The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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existence, with its precarious financial state, its drudgery and
most of all the gradual disappearance of his ideals. He is frank
to himself alone, wishes he had made money, but is apt to sneer
at the world of the “fat and successful” as less than his
intellectual equal. He compares his own rewards with that of the
successful man knowing less and with a narrower outlook.
Thus, through success, A. is broadening and becoming something of
an idealist. B. is narrowing and through failure is losing his
ideals. This is not an uncommon effect of success and failure.
Where success leads to arrogance and conceit it narrows, but
where the character withstands this result the increased
experience and opportunity is of great value to character.
Failure may embitter and thus narrow through envy and lost
energy, but also it may strip away conceit and overestimation and
thus lead to a richer insight into life.
3. The hyperkinetic, uncontrolled or shallow. This type, although
quick and apparently energetic, is deficient in a fundamental of
the personality, in the organizing energy. This deficiency may
extend into all phases of the mental life or in only a few
phases. Thus we see people whose thinking is rapid, energetic,
but they cannot “stick” to one line of thought long enough to
reach a goal. Others are similarly situated in regard to
purposes; they are enthusiastic, easily stirred into activity,
but rarely do their purposes remain fixed long enough for
success. As a rule this class is inconstant in affections, though
warm and sympathetic. They gush but never organize their
philanthropic efforts, so that they rarely do any real good.
Often the most lovable of people, they are at the same time the
despair of those who know them best.
M. is a woman who makes a fine first impression, is very pretty,
with nice manners and a quick, flattering interest in every one
she meets. She is usually classed as intelligent because she is
vivacious, that is, her mind follows the trend of things quickly,
and she marshals whatever she knows very readily. As one who
knows her well says, “She shows all her goods the first time. You
really do not know how slender her stock in trade is until you
see the same goods and tricks every time you meet her.” Needless
to say her critic is a woman.
M. is interested in something new each week. The “new” usually
fascinates her, and she becomes so extraordinarily busy that she
hardly has time to eat or sleep. She is always put on committees
if the organization heads do not know her, but if they do, she is
carefully slated for something of no importance. After a short
time her interest has shifted to something else. Thus she passes
from work in behalf of blind babies to raising funds for a home
for indigent actors; from energy spent in philanthropy to energy
spent in learning the latest dances. Her enthusiasm never cools
off, though its goal always changes.
Fortunately she is married to a rich man who views her with
affection and a shrug of his shoulders. Her children know her;
now and then, she becomes extraordinarily interested in their
welfare, much to their disgust and rebellion, for they have long
since sized her up.
She has often been on the verge of a love affair with some man
who is professionally interested in something into which she has
leaped for a short time. She raves about him, follows him,
flatters and adores him, and then, before the poor fellow knows
where he is at, she is out of love and off somewhere else. This
mutability of affection has undoubtedly saved her from disaster.
Were she not rich, M. would be one of the social problems that
the social workers cannot understand or handle, e. g., there is a
type who never sticks to anything, not because he is bored
quickly, or is inefficient, but because he is at the mercy of the
new and irrelevant. Without sufficient means he throws up his job
and tries to get the new work he longs to do. Sometimes he fails
to get it, and then he becomes an unemployed problem.
This type of uncontrolled energy reaches its height in the
manical or manic phase of the disease already described as manic
depressive insanity. The “manic personality,” which need not
become insane, is characterized by high energy, vivacious
emotions, rapid flow of thought and irrelevant associations.
4. The mesokinetic—medium or average in their energy (feeling
and power)—run the range of the vast groups we call the average.
This type is spurred on by necessity, custom and habit to steady
work and steady living. Possessed of practical wisdom, their
world is narrow, their affections only called out for their
kindred and immediate friends. Their interests are largely away
from their work and as a rule do not include the past or future
of the race. Usually conservative, they accept the moral
standards as absolute and are quick to resent changes in custom.
They follow leaders cheerfully, are capable of intense loyalty to
that cause which they believe to stand for their interests. Yet
each individual of the mass of men, though he never rises above
mediocrity, presents to his intimates a grouping of qualities and
peculiarities that gives him a distinct personality.
C. is one of those individuals whose mediocre energy has stood
between him and so-called success. At present he is forty and
occupies about the same position that he did at twenty. As a boy
he was fond of play but never excelled in any sport and never
occupied a place of leadership. He had the usual pugnacious code
of boys, but because he was friendly and good-natured rarely got
into a fight. He liked to read and was rather above the average
in intelligence, but he never tackled the difficult reading,
confining himself to the “interesting” novel and easy
information. He left high school when he was sixteen and
immediately on leaving he dropped all study. He entered an office
as errand boy and was recognized as faithful and industrious, but
he showed no especial initiative or energy. In the course of time
he was promoted from one position to another until he became a
shipper at the age of twenty. Since this time he has remained at
this post without change, except that when he got married and on
a few occasions afterward, when the cost of living rose, his
salary was raised.
C. is married, and his wife often “nags” him because he does not
get ahead. She tells him that he has no energy and fight in him,
that if he would he could do better. Sometimes he takes refuge in
the statement that he has no pull, that those who have been
promoted over his head are favorites for some reason or another,
and he rarely recognizes the superiority of his immediate
superiors, though he is loyal enough to the boss. He lives in
that “quiet despair” that Thoreau so aptly describes as the life
of the average man, and he seeks escape from it in smoking, in
belonging to a variety of fraternal organizations, in the movies
and the detective story. He is a “good” father and husband, which
means that he turns over all his earnings, is faithful and kind.
Except that he admonishes and punishes his children when they are
“bad,” he takes no constructive share in their training and
leaves that to the mother, the church and the school. He and his
wife are attached to one another through habit and mutual need,
but they have some time since outlived passion and intense
affection. She has sized him up as a failure and knows herself
doomed to struggle against poverty, and he knows that she
understands him. This mutual “understanding” keeps them at arm’s
length except in the face of danger or disaster, when they cling
to each other for comfort and support. This is the history of
many a marriage that on its surface is quiet and peaceful.
The hypokinetic types. We cannot separate energy display from
enthusiasm, courage, intelligence, persistent purpose, etc. If I
have made myself clear in the preceding pages of this book, you
will realize that no character of man works alone, but all
feeling, thought and action is a resultant of forces.
Nevertheless, there are those in whom the fire of life burns high
and others in whom it burns low, and either group may be of
totally different qualities otherwise.
There are people of low energy discharge, and these it seems to
me are of two main kinds,—the one where nothing seems to arouse
or create powerful motives and purposes, and the other in whom
the main defect is a rapidly arising exhaustion. The first I call
the simple hypokinetic group and the other the irritable
hypokinetic group.
The simple hypokinetic person may be one of any grade of
intelligence but more commonly is of low intelligence. In any
school for the feebleminded one finds the apathetic imbecile,
who can be kept at work by goading and stimulation of one kind or
another, who does not tire especially, but who never works beyond
a low level of speed and enthusiasm.
5. A more interesting type is T. He may be called the intelligent
hypokinetic, the high-grade failure. As a baby he learned to walk
late, though he talked early and well. He played in a leisurely
sort of way, running only when he had to and content as a rule to
be in the house. He was not seclusive, seeming to enjoy the
company of other children, but rarely made any efforts to seek
them out. He was quick to learn but showed only a moderate
curiosity, and he rarely made any investigations on his own
account. It was noticed that he seldom asked “why” in the usual
manner of intelligent children.
He did fairly well in school; he had a wonderful memory and
seemed to see very quickly into intricate problems. It was always
a great surprise of his teachers that he was so bright, as one
said, in comparison to his standing. Once or twice a zealous
teacher sought to stimulate him into more effort and study, but
though he responded for a short time, gradually he slipped back
into his own easy pace. He went through high school, and on the
basis of a splendid memory and a keen intelligence, which by this
time were easily recognized, he was sent to college. He took no
part in athletics and little part in the communal college
activities. He had so good a command of facts and with this so
cynical a point of view that he became quite a college character
and was pointed out as a fellow who could lead his class if he
would. As a matter of fact, nothing could spur him to real
competitive effort.
We may pass briefly over his life. After he left college, he
drifted from one position to another. Usually in some hack
literary line. Were it not for a small income he would have
starved. After a few years he become very fat and gross looking,
and then came a kindly pneumonia which carried him off.
We must not mistake the stolid for the hypokinetic. There was a
classmate of mine in the medical school, a large, quiet fellow,
D. M., who got by everything, as the boys said, by the skin of
his teeth. He worked without enthusiasm or zeal, studied
infrequently and managed to pass along to his second year, at
about the bottom of the class. In that year we took up
bacteriology, the “bug-bear” as one punster put it, of the
school. Just what it was about
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