The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
Part IV: Life Record of an Immigrant Introduction
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The problem of the present volume is the application of the methods of social psychology to an evolving human personality.
In the methodological note prefacing volume I we have outlined the standpoint that a nomothetic social science is possible only if all social becoming is viewed as the product of a continual interaction of individual consciousness and objective social reality. In this connection the human personality is both a continually producing factor and a continually produced result of social evolution, and this double relation expresses itself in every elementary social fact; there can be for social science no change of social reality which is not the common effect of pre-existing social values and individual attitudes acting upon them, no change of individual consciousness which is not the common effect of pre-existing individual attitudes and social values acting upon them. When viewed as a factor of social evolution the human personality is a ground of the causal explanation of social happenings; when viewed as a product of social evolution it is causally explicable by social happenings. In the first case individual attitudes toward pre-existing social values serve to explain the appearance of new social values; in the second case social values acting upon pre-existing individual attitudes serve to explain the appearance of new individual attitudes.
The study of human personalities, both as factors and as products of social evolution, serves first of all the same purpose as the study of any other social data—the determination of social laws. A person-
( 1832) -ality is always a constitutive element of some social group; the values with which it has to deal are, were and will be common to many personalities, some of them common to all mankind, and the attitudes which it exhibits are also shared by many other individuals. And even if the values as viewed by a given individual, and the attitudes assumed by this individual present peculiarities distinguishing them to some extent from values given to and attitudes assumed by all other individuals, we can ignore these peculiarities for the purposes of scientific generalization, just as the natural scientist ignores the peculiarities which make each physical thing or happening in a sense unique. In analyzing the experiences and attitudes of an individual we always reach data and elementary facts which are not exclusively limited to this individual's personality but can be treated as mere instances of more or less general classes of data or facts, and can thus be used for the determination of laws of social becoming. Whether we draw our materials for sociological analysis from detailed life-records of concrete individuals or from the observation of mass-phenomena, the problems of sociological analysis are the same. But even when we are searching for abstract laws life-records of concrete personalities have a marked superiority over any other kind of materials. We are safe in saying that personal life-records, as complete as possible, constitute the perfect type of sociological material, and that if social science has to use other materials at all it is only because of the practical difficulty of obtaining at the moment a sufficient number of such records to cover the totality of sociological problems, and of the enormous amount of work demanded for an adequate analysis of all the personal materials necessary
( 1833) to characterize the life of a social group. If we are forced to use mass-phenomena as material, or any kind of happenings taken without regard to the life-histories of the individuals who participate in them, it is a defect, not an advantage, of our present sociological method.
Indeed it is clear that even for the characterization of single social data —attitudes and values — personal life-records give us the most exact approach. An attitude as manifested in an isolated act is always subject to misinterpretation, but this danger diminishes in the very measure of our ability to connect this act with past acts of the same individual. A social institution can be fully understood only if we do not limit ourselves to the abstract study of its formal organization, but analyze the way in which it appears in the personal experience of various members of the group and follow the influence which it has upon their lives. And the superiority of life-records over every other kind of material for the purposes of sociological analysis appears with particular force when we pass from the characterization of single data to the determination of facts, for there is no safer and more efficient way of finding among the innumerable antecedents of a social happening the real causes of this happening than to analyze the past of the individuals through whose agency this happening occurred. The development of sociological investigation during the past fifteen or twenty years, particularly the growing emphasis, which under the pressure of practical needs, is being put upon special and actual empirical problems as opposed to the general speculations of the preceding period, leads to the growing realization that we must collect more complete sociological documents than we possess. And the more complete a sociological docu-
( 1834) -ment becomes the more it approaches a full personal life-record. The ultimate aim of social science, like that of every other science, is to reconcile the highest possible exactness and generality in its theoretic conclusions with the greatest possible concreteness of the object-matter upon which these conclusions bear. Or, in other words, to use as few general laws as possible for the explanation of as much concrete social life as possible. And since concrete social life is concrete only when taken together with the individual life which underlies social happenings, since the personal element is a constitutive factor of every social occurrence, social science cannot remain on the surface of social becoming, where certain schools wish to have it float, but must reach the actual human experiences and attitudes which constitute the full, live and active social reality beneath the formal organization of social institutions, or behind the statistically tabulated mass-phenomena which taken in themselves are nothing but symptoms of unknown causal processes and can serve only as provisional ground for sociological hypotheses.
But in order to be able to use adequately personal life-records for the purposes of nomothetic generalizations social science must have criteria permitting it to select at once from a mass of concrete human documents, those which are likely to be scientifically valuable for the solution of a given general problem. We cannot study the life-histories of all the individuals participating in a certain social happening, for then our task would be inexhaustible. We must limit ourselves, just as the natural scientist does, to a few representative cases whose thorough study will yield results as nearly applicable as possible to all other
( 1835) cases concerned. But the problem of selecting representative cases is much less easy in social than in natural science because the greater complexity and variety which human personalities present as compared with natural things makes their classification more difficult. When the mineralogist has studied the chemical composition of a stone it is easy for him to ascertain to what other stones the results of his investigation will apply, for the class of which this stone was chosen as representative is distinguishable by certain superficial physical features, and the scientist can assume without too much risk that any stone presenting the same physical features belongs to the same class and has approximately the same chemical composition. But up to the present the sociologist lacks really efficient heuristic devices of this kind. When he has studied the process of the appearance of a certain attitude or a certain value in the life-history of one social personality he is taking a serious risk when he provisionally assumes that this case is representative of a certain general class — that the process is the same, for example, in all the individuals who belong to a certain community, nation, profession, religious denomination, etc. Of course any error which he commits can be corrected by further research, but the question is, how to diminish in advance the chances of such errors, how to find criteria which will permit us, after having investigated one human being, to tell more or less exactly to what class of human beings the results of this investigation are applicable.
Such criteria can be given only by a theory of human individuals as social personalities. The use of individual life-records as material for the determination of abstract social laws must be supplemented by a
( 1836) sociological study of these individuals themselves in their entire personal evolution, as concrete components of the social world. The tendency of such a study is exactly opposite to that of a search for general laws. Its task is the synthesis of the concrete from its abstract elements, not the analysis of the concrete into abstract elements. If the ideal of nomothetic research is to analyze the whole conscious life going on in a society into elementary facts and to subordinate these to general laws, the ideal of the theory of social personalities is to reconstruct the entire process of every personal evolution from single facts, each of which should be perfectly explicable on the basis of a general law. And such a synthetic investigation, in addition to being an indispensable auxiliary of nomothetic sociological generalization, has also an important theoretic and practical interest of its own, as is indicated in the attention which has always been paid to biography and to questions of temperament and character. There has been, however, a striking lack of progress in these investigations; they still remain approximately on the level which they reached in antiquity. The reason of this stagnation is evident. Almost all the studies of temperament and character have been constructed on the ground of individual, not of social psychology, and since personal evolution can be understood only in connection with social life these theories were unable to take into adequate consideration the whole wealth of important problems bearing on personal evolution, and had to limit themselves to a mere abstract description and classification of statically considered formal types.
Before proceeding, therefore, to the investigation of the particular problems involved in the present
( 1837) volume we must discuss the standpoint from which every synthetic study of a human individual as social personality should be made. This implies a complete revision of the problem of type, for the concept of type plays the same part in social synthesis as the concept of the causal fact plays in social analysis, the aim of the former being to find classes, just as the aim of the latter is to find laws. Our present discussion will be, of course, merely formal and methodological; we do not aim to establish in advance a complete classification of human personalities—this must be the result of long studies—but to show in what way such a classification can be reached. We shall be forced, indeed, to characterize several ideal types which social personalities tend to assume, but our characterization will be purely formal and based upon relations between the individual and his social environment whose essential features are the same in all societies, whatever may be the content of the personal and social life. Our classification will, therefore, claim to be only a starting-point for researches whose aim must consist in a synthetic characterization of human types precisely with regard to the content of the attitudes and values which constitute their social personalities.
The essential points, which cannot be here sufficiently emphasized, are that the social personality as a whole manifests itself only in the course of its total life and not at any particular moment of its life, and that its life is not a mere empirical manifestation of a timeless metaphysical essence, always the same, but is a continuous evolution in which nothing remains unchanged. This evolution often tends toward a stabilization as its ultimate limit, but never attains this limit completely; and even then it is not this
( 1838) limit as such, but the very course of evolution tending to this limit, that constitutes the main object-matter of socio-psychological synthesis.
If we wish, therefore, to use the concept of type as applied to social personalities, we must, first of all, extend this concept to the process of personal evolution. Now this implies a special problem. A personal evolution taken in its totality is certainly a unique occurrence; no individual develops in the same way as any other individual. On the other hand, from the standpoint of nomothetic social science this total development should be entirely analyzable into elementary facts, each indefinitely repeatable and subordinated to a general law. But this possibility of subordinating single isolated facts of individual life to general laws of becoming is evidently not sufficient to justify any generalizations concerning personalities, for the combination of these elementary facts in the evolution of each individual may be so different from what it is in the life of others that no comparison of any two personalities is possible. We must, therefore, assume — and social observation certainly corroborates this assumption — that not only single attitudes and values, not only single elementary facts, but more or less complete combinations, series of facts, present a certain similarity from individual to individual. This Similarity cannot be assumed to go as far as absolute identity; the identity is always only approximate. Nor is any such combination of facts universal; it is not a matter of a single abstract law, but of a concrete co-operation of many laws, and is therefore usually common to only a certain number of individuals. But the concept of type, unlike the concept of law, needs only an approximate identity of individual cases, and
( 1839) a class is supposed to possess only a relative generality.
The application of sociological generalization to social personalities requires thus, first of all, the admission of what we may call typical lines of genesis.[1] A line of genesis is a series of facts through which a certain attitude is developed from some other attitude (or group of attitudes), a value from some other value (or group of values), when it does not develop directly, and the process cannot be treated as a single elementary fact. For example there is probably no social influence that could produce directly an attitude of appreciation of science from the parvenu's pride in his wealth, no intellectual attitude that could directly lead an untrained individual to produce a scientifically valid concept from the data of common-sense observation; but by a series of intermediary stages the parvenu can become a sincere protector of science, by a more or less long training in theoretic research a student learns to produce scientific values. In such a series every single link is a fact of the type: attitude — value — attitude, or: value — attitude — value, and as such, if properly analyzed, can always be explained by sociological law (or lead to the discovery of a sociological law), but the series as a whole cannot be subject to any law, for there are many possible ways in which an attitude can be developed out of another attitude, a value out of another value; all depends on the nature of the intermediary data. Thus, if we have as starting-point an attitude a and as result an attitude
( 1840) m, the evolution may have gone on in such a way that out of a, under the influence of a value B, is evolved the attitude d; out of d, under the influence of J, the attitude k, and k, under the influence of a value N, was changed into the attitude m. But it may have happened also that a was influenced not by B, but by C, and the result was a different attitude e, which again under the influence not of F, but of G, gave i, and i, when influenced by L, also produced m. And the same can be said of values. To take well-known examples, there is probably usually one and the same primary attitude — a particular form of the desire for excitement, which we shall analyze in a later volume —out of which habitual drinking develops, and yet there are many possible ways of becoming a drunkard. The history of inventions shows that many inventors working independently on the same practical problem may produce the same invention, but their procedure may be completely different. And of course it is hardly necessary to say that from a given attitude or value many different lines of evolution may start and reach quite different results, and that a given attitude or value may have been reached from many different starting points by different lines of evolution. Moreover in the development of a human personality there are many and various divergent lines of genesis, since at any moment of his life the individual not only presents many attitudes acquired during his past development and produces many values which he has learned to produce, but this acquired set of attitudes and abilities is more or less different from moment to moment. Viewed therefore from the standpoint of particular lines of genesis the human personality in its total evolution might appear as too complex to be the object-
( 1841) -matter of scientific generalization. But the theoretically limitless variety of lines of genesis is really limited in practice. There are only a few typical ways in which an attitude is developed out of a determined other attitude or a value out of a determined other value. More than this, when an attitude or a value becomes the starting-point of a line of evolution we can assume that there are only a few different results which this evolution may reach, and when an attitude or a value is given, we can assume that there are only a few different starting-points from which such a result might have been reached. As long as the attitudes of the individual are unsettled and unorganized, as in the child, a new attitude can be developed out of a pre-existing one in many ways, because the individual is open to many and various influences; there is in him little to interfere with a given influence. This gives, of course, many opportunities to educational endeavors tending to produce certain values; and for the same reason a determined influence exercised upon the child may open the way to almost any line of genesis and lead to any new ultimate results. On the contrary, when the individual has acquired a more or less rich stock of stabilized attitudes, a certain influence may not be accepted because in disagreement with this stock. Therefore the way in which a given new attitude can develop is limited, and it may be difficult, sometimes even practically impossible, to produce it because the necessary influences to which the individual would react in the desired way may not be available. Thus the stabilization of individual attitudes diminishes the probability that his future development will assume an unforeseen direction.
And there is a further limitation of the possible lines
( 1842) of genesis in the stability and limited variety of external conditions. First of all there is a general negative limitation of external influences by the fact that the milieu in which the individual lives includes only a limited variety of values. But much more important is the positive limitation of evolution which society imposes upon the individual by putting him into a determined frame of organized activities which involves in advance a general succession of influences — early family education, beginning of a definite career with determined openings, marriage, etc. — establishes a regularity of periodical alternations of work and play, food and sleep, etc., and with the help of economic, legal and moral sanctions prescribes and excludes certain forms of behavior. The more uniform and steady this frame, the greater the relative parallelism of evolution between individuals; similar lines of genesis repeat themselves in many members of the group, for the individual cannot find around him influences which would make him take a course different from other members of the group in acquiring a new attitude. Of course this means also a limitation of the variety of possible attitudes or values that can develop from a given starting-point; given a certain material in the form of an individual disposition or of a social value, it is probable that the group will make of it something very definite, and the same in every case, particularly where the social framework is little varied and flexible.
Still more extensive uniformities of development are found in connection with temperament and character. Not only single attitudes or values but wide and organized groups of attitudes and groups of values are found developing in a similar way in many personalities and certain of these organized groups assume such
( 1843) prevalence in personal life that the individual taken in his entire evolution may be approximately characterized by the prominence of a few such groups. Temperament and character are the concepts in which has been expressed the common-sense realization that there are always a few organized groups of attitudes in a personality which play a predominant part in its activity, so that for practical purposes any attitudes outside of those groups can be neglected as inconspicuously manifesting themselves in personal behavior. The concept of individual life-organization may be used to indicate the existence, within the sphere of experience of an individual, of a limited number of selected and organized groups of social values which play a predominant part in his life both as partial causes and partial effects of his more or less organized attitudes.
We must here investigate the methodological significance of these concepts and attempt to give them more exact and more productive meanings than those they have had in popular psychology and in half-literary reflection about human life. It must be remembered in particular that the fundamental problems of the synthesis of human personalities are not problems of a personal status but problems of personal becoming, that the ultimate question is not what temperaments and characters there are but what are the ways in which a definite character is developed out of a definite temperament, not what life-organizations exist but by what means a certain life-organization is developed. It is relatively easy to classify temperaments and characters, but this classification is entirely unproductive unless it is used as a mere preparation for the study of their evolution, where the aim is to determine human types as dynamic types, as types of development.
( 1844) Similarly with regard to personal life-organization, we find in any society ready models of organization with which individuals are expected to comply; but the analysis of these models does not constitute a study of personalities — it is merely its starting-point. After learning what models the group proposes to its members, we must learn by what typical means those members gradually realize or fail to realize these models. In other words the concepts of temperament, character, life-organization, mark only the starting-point and the limit of the evolution which is the real object-matter of the study of human personalities. It becomes, therefore, a point of essential importance to frame definitions of temperament, character and life-organization which may be used in the study of personal evolution.
We may call temperament the fundamental original group of attitudes of the individual as existing independently of any social influences; we may call character the set of organized and fixed groups of attitudes developed by social influences operating upon the temperamental basis. The temperamental attitudes are essentially instinctive, that is, they express themselves in biological action but not in reflective consciousness; the attitudes of the character are intellectual, that is, they are given by conscious reflection. This does not mean that the temperamental attitude cannot be experienced; it usually is experienced when for some reason the activity is inhibited. But with the temperamental attitude there is no conscious connection between the separate actions in which it expresses itself; every single feeling and satisfaction (e. g., hunger), is for the individual a separate entity; the living being does not generalize these feelings as
( 1845) forming one series, one permanent attitude. On the contrary, every manifestation of a character-attitude is given to the subject as a single expression of a more or less general tendency; a helpful or harmful action is accompanied by a consciousness of sympathy or hate, that is, by a conscious tendency to the repetition (or remembrance) of actions with an analogous meaning; the attitude accompanying the actual production of some piece of work is given as one element of a series that may be willingness or unwillingness to do such work, desire to realize a plan, to earn money, etc. This consciousness need not be always explicit, but it must be implicitly present and become explicit from time to time if the attitude is to be defined as a character-attitude.
Correspondingly, the temperamental attitudes are not systematically organized and co-ordinated among themselves in the whole course of personal life but are only associated with each other by being repeatedly used together for the production of certain common results in certain conditions provided by the organism and its environment. If a certain group of temperamental attitudes reappears from case to case in such activities as the satisfaction of hunger or of the sexual appetite, it is not because these attitudes have been consciously subordinated to a predominant attitude, but because their association has habitually brought the desired result in the given conditions. And, on the other hand, there is no conscious tendency to establish harmony and to avoid contradictions between separate groups of temperamental attitudes manifested at various moments of individual life. A group of temperamental attitudes either finds its expression at a given moment by pushing others aside, or is pushed
( 1846) aside by some other group and is not expressed at all. Thus, hunger and sexual desire, fear and anger manifest themselves independently of each other without any conscious attempt at co-ordination. In character, on the contrary, attitudes are more or less systematized; their continuity through many manifestations makes this indispensable. Thus, hunger or sexual desire becomes a permanent basis of a conscious and systematic organization of a large group of economic, social, hedonistic, intellectual, aesthetic attitudes, and this organization works continuously, independently of the actual association of these attitudes from case to case; the attitudes organized for the permanent satisfaction of hunger or sexual desire manifest themselves even while no hunger or sexual desire is actually felt and while the actual material conditions do not suggest them in any way. Moreover, between the system of attitudes subordinated to hunger and the system of attitudes subordinated to sexual desire, between a general policy of prudence having the attitude of fear as its basis and a general system of aggressive tendencies rooted ultimately in the attitude of anger, permanent relations are usually established, either by subordinating the conflicting attitudes to some more general attitude — desire for happiness, for social success, etc. — or by giving priority to one of them.
These differences between temperament and character find their expression on the objective side in matters of life-organization. But in order to understand this side of the question we must get rid of the whole schematic conception of the world assimilated from common-sense reflection and from science. We must put ourselves in the position of the subject who
( 1847) tries to find his way in this world, and we must remember, first of all, that the environment by which he is influenced and to which he adapts himself, is his world; not the objective world of science—is nature and society as he sees them, not as the scientist sees them. The individual subject reacts only to his experience, and his experience is not everything that an absolutely objective observer might find in the portion of the world within the individual's reach, but only what the individual himself finds. And what he finds depends upon his practical attitudes toward his environment, the demands he makes upon it and his control over it, the wishes he seeks to satisfy and the way in which he tries to satisfy them. His world thus widens with the development of his demands and his means of control, and the process of this widening involves two essential phases — the introduction of new complexities of data into the sphere of his experience and the definition of new situations within those complexities.
The first phase is characterized by an essential vagueness. The situation is quite undetermined; even if there are already in the individual wishes which will give significance to the new data, they are not sufficiently determined with regard to these data, and the complexity is not ordered, values are not outlined, their relations are not established. In the second phase the situation becomes definite, the wish is crystallized and objectified, and the individual begins to control his new experience. Now, the sphere of experience in which new situations can be defined by the temperament alone does not include social life at all. It includes only internal organic processes and such external experiences as are directly connected with the satisfaction of organic needs and the avoidance of
( 1848) physical danger. Of course this sphere is also continually extended, chiefly during the period between birth and maturity, and its extension, as we know from observation and from direct consciousness of such processes as the development and satisfaction of sexual instincts, has also the two periods of vague perception of a chaos of new data and gradual definition of new situations. But all the material with which the temperament deals has one essential limitation: it includes only natural objects, whose significance for the individual is determined by their sensual content. Meanwhile the social values are significant as much or more because of the meaning they have for other individuals or for the group. For example, a material object outside of social life and in relation to organic needs may be significant on account of its sensual qualities, as food, as shelter, as source of possible pain, etc. In social life it acquires through its meaning for others ideal qualities which make it an economic value (object of exchange), a source of vanity, a weapon in a fight for some other value, etc. A word outside of social life is a mere sound, perhaps helping to foresee possible danger or satisfaction; in social life it has a meaning, it points to experiences common to many individuals and known as common by all of them. A painting as natural object is a piece of canvas with colors, perhaps suggesting by association the things represented; in social life it has a new meaning; it stands for the ideas and emotions of the painter himself, the critics, the crowd of observers, etc. An individual of the other sex is naturally chiefly a body, object of physical satisfaction; socially it is also a conscious being with an experience of its own and a personality which has to be adapted to the subject's own personality or to which
( 1849) the subject has to adapt himself. And so on. This is why social psychology, while rejecting the old conception of individual consciousness as closed receptacle or series of conscious data or happenings, cannot accept as its methodological basis the principles recently developed by the behavioristic school. The behavior of an individual as social personality is not scientifically reducible to sensually observable movements and cannot be explained on the ground of the direct experience of the observing psychologist; the movements (including words) must be interpreted in terms of intentions, desires, emotions, etc. — in a word, in terms of attitudes — and the explanation of any particular act of personal behavior must be sought on the ground of the experience of the behaving individual which the observer has indirectly to reconstruct by way of conclusions from what is directly given to him. We cannot neglect the meanings, the suggestions which objects have for the conscious individual, because it is these meanings which determine the individual's behavior; and we cannot explain these meanings as mere abbreviations of the individual's past acts of biological adaptation to his material environment — as manifestations of organic memory — because the meanings to which he reacts are not only those which material things have assumed for him as a result of his own past organic activities, but also those which these things have acquired long ago in society and which the individual is taught to understand during his whole education as conscious member of a social group.
The biological being and his behavior represent therefore nothing but the limit dividing natural from social life; the individual is an object-matter of social psychology only in so far as his activities are above
( 1850) this limit, imply on his part a conscious realization of existing social meanings and require from the scientist an indirect reconstruction of his attitudes. Therefore this limit itself must be defined by social psychology in terms of attitudes, and the concept of temperamental attitudes serves precisely this purpose. An individual with nothing but his biological formation, or — in social terms — with nothing but his temperamental attitudes, is not yet a social personality, but is able to become one. In the face of the world of social meanings he stands powerless; he is not even conscious of the existence of this reality, and when the latter manifests itself to him in changes of the material reality upon which his instincts bear, he 'is quite lost and either passively submits to the unexpected, or aimlessly revolts. Such is the position of the animal or the infant in human society; and a similar phenomenon repeats itself on a smaller scale wherever an individual on a low level of civilization gets in touch with a higher civilized environment, a worldling with a body of specialists, a foreigner with an autochthonic society, etc. In fact, human beings for the most part never suspect the existence of innumerable meanings — scientific, artistic, moral, political, economic —and a field of social reality whose meanings the individual does not know, even if he can observe its sensual contents, is as much out of the reach of his practical experience as the other side of the moon.
In order to become a social personality in any domain the individual must therefore not only realize the existence of the social meanings which objects possess in this domain, but also learn how to adapt himself to the demands which society puts upon him from the standpoint of these meanings and how to control these
( 1851) meanings for his personal purposes; and since meanings imply conscious thought, he must do this by conscious reflection, not by mere instinctive adaptations of reflexes. In order to satisfy the social demands put upon his personality he must reflectively organize his temperamental attitudes; in order to obtain the satisfaction of his own demands, he must develop intellectual methods for the control of social reality in place of the instinctive ways which are sufficient to control natural reality. And this effective reorganization of temperamental attitudes leads, as we have seen, to character, while the parallel development of intellectual methods of controlling social reality leads to a lifeorganization, which is nothing but the totality of these methods at work in the individual's social career.
The practical problem which the individual faces in constructing a life-organization has only in so far a similarity with the problem of biological control of the living being's natural environment as the solution of both implies a certain stabilization of individual experiences, the realization of a certain more or less permanent order within that sphere of reality which the individual controls. But the nature of this stability, of this permanent order, is essentially different in both cases — a difference which has been obliterated by the indistinct use of the term "habit" to indicate any uniformities of behavior. This term should be restricted to the biological field. A habit, inherited or acquired, is the tendency to repeat the same act in similar material conditions. The stabilization reached through habit involves no conscious, purposeful regulation of new experiences, but merely the tendency to find in new experiences old elements which will enable the living being to react to them in an old way. This tendency
( 1852) is unreflective; reflection arises only when there is disappointment, when new experiences cannot be practically assimilated to the old ones. But this form of stability can work only when the reality to which the individual has to adjust is entirely constituted by sensually given contents and relations. It is evidently insufficient when he has to take social meanings into account, interpret his experience not exclusively in terms of his own needs and wishes, but also in terms of the he traditions, customs, beliefs, aspirations of his social milieu. Thus the introduction of any stable order into experience requires continual reflection, for it is impossible even to realize whether a certain experience is socially new or old without consciously interpreting the given content — an object, a movement, a word — and realizing what social meaning it possesses. However stable a social milieu may be, its stability can never be compared with that of a physical milieu; social situations never spontaneously repeat themselves, every situation is more or less new, for every one includes new human activities differently combined. The individual does not find passively ready situations exactly similar to past situations; he must consciously define every situation as similar to certain past situations, if he wants to apply to it the same solution applied to those situations. And this is what society expects him to do when it requires of him a stable life-organization; it does not want him to react instinctively in the same way to the same material conditions, but to construct reflectively similar social situations even if material conditions vary. The uniformity of behavior it tends to impose upon the individual is not a uniformity of organic habits but of consciously followed rules. The individual, in order to control social reality
( 1853) for his needs, must develop not series of uniform reactions, but general schemes of situations; his life-organization is a set of rules for definite situations, which may be even expressed in abstract formulas. Moral principles, legal prescription, economic forms, religious rites, social customs, etc., are examples of schemes.
The definiteness of attitudes attained in character and the corresponding schematization of social data in life-organization admit, however, a wide scale of gradation with regard to one point of fundamental importance, — the range of possibilities of further development remaining open to the individual after the stabilization. This depends on the nature of the attitudes involved in the character and of the schemes of life-organization, and also on the way in which both are unified and systematized. And here three typical cases can be distinguished.
The set of attitudes constituting the character may be such as practically to exclude the development of any new attitude in the given conditions of life, because the reflective attitudes of an individual have attained so great a fixity that he is accessible to only a certain class of influences — those constituting the most permanent part of his social milieu. The only possibilities of evolution then remaining open to the individual are the slow changes brought by age in himself and by time in his social milieu, or a change of conditions so radical as to destroy at once the values to whose influence he was adapted and presumably his own character. This is the type which has found its expression in literature as the "Philistine." It is opposed to the "Bohemian," whose possibilities of evolution are not closed, simply because his character remains unformed. Some of his temperamental attitudes are in their
( 1854) primary form, others may have become intellectualized but remain unrelated to each other, do not constitute a stable and systematized set, and do not exclude any new attitude, so that the individual remains open to any and all influences. As opposed to both these types we find the third type of the individual whose character is settled and organized but involves the possibility and even the necessity of evolution, because the reflective attitudes constituting it include a tendency to change, regulated by plans of productive activity, and the individual remains open to such influences as will be in line of his preconceived development. This is the type of the creative individual.
A parallel distinction must be made with regard to the schemes of social situations constituting the lifeorganization. The ability to define every situation which the individual meets in his experience is not necessarily a proof of intellectual superiority; it may mean simply a limitation of claims and interests and a stability of external conditions which do not allow any radically new situations to be noticed, so that a few narrow schemes are sufficient to lead the individual through life, simply because he does not see problems on his way which demand new schemes. This type of schemes constitutes the common stock of social traditions in which every class of situation is defined in the same way once and forever. These schemes harmonize perfectly with the Philistine's character and therefore the Philistine is always a conformist, usually accepting social tradition in its most stable elements. Of course every important and unexpected change in the conditions of life results for such an individual in a disorganization of activity. As long as he can he still applies the old schemes, and up to a
( 1855) certain point his old definition of new situations may be sufficient to allow him to satisfy his claims if the latter are low, although he cannot compete with those who have higher claims and more efficient schemes. But as soon as the results of his activity become unsuccessful even in his own eyes, he is entirely lost; the situation becomes for him completely vague and undetermined, he is ready to accept any definition that may be suggested to him and is unable to keep any permanent line of activity. This is the case with any conservative and intellectually limited member of a stable community, whatever may be his social class, when he finds himself transferred into another community or when his own group undergoes some rapid and sudden change.
Opposed to this type we find an undetermined variation of schemes in the life of all the numerous species of the Bohemian. The choice of the scheme
by a Bohemian depends on his momentary standpoint, and this may be determined either by some outburst of a primary temperamental attitude or by some isolated character-attitude which makes him subject to some indiscriminately accepted influence. In either case inconsistency is the essential feature of his activity. But on the other hand he shows a degree of adaptability to new conditions quite in contrast with the Philistine, though his adaptability is only provisional and does not lead to a new systematic life-organization.
But adaptability to new situations and diversity of interest are even compatible with a consistency of activity superior to that which tradition can give if the individual builds his life-organization not upon the presumption of the immutability of his sphere of social values, but upon the tendency to modify and to enlarge
( 1856) it according to some definite aims. These may be purely intellectual or aesthetic, and in this case the individual searches for new situations to be defined simply in order to widen and to perfect his knowledge or his aesthetic interpretation and appreciation; or his aims may be "practical," in any sense of the term —hedonistic, economical, political, moral, religious and then the individual searches for new situations in order to widen the control of his environment, to adapt to his purposes a continually increasing sphere of social reality. This is the creative man.
The Philistine, the Bohemian and the creative man are the three fundamental forms of personal determination toward which social personalities tend in their evolution. None of these forms is ever completely and absolutely realized by a human individual in all lines of activity; there is no Philistine who lacks completely Bohemian tendencies, no Bohemian who is not a Philistine in certain respects, no creative man who is fully and exclusively creative and does not need some Philistine routine in certain lines to make creation in other lines practically possible, and some Bohemianism in order to be able to reject occasionally such fixed attitudes and social regulations as hinder his progress, even if he should be unable at the time to substitute for them any positive organization in the given line. But while pure Philistinism, pure Bohemianism and pure creativeness represent only ideal limits of personal evolution, the process of personal evolution grows to be more and more definite as it progresses, so that, while the form which a human personality will assume is not determined in advance, either by the individual's temperament or by his social milieu, his future becomes more and more determined by the very course of his
( 1857) development; he approaches more and more to Philistinism, Bohemianism or creativeness and thereby his possibilities of becoming something else continually diminish.
These three general types — limits of personal evolution — include, of course, an indefinite number of variations, depending on the nature of the attitudes by which characters are constituted and on the schemes composing the life-organization of social individuals. If we wished therefore to classify human personalities on the ground of the limits of development to which they tend, our task would be very difficult, if not impossible, for we should have to take characters and life-organizations separately in all their varieties into account. In each of these three fundamental types similar characters may correspond to indefinitely varying life-organizations and similar life-organizations to indefinitely varying characters. But, as we have seen, the problem is to study characters and life-organizations not in their static abstract form, but in their dynamic concrete development. And both character and lifeorganization —the subjective and the objective side of the personality — develop together. For an attitude can become stabilized as a part of the reflective character only under the influence of a scheme of behavior, and vice versa, the construction or acceptance of a scheme demands that an attitude be stabilized as a part of character. Every process of personal evolution consists, therefore, in a complex evolutionary series in which social schemes, acting upon pre-existing attitudes, produce new attitudes in such a way that the latter represent a determination of the temperamental tendencies with regard to the social world, a realization in a conscious form of the character-possibilities which
( 1858) the individual brings with him; and these new attitudes, with their intellectual continuity, acting upon pre-existing sets of social values in the sphere of individual experiences produce new values in such a way that every production of a value represents at the same time a definition of some vague situation, and this is a step toward the constitution of some consistent scheme of behavior. In the continual interaction between the individual and his environment we can say neither that the individual is the product of his milieu nor that he produces his milieu; or rather, we can say both. For the individual can indeed develop only under the influence of his environment, but on the other hand during his development he modifies this environment by defining situations and solving them according to his wishes and tendencies. His influence upon the environment may be scarcely noticeable socially, may have little importance for others, but it is important for himself, since, as we have said, the world in which he lives is not the world as society or the scientific observer sees it but as he sees it himself. In various cases we may find various degrees of dependence upon the environment, conditioned by the primary qualities of the individual and the type of social organization. The individual is relatively dependent upon society in his evolution, if he develops mainly such attitudes as lead to dependence, which is then due both to his temperamental dispositions and to the fact that the organization of society is such as to enforce by various means individual subjection; he is relatively independent if in his evolution he develops attitudes producing independence, which again results from certain primary tendencies determined by a social organization which favors individual spontaneity. And thus both dependence and
( 1859) independence are gradual products of an evolution which is due originally to reciprocal interaction; the individual cannot become exclusively dependent upon society without the help of his own disposition, nor become independent of society without the help of social influences. The fundamental principles of personal evolution must be sought therefore both in the individual's own nature and in his social milieu.
We find, indeed, two universal traits manifested in all individual attitudes, instinctive or intellectual, which form the condition of both development and conservatism. In the reflex system of all the higher organisms are two powerful tendencies which in their most distinct and explicit form manifest themselves as curiosity and fear. Without curiosity, that is, an interest in new situations in general, the animal would not live; to neglect the new situation might mean either that he was about to be eaten or that he was missing his chance for food. And fear with its contrary tendency to avoid certain experiences for the sake of security is equally essential to life. To represent these two permanent tendencies as they become parts of character in the course of the social development of a personality we shall use the terms "desire for new experience" and ‘desire for stability." These two tendencies in every permanent attitude manifest themselves in the rythmical form which conscious life assumes in every line. When consciousness embraces only a short span of activities, the rhythm expresses itself in the alternation of single wishes or appetites with repose. The satisfaction of hunger or of sexual desire and the subsequent wish for uninterrupted calm are the most general examples. On a higher level these tendencies manifest themselves with regard to much more complex and
( 1860) longer series of facts. The desire for stability extends to a whole period of regular alternations of activity and rest from which new experiences are relatively excluded; the desire for new experience finds its expression in the break of such a whole line of regulated activities. And the range and complexity of both stability and change may have many degrees. Thus, for example, stability may mean the possibility of a single series of satisfactions of hunger in a certain restaurant, of a week's relation with an individual of the other sex, of a few days' stay in one place during travel, of a certain kind of work in an office; or it may lie in the possibility of such an organization of money-affairs as gives the certainty of always getting food, of a permanent marriage-relation, settling permanently in one place, a life career, etc. And new experience may mean change of restaurant, change of the temporary sexual relation, change of the kind of work within the same office, the resuming of travel, the acquiring of wealth, getting a divorce, developing a Don Juan attitude toward women, change of career or speciality, development of amateur or sporting interests, etc.
On the individual side, then, alternation of the desire for new experience and of the desire for security is the fundamental principle of personal evolution, as including both the development of a character and of a life-organization. On the social side the essential point of this evolution lies in the fact that the individual living in society has to fit into a pre-existing social world, to take part in the hedonistic, economic, political, religious, moral, aesthetic, intellectual activities of the group. For these activities the group has objective systems, more or less complex sets of schemes, organized either by traditional association or with a conscious
( 1861) regard to the greatest possible efficiency of the result, but with only a secondary, or even with no interest in the particular desires, abilities and experiences of the individuals who have to perform these activities. The latter feature of the social systems results, of course, from the fact that the systems have to regulate identically the activities of many individuals at once, and that they usually last longer than the period of activity of an individual, passing from generation to generation. The gradual establishment of a determined relation between these systems which constitute together the social organization of the civilized life of a group, and individual character and life-organization in the course of their progressive formation, is the central problem of the social control of personal evolution. And social control — which, when applied to personal evolution, may be called "social education" —manifests itself also in the duality of two opposite tendencies: the tendency to suppress in the course of personal evolution, any attitudes or values which are either directly in disharmony with the existing social organization or seem to be the starting-points of lines of genesis which are expected to lead to socially disharmonious consequences; and the tendency to develop by adequately influencing personal evolution features of character and schemes of situations required by the existing social systems.
There is, of course, no pre-existing harmony whatever between the individual and the social factors of personal evolution, and the fundamental tendencies of the individual are always in some disaccordance with the fundamental tendencies of social control. Personal evolution is always a struggle between the individual and society — a struggle for self-expression on the part
( 1862) of the individual, for his subjection on the part of society—and it is in the total course of this struggle that the personality—not as a static "essence" but as a dynamic, continually evolving set of activities—manifests and constructs itself. The relative degree of the desire for new experience and the desire for stability necessary for and compatible with the progressive incorporation of a personality into a social organization is dependent on the nature of individual interests and of the social systems. Thus, different occupations allow for more or less change, as in the cases of the artist and the factory workman; and a many-sided dilletante needs and can obtain more new experiences than a specialist; single life usually makes more new experiences along certain lines possible and demands less stabilization than married life; political co-operation with the conservative part of a group brings less change than taking part in a revolutionary movement. And in modern society in general there is an increasing tendency to appreciate change, as compared with the appreciation of stability in the ancient and mediaeval worlds. For every system within a given group and at a certain time there is a maximum and a minimum of change and of stability permissible and required. The widening of this range and the increase of the variety of systems are, of course, favorable to individual self-expression within the socially permitted limits. Thus, the whole process of development of the personality as ruled in various proportions by the desire for new experience and the desire for stability on the individual side, by the tendency to suppress and the tendency to develop personal possibilities on the social side, includes the following parallel and interdependent processes:
( 1863)
(1) Determination of the character on the ground of the temperament;
(2) Constitution of a life-organization which permits a more or less complete objective expression of the various attitudes included in the character;
(3) Adaptation of the character to social demands put upon the personality;
(4) Adaptation of individual life-organization to social organization.
1. We know already that the development of temperamental attitudes into character-attitudes can assume many different directions, so that, if the proper influences were exercised from the beginning, a wide range of characters, theoretically any possible character, might be evolved out of any temperament. But the directions which evolution must take in order to produce a determined attitude out of a pre-existing one become more and more limited with the fixation of character; in a systematically unified "consistent" character every fixed attitude would exclude the contrary one, and some degree of consistency appears as soon as the character begins to be formed. With the progressive evolution of the personality the means of developing a given character become therefore less and less numerous and it may be finally practically impossible to carry the development of certain attitudes to their end, for the process necessary to develop them might be so long and complicated as to be impracticable. Thus, it might be possible to produce a sweet and
( 1864) even a meek character out of an irascible temperament by developing first, for example, a strong altruistic disposition, to which in turn the way might lead through the desire for social response. But if in the development of the personality other attitudes were gradually formed contrary to the desire for response or to altruism, such as desire for solitude, pride, etc., the original irascibility might be still subdued by other influences, but certainly it would be impossible to produce sweetness. Assuming now that we are determined to produce the latter, then we must be careful not to allow any temperamental possibilities to realize themselves which may be contrary either to this attitude itself or to any of the attitudes which the individual must evolve in order to attain this stage. The more opposition there is between the original temperamental attitude and the one that we want to develop, the longer the process, the more the intermediary stages to be passed, and the greater the number of necessary suppressions.
But in actual social life the mechanism of suppression is not used in this detailed way and the motives of suppression are not in the main those which we have outlined. The possible attitudes which the members of the group wish to suppress are usually those whose direct expression in action would, in the social opinion, be harmful, rather than those which are contrary to the development of other useful ones. The control exercised by the group is negative much more than positive, tends to destroy much more than to construct, for reasons which we shall investigate presently. And even when it wishes to construct, it often assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that when an undesirable attitude is suppressed, the contrary desirable one will develop. And, of course, if there is in individual temperament
( 1865) it possibility of the desirable attitude, this supposition may be true. But the point is that by suppressing an attitude, t whether for the sake of some other more desirable one or through fear of its undesirable manifestations, we suppress at the same time all the possible lines of a further evolution that may have started from the be suppressed attitude and resulted in something very desirable. The earlier the suppression, the greater the number of possibilities destroyed and the greater the resulting limitation of the personality. Well-known examples are the suppression of the adventurous spirit and of the critical tendency in children.
The mechanism of suppression is double. A temperamental possibility not yet conscious is suppressed if f given no opportunity to manifest itself in any situation, for only through such manifestations can it become explicit and be evolved into a character-attitude. This form of suppression is attained by an isolation of t the individual from all experiences that may give stimulation t ion to endeavors to define situations by the undesirable tendency. The suppression of sexual attitudes and of free thought in religious matters are good examples of this mechanism. The second course, used when an attitude is already manifested, in order to prevent its further development and stabilization, is suppression by negative sanction; a negative value — punishment or blame —is attached to the manifestation of the attitude, and by lack of manifestation the attitude cannot evolve. But both mechanisms are in fact only devices for postponing the development of t the undesirable attitude until a character is fixed in
hiding the contrary attitudes, and it is only this fixation which does suppress the undesirable attitude definitively.
( 1866)
But suppression is not always a necessary consequence of the evolution of character from temperament. Attitudes need to be suppressed only when they are inadequately qualified and thus interfere with more desirable ones when meeting in the same field of social experience. For example, unqualified spirit of adventure and a tendency to regulated life, unqualified sexual desire and claims of social respectability, unqualified wish for pleasures and recognition of familial obligations are, indeed, more or less irreconcilable with each other. But one of the fundamental points of the development of character from temperament is precisely the qualification of attitudes with respect to definite social contents, and if this qualification begins in time and the attitudes are determined with sufficient precision, there may be no opposition between them at all and none of them needs to be socially harmful.
The principle that permits the harmonizing of opposite attitudes without impairing the consistency of character is, in general, distinction of applicability of attitudes. The situations involved must, of course, be classed in advance so that certain features of a given complex of values may be a sufficient criterion for the application of one attitude or another. Many criteria are given by social tradition; the conventionalization of certain attitudes in certain circumstances permits of their preservation together with others to which they are opposed. The criteria are of various kinds. They may consist, for example, in a time-limitation. Vacation is considered a time when some of the spirit of adventure suppressed during the year may be expressed. Or it may be a limitation in space, as when certain behavior is permitted at a certain place, like
( 1867) the dropping of social forms and the relative freedom of relations between the sexes at bathing resorts. Sometimes the occasion is ceremonial, as in the hilarity of evening parties and the drinking at social meetings. On other occasions a certain attitude is assumed to be excluded from situations to which without the conventionalization it would apply. Thus, the sexual attitude is theoretically not applied to passages in the Bible bearing on sexual questions, or to an artist's model, or in medical studies and investigations and in legal works. More important cases of conventionalization are found when a whole line of organized activities, with the corresponding attitudes, is permitted under circumstances carefully circumscribed and usually designated by some social symbol. Thus, marriage is a conventionalization of the woman's — to some extent also the man's — system of sexual attitudes, besides being a familial organization. War is the conventionalization of murder, plundering and arson, diplomacy a conventionalization of cheating and treachery. Freedom of theoretic investigation has attained a social conventionalization in the physical sciences but not yet in human sciences — philosophy, sociology, history, history of literature, economics.
In every case the dividing line between the fields of applicability of two contrary attitudes can be drawn by or for the individual even if no general rules of division are laid down by society. The only difficulty is that every attitude if allowed to develop freely tends to an exclusive domination of the whole field of experience to which it can be applied. Of course this is not true of every attitude of every individual, but there is probably not a single attitude which does not in somebody tend to assume such an importance as to conflict
(1868) with others. The principle of right measure and harmony of virtues, developed by Greek ethics, expressed precisely the need of such a limitation of attitudes. But it is evident that with a proper limitation no attitude needs to be suppressed and all the temperamental possibilities can be allowed to develop without leading to internal contradictions and impairing the consistency of character. The principle through which any attitude can be made not only socially harmless but even useful, is sublimation. It consists in turning the attitude exclusively toward situations that have in them an element endowed with social sacredness. We cannot analyze the latter concept now; we shall do it another time. At present it is enough to point out that an object is socially sacred when it provokes in members of the group an attitude of reverence and when it can be profaned in the eyes of social opinion, by being connected with some other object. There are many degrees of social sacredness; an object that may appear as sacred in comparison with another may be itself a source of profanation of a third. Thus, business has a feature of sacredness which becomes manifest when it is interfered with by frivolous things like drinking or the company of women of the demi-monde; but its sacredness is not very high since it can easily appear as profane when it interferes with scientific or religious interests. And even so highly sacred an object as a scientific congress or a formal religious meeting may seem profane as compared with a particularly eager and difficult pursuit by the individual of the solution of a great theoretic problem, the ecstasy of a mystic, or the preservation of the society itself from destruction or devastation by an alien enemy. And of course the degree of sacredness attached to different objects varies
(1869) from group to group and from time to time, and some still current contrarieties, such as the fight for superiority of sacredness between art and morality, religion and science, patriotism and internationalism, show that in certain lines a general understanding even within a single group may be hardly possible at a given moment. But in spite of all these variations of sacredness there are, from this point of view, higher and lower forms possible for every attitude, dependent on the relative degree of sacredness of the situations which it defines. Thus, the spirit of adventure may manifest itself in a criminal's career, in a cow-boy's or trapper's life, in the activity of a detective, in geographical or ethnographical exploration; the desire for money, in stealing, gambling, "living by one's wits," commercial activity, great industrial organization; the sexual attitude may manifest itself in association with prostitutes, in relations, short but not devoid of individualization, with many girls and married women, in an ordinary marriage for the sake of the regulation of sexual life; in romantic love, in artistic creation, in religious mysticism. Even such attitudes as seem essentially harmful, as the desire of shedding blood, may become sublimated; the butcher's activity represents a lower degree of sublimation, surgery the highest.
To sublimate an attitude we must develop an appreciation of its higher forms, which then becomes a factor of evolution and eventually results in a depreciation of its lower manifestations. The feeling of social sacredness can arise in the individual only in close contact with a group which has definite standards of sacredness; more than any other feeling it needs a continual and permeating influence of social opinion and is likely to be lost without the support of the en-
(1870) -vironment. But the social group does not always provide ready methods for the sublimation of all the attitudes which need this stimulation; its standards of sacredness are incomplete, often contradictory, and not extended to all the values to which they ought to be applied. The individual's own initiative must therefore supplement the social influences. When the feeling of social sacredness is once strongly developed with regard to a larger number of values the individual will be able to sublimate spontaneously social attitudes whose sublimation is not provided for by social tradition, by extending old standards of social sacredness to new values or by creating new standards. And as he needs social support to maintain his new valuations, he will try to convert his environment, to impart to others his reverence for things whose sacredness they have failed to recognize.
The principles of discrimination of situations to which contrary attitudes should be applied and of sublimation of socially forbidden attitudes allow a rich and consistent character to develop without suppressions from any source, temperamental or social. The individual spontaneously tries to preserve his temperamental attitudes, and as he can do this only by removing contradictions between attitudes contending for supremacy and by sublimating attitudes that can find no expression in his milieu, and since society never gives him all the ready conventions and the whole hierarchy of sacredness that he needs, he is naturally led to create new discriminations and new valuations, and becomes a creative type simply by fully developing all of his possibilities. The only task of social culture is to prepare him for this creation by teaching him the mechanism of discrimination and sublimation in general, and
(1871) not interfering with his efforts to preserve all that he is able to preserve of his individuality. It is the suppression that produces the two other fundamental characters, the Philistine and the Bohemian. If society is successful in repressing all the possibilities that seem directly or indirectly dangerous until a character is formed which excludes them once and forever, then the product tends to be an individual for whom there are no problems of self-development left, no internal contradictions to solve, no external oppositions to overcome — a limited, stable, self-satisfied Philistine. If, on the contrary, the suppression is unsuccessful and the rebellious attitudes break out before a sufficiently stable set of contrary attitudes is formed, the individual is unprepared to meet the problems that arise, unable to discriminate or to sublimate, and an inconsis cent, non-conformist, Bohemian type develops, which in its highest form, as artist, thinker, religious reformer, social revolutionist, may even succeed in producing, but whose products will always lack the internal harmony and social importance of the true creative type.
2. The construction of a life-organization in conformity with individual character may go on in two typically different ways. There may be ready social schemes which are imposed upon the individual, or the latter may develop his schemes himself, in agreement or non-agreement with those prevailing in his social environment. In the first case the scheme is usually given to the individual in an abstract form or through concrete examples, and then he is taught to apply it to the various situations which he meets by chance or which are especially created for him. In the second case he works out himself a definition of every new
(1872) situation in conformity with his existing attitude, which grows in definiteness as the solved situation acts back upon it, and out of these definitions he gradually constructs a schematism.
Education gives us many examples of the first method. The inculcation of every moral norm, precept of behavior, logical rule, etc., follows this course. The formula or example is easily communicated; the difficulty begins with its application. It may happen that the individual has already defined situations spontaneously as the rule demands; then he accepts gladly the formulation of his own behavior which solves in advance the problem of reconciling this part of his life-organization with the social organization of the group. The well-known educational device is precisely to find among the individual's own actions such as are in accordance with the rule and then to state the rule as an induction from his own behavior. This is really an introduction of the second method, the one of spontaneous development, into the field of education. More frequently it happens that the individual has the attitude necessary to define situations in accordance with the rule, but the attitude lacks the determination that it needs to express itself in action, has not attained the consciousness of its social object enabling it to pass from the sphere of temperament into that of character. If then the individual has one or two situations defined for him it is enough to make him imitate this definition in the future and accept the scheme as a rule of behavior.
But the most common case is the one where the individual lacks the attitude which the social scheme demands. This 'is very general in the education of youth, where attitudes are developed progressively and the social group does not wait—and frequently
( 1873) cannot wait—for their spontaneous development, but forces the process so as to fit young people promptly into a social framework and have as little trouble with them as possible. Another general cause of the frequent failure of the social schemes to find ready response in the individual is their uniformity and stiffness. The social schematism is not adapted to the variety of individuals but to the artificial production of a minimum of uniformity. And even when this is successful the attitudes tend to evolve, not only in single individuals but also in the whole group, and this evolution is continuous, while the schemes can be changed only discontinuously, and so they remain behind — occasionally run ahead of — the social reality which they tend to express. From all these causes comes the continual and in a large measure fruitless effort to adapt the content of social life to its form — to produce attitudes to fit the schemes, while the contrary and more important process must be left largely to the individuals themselves.
The adaptation of attitudes to schemes may be pursued by two methods. The representatives of the social environment can try to develop the attitude on the basis of some existing attitude by applying such social laws as may be known. This would be the normal and successful method, but though it is sometimes applied, its success is now quite accidental, because, as we have indicated in the methodological note to Volume I, social technique is at present in a purely empirical stage, for there are scarcely any social laws definitely demonstrated. The only domain in which some consistent success has been obtained by this method is theoretic instruction. There at least it is clearly recognized that it is vain to try to force the
( 1874) individual to accept schemes, to define situations, to state and solve problems for which he has not yet the necessary preparation, and that new mental attitudes must be developed in a certain determined order and gradually. By the second and more usual method the individual is forced to define situations according to the imposed scheme, because to every situation coming under the scheme some sanction is added, some value which appeals to an existing attitude of the individual. But if the sanction is a more or less successful device in suppressing temporarily the manifestation of undesirable attitudes until character is formed, it proves quite unsuccessful in developing desirable ones. The situation to which the sanction is added is quite different from what it would have been without the sanction; the scheme accepted is really not the scheme that society wanted to impose, but a different one, consisting fundamentally in an adaptation to the sanction, and the individual develops not the attitude demanded, but another one, a modification of the attitude provoked by the sanction. Thus —to take a familiar type of cases — by inducing the individual to comply with a moral norm through the fear of punishment or the hope of reward the idea of punishment or reward is added to every situation which demands the application of the moral norm. Then the situation is not the moral situation as such, but the moral situation plus the idea of punishment or reward; the scheme is not a moral scheme, but a scheme of prudence, a solution of the problem of avoiding punishment or of meriting reward; the attitude developed is not the moral attitude, but the fear of punishment or the hope of reward qualified by the given moral part of the situation.
When the individual constructs his life-organization
( 1875) himself instead of having it imposed upon him by society, his problem always consists, as we have already seen, in the determination of the vague. Any new situation is always vague and its definition demands not only intellectual analysis of the objective data but determination of the attitude itself, which becomes explicit and distinct only by manifesting itself in action. The definition of the new situation is therefore possible only if a new corresponding attitude can directly arise out of some preceding one, as its qualification or modification in view of the new values, and this determination of the attitude is in turn possible only if the new situation can be defined on the ground of some analogy with known situations—as an old problem viewed from a new standpoint. This explains why an entirely new situation which has no analogies in the past experience of the individual remains practically undefined even if it is understood theoretically; the individual may know all the values that are there, he may know how others define such a situation, and still all this remains practically meaningless to him. But when the scheme has once been formed it becomes itself a great help in developing new attitudes and defining situations in a new way. As long as the scheme is not there the new elements appearing in individual character and experience are not sufficiently noticed. There is still a lingering of the past, a conscious or unconscious effort to interpret the new in terms of the old, to consider the recently formed type of behavior as a mere variation of the pre-existing type. The constitution of a new scheme at once makes conscious the evolution that has been accomplished — sometimes even makes the subject exaggerate its importance. In its light the recent changes appear as
( 1876) examples of a new general line of behavior, acquire an objectivity that they did not possess, for the scheme can be communicated to others, compared with social rules of behavior and can even become a social rule of behavior — for such is the source of every social reform.
The factor making the individual perceive and define new situations is always his own, conscious or subconscious, desire for new experience. There is no external power capable of forcing him to work out a new definition. Even the influence of natural or social sanctions, of punishment following an unsuccessful definition, presupposes some active effort on the part of the individual tending to define the situation in view of the punishment. Even the mere defense against an aggression disturbing a state of security would be impossible without a latent power making the individual face the new situation instead of running away. The usual doctrine that new ways of behavior, new definitions, appear as a result of adaptation to new external conditions is based upon a quite inadequate conception of adaptation. The common idea is that adaptation marks a certain fixed limit to which the individual has to approach, because as long as he has not reached it he is misadapted, and various calamities force him to adapt himself. But where is such a limit?
It must be different for various individuals. Napoleon was adapted to the conditions of French life after the revolution, and so was any one of his guards; the honest and solid real estate owner is as well adapted to the conditions of city life as is the successful pick-pocket. And it must change for every individual; the errandboy who becomes a millionaire is no less adapted to his environment during his youth than in his later life. If adaptation means anything, it can be only a har-
( 1877) -monious relation between individual claims and individual control of the environment; the harmony can be perfect whatever the range of claims and of control. But then the concept of readaptation to a changed environment loses its seeming precision. By an analogy with biological theories, the meaning that is given to readaptation in sociology is usually this, that the individual attains in the new conditions a range of control and claims relatively equal to those he had in the old conditions. This equality is not particularly difficult to determine in biology where for every organism a certain minimum can be fixed and the living being seldom goes far beyond this minimum. But how shall we fix a minimum of claims and control in social life? And without this the meaning of equality of range of adaptation becomes very unclear.
The real point is not adaptation as a state reached at a certain moment, but the process of the widening or narrowing of the sphere of adaptation. And this depends essentially upon the individual himself, not upon his environment. If the individual is satisfied with what he can get out of the given conditions he will not try to set and solve new problems, to see more in the situations he meets than he used to see or to find in his environment a greater complexity of situations than he used to find. The dissatisfaction which the individual feels with what he can get out of given conditions arises frequently, indeed, when an external change makes it impossible to get the same results with the same efforts, but even then the individual may as well resign the results as increase his efforts. The course he selects depends on the prevalence of the desire for new experience over the desire for stability, the first pushing him to find new methods and to widen
( 1878) the sphere of activity in order to preserve the old claims, the second tending to preserve the old form and range of activity in spite of the changed conditions and to be satisfied with the results that can be obtained in this way. But in modern human society dissatisfaction with the given is far more frequently expressed as desire for the new, and even external changes in the given conditions are often only an unconscious or conscious pretext to satisfy this desire by justifying the individual in leaving these conditions for others. A typical example is emigration. Thus, in Poland the conditions of the peasants' life are now much better, in spite of the rapid increase of population with which the growth of cities does not keep pace, than they were fifty years ago. But the subjective tendencies are not the same. A desire for economic progress has arisen, the opening of new fields for the satisfaction of this desire provokes a latent dissatisfaction with the old life, and the slightest change for the worse, which could be remedied with a little effort, is often enough to make the peasant start to America.
With the formation of schemes it is different. A new scheme which the individual finds to express his new way of defining situations is not the result of the desire for new experience, but, on the contrary, the result of the desire for stability. Behavior that is not schematized, not generalized, but is or seems to be different from moment to moment and in disaccordance with the previously recognized rules calls after a time for recognition and justification, provokes a desire for a settlement. Moreover there are always plans to be made for the future requiring a conscious stabilization of the individual's own activity. And thus, even independently of social demands which make the individual
( 1879) search for security in determined systems and which we shall study presently, the individual, after a longer or shorter period during which new forms of behavior are developed, wants to fix his acquisition in a stable formula. And when such a moment comes, if the individual is unable to create his own scheme, he is ready to accept any one that is given to him and expresses more or less adequately his new way of defining situations. This explains such striking cases as the sudden "conversion" of individuals whose intellectual level is much above the doctrine to which they are converted, the influence that people of a limited intellectual power but of strong convictions can occasionally exercise over much more profound, but doubting personalities, and the incomprehensible social success of self-satisfied mediocrities during periods of intellectual unrest. Anything may become preferable to mental uncertainty.
Although there seems to belittle difference between the schemes spontaneously created or selected by the individual and the schemes imposed by society, in the sense that both correspond to the way in which the individual actually does define situations, the different processes of development lead to the formation of quite opposite life-organizations. It is clear that if the individual learns to adapt his attitudes to the schemes given him he will always be dependent upon society and its ready schemes, and if society succeeds in imposing upon him a complete life-organization and in adapting his character to this, no further development will be possible for him unless his environment works out some new scheme; but even then it will be difficult for him to adapt himself to this new scheme in the degree that his life-organization and character have become stabilized.
( 1880) Or if he is temperamentally inclined to change he will pass from one form of behavior to another according to the schemes that actually happen to come in his way. A Philistine or Bohemian life-organization is thus the necessary result of this process in which schemes are imposed and attitudes are made to fit them. Bolshevism is really nothing but the disorganization of a society that was organized exclusively for Philistinism. On the contrary the individual who has learned to work out new schemes spontaneously will not be stopped in his evolution by the non-existence of a ready scheme nor disorganized at periods of social crisis, but will be able to construct progressively better schemes to suit his spontaneous evolution. His desire for stability itself will lead him not to a limitation of his desire for new experience in conformity with a fixed, externallygiven scheme, but to the elaboration of schemes that will be wide and dynamic enough to permit a development of behavior within their limits; we shall study presently the nature of these schemes. Thus an organization of life in view of creation is the result of the spontaneity of the process in which the individual elaborates schemes to fit his developing attitudes.
3. We pass now to the social aspect of the problem of personal evolution. We have seen that the social group tends to fit the individual perfectly into the existing organization and to produce a definite character as rapidly as possible. This character must also be stable, so that no surprises need be anticipated from its future development; simple, so that any member of the group, however limited his mental capacities, can understand it at once; presenting a perfect unity, in spite of the multiplicity of individual activities; based
( 1881) on attitudes common to all members and socially desirable, so that each member shall appreciate it positively. In other words, in its demands upon personal character society aims to stop individual evolution as early as possible, to limit the complexity of each personality as much as is compatible with the variety of interests which it is required to possess, to exclude all real or apparent irrationality of its manifestations in different fields of social civilization, to reduce the differences between personalities to a minimum compatible with the social division of classes and professions.
The tendency of society to produce such characters in its members is most efficient when the social environment is a primary group in which all his activities are enclosed. In such a group, as, for instance, a peasant community, all the individual interests are supposed to be subordinated to the predominant social interest, because all the values — hedonistic, economic, intellectual, aesthetic —which are within the reach of the individual are included in the stock of civilization of his primary group and controlled by it. Every cultural problem reaches the individual only through the mediacy of this group, which, because of the immediate character of the relations between its members, is for each member the primary and fundamental complex of values; all other values are continually referred to this complex and draw their positive or negative character directly from this reference. The continual tendency of social education in such a group is to have each individual appreciate every object from the standpoint of the attitude of the group toward this object. Every situation is first of all treated as a social situation and only secondarily as an economic, religious, sexual, aesthetic intellectual one.
( 1882)
The adaptation of the individual to the primary group requires, therefore, that all his attitudes be subordinated to those by which the group itself becomes for him a criterion of all values. These fundamental social attitudes are the desire for response, corresponding to the family system in the primary group-organization, and the desire for recognition, corresponding to the traditionally standardized systems of social values upon which the social opinion of the community bases its appreciations. The desire for response is the tendency to obtain a direct positive personal reaction to an action whose object is another individual; the desire for recognition is the tendency to obtain a direct or indirect positive appreciation of any action, whatever may be its object. The desire for response is the common socio-psychological element of all those attitudes by which an individual tends to adapt himself to the attitudes of other individuals — family affection, friendship, sexual love, humility, personal subordination and imitation, flattery, admirative attachment of inferior to superior, etc. Of course each of the attitudes indicated by these terms is usually more or less compound and contains other elements besides the desire for response. Those other elements may range with regard to their social bearing from the most altruistic and self-sacrificing love of another personality, becoming almost independent of the response actually obtained, to the most calculating and egotistic tendency to use the responses of the other personality as mere instruments for the attainment of social ends; and yet the desire for response as such and independently of its further consequences is hardly ever absent even in the most radical examples of these contradictory attitudes. It is clearly an egotistic attitude and yet it
( 1883) contains a minimum of altruistic considerations. Its egotistic side makes it the most general and on the average the strongest of all those attitudes by which harmony is maintained and dissension avoided between the members of a group; it may be qualified, therefore, as representing the lowest possible, and yet precisely, therefore, in the large mass of mankind, the most efficient positive type of emotional morality.
The desire for recognition is the common element of all those attitudes by which the individual tends to impose the positive appreciation of his personality upon the group by adapting his activities to the social standards of valuation recognized by the group. It is found, more or less connected with other attitudes, in showingoff, pride, honor, feeling of self-righteousness, protection of inferiors, snobbishness, cabotinism, vanity, ambition, etc. It is the most common and most elementary, and probably the strongest factor pushing the individual to realize the highest demands which the group puts upon personal conduct, and, therefore, constitutes probably the primary source of rational morality.
These two fundamental social attitudes supplement each other, in normal conditions, in producing the general basis for a unified character, such as is needed in and demanded by the primary group. If they sometimes conflict — as when the desire for recognition impels the individual to ignore the attitudes of his family when its standing in the community is low — the existence of a conflict usually shows a certain disorganization of the primary group itself; as long as the latter is consistent and strong the two fundamental social attitudes are more apt to strengthen each other than to conflict; for instance, family solidarity in the peasant community is one of the grounds of recogni-
( 1884) -tion, and a high recognition shown to a member by the community may produce in the relatives of this member a readiness to respond to him proportionate to the degree in which they are influenced by social opinion.
It is clear that an individual dominated by these attitudes, if he stays permanently within a primary group, can develop the very kind of character which society requires. His personality will be relatively stabilized at an early period — a good example is the precocious maturity of young people of the peasant class his character will be relatively simple, because primarily constituted by attitudes on the ground of which he can get response and recognition of many members of the group; i. e., by the most average and commonplace attitudes; it will present few, if any, important conflicts, for conflicts appear when the individual has many incompatible interests, whereas here all interests are subordinated to the social interest; finally, it will be positively appreciated by the whole group, since all the members of the latter possess and want to possess in a large measure similar tendencies.
But such a stabilization and unification of character on the ground of the desires for response and recognition becomes more and more rare with the progress of civilization. Even in the still existing primary groups it tends to diminish as members of these groups get in contact with the external world. Every attempt of a member of such a group to define his situations from the standpoint of his hedonistic, economic, religious, intellectual, instead of his social attitudes, is in fact a break in his character, and such attempts become more and more frequent as, through extra-communal
( 1885) experiences, the individual finds before him situations that are not connected with the primary group for example, when in the city he has the opportunity of drinking without any ceremonial occasion, when he earns money by hired labor instead of working on the family farm, when he can have a sexual experience without passing through the system of familial courtship, when he learns anything alone by reading and not in common with the whole village from a news-bearer, etc. But since the educational factors of his new environment which might replace those of the old are not at first given him, and he is unable to develop a character by his own efforts, such new experiences destroy the old unity of character without constructing a new one, and we witness partial disorganization from which only gradually new types emerge — the economic climber, the student, etc. And then the problem assumes a new form.
A complex modern society is no longer in all its parts in immediate touch with its members. It is composed, indeed, of small groups whose members are in personal interrelations; but none of these groups can enclose all the interests of the individual, because each one has only a limited and specialized field. Therefore individual character can be no longer unified upon the basis of the general desires for response and recognition, for even if these desires always remain fundamental for social relations, they must be differently qualified in different groups. The kind of response and recognition the individual gets in his family, in his church, in his professional group, in his political party, among his companions in pleasure, varies within very wide limits. It is based now upon the special activities which constitute the object of interest of every special
( 1886) group. Therefore the ground of the unity of character must now be sought in attitudes corresponding to these activities; the character of the social personality can no longer be unified by a reduction of all special attitudes to a general social basis but by an organization of these attitudes themselves.
But the difficulty is that each limited and specialized social group tends to impose upon every member a specific character corresponding to its particular line of common interests, wants him to be mainly, if not exclusively, a family member, a religious person, a professional, a political party member, a sportsman, a drunkard, etc., and expects his other attitudes to be subordinated to one particular kind of attitude. The individual cannot satisfy completely the claims of any of these groups, and he may either yield to the old social claim that he should possess an early, fixed, stable and simple character upon which society can count, and satisfy completely the claims of a specialized group, or he may reject all claims together. In the first case he can attain a unity of character only at the cost of a narrowness of interests such as no member of a primary group, peasant or savage, ever knows. Examples of this are found among the professional types. Certain occupations, such as military service, schoolteaching, the ministry, administrative service in a strongly developed bureaucracy, small shopkeeping, farming, housekeeping, tend to influence character in a measure sufficiently strong to produce types which in their fundamental features are similar in all societies. Occupational groups tend more and more to exclude from the sphere of their interests anything that is not directly connected with their "business," and an individual whose character is formed by a modern profes-
( 1887) -sional group is the narrowest type of Philistine the world has ever seen, particularly if the profession itself does not afford much opportunity for development.[3]
But even so, the narrowness of the occupational type has probably not yet attained the extreme limit it is able to reach — and would reach if evolution went on undisturbed in the same direction as in the last two centuries because social tradition still preserves some of the remnants of the old primary group conditions, in which the individual is supposed to share all the interests of his social group, and the latter includes a large variety of interests. An occupational group of the type of a medieval guild, though not satisfying all individual interests as completely as a peasant community, appealed nevertheless to many interests besides the professional ones; it controlled individual character rather tyrannically, imposed a very definite complex of attitudes, but the complex was much less narrow than, for instance, the one which in recent times was imposed upon a Prussian army officer. In the past the occupational group put both negative and positive demands as to what character and interests its members should possess so as to uphold the standing of the group within the larger society of which it was a part by taking a definite standpoint toward the most important social problems, even those which did not belong in the special domain of the group's profession. But this type of occupational group, which seemed to
(1888) be intermediary between the old primary group and the modern forms of social organization, is clearly decaying everywhere, in spite of the occasional efforts to revive it.
But precisely because of the growing specialization of occupational groups, cases of character formed exclusively by adaptation to one occupational group are becoming less and less frequent. The modern individual usually belongs to different groups, each of which undertakes to organize a certain kind of his attitudes. But it remains true that the way in which these various complexes of attitudes are combined usually shows a complete lack of organization. An individual of this type is a completely different man in his shop, in his family, with his boon companions, preserving his balance by distributing his interests between different social groups, until it is impossible to understand how such a multiplicity of disconnected, often radically conflicting characters, can co-exist in what seems to be one personality. This is a new style Philistinism —the Philistinism of the dissociated personality, amounting to a sortof stabilized Bohemianism. And a striking feature of modern society, showing how little reflective attention is paid to the problem of developing organized and rich human personalities, is the fact that society does not notice this chaotic and mechanical stabilization of the character of its member, provided he shows himself properly adapted to the minimum demands of each of the special groups to which he belongs, and does not give an undue prevalence to one of his particular characters at the expense of others. The weakness of this Philistinism, in spite of the seeming broadness of interests which the Philistine exhibits, shows it-
(1889) -self at periods of social crisis when old special groups break down. Each such breakdown brings a complete disorganization of the corresponding attitudes. A striking recent example is the sudden decay of intellectual life in American colleges and universities during the present war; all those members whose intellectual attitudes were organized in an exclusive adaptation to the routine of the institution and to the common educational pursuits of their limited intellectual milieu lost temporarily all ability to do productive work as soon as this routine was interrupted and the common pursuits dropped or diminished in vitality — unless they found in war work a milieu with intense common interests of another kind to which they were forced to adapt themselves. A wider and more complex example of a disorganization of individual characters resulting from a dissolution of common standards and pursuits in special groups is the often described and emphasized "lack of character" of the Russian middle and higher classes since the old social interests lost their influence on individuals. We may even make a more general supposition: The "moral unrest" so deeply penetrating all western societies, the growing vagueness and indecision of personalities, the almost complete disappearance of the "strong and steady character" of old times, in short, the rapid and general increase of Bohemianism and Bolshevism in all societies, is an effect of the fact that not only the early primary group controlling all interests of its members on the general social basis, not only the occupational group of the mediaeval type controlling most of the interests of its members on a professional basis, but even the special modern group dividing with many others the task of organizing permanently the attitudes of each of its
(1890) members, is more and more losing ground. The pace of social evolution has become so rapid that special groups are ceasing to be permanent and stable enough to organize and maintain organized complexes of attitudes of their members which correspond to their common pursuits. In other words, society is gradually losing all its old machinery for the determination and stabilization of individual characters.
But under these conditions it is both illogical and impractical to continue to treat the formation of stable characters as the chief aim of social education. Our pedagogical and ethical concepts and methods correspond to a stage of civilization when individual attitudes were sufficiently stabilized at an age between sixteen and twenty-five to permit practical reflection and social control to ignore their subsequent evolution as insignificant. It was then all right to identify social maturity and stabilization of character, to assign to both a term approximately coincident with physical maturity, and to consider the period of change preceding stabilization as a mere preparation for the latter. But when the limit of an even approximate fixation of attitudes is pushed further and further, when the individual continues to evolve psychologically long after having reached biological maturity and social productivity, the social importance of the period during which he is changing increases at the expense of the period during which he remains approximately stable. For a modern civilized personality the fixation of character begins to identify itself more and more not with the attainment of maturity, but with old age; it no longer expresses the establishment of full civilized life but corresponds with retirement from active civilized life, to a growing passivity and limitation of
(1891) social interests. The center of pedagogical and ethical attention must, therefore, be entirely shifted; not attainment of stability, but organization of the very process of personal evolution for its own sake should be the conscious task of social control. At the present moment society not only lacks any methods by which it could actually and continuously organize the change of attitudes of its members, but it is only beginning (in our experimental schools) to search consistently for methods of education by which the individual can be trained in his youth to organize his later evolution spontaneously and without social help. At present the individual who succeeds in producing for himself such a dynamic organization has to do it by his own devices, is forced to invent for himself all the methods of self-education which he needs without profiting by the past experiences of others, and must consider himself lucky if his environment does not interfere with him too efficiently by trying to impose upon him a stable character.
4. The chief social problem arising with reference to the relation between individual life-organization and social organization is the reconciliation of the stability of social systems with the efficiency of individual activities, and the most significant feature of social evolution in this line is the growing difficulty of maintaining a stable social organization in the face of the increasing importance which individual efficiency assumes in all domains of cultural life.
In early societies we find individual efficiency entirely subordinated to the demand for social stability. All the social schemes of the group are connected, are parts of one whole, one large complex of social tradition,
( 1892) and any innovation is considered a break not only of the one particular scheme which it modifies, but of this entire complex. There is, of course, no objective rational ground whatever for taking the traditional schemes en bloc, no finalistic connection between the corresponding activities; the real results of a change of practical methods in a certain line may have little or no bearing on the results of other traditional forms of behavior. Thus, a modification introduced into some social ceremony has nothing to do objectively with the technique of hunting or warfare, a new technical device in constructing houses has no direct effect upon the political organization of the group, etc. But the common bond between all these schemes lies in the character of sacredness which all of them possess in the eyes of the group as parts of the same traditional stock whose unity is ultimately founded on the unity and continuity of the group itself. The individual must make each and all of these schemes his own in order to be a full member of the group. If for the formation of his character the important point is that all his interests are satisfied within the group and therefore are supposed to be founded on his social interest, the essential thing about his life-organization is that he is supposed to share in all the interests of his group and to adopt all social schemes as schemes of his personal behavior. There may be some differentiation between individuals as to the relative importance which certain particular interests assume in their lives, but no specialization in the sense of an absorption by some particular interests to the exclusion of others. Each member of a primary group is by a gradual initiation introduced into all the domains which compose the civilization of the group and is as all-sided in his activities as the
( 1893) stage of civilization which his group has reached permits him to be.
But this all-sidedness is attained at the cost of efficiency. There is a maximum of efficiency in each line which no member of the group can transgress, not because — as is the case on a higher level of culture — a higher efficiency in one particular line would impair his activities in other lines in which he is also expected to be active, but because in each particular line the domination of traditional schemes excludes not only the creation of new and better working schemes, but limits even the possibility of extending old methods to new classes of problems. The only increase of efficiency which is allowed and encouraged is the more and more perfect solution of traditional problems — an increase whose results are well exemplified in the perfection of primitive art and technique, in elaborate religious rituals, in the reliability of information which much of primitive knowledge shows, in the perfect rational order presented by many complex early systems of social and political organization, etc. Under these conditions, spontaneous social evolution is possible only by an agglomeration of small changes which are not noticed at once but modify from generation to generation the stock of traditions while leaving the illusion of its identity. When, on the contrary, the primary group is brought rapidly into contact with the outside world with its new and rival schemes, the entire old organization is apt to break down at once, precisely because all the old schemes were interconnected in social consciousness; and the individual whose lifeorganization was based on the organization of his primary group is apt also to become completely disorganized in the new conditions, for the rejection of a
( 1894) few traditional schemes brings with it a general negative attitude toward the entire stock of traditions which he has been used to revere, whereas he is not prepared for the task of reorganizing his life on a new basis. This occurs very frequently with the European peasant who emigrates and we have given in our first two volumes examples showing that the peasants themselves realize the effect which the rejection of certain elements of this stock has on the total personal complex of schemes.
But with the growing social differentiation and the increasing wealth and rationality of social values, the complex of traditional schemes constituting the civilization of a group becomes subdivided into several more or less independent complexes. The individual can no longer be expected to make all these complexes his own; he must specialize. There arises also between the more or less specialized groups representing different more or less systematic complexes of schemes a conscious or half-conscious struggle for the supremacy of the respective complexes or systems in social life, and it happens that a certain system succeeds in gaining a limited and temporary supremacy. Thus, among the ancient Hebrews, in some European countries during and after the Reformation, and in the early American colonies, certain religious systems predominated over all other cultural complexes; in Russia and Prussia, up to the present war, a similarly dominant role was assumed by the state; in Poland and Bohemia during the nineteenth century the concept of nationality, determined mainly by language, historical tradition and the feeling of solidarity, constituted the chief ground of social organization and was supposed to dominate individual life-organization; in societies with
(1895) a powerful economic development like modern England and America the leading part is played by industrial and commercial schemes. The family system was until lately supposed to be the exclusive foundation of individual life-organization for women. During the present war, military interests have almost everywhere taken the center of attention and imposed farreaching modifications of the life-organization on all the members of western societies.
But it is clear from the above examples that no special social complex, however wide, rich and consistent, can regulate all the activities which are going on in the group: the predominance of a complex is not only limited in time and space, but always incomplete and relative. Moreover each of the broad complexes which we designate by the terms "religion," "state," "nationality," "industry," "science," "art," etc., splits into many smaller ones and specialization and struggle continue between these. The prevalent condition of our civilization in the past and perhaps in the present can thus be characterized as that of a plurality of rival complexes of schemes each regulating in a definite traditional way certain activities and each contending with others for supremacy within a given group. The antagonism between social stability and individual efficiency is under these circumstances further complicated by the conflicting demands put upon the individual by these different complexes, each of which tends to organize personal life exclusively in view of its own purposes.
Whenever there are many rival complexes claiming individual attention the group representing each complex not only allows for but even encourages a certain amount of creation, of new developments, within the
(1896) limits of the traditional schemes, for a complex of schemes which excluded new experiences as it does in the primary group would be unable to maintain itself in its implicit or explicit contest with other complexes. Therefore the conservative groups which support any existing schematism want it to be alive, to be as adaptable to the changing conditions of life as is compatible with the existence of the traditional schemes. The amount of efficiency which a scheme makes possible varies, of course, with the nature of the scheme itself, with the rigidity with which the group keeps the mere form, with the rapidity of the social process. And thus society demands from the individual productivity in the line of his career; in morality it is seldom satisfied with passive acceptance of the norms, with their limitation to old and known actions, but usually wants their application to new facts coming under their definition; in custom it is glad to see every extension of tradition; in science or art it greets with satisfaction every new work done in accordance with the traditional system; in religion it meets with joy every revival which proves that the old emotions can stir some modern souls, every theoretic application of dogma which proves that the old conceptions can satisfy some modern intellects; in family life everything is welcome that can enliven the content without changing the form of relation between husband and wife, parents —and children; in politics, in law, in economic organization, every reform increasing the efficiency of the existing system without modifying it in the slightest is highly appreciated.
The fact that most if not all social schemes are incorporated in more or less comprehensive and systematic complexes helps to maintain the feeling of
(1897) their immutability. The unity of many special traditional complexes is still almost as firmly established in modern civilized society as is the unity of its total stock of traditions in a savage primary group. The breakdown of any scheme belonging to a traditional complex seems to imperil the complex itself. And the individual who might easily reject a single scheme will hesitate before rejecting the whole complex. How consciously and masterfully incorporation of the most insignificant schemes into a great system is often made is manifested by such examples as religion and legal state-control. In the Roman Catholic Church disaccordance with the apparently most insignificant detail of the system of beliefs or an infraction of any rule of behavior is supposed to produce estrangement from the congregation, because it involves in social consciousness a break with the whole system; the individual must either admit that he is in error, recant and recognize the scheme — at least in the form of a confession and penance — or consider himself outside the church. In the same way, by breaking any law or ordinance of the state the individual is considered a rebel against the whole system of legal state-control and loses in fact his rights as member of the group, since he may become the object of any violence decreed as punishment for this break; the punishment becomes thus a forcible recognition of the broken scheme. The same method, with only less consistency and less power to enforce obedience, is followed in morality, in classorganization, even in customs, as when one break of social etiquette is sufficient to disqualify a person as member of polite society, or one act opposed to traditional morals sufficient to make all "well-behaved"
(1898) members of a group disclaim every connection with the offending member.
But such a traditional fixation of special complexes of schemes within which efficiency is required with the condition that all schemes remain recognized does not correspond at all with the spontaneous tendencies of individuals. First of all, the scheme represents for the evolving individual either the minimum of stability which he reaches after a period of changing active experiences, or the minimum of new active experiences which he reaches after a period of passive security. In other words, as long as the individual evolves, an activity regulated by the scheme and efficient within the limits of this regulation does not represent a definite level; it corresponds always only to an intermediary stage, either of progression from the passive acceptance of socially imposed situations toward a creative activity free from all subordination to schemes, or of regression in the opposite direction. The individual may indeed oscillate, so to speak, from relative passivity to relative creativeness without going far enough in the first direction to become entirely inefficient, and without becoming so efficient as to have to reject the scheme; the less radical these oscillations, the more the individual's conduct approaches the average prescribed by the scheme. Such an individual represents then a social model of behavior in the given sphere; he is the moderately productive conservative, the famous juste milieu type. Frequently, however, the individual goes on with a progressively intense and efficient activity, tries continually to find and to define new situations; his efficiency becomes then increasingly dangerous to the scheme, because even if activity begins in perfect conformity with the scheme, the accumulating novelty of
(1899) experience sooner or later makes the scheme appear insufficient. There are innumerable examples of individuals who began creative activity with the firm intention of keeping within the limits of the traditional schematism and ended by rejecting it altogether. The history of morality, of science, of political and social reform, and particularly of religious heresies is full of such biographies. And therefore the social group which is the bearer of a traditional complex is mistrustful of the individual who is too creative, particularly as the majority is usually composed of personalities whose evolution tends to the opposite limit — to the purely passive acceptance of the formal elements of tradition and the repetition of old activities bordering on habit. In normal times this passivity may be scorned by the active part of the group, but at moments of crisis we find the group condemning all "imprudent" innovations and falling back upon the most abject Philistinism as upon the only absolutely unshakable basis of security.
The second difficulty concerning the adaptation of individual life-organization to the social complexes is the fact that while a complex has to be accepted or rejected in its entirety, since the group does not permit the individual to accept some schemes and to reject others, the individual in his spontaneous development tends to make a selection of schemes from various complexes, thus cutting across social classifications of schemes, and often including in his dynamic life-organization successively, or even simultaneously, elements which from the traditional standpoint may seem contradictory. This difficulty is increased by the fact that many — perhaps most — social complexes are not freely chosen by the individual, but their acceptance
( 1900) is either expected to follow from a position that the individual occupies in the group from birth — as member of a certain class, a certain race, as male or female, handsome or homely, etc. — or from a position which is imposed on him in his early youth through a certain moral code, religion or form of education, or, finally, from a position which he is forced to take in order to satisfy his elementary needs — for example, marriage or choice of a profession. There are complexes prescribed for the son and the daughter, for the bachelor and the married man, for the girl, the wife and the mother, for the society person and the member of a lower class, for the adherent of a religious creed and the atheist, for the professional in any line, for the city and the country inhabitant, for the householder, the tenant of an apartment and the roomer, for the person who eats at home, in a boarding house or in a restaurant, for the pedestrian, the car-passenger and the owner of an automobile, etc. The individual who has a complex imposed upon him or accepts it voluntarily is expected to show the prescribed amount of efficiency — neither more nor less in all the activities regulated by the schemes belonging to the complex, and is not expected to perform any activities demanded by a rival complex, or to invent any new schemes which may seem to disagree with the accepted ones. More than this, he is often required to abstain from activities which, even if they do not contradict directly the existing schematism, may take his time and energy from the performance of the prescribed activities.
It is obvious that this type of social organization disregards entirely the personal conditions of efficiency. The organization of schemes in a traditionally fixed complex represents usually a degree of methodical per-
( 1901) -fection sufficient to obtain from individuals an average amount of efficiency, making each individual contribute in some measure to the maintenance of the existing social status, so that an activity organized in accordance with the complex is indubitably more productive socially than an unorganized one. But no socially fixed complex of schemes in whatever line economic, political, moral, scientific, aesthetic, religious — can obtain from any individual the highest amount of efficiency of which he is capable, not only because it prohibits creation beyond the limits traced by the schemes, but also because it ignores both the differences of personal endowment which make one individual more capable of performing certain activities than others and the variations of personal evolution which make the individual more efficient in a certain line at one period of his life than at another. The organization of activities demanded by a social complex is both impersonal and changeless, whereas an organization which would fulfill the conditions of the highest individual efficiency would have to be personal and changing.
An unavoidable consequence of the now prevalent social organization is that the immense majority of individuals is forced either into Philistinism or Bohemianism. An individual who accepts any social system in its completeness, with all the schemes involved, is necessarily drifting toward routine and hypocrisy. A part of the system may satisfy his personal needs for a time, particularly as long as he is gradually assimilating and applying certain of its schemes, but the rest of the system will not correspond to his predominant aspirations and may be even opposed to them. If the development of life-organization goes on spontaneously, the individual is gradually led
( 1902) to realize the importance for his chief aims of even activities which originally did not appeal to him — his efficiency in the line of his main interest gradually spreads to many side lines — whereas if a life-organization is socially imposed, the personally uninteresting elements of the social complex cannot become personally attractive by being gradually connected with the interesting ones in the course of personal evolution, since this evolution is limited. As a consequence we find the original inefficiency along uninteresting side lines influencing even those activities in which the individual was actually interested at some period of his life, and the whole productivity in the given field drops below the minimum required by the group. In order to remain socially adapted, to avoid active criticism of the group, the individual has then to display in words interests which he does not possess and to invent all kinds of devices in order to conceal his lack of efficiency. This tendency to hypocrisy and pretense is greatly facilitated in such cases by the fact that the majority of the group is in a similar situation and is not only willing to accept any plausible pretension designed to cover individual inefficiency but even often develops a standardized set of "conventional lies" to be used for this purpose, which every one knows to be lies but tacitly agrees to treat as true.
If, on the contrary, the individual either refuses to accept certain of the schemes included in a social complex or develops some positive form of behavior contradicting in the eyes of society some of the schemes of the complex, he is forced to reject the complex in its entirety, and becomes thus, voluntarily or not, a rebel. His situation is then rather difficult, for society has not trained him to develop a life-organization spon-
( 1903) -taneously and the social organization of the type outlined above opposes innumerable obstacles to such a development. With rare exceptions, he can do nothing but adopt some other ready system instead of the rejected one. But then the same problem repeats itself, and every successive attempt at complete adaptation to a new system after rebellion is usually more difficult than the preceding ones, both because the personal demands of the individual become better and better defined in opposition to social regulation and because each particular rebellion undermines the prestige of social systems in general. The usual consequence of rebellion is thus Bohemianism, a permanent tendency to pass from one system to another, attracted at first by the personally interesting sides of a system and soon repelled by the personally uninteresting ones. The result is again unproductivity.
Under such conditions the appearance of a really efficient, creative personality is actually a very exceptional social happening, for it needs a very high personal ability and persistence to develop a dynamic individual organization for efficiency instead of adopting a static social organization for stability when social education has exclusively the second purpose in view, and only by a rare concurrence of circumstances individuals who have this high ability of developing without proper educational help happen to be left in peace to pursue their own self-made lines. And it is no wonder that the scarcity of creative individuals has led to the concept of the genius, and high efficiency is still treated as a prodigy.
But the direction which social evolution has been gradually assuming in modern times seems to show that though the conditions outlined above are still predom-
( 1904) -inant in civilized society they cannot last long; a different type of social organization is developing which begins to put higher demands on individual efficiency than on individual conformism. First of all, progressing specialization is continually subdividing the old social complexes into more and more narrow systems which can no longer constitute a sufficient basis for individual life-organization in any field. Thus, a modern scientist, business-man, technician, when forced by social division of labor to work in a limited and special line, does not find in this line an organization of even all the intellectual, economic and technical activities which he can and wishes to perform. And on the other hand, there is a continually growing field of common values and common activities over and above the special systems, a political, economic, intellectual, aesthetic "universe of discourse," in which all the members of a modern society more or less participate; this field is incomparably smaller, in proportion to the totality of the civilization of the group, than it was in an early primary group or in the upper class of an ancient city-state, but it is much wider than it was, for instance, during the middle ages, and it is certainly wide enough to make every specialized individual realize the narrowness of his specialty and to open before him wide horizons of possible new experiences. Thence the increasing tendency of modern society to "vagabondage" in all forms — changes of residence, of profession, of political views, of religion, the decay of the family system as economic, hedonistic and educational institution, Bolshevism in politics and economics. And when vagabondage is in fact impossible, substitutes are sought which satisfy this tendency at least in imagination. This is the chief role of the popu-
( 1905) -lar literature of adventure, of moving pictures, of daydreams, even, in a large measure, of alcoholism. The task of imposing any particular social systems as definitive frames of individual life-organization is rapidly becoming too difficult for modern society.
And further, the demand for efficiency in every particular line is rapidly growing; efficiency begins to be appreciated even at the cost of conformity. This most important evolution seems to be brought by a radical change of relations between different social complexes, different lines of social activity. Mere specialization of social activity begins to be consciously supplemented by a growing organization of specialized lines. Struggle between social complexes is gradually supplanted by co-operation; the field of application of each complex is more and more frequently defined by distinction from rather than by opposition to other complexes. This evolution is almost completed in the economic field, is rapidly progressing in the fields of science, and is beginning to penetrate everywhere. Thus, the modern state is a highly developed system of the old style, claiming supremacy over other systems, but even there the idea that the state is only an instrument of the national life is being recognized and proclaimed. And when internal struggles lose their traditional form of physical conflict the chief reason for the internal supremacy of the state over other domains of the cultural life of a nation will be gone. Now, wherever co-operation between systems takes the place of struggle, the demand for conformity loses its power in the very measure in which each group engaged in special activities accepts as ultimate aim of these activities not the preservation of a traditional complex against all external influences, but a contribution to the
( 1906) general development of civilization. At the same time co-operation requires that certain results be reached independently of the question whether they are reached by traditional methods or by new ones; calls for efficiency come to every line of social activity from other lines, and the more frequent and insistent they become the more necessary it is to leave to every individual as much freedom as is compatible with efficient co-opera
tion. In certain lines we find, indeed, the division of labor resulting in a separation between inventive and organizing activities on the one hand and mechanical activities on the other hand, but the best sign of the changed social attitudes is that this separation is not accepted calmly by social consciousness but has become one of the great social problems to be solved by conscious efforts.
It is clear that these new characters of modern social evolution require an entirely new standpoint with reference to individual life-organization. The individual must be trained not for conformity, but for efficiency, not for stability, but for creative evolution. And we cannot wait until new educational methods are developed by the slow and groping way of unorganized and unreflective empirical trials. We must realize that social education in the past, viewed from the standpoint of the human personality, has always been a failure and that whatever social progress and whatever personal development has ever been achieved was due to the spontaneous constructive power of individuals who succeeded, not thanks to social help but in spite of social hindrances. The best that society has ever done for its members was to put at their disposal materials for creative development by preserving values produced by the past. The task of future society will
( 1907) be not only to remove obstacles preventing spontaneous personal development but to give positive help, to furnish every individual with proper methods for spontaneous personal development, to teach him how to become not a static character and a conformist, but a dynamic, continually growing and continually creative personality. And such methods can be found only by socio-psychological studies of human individuals.
The present volume represents an attempt to analyze and to reconstruct a personal life-record from the standpoint outlined above and by the methods of social psychology as determined in the methodological note prefacing Vol. I of this work. The material of our study is the autobiography of a Polish immigrant, written at our request three years ago. We hardly need to emphasize that the interest of this autobiography is exclusively scientific, not historical; the personality of the author is entirely insignificant from the point of view of the cultural development of Polish society, since he is a typical representative of the culturally passive mass which, under the present conditions and at the present stage of social evolution, constitutes in every civilized society the enormous majority of the population and whose only role seems to be to maintain, by innumerable and indefinitely repeated routine activities, a certain minimum of civilization in mankind at large, without being able to increase this minimum otherwise than by slowly assimilating and reproducing, very partially and inadequately, a few of the new cultural values produced by a small minority of creators and inventors. But precisely for this reason a record of this type can claim a great scientific and practical importance —greater perhaps than that of
( 1908) a creative man; for only the study of the commonplace man can make us understand why there are commonplace men. It will make us realize also that the greatest defect of our entire civilization has been precisely the existence of a culturally passive mass, that every noncreative personality is an educational failure. It will show the sources of such failures and thus open the way for a more successful social education in the future. It will be the deepest and the most efficient criticism of our social organization as inherited from the past. And such a criticism is most necessary at the present moment, when we are facing the greatest historical change that has ever taken place — a general democratization of the world. The growing recognition that democracy is the only order compatible with our highest humanitarian ideals must be accompanied by a growing understanding that the removal of political obstacles is only the first step toward this order, that what we call democracy has been mainly ochlocracy, and will be until the culturally passive mass becomes a thing of the past.
The author of our autobiographical record, whose life is an alternation of periods during which he drifts into Bohemianism with periods of Philistinization, and shows a gradual increase of Philistine tendencies in the total curve of its evolution, exhibits thus both of these social failures and is typical not only for the study of each of them separately, but also for that of their combination, since many Bohemians sooner or later begin to tend toward Philistinism and there are hardly any Philistines who never showed Bohemian tendencies. Of course the type of Wladek Wiszmewski is determined in its social content by its social milieu; we cannot understand it adequately without a certain
( 1909) knowledge of Polish society in general, and of the special section of Polish society to which this type belongs. Therefore our socio-psychological analysis presupposes an acquaintance with the materials and notes of Volumes I and II, which give an insight into the traditional social attitudes and values found in the peasant and lower city classes of Polish society. On the other hand, Wladek's life-record throws a certain light on the evolution which is going on in the lower stratum of Polish society. Wladek and his family are of peasant origin and often in touch with peasants, but no longer belong to a peasant community. Some of Wladek's relatives and Wladek himself live in towns and mix there with the lower city class — small merchants and handworkers —but the family is not originally a part of any of the old lower town-communities, which were formerly as close and traditional groups as the peasants of a farmer-community. No definite social place can be assigned to the Wiszniewskis in the old class-system; in the new class-system they certainly belong to the intermediary class between the unskilled workmen and the lower-middle class. A few members of the family succeed in getting into the lower-middle class. But Wladek never had any opportunity of getting in touch with people of the higher-middle class — men with university education and still less with people of the upper classes — the aristocracy of birth, wealth or mind. A few incidental meetings can hardly count. This is an important point, showing that he could not get by direct personal relations any intellectual, moral or aesthetic standards higher than those of his class.
The light which the study of Wladek's life-record throws upon the evolution of his social milieu is thus necessarily one-sided. It shows the disorganizing effect
(1910) which the passage from an old to a new form of social organization has upon an individual if not consciously and rationally directed. In our fourth volume we shall study the other side of this evolution and show the positive and constructive results which can be attained by a planful and conscious reorganizing activity. In this respect, as in many others, Polish society has a particular interest for the sociologist, because as a consequence of its exceptional political conditions during the last one hundred and twenty years it has lacked certain elements of a normal social life and has developed other elements to a degree seldom found in normal conditions. Thus, the lack of a national statesystem giving a permanent and stable frame-work for certain social activities and ready means of control has forced the nation to develop reflectively purely social methods of voluntary organization by which social evolution could be controlled and has compelled it to put a greater emphasis than elsewhere upon individual efficiency, since the preservation and development of national culture depended much more on efficiency of personal activities than on social tradition, whose main foundations were destroyed. In so far as these new methods have been developed and applied the results have proved very valuable, and the passage of the lower classes from the old to the new social organization
is effected without individual disorganization. But the abnormal political conditions have hampered the application of the new methods, so that at the beginning of the present war only a certain part of the lower classes had been rationally reorganized on the new basis; a large part still preserves, as we have seen in the first two volumes, the old primary group organization, while the rest has already broken with the old
(1911) forms of social life without being able to construct any new personal life-organization. Wladek — for reasons which his life-record will show — belongs to the latter group.
But while our present study is limited not only to a certain society, but also to a certain class of this society and a certain epoch in the evolution of this class, this study should give us results applicable to many societies, many classes and many epochs. The original object-matter of every science is constituted by particular data existing in a certain place, at a certain time, in certain special conditions, and it is the very task of science to reach, by a proper analysis of these data, generally applicable conclusions. And the degree of reliability of these general conclusions is directly dependent on the carefulness with which each datum has been studied in its concrete particularity. The same, of course, holds true of the study of human personality. Every individual whose personal evolution we wish to use as material of social psychology must be first taken and understood in connection with his particular social milieu before we try to find in him features of a general human interest. When we remember this methodological rule, we shall not fail to see in Wladek's personal evolution, however much it depends on the particular social conditions in which he evolved, numerous elements whose significance reaches far beyond his milieu and his time. We have indicated some of these elements in the conclusion of this volume, but the limits of the work did not permit us to develop all the general socio-psychological hypotheses which the material suggested to us, and we have certainly failed to see the general meaning of many facts. Our readers will be able to draw
(1912) many inferences which we have not explicitly pointed out.
We must add a few remarks about the document itself. Wladek was first induced to write his autobiography by a promise of money, but ambition, literary interest and interest in his own life probably became at once the main motives. He wrote with an astonishing rapidity. The original manuscript is almost twice the size of the text which we are printing and was ready in less than three months.[4] This fact can be properly appreciated only if we remember how difficult is the technique of composing and writing for people of his class. Wladek seems to possess some real literary talent; the contrast is striking between the poor external form of the original — little punctuation, very bad spelling, numerous faults of Polish style — and the vivid, well composed, picturesque content. No additions whatever were made by us, except in brackets.
The sincerity of the autobiography is unmistakable. Its source is the self-complacency of the author, who naively accepted the suggestion of the editors, thought everything about him as interesting to others as it was to himself and did not distinguish at all between scientific and immediate interest. There are, of course, cases of one-sided presentation of happenings and people, but we have usually indicated these in the notes. We do not discover any voluntary omissions in comparing his story with the letters from his family. We add at the end some extracts from these letters,
( 1913) showing the light in which he appeared to his family. He does not seem to have intentionally lied. He did not know our standards, and any coloring or omissions can hardly hinder our understanding of his personality. There is another source of inexactness: he evidently does not notice certain sides of things. We have located two of these defects. He often does not see details in other people's attitudes that are unfavorable to his vanity, and his memory frequently shows a kind of negative hedonistic selection, recording rather the unpleasant than the pleasant details in certain epochs of his life. But both defects arc very significant for the understanding of his character. We must also mention that the same attitude of naive immediate interest in his past life which is the source of his sincerity manifests itself in a curious variation of the mood of the autobiography in accordance with the situation described. There is little consistency of standpoint. He changes his standpoints during his description as he changed them during his life; for example, his momentary attitude toward any member of his family is dependent on just the phase of his relation with him that he happens to recall.
If the reader wishes properly to appreciate this autobiography as literary work as well as sociological document, he must remember that it was written by a man whose educational opportunities were much below the average in America. His systematic instruction stopped on the level of a primary country school which under Russian domination included hardly anything more than reading and writing in Polish and Russian and some arithmetic. Later his wandering life never permitted him to get in touch with the private organizations for self-education which were scattered all over
( 1914) Poland for the purpose of supplementing the deficiencies of governmental education, because these organizations had to be kept secret. Thus, except for his occasional meetings with more instructed individuals, he had neither adequate external incentive nor proper advice for systematic self-education. His reading was poorly selected, chaotic and quantitatively insufficient. Taking all this into account, it seems quite possible that if born and educated in different conditions, Wladek could have become a prominent literary man, in spite or perhaps even because of his many morally deficient attitudes, which then would have become sublimated by being turned into the channels of aesthetic productivity.
