The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
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every age we hear of the “simple life,” the happy, contented
life, where needs are few and things are “natural.” The ascetic
ideal of renunciation is the dominant note in Buddhism and
Christianity; fly from the pleasures of this world, give up and
renounce, for all is vanity and folly. To every struggler this
seems true when the battle is hardest, when achievement seems
futile and empty, and when he whispers to himself, “What is it
all about, anyway?” To stop struggling, to desire only the
plainest food, the plainest clothes, to live without the needless
multiplication of refinements, to work at something essential for
daily bread, to stop competing with one’s neighbor in clothes,
houses, ornaments, tastes,—it seems so pleasant and restful. But
the competition gets keener, the struggle harder, tastes
multiply, yesterday’s luxury is to-day’s need—to what end?
Will mankind ever accept a modified asceticism as its goal? I
think it will be forced to, but it may be that the wish is father
to the thought. Sometimes it seems as if the real crucifixion for
every one of us is in our contending desires and tastes, in the
artificial competing standards that are mislabeled refinement. To
be finicky is to court anhedonia, and the joy of life is in
robust tastes not easily offended and easily gratified.
Perhaps this is irrelevant in a chapter on play and recreation,
but it is easily seen that much of play is a revolt against
refinement and taste, just as much as humor is directed against
them. In play we allow ourselves to shout, laugh aloud and to be
unrefined; we welcome dirt and disorder; we forget clothes and
manners; we are “natural,” i. e., unrefined. The higher we build
our tastes the more we need play. If such a thing as a “state of
nature” could be reached, play and recreation in the adult sense
would hardly more than exist.
CHAPTER XVI. RELIGIOUS CHARACTERS. DISHARMONY IN CHARACTER
I find in William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”, the
following definition of religion: “Religion, therefore, as I
shall ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the
feelings, acts and experiences of individuals in their solitude
so far as they comprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they may consider the divine.”
It seems to me the common man would as soon understand Einstein
as this definition. In fact, the religious trends of the men and
women in this world have many sources and are no more unified
than their humor is. Whether all peoples, no matter how low in
culture, have had religion cannot be settled by a study of the
present inhabitants of the world, for every one of these, though
savage, has tradition and some culture. Theoretically, for the
one who accepts some form of evolution as true, at some time in
man’s history he has first asked himself some of the questions
answered by religion.
For my part, as I read the anthropologists (whose answers to the
question of the origin of religion I regard as the only valid
ones, since they are the only ones without prejudice and with
some regard for scientific method), it is the practical needs of
man, his curiosity and his tendency to explain by human force,
which are the first sources of the religions. How to get good
crops, how to catch fish and game, how to win over enemies, how
and whom to marry, what to do to be strong and successful as
individual and group, found various answers in the taboo, the
prayer, the ceremony and the priest, magician and scientist.
Curiosity as to what was behind each phenomenon of nature and the
tendency of man to personalize all force, as well as the awe and
admiration aroused by the strong, wise and crafty contemporary
and ancestor brought into the world the “old man-cult,” ancestor-worship, gods and goddesses of ranging degrees and power, but
very much like men and women except for power and longevity.
Certain natural phenomena—death, sleep, trance, epileptic
attack—all played their part, bringing about ideas of the soul,
immortality, possession, etc. With culture and the growth of
inhibition and knowledge and the use of art and symbols, the
primitive beliefs modified their nature; the gods became one God,
who was gradually stripped of his human desires, wishes,
partialities and attributes until for the majority of the
cultivated he becomes Nature, which in the end is a collection of
laws in which one HOPES there is a unifying purpose. But the vast
majority of the world, even in the so-called civilized countries,
worship taboos, symbols, have a modified polytheistic belief or a
personalized God, still attempt to persuade the Power in their
own behalf, to act favorably to their own purposes and follow
those who claim knowledge of the divine and inscrutable,—the
priest, minister, rabbi, the man of God, in a phrase.
A part of religious feeling arises in civilized man, at least,
from the feeling of awe in the presence of the vast forces of
nature. Here science has contributed to religious feeling, for as
one looks at the stars, his soul bows in worship mainly because
the astronomer, the scientist, has told him that every twinkling
point is a great sun surrounded by planets, and that the light
from them must travel unimaginable millions of miles to reach
him. As the world forces become impersonal they become more
majestic, and a deeper feeling is evoked in their presence.
Science aids true religion by increasing awe, by increasing
knowledge.
A great factor in religion is the longing to compensate for death
and suffering. Religion represents a reaction against fear,
horror and humiliation. It is a cry of triumph in the face of
what otherwise is disaster “I am not man, the worm, sick, old,
doomed to die; I am the heir of the divine and will live forever,
happy and blessed.” Whether religious teaching is true or not,
its great value lies in the happiness and surety of those who
believe.
In its very highest sense the religious life is an effort to
identify oneself with the largest purpose in the world. All
cooperative purposes are thus religious, all competitive
nonreligious. The selfish is therefore opposed to the altruistic
purpose, the narrow to the broad. Good is the symbol for the
purposes that seek the welfare of all: evil is the symbol of
those who seek the welfare of a person or a group, regardless of
the rest.
If this definition is correct, then every reformer is religious
and every self-seeker, though he wear all the symbols of a
religion and pray three times a day, is irreligious. I admit no
man or woman to the fellowship of the religious unless in his
heart he seeks some purpose that will lift the world out of
discord and into harmony.
The power of the human being to believe in the face of opposed
fact, inconsistency and unfavorable result is nowhere so well
exemplified as in religion. I do not speak of the untold crimes
and inhumanities done in the name of religion, of human
sacrifice, persecution, religious war,—these are parts of a
chapter in human history outside of the province of this book and
almost too horrible to be contemplated. But men have believed
(and do believe) that some among them knew what God wanted, that
certain procedures, tricks and ceremonies conveyed sanctity and
surety; that cosmic events like storms, droughts, eclipses and
epidemics had personal human meanings, that Infinite Wisdom would
be guided in action by the prayers of ignorance, self-seeking and
hatred, etc., etc. The savage who believes that his medicine
man’s antics, paint and feathers will bring rain and fertile soil
has his counterpart in the civilized man who believes that this
or that ceremonial and professed belief insures salvation. Faith
is beautiful in the abstract, but in the concrete it is often the
origin of superstition and amazing folly.[1] However crudely
intelligence and honest scientific effort may work, they soar in
a heaven far above the abyss of credulity.
[1] It would be amusing were it not sad to see how remarkably
well some philosophers use their intelligence and logic to prove
the invalidity of intelligence and logic. They praise emotion,
instinct and “intuition” and such modes of knowing and acting,
yet their works are closely argued, reasoned and appeal
throughout to the intelligence of their readers for acceptance.
True religion in the sense I have used the word has faith in it,
the faith that there is a purpose in the universe, though it
seems impossible for us to discover it. In the personal character
it seeks to establish altruistic feeling and conduct, though it
does not rule out as unworthy self-feeling or seeking. It merely
subordinates them. It does not deny the validity of pleasure, of
the sensuous pleasures; it does not set its face against
drinking, eating, sexual love, play and entertainment, but it
urges a valid purpose as necessary for happiness and morality. It
does not glorify faith as against reason, emotion as against
intelligence; on the contrary, it holds that reason and
intelligence are the governing factors in human life and only by
use of them do we rise from the beast.
So the religious life of those we study will be of great
importance to us. In the majority of cases we shall find that
social heredity, tradition and backing will play the dominant
role, in that most, in name at least, live and die in the faith
in which they were born. We find those who identify form and
ceremonial with religion (the majority), others who identify it
with ethics and morality, and who can conceive no righteousness
out of it. Then there is the strictly modern type of person to
whom right conduct is held to have nothing to do with religious
belief and who measures Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and agnostic
by their acts and not at all by their dogma, and who thus
relegates religion, in the ordinary use of the word, to a rather
useless place in human life. Orthodoxy, piety, tolerance and
skepticism represent attitudes towards organized religion:
altruism, sympathy, good will, and fellowship are the
measurements of the unorganized religion whose mission it is to
find the purpose of life.
We have spoken throughout of man as a mosaic of character, and we
must modify this statement. A mosaic is a static collection,
whereas a man has character struggles, balance and overbalance.
Really to know a man is to get at the proportionate power of his
various trends, to understand his harmonies and disharmonies.
Character development is the story of the unification of the
traits or characters. Disharmony, disproportion of traits and
characters may be progressive and lead to disaster and mental
disease, or a balance may be reached after a struggle and what we
call reform takes place. Though our social life tends to narrow
and repress character, it also tends to harmonize it by the
preventing of excess development of certain traits. The social
person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre.
On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to
unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric.
What are the chief disharmonies? I mean, of course, glaring
disharmonies, for no one is of harmonious development, with
intelligence, emotions, instincts, desires, purposes in
cooperation with each other. This I propose to consider in more
detail in the next chapter, on some character types, but it will
be of use to sketch the great disharmonies.
Character is dynamic, and a fundamental disharmony, even if not
noticeable early in life, may progress to the point of disruption
of the personality. Thus an individual who is strongly egoistic
in his purposes and
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