from the individual to the collective goals.
GENERALIZATION AND PROJECTION AS METHODS OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIALIZATION— THE NATURE of GENERALIZATION— This analysis of historical collective behavior and the recognition of our proper function in connection with it occurs in the form of a generalization of the concrete relationships involved. From the study and the integration of history and of contemporary society into processes or movements we come to view people acting collectively and our own or another person's behavior over a considerable period of time as a unit. Since we cannot image the whole of such behavior in detail it is necessary to abstract or foreshorten it and to state it symbolically. If this symbolical and foreshortened statement of individual and collective behavior is carried to the point of condensation at which it becomes
( 389) highly abstract and wholly symbolical, instead of concretely descriptive, we call this statement a generalization. By generalization we mean simply that we have compressed a vast number of concrete types of behavior into a few all-inclusive verbal symbols of those responses and stimuli and of the conditioned relationships existing between them. The generalization must contain not only the symbolic condensation of the concrete stimuli and responses, but also the symbolical statement of the relationship existing between these two types of symbols as analogous and equivalent to the conditioned relationships which exist or existed between the original concrete constituent stimuli and responses. In other words, a true generalization must be a logical symbolic statement of relationships and of the objects related. We saw in an earlier chapter that the essence of logic is the statement of the expected or stereotyped relationship between stimulus and response.
RELATIVE DEGREES OF GENERALIZATION IN SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND ART— In concrete descriptive art or science the statement of the relationship between stimulus and response is a mere perceptual description of what happens as perceived more or less directly through the senses. But in the more abstract forms of art, philosophy, and science, where there is no longer time for a complete or even very considerable detailed description of stimuli and responses and of their relationships and these have to be symbolized as described above, the logical statement of relationship is transferred to the symbols of stimuli and responses. Thus symbols of stimuli become logically or verbally associated with symbols of responses, or we might say that response symbols are conditioned by or stand for stimuli symbols and this relationship must be described or indicated in any production of art or science. This statement is logic in the conventional sense. And the kind of logic which obtains depends upon the kind of relationship expressed between the two types of symbols. A quantitative generalized statement increasingly characterizes science ; a qualitative Statement belongs ordinarily to philosophy and the higher forms of art; while a very vague statement, or no definite generalization, of relationships puts the integration of the symbolized
( 390) processes into the category of the more emotional arts or even the field of irrational behavior. Science and philosophy and the higher forms of art, which are literary rather than pictorial and plastic, can make use of verbal symbols only, and science adopts even highly specialized verbal symbols for its highly quantitative logical statements. The non-literary arts use other symbols of stimuli and responses, such as holophrases in music and analogues of the gesture and emotional expression in painting and sculpture. In architecture still forms of visual representation are employed which are even lower in abstracting power than those symbols used in painting and sculpture.
THE TENDENCY TOWARD ABSTRACT GENERALIZATION IN THE ARTS— No great degree of abstract symbolization has yet been obtained in the non-literary arts of painting and sculpture, although the recent modernist movement in art is definitely in this direction. Formal design has always stereotyped natural models, but only in simpler forms. The representation of bodies in cubist or other geometrical patterns and the tendency to symbolize and stereotype the organs and parts of the body instead of painting or sculpturing them realistically appears to be a movement, purposive or otherwise, in the direction of abstracting and generalizing communication through art. The body so represented ceases to be some particular body and becomes any body under typical circumstances. That is, the circumstances which condition the personality rather than the personality itself tend to be symbolized in such art. In the same way landscape painting gets farther away from the particularistic and photographic and is abstracted or generalized into types by means of symbolic or stereotyped symbols. In music also there has been this movement away from the reproduction of concrete specific tones heard in nature to symbolic tones and phrases which generalize emotional attitudes. Thus the holophrases are broken up in a measure and the old method of allowing each one to read whatever meaning he pleased into the rendition as he heard it is giving way to training in the technique of recognizing the conventionalized symbols, with the result that all who understand the new conventionalized language of music will respond to much the same thing. In
( 391) such intellectualizing or abstracting and generalizing of the language of music there is no longer the opportunity to revel freely in the vague and random suggestive power of natural tones harmoniously and melodiously organized. In fact no one without training in the conventional language of classical music can recognize its intended meaning any more than any one untrained in the language of science or philosophy or of literary art could understand those productions without special training. By such processes of abstraction and conventionalization and generalization of symbols, literacy threatens to be introduced into all forms of art as a preliminary to its appreciation, just as it has already been introduced into the literary arts, philosophy or metaphysics, and science.
The generalization, therefore, is an organization of the symbols of stimuli and responses with a stated or indicated relationship between the symbols of the stimuli and those of the responses. Art of the concrete kind, that which has not yet had its language abstracted and stereotyped into general or synthetic symbols, does not generalize relationships. It only describes them by more or less direct reproductions or descriptive symbolizations of the original experiences, as in the representation of figures in attitudes towards each other in sculpture, painting, and the drama, or in the reproduction of sounds, tones, and pitch in music. The newer or modernistic tendencies in art, if realized, may make such generalization possible. In music there is more opportunity for generalization than in painting, sculpture, and possibly dramatic representation.
In literary art this generalization has advanced to a very considerable degree, especially in the allegorical poetry and the novel and in the morality plays which served the function of presenting general social and ethical truths before the, day of popular philosophic and scientific writing. In such literary generalization through art the concrete personalities and social situations were, of course, retained, but these personalities were stereotyped and given general values, so that their behavior had a collective or social and general ethical significance which is largely or wholly wanting in most modern fiction, drama, and poetry. Such literature was allegorical rather than concretely descriptive in character. Even as late as Fielding's
( 392) Tom Jones, the characters were named according to their personality types. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was written intentionally for allegorical or character teaching purposes, and the characters are named on purpose to symbolize their virtues or vices. In fact they are little more than virtues and vices speaking and acting out their parts as in the old morality plays.
THE REACTION AGAINST ABSTRACT GENERALIZATION IN THE LITERARY ARTS— The depersonalization and demoralization of literary art in recent times, the return to concrete and specific representation instead of the general and allegorical, has occurred primarily because other methods of teaching abstract lessons have been developed as the result of an increasing literacy. Literary art has, as a consequence, retired from the function of moralizing to occupy itself almost wholly with the esthetic and to serve the function of affording amusement and recreation. Whether it will again move back in the other direction, as we have shown the pre-literary forms of art, at least in the hands of the more philosophic artists, are now tending to do, is doubtful. Perhaps the reason why literary art dropped the moralizing function and retired almost wholly into the esthetic and recreative, is that it has come to be so highly commercialized in the last few centuries with the growth of literacy in the population at large and has been reduced almost wholly to the function of providing amusement rather than instruction. An analogous reaction against abstract generalizing tendencies in music is to be found in the more recent substitution of jazz for classical music. Jazz music is commercialized and serves the function of amusement and recreation. In minor ways vaguely suggestive free verse and the vivid emphasis of color in painting (as distinguished from stereotyped conventionalized forms of these arts) represent the same degeneralizing tendencies.
THE PREËMINENCE OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS METHODS OF GENERALIZING BEHAVIOR— The completer symbolization and abstraction of behavior processes in philosophy and science render them much better equipped for purposes C, f generalizing behavior than is literary art or any of the other more primitive forms of art. Personalities and concrete collective relationships still remain as the center of interest in
( 393) literary art, especially in fiction and the drama. But in philosophy and science they are incidental and illustrative, if they remain at all. For the most part they drop out and abstract symbols condensing behavior replace them as their representatives. It is the logic of these symbols which constitutes the generalized content of philosophy and science. The use of the generalization is to be found in its capacity to summarize or condense a vast number of concrete personalities and individual or collective behavior relationships under its symbolical formulation or logical language organization. These symbolical generalizations can be used in the control of actual concrete behavior organization and in the building up of the individual's character and in assisting him to find his place in the social organization by a process of retranslation of the abstract condensed behavior symbols back into concrete responses. In logic this process is known as deduction. The function of the individual instance— in this case, the functioning of the concrete personality or of the collective organization or group— is deduced from the abstract statement as a whole. The collective generalization is normally integrated through induction, unless it is a corollary of a more inclusive generalization. But the location of the concrete instance is found by deduction. The several sciences are systems of such inductive integrations of concrete phenomena which have been symbolized. The social sciences are integrations of those symbolized behavior phenomena which apply to human association.
THE PROJECTION OF GENERALIZATIONS INTO THE FUTURE FOR PURPOSES OF CONTROL— The social generalization is integrated from a study of the data of history or of contemporary society. It symbolizes and synthesizes the past and the present. It can become useful for the control of behavior in the future only by a process of projection. In so far as possible we plot tendencies and discount present relationships in the light of these projected tendencies. By accumulating data with regard to tendencies we are able frequently to predict pretty accurately the future situation lit any field of phenomena with which we are closely familiar and in which changes are not irregular. We are the more able to do this in direct proportion to our familiarity with the field and the degree to
( 394) which we have formulated abstract generalizations in it. The method of projection is essentially, with the exception of making the allowances here indicated, simply that of changing our viewpoint from the past to the future. In astronomy we have attained such facility in generalizing relationships and tendencies that we can predict the movements of solar bodies for millennia of years ahead. Our power of projecting human phenomena is as yet much less complete.
PROJECTIVE GENERALIZATIONS BY THE ARTIST AND SCIENTIST COMPARED— It is the scientist who pushes his understanding by analysis and synthesis far out into the realm of the unknown and brings new worlds of facts into view and measures them for us, that is, conditions our responses to them in a definite and dependable way. When the poet or the Utopist prophesies a new world or grasps a truth far in advance of existing scientific verification, he is working projectively in exactly the same manner as the scientist, but much less accurately and dependably. The one, we say, is inspired, while the other is employing rational methods of projective thinking. But if we should count the number of failures of projections which are made in the form of artistic inspiration, instead of remembering only the successful prophecies, as is our habit, we should in all probability think less of the inspirational method than some of us do. Science anchors us to our world with conditioned responses which are accurate and capable of being repeated indefinitely, at least until our environing conditions change. It does not carry us so far on the wings of the morning, but our travel through lower altitudes is safer, and in the end we go farther and are able to inhabit or possess the continents of thought and behavior which we discover.
However, the higher and more abstract phases of scientific generalization are not wholly unlike the methods of artistic inspiration. All imagination, artistic or scientific, is essentially of the same pattern. The differences are primarily in the accuracy and minuteness of procedure and in the degree to which our progress in making judgments, that is, in the reconditioning of abstract and abbreviated responses to symbolic stimuli, is checked up and verified. Art, like science, extends from the concrete and perceptual into the abstract and conceptual. The
( 395) abstract and esoteric forms of art deal almost wholly with the presentation of abstract symbolic stimuli, which are to call forth abbreviated, mainly internal conscious and subconscious, responses in the individual. These internal responses or concepts may later be translated back through the series of conditioned responses into overt adjustment behavior in a concrete social situation. Science also consists in the presentation of abstract symbolic stimuli whose function it is to release responses of an abbreviated and internal character, which may ultimately in the same way be translated back into overt adjustment responses. But the release of responses by the art symbols is frequently by means of vague analogy, with the result that the adjustments made on such a basis, either in theory (that is, in the organization of thought) or in overt total adjustment responses, are not so dependable nor so fruitful of practical results as are those released by carefully measured scientific symbolic stimuli. The method of the one is relatively impressionistic and qualitative; that of the other is normally highly quantitative. But when science ventures into realms of reconditioning abstract or abbreviated psychic responses to newly symbolized stimuli complexes, it also, like art, suffers from the lack of perfectly accurate definition or abstract recognition of stimuli. As a result, science, in these farther speculative outreaches of generalization, often ventures into unverified conclusions or prophecies not unlike those of the poet. In this respect science becomes a higher and more abstract phase of speculative art or philosophy.
THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS METHODS of GENERALIZING SOCIAL BEHAVIOR— Science in this phase of generalization is really a phase of philosophy, as it was originally, or metaphysics. Philosophy is a higher form of literary art, attempting always to reach out in the organization of symbolic stimuli to condition abstract or hypothetical thought responses beyond the reach of scientific verification by quantitative measurement. It represents the attempt of man to grasp the meaning of his world in advance of his power to measure it and analyze it quantitatively. He uses art in its abstract forms for the same purpose, although originally art, like all forms of representation, was used for purposes of re-
( 396) call rather than of projection. Concrete art restores sensory experience, perceptions, emotions. But abstract art helps to project behavior into the future or the unknown and thus widens the limits of our world and deepens the development of our characters. In its lighter forms, especially in poetry and prophecy (which is never very far removed from the exaltation of poetry), and in the drama, which is sometimes prophetic, the projection of art into new integrations of experience is likely to be recognized as largely fanciful. Hence the coming of an abstract philosophy as the supreme method of projective art in the human attempt to subject written and spoken artistic discourse to the strictest rules of measurement or of logic known to the artist-thinker. We may, therefore, define philosophy as logically corrected or tested literary art, just as science is philosophy or metaphysics tested and corrected by quantitative measurement or mathematical logic. Science verifies or rejects the hypotheses of its own or less rigorous thinkers by applying definite measurements to the conditioned relationships between the stimuli (symbolic or concrete) and the responses (abstract and psychic or overt).
Philosophy is always occupying this middle ground between art and science, taking suggestions from both and evacuating intellectual territory to science as rapidly as the latter is able to develop new measuring apparatus and methods with which to test the dependability and accuracy of the predicated relationships between stimuli and conditioned responses. What was largely the territory of philosophy in the time of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle is now mainly the province of science. At that time there was not much science because there were but few methods and means of quantitative measurement and generalization. What methods of measurement there were in existence were applicable primarily to the physical sciences, what we now call physics, astronomy, land measurement, and the like. The biological, psychological, and social sciences were almost wholly philosophic in character. The methods of measurement and generalization used in these and indeed largely in the realm of the physical or natural philosophies as well, were those of descriptive or qualitative logic. Socrates and Plato called it the dialectic method. Aristotle improved upon
( 397) it by systematizing it into the syllogism. The only other testing method available was that of concrete verification by observation of sensory phenomena. Such verification was largely at random and was hopelessly inaccurate in all except the simplest phenomena. And even in matters connected with these the direct and unchecked evidences of the senses could not always be trusted, as we know from our present-day studies of the psychology of testimony. To rectify this last difficulty Roger Bacon attempted to defend and extend laboratory or experimental procedure, as a method of checking up on the evidences of the senses and general speculation or "intuition." Yet even he believed that the chief source of truth was in speculative thinking or intuition, the philosophic method. It was not until the nineteenth century that statistical methods, in the hands of Quételet, Le Play, and others, reached that point of development which permitted the utilization of quantitative checks or tests in the generalizing of complex and abstract phenomena.
THE RELATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY A\D ART AS METHODS OF GENERALIZING BEHAVIOR— Before the coming of philosophy as a method of projecting generalizations of collective behavior, art had attempted to perform this function. The epic poetry of Homer and the odes of other poets and the Greek drama, such as the more highly perfected works of AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and even the literary historical works of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon, are good examples of the utilization of the higher forms of literary art for purposes of presenting abstract situations and principles of behavior for the imitation of the youth and citizens or to inspire the mergence of the self in the collective behavior or movements thus held up to praise. Those who have regarded the Greek civilization as the highest yet reached by man have been chiefly literary men. They are correct in their judgment in one respect. The Greeks did succeed in making the most highly perfected presentation of the great problems of human existence in the form of literary art, especially the drama. But they arc in error in nest recognizing that presentations of those problems involving much more detailed insight and accurate measurement of the factors concerned have since been made in scientific and philosophic form. Such
( 398) semi-abstract and semi-philosophic literary presentations of the great moral and social issues for public consideration and emulation are still to be found in the more abstract forms of our artistic literature, but they have never again attained the degree of perfection which they reached among the Greeks. This fact is not due to a decline in the powers of the human intellect, as many writers have supposed, but to an improvement in language integration or communication. Philosophy learned to do the same tasks better than art immediately after the Periclean age, and since that day philosophy has largely taken the place of art in the performance of the function of generalizing human behavior concepts for purposes of social control. Philosophy, which reigned supreme in this respect throughout late ancient and mediaeval times, has since the eighteenth century been giving way to the method of science. Out of this change to the scientific method of testing and reconditioning and generalizing behavior in collective and social situations have come the social sciences which are now so rapidly developing.
THE EFFECT OF THE DISPLACEMENT OF PHILOSOPHY BY SCIENCE UPON SOCIAL AND ETHICAL STANDARDS— Many bewail this giving way of philosophy before the social sciences as a method of dealing with social adjustment problems and believe that it indicates a weakening of sincerity and idealism. They forget that with the work of the physical and chemical experimentalists of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and of the biological and psychological experimenters of the nineteenth century, metaphysics was driven out of the territory which is now occupied by the sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. In each instance of displacement the same cry of the decay of morals and religion, of sincerity and idealism, was raised. The philosophers and theologians did not realize that these very systems of values were being strengthened by the substitution of accurate methods of measuring such values for the old inaccurate and traditional methods. The struggle of philosophy acid theology against the scientific norms and methods in biology and psychology has come down to our day, and now their fight is against sociology and social psychology. But as these subjects
( 399) adopt scientific methods and tests they will vindicate themselves because of the superior results which they will offer in the fields of character building and progressive social organization.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOOLS TOWARDS THE NEWER EMPHASIS UPON SCIENTIFIC SOCIAL GENERALIZATION— The schools and the universities, however, are still organized largely from the older educational viewpoints in so far as the inclusion of material for character training in their curricula is concerned. The subject of artistic literature, in the form of poetry, the novel, and the drama, still receives more attention and detailed exposition than the social and ethical sciences. The social sciences, except in the form of history, which is now only in transition from an art to a science content, are given very little attention in schools below the grade of universities. And that portion of the social sciences which is most fully treated in the universities is the part which aids in the establishment or conduct of commercial enterprises and the practical administration of governmental units. The part of social science which can be of use in the direct processes of character formation and in directing the coöperation of the individual with the collective organization of society is still largely, but not wholly, neglected even in the higher institutions of learning. On the other hand, artistic literature and history and language occupy from three-fifths to three-fourths of the time in our high schools and perhaps half of the time of students in the universities. Whole courses are given over to the interpretation of the artistic writings of one man or to the interpretation of the types of literary production in a limited period of a single people's history. The political history of peoples, presented largely as literary narrative with little or no attempt to trace the development of scientific methods or the growth of individual or social values in the control of civilization, still receives voluminous treatment by periods or movements. Yet it is rare to find such presentations of the social or other sciences by brief epochs or by individual thinkers or movements. As yet the universities do not find money, nor students the time, for the encouragement of such detailed analyses. The students themselves are more interested in the vague suggestion materials of the literary and artistic subjects, where relatively
( 400) uncontrolled imagination can still play at will and where the emotions have a chance for exercise, than they are in the more rigorous logical and quantitative analyses and critical examination of the abstract concepts and generalizations of the sciences. Also, those who administer the universities and the schools are themselves often so little acquainted with the development of the scientific trends that they are not aware to what extent the scientific procedures are supplanting those of art and philosophy.
THE LEGITIMATE FUNCTIONS OF ART AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE CURRICULA— This does not mean, of course, that there will not always be a legitimate place in life and in our educational instruction for both art and philosophy. Art has a great recreational and cathartic value, especially for the normal release of the emotions; and man is by nature an emotional as well as an intellectual being. The old function of art as a means to individual development and collective adjustment has been largely supplanted by newer controls, but not entirely so. It can still do for childhood, in its crude and vague suggestive way and in the stimulation of the individual in copying emotional and other less intellectual forms of behavior, what it earlier did for the human race before the advent of philosophy and science. It is also an important method of conveying suggestion and of presenting objects for imitation and assimilation to people who have not yet learned to respond to the more exact and more intellectual language of science. Very illuminating from this angle is the amount of use made in our day of pictures and stories and dramatics for children. Undoubtedly children secure much valuable training in character development and in orientation to the world through these channels of art. It is to be regretted that the art thus employed should not make better use of sound psychological and ethical principles than it sometimes does. Also, the greater concreteness and simplicity of art as a vehicle for the instruction of children should not blind »s to the importance of using the simpler materials of science whenever we can, because they are so much more accurate and their values are so much more easily tested. At least we may always apply the principles of science in test-
( 401) -ing the values of art in the education of children. And in this direction much progress is now being made.
The strong partiality of large numbers of adults for the artistic and philosophical over the scientific presentation of generalizations of behavior is due partly to their preference for amusement and recreation and "the interesting" to more positive and serious self-improvement through learning. Recreation and amusement fall primarily in the field of suggestion, which is the province peculiarly of art. The large range of relatively vague and random responses which art permits can always give vicarious adventures to people, and the relatively emotional content of the responses called forth by art stimuli makes it easily possible for them to find a form of art or an art theme which will give them a chance to release their own pent-up emotional impulses. This is the essence of amusement.
THE VALUE of ART AND PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERALIZING EVERYDAY ADJUSTMENT RELATIONSHIPS — But the appeal of art and philosophy to the masses of mankind is also based on more serious considerations than those of recreation and a chance for emotional catharsis. They are valued because they are the most effective media for personality integration and collective adjustment which their advocates understand. Many art societies and art collectors find, aside from recreational hobbies, genuine moral and social inspiration in pictures, plays, novels, poetry, and philosophy, which they study or hear discussed. The very large number of art and literary study clubs and of various philosophic societies, including the mystical Hindu and various New Thought cults, constitute an overwhelming testimonial to the serious moral purpose of men and women, as well as to the poverty of their intellectual development. The existence of these organizations also testifies sadly enough to the large number of adults who have not yet grasped the methods and importance of scientific generalization for a better and farther reaching adjustment to the problems of life. But now there is happening to the masses what earlier occurred with respect to the scholars. They are beginning to grasp this superiority of science as an adjustment aid, and they are utilizing science more and more, partly in their schools, frequently by reading books on scientific themes, and also by the organi-
(402) -zation of societies and clubs and the publication of journals for the discussion of their adjustment problems in a scientific manner.
MATERIALS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING
- Addams, J., The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Chs. V, VI
- Case, C. M., Outlines of Introductory Sociology, Ch. XIX
- Cope, H. F., Education for Democracy
- Dewey, J., Human Nature and Conduct, Part III, Section VII
- — , Moral Principles in Education, Ch. IV
- Griggs, E. H., Moral Education, Ch. XX
- Hall, G. S., "The Pedagogy of History," Ped. Sem., XII:339-349
- MacCunn, J., The Making of Character, Part II, Chs. IX, XI, XII, Part III
- Ross, E. A., Social Control, Chs. XXIV-XXVII
- Sharp, F. C., Education for Charactcr, Chs. XII-XIV
- Yarros, V. S, "Ethics in Modern Fiction," Int. Jour. Ethics, XXIX : 39-4
