Get the full ebook with Bonus Features for a Better Reading Experience on ebookluna.

com

Understanding Psychology 12th Edition (eBook PDF)

https://ebookluna.com/product/understanding-psychology-12th-
edition-ebook-pdf/

OR CLICK HERE

DOWLOAD NOW

Download more ebook instantly today at https://ebookluna.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) ready for you
Download now and discover formats that fit your needs...

(eBook PDF) Understanding Psychology 12th by Robert

Feldman

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-understanding-psychology-12th-
by-robert-feldman/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Essentials of Understanding Psychology 12th

Edition by Robert Feldman

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-essentials-of-understanding-
psychology-12th-edition-by-robert-feldman/

ebookluna.com

Essentials of Understanding Psychology 12th Edition Robert

S. Feldman - eBook PDF

https://ebookluna.com/download/essentials-of-understanding-psychology-
ebook-pdf/

ebookluna.com

Essentials of Understanding Psychology - eBook PDF

https://ebookluna.com/download/essentials-of-understanding-psychology-
ebook-pdf-2/

ebookluna.com
(eBook PDF) Educational Psychology 12th Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-educational-psychology-12th-
edition/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Psychology From Inquiry to Understanding From

Inquiry to Understanding 4th

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-psychology-from-inquiry-to-
understanding-from-inquiry-to-understanding-4th/

ebookluna.com

Understanding Business 12th Edition Bill Nickels - eBook

PDF

https://ebookluna.com/download/understanding-business-ebook-pdf-2/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Essentials of Understanding Psychology 14th

Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-essentials-of-understanding-
psychology-14th-edition/

ebookluna.com

Understanding Psychology 13th Edition Robert Feldman -

eBook PDF

https://ebookluna.com/download/understanding-psychology-ebook-pdf/

ebookluna.com
Understanding
Psychology
ROBERT S. FELDMAN

12e
About the Author

ROBERT S. FELDMAN is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Deputy

Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A recipient of the College Distin-
guished Teacher Award, he teaches psychology classes ranging in size from 15 to nearly
500 students. During the course of more than two decades as a college instructor, he has
taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Mount Holyoke College, Wesleyan University,
and Virginia Commonwealth University in addition to the University of Massachusetts.
Professor Feldman, who initiated the Minority Mentoring Program at the University
of Massachusetts, also has served as a Hewlett Teaching Fellow and Senior Online
Teaching Fellow. He initiated distance-learning courses in psychology at the University
of Massachusetts.
A Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for
Psychological Science, Professor Feldman received a BA with High Honors from
Wesleyan University and an MS and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He is a winner of a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer Award and the
Distinguished Alumnus Award from Wesleyan. He is President of the Federation of
Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) Foundation, which advocates for
the field of psychology.
He has written and edited more than 200 books, book chapters, and scientific
articles. He has edited Development of Nonverbal Behavior in Children, Applications of
Nonverbal Behavioral Theory and Research, Improving the First Year of College: Research
and Practice, and co-edited Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior. He is also author of
P.O.W.E.R. Learning: Strategies for Success in College and Life. His textbooks, which have
been used by more than 2 million students around the world, have been translated
into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
His research interests include deception and honesty in everyday life, work that he
described in The Liar in Your Life, a trade book published in 2009. His research has
been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National
Institute on Disabilities and Rehabilitation Research.
Professor Feldman loves music, is an enthusiastic pianist, and enjoys cooking and
traveling. He serves on the Board of New England Public Radio. He has three children
and two grandsons. He and his wife, a psychologist, live in western Massachusetts in
a home overlooking the Holyoke mountain range.

v
Brief Contents

Preface xxv

CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Psychology 2

MODULE 1 Psychologists at Work 5
MODULE 2 A Science Evolves: The Past, the Present, and
the Future 14
MODULE 3 Psychology’s Key Issues and Controversies 22

CHAPTER 2 Psychological Research 30

MODULE 4 The Scientific Method 33
MODULE 5 Conducting Psychological Research 37
MODULE 6 Critical Research Issues 48

CHAPTER 3 Neuroscience and Behavior 56

MODULE 7 Neurons: The Basic Elements of Behavior 59
MODULE 8 The Nervous System and the Endocrine System:
Communicating Within the Body 68
MODULE 9 The Brain 76

CHAPTER 4 Sensation and Perception 94

MODULE 10 Sensing the World Around Us 97
MODULE 11 Vision: Shedding Light on the Eye 102
MODULE 12 Hearing and the Other Senses 111
MODULE 13 Perceptual Organization: Constructing Our
View of the World 124

CHAPTER 5 States of Consciousness 138

MODULE 14 Sleep and Dreams 141
MODULE 15 Hypnosis and Meditation 154
MODULE 16 Drug Use: The Highs and Lows of
Consciousness 161

vii
viii Brief Contents

CHAPTER 6 Learning 176

MODULE 17 Classical Conditioning 179
MODULE 18 Operant Conditioning 187
MODULE 19 Cognitive Approaches to Learning 200

CHAPTER 7 Memory 210

MODULE 20 The Foundations of Memory 213
MODULE 21 Recalling Long-Term Memories 225
MODULE 22 Forgetting: When Memory Fails 235

CHAPTER 8 Cognition and Language 244

MODULE 23 Thinking and Reasoning 247
MODULE 24 Problem Solving 254
MODULE 25 Language 267

CHAPTER 9 Intelligence 278

MODULE 26 What Is Intelligence? 281
MODULE 27 Variations in Intellectual Ability 296
MODULE 28 Group Differences in Intelligence: Genetic and
Environmental Determinants 300

CHAPTER 10 Motivation and Emotion 308

MODULE 29 Explaining Motivation 311
MODULE 30 Human Needs and Motivation: Eat, Drink,
and Be Daring 319
MODULE 31 Understanding Emotional Experiences 330

CHAPTER 11 Sexuality and Gender 342

MODULE 32 Gender and Sex 345
MODULE 33 Understanding Human Sexual Response:
The Facts of Life 357
MODULE 34 The Diversity of Sexual Behavior 363
Brief Contents ix

CHAPTER 12 Development 380

MODULE 35 Nature and Nurture: The Enduring
Developmental Issue 383
MODULE 36 Prenatal Development: Conception to Birth 387
MODULE 37 Infancy and Childhood 394
MODULE 38 Adolescence: Becoming an Adult 412
MODULE 39 Adulthood 422

CHAPTER 13 Personality 436

MODULE 40 Psychodynamic Approaches to Personality 439
MODULE 41 Trait, Learning, Biological and Evolutionary, and
Humanistic Approaches to Personality 449
MODULE 42 Assessing Personality: Determining What Makes
Us Distinctive 462

CHAPTER 14 Health Psychology: Stress, Coping, and

Well-Being 472
MODULE 43 Stress and Coping 475
MODULE 44 Psychological Aspects of Illness and
Well-Being 487
MODULE 45 Promoting Health and Wellness 493

CHAPTER 15 Psychological Disorders 502

MODULE 46 Normal Versus Abnormal: Making the
Distinction 505
MODULE 47 The Major Psychological Disorders 515
MODULE 48 Psychological Disorders in Perspective 534

CHAPTER 16 Treatment of Psychological Disorders 542

MODULE 49 Psychotherapy: Psychodynamic, Behavioral, and
Cognitive Approaches to Treatment 545
MODULE 50 Psychotherapy: Humanistic, Interpersonal, and
Group Approaches to Treatment 556
MODULE 51 Biomedical Therapy: Biological Approaches
to Treatment 565
x Brief Contents

CHAPTER 17 Social Psychology 576

MODULE 52 Attitudes and Social Cognition 579
MODULE 53 Social Influence and Groups 588
MODULE 54 Prejudice and Discrimination 596
MODULE 55 Positive and Negative Social Behavior 602

APPENDIX Going by the Numbers:

Statistics in Psychology A-2
MODULE 56 Descriptive Statistics A-5
MODULE 57 Measures of Variability A-10
MODULE 58 Using Statistics to Answer Questions: Inferential
Statistics and Correlation A-14

McGraw-Hill Psychology’s APA

Documentation Style Guide
Glossary G-1
References R-1
Credits C-1
Name Index I-1
Subject Index I-22
Contents

Preface xxv
Making the Grade xxxii
CHA PTER 1

Introduction to Psychology 2
MODULE 1 Psychologists at Work 5
The Subfields of Psychology: Psychology’s Family Tree 6
Working at Psychology 9

MODULE 2 A Science Evolves: The Past, the Present, and the Future 14
The Roots of Psychology 14
Today’s Perspectives 16
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Psychology Matters 20

MODULE 3 Psychology’s Key Issues and Controversies 22

EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Understanding How Culture, Ethnicity, and Race Influence
Behavior 24
Psychology’s Future 25
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: Reading the Movies in Your Mind 26
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Thinking Critically About
Psychology: Distinguishing Legitimate Psychology from Pseudo-Psychology 26

CHA PTER 2

Psychological Research 30

MODULE 4 The Scientific Method 33

Theories: Specifying Broad Explanations 34
Hypotheses: Crafting Testable Predictions 34

xi
xii Contents

MODULE 5 Conducting Psychological Research 37

Archival Research 37
Naturalistic Observation 37
Survey Research 38
The Case Study 39
Correlational Research 39
Experimental Research 41
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: What Makes a Hero? 46

MODULE 6 Critical Research Issues 48

The Ethics of Research 48
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Choosing Participants Who Represent the Scope of Human
Behavior 49
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: The Importance of Using Representative Participants 50
Should Animals Be Used in Research? 50
Threats to Experimental Validity: Avoiding Experimental Bias 51
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Thinking Critically About
Research 52

CHAPTER 3

Neuroscience and Behavior 56

MODULE 7 Neurons: The Basic Elements of Behavior 59

The Structure of the Neuron 59
How Neurons Fire 60
Where Neurons Meet: Bridging the Gap 63
Neurotransmitters: Multitalented Chemical Couriers 64

MODULE 8 The Nervous System and the Endocrine System:

Communicating Within the Body 68
The Nervous System: Linking Neurons 68
The Evolutionary Foundations of the Nervous System 71
The Endocrine System: Of Chemicals and Glands 72

MODULE 9 The Brain 76

Studying the Brain’s Structure and Functions: Spying on the Brain 76
The Central Core: Our “Old Brain” 78
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Mind Over Cursor: Harnessing
Brainpower to Improve Lives 79
The Limbic System: Beyond the Central Core 80
Contents xiii

The Cerebral Cortex: Our “New Brain” 81

Neuroplasticity and the Brain 84
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: The Plastic Brain 85
The Specialization of the Hemispheres: Two Brains or One? 86
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Human Diversity and the Brain 87
The Split Brain: Exploring the Two Hemispheres 88
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Learning to Control Your
Heart—and Mind—Through Biofeedback 89

CHA PTER 4

Sensation and Perception 94

MODULE 10 Sensing the World Around Us 97

Absolute Thresholds: Detecting What’s Out There 98
Difference Thresholds: Noticing Distinctions Between Stimuli 99
Sensory Adaptation: Turning Down Our Responses 100

MODULE 11 Vision: Shedding Light on the Eye 102

Illuminating the Structure of the Eye 103
Color Vision and Color Blindness: The 7-Million-Color Spectrum 107

MODULE 12 Hearing and the Other Senses 111

Sensing Sound 111
Smell and Taste 115
The Skin Senses: Touch, Pressure, Temperature, and Pain 117
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Managing Pain 120
How Our Senses Interact 121
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: Synesthesia and the Over-Connected Brain 122

MODULE 13 Perceptual Organization: Constructing Our View of the World 124

The Gestalt Laws of Organization 124
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing 126
Depth Perception: Translating 2-D to 3-D 126
Perceptual Constancy 128
Motion Perception: As the World Turns 129
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Study-Break Soundtrack 130
Perceptual Illusions: The Deceptions of Perceptions 130
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Culture and Perception 132
xiv Contents

CHAPTER 5

States of Consciousness 138

MODULE 14 Sleep and Dreams 141

The Stages of Sleep 142
REM Sleep: The Paradox of Sleep 143
Why Do We Sleep, and How Much Sleep Is Necessary? 144
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: Why Are You so Irritable When You Don’t Get
Enough Sleep? 145
The Function and Meaning of Dreaming 146
Sleep Disturbances: Slumbering Problems 149
Circadian Rhythms: Life Cycles 150
Daydreams: Dreams Without Sleep 151
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Sleeping Better 152

MODULE 15 Hypnosis and Meditation 154

Hypnosis: A Trance-Forming Experience? 154
Meditation: Regulating Our Own State of Consciousness 156
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Will the Person on the Cell Phone
Please Pipe Down! 158
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Cross-Cultural Routes to Altered States of Consciousness 159

MODULE 16 Drug Use: The Highs and Lows of Consciousness 161

Stimulants: Drug Highs 163
Depressants: Drug Lows 166
Narcotics: Relieving Pain and Anxiety 169
Hallucinogens: Psychedelic Drugs 170
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Identifying Drug and Alcohol
Problems 171

CHAPTER 6

Learning 176

MODULE 17 Classical Conditioning 179

The Basics of Classical Conditioning 180
Applying Conditioning Principles to Human Behavior 182
Extinction 183
Generalization and Discrimination 184
Beyond Traditional Classical Conditioning: Challenging Basic Assumptions 185
Contents xv

MODULE 18 Operant Conditioning 187

Thorndike’s Law of Effect 187
The Basics of Operant Conditioning 188
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Using Behavior Analysis and
Behavior Modification 197

MODULE 19 Cognitive Approaches to Learning 200

Latent Learning 200
Observational Learning: Learning Through Imitation 202
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: Learning Through Imitation 203
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: What Do We Learn About Gender
from the Media? 205
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Does Culture Influence How We Learn? 205

CHA PTER 7

Memory 210

MODULE 20 The Foundations of Memory 213

Sensory Memory 214
Short-Term Memory 215
Working Memory 217
Long-Term Memory 219
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: The Building Blocks of Memory: Do You Have a
Jennifer Aniston Neuron? 223

MODULE 21 Recalling Long-Term Memories 225

Retrieval Cues 225
Levels of Processing 226
Explicit and Implicit Memory 227
Flashbulb Memories 228
Constructive Processes in Memory: Rebuilding the Past 229
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Mind Pops 230
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Are There Cross-Cultural Differences in Memory? 233

MODULE 22 Forgetting: When Memory Fails 235

Why We Forget 236
Proactive and Retroactive Interference: The Before and After of Forgetting 237
Memory Dysfunctions: Afflictions of Forgetting 238
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Improving Your Memory 240
xvi Contents

CHAPTER 8

Cognition and Language 244

MODULE 23 Thinking and Reasoning 247

Mental Images: Examining the Mind’s Eye 247
Concepts: Categorizing the World 248
How Culture Influences How We Categorize
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE:
the World 250
Reasoning: Making Up Your Mind 251
Computers and Problem Solving: Searching for Artificial Intelligence 252

MODULE 24 Problem Solving 254

Preparation: Understanding and Diagnosing Problems 254
Production: Generating Solutions 257
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Sleep on It 260
Judgment: Evaluating Solutions 261
Impediments to Solutions: Why Is Problem Solving Such a Problem? 261
Creativity and Problem Solving 263
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Thinking Critically and
Creatively 264

MODULE 25 Language 267

Grammar: Language’s Language 267
Language Development: Developing a Way with Words 268
The Influence of Language on Thinking: Do Eskimos Have More Words for Snow
Than Texans Do? 271
Do Animals Use Language? 272
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Teaching with Linguistic Variety: Bilingual Education 273

CHAPTER 9

Intelligence 278

MODULE 26 What Is Intelligence? 281

Theories of Intelligence: Are There Different Kinds of Intelligence? 282
The Biological Basis of Intelligence 283
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: What Makes a Child Intelligent? 285
Practical and Emotional Intelligence: Toward a More Intelligent View
of Intelligence 285
Assessing Intelligence 287
Contents xvii

Contemporary IQ Tests: Gauging Intelligence 289

BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Scoring Better on Standardized
Tests 294

MODULE 27 Variations in Intellectual Ability 296

Intellectual Disabilities (Mental Retardation) 296
The Intellectually Gifted 298

MODULE 28 Group Differences in Intelligence: Genetic and Environmental

Determinants 300
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: The Relative Influence of Genetics and Environment: Nature,
Nurture, and IQ 301
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Are We Getting Smarter? The Flynn
Effect 303

CHA PTER 10

Motivation and Emotion 308

MODULE 29 Explaining Motivation 311
Instinct Approaches: Born to Be Motivated 311
Drive-Reduction Approaches: Satisfying Our Needs 312
Arousal Approaches: Beyond Drive Reduction 313
Incentive Approaches: Motivation’s Pull 313
Cognitive Approaches: The Thoughts Behind Motivation 315
Maslow’s Hierarchy: Ordering Motivational Needs 315
Applying the Different Approaches to Motivation 317

MODULE 30 Human Needs and Motivation: Eat, Drink, and Be Daring 319
The Motivation Behind Hunger and Eating 319
Eating Disorders 323
Applying Psychology in the 21st Century: Finding the Motivation to Get Unstuck 324
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: When Regulation of Eating Behavior Goes Wrong 325
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Dieting and Losing Weight
Successfully 326
The Need for Achievement: Striving for Success 327
The Need for Affiliation: Striving for Friendship 328
The Need for Power: Striving for Impact on Others 328

MODULE 31 Understanding Emotional Experiences 330

The Functions of Emotions 331
Determining the Range of Emotions: Labeling Our Feelings 331
xviii Contents

The Roots of Emotions 332

EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Do People in All Cultures Express Emotion Similarly? 337

CHAPTER 1 1

Sexuality and Gender 342

MODULE 32 Gender and Sex 345

Gender Roles: Society’s Expectations for Women and Men 345
Sexism on the Job 347
Gender Differences: More Similar Than Dissimilar 350
NEUROSCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE: Do Men and Women Process Information
Differently? 352
Sources of Gender Differences: Where Biology and Society Meet 353

MODULE 33 Understanding Human Sexual Response: The Facts of Life 357

The Basic Biology of Sexual Behavior 357
Physiological Aspects of Sexual Excitement: What Turns People On? 359
The Phases of Sexual Response: The Ups and Downs of Sex 359
EXPLORING DIVERSITY: Female Circumcision: A Celebration of Culture—or Genital
Mutilation? 361

MODULE 34 The Diversity of Sexual Behavior 363

Approaches to Sexual Normality 364
Surveying Sexual Behavior: What’s Happening Behind Closed Doors? 365
Heterosexuality 366
Homosexuality and Bisexuality 368
APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Changing Views Toward LGBT
People 370
Transsexualism 371
Sexual Difficulties and Issues 371
BECOMING AN INFORMED CONSUMER OF PSYCHOLOGY: Lowering the Risks
of Date Rape 376

CHAPTER 1 2

Development 380

MODULE 35 Nature and Nurture: The Enduring Developmental Issue 383

Determining the Relative Influence of Nature and Nurture 385
Developmental Research Techniques 385
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
that our difficulties are greater in this generation; it is hard to see
that the effort we put forth to overcome these difficulties is not
proportional to that increase. I am aware that to blame your
surroundings when the fault lies in your own character is the one
impiety which rouses the horror of present-day moral teachers. Can
it not count to us for good, then, that most of us, while coming
theoretically to believe that this economic situation explains so much
of our trouble, yet continue to act as if our deficiencies were all our
own fault?
Our critics are misled by the fact that we do not talk about
unselfishness and self-sacrifice and duty, as their generation
apparently used to do, and conclude that we do not know what
these things mean. It is true that we do not fuss and fume about our
souls, or tend our characters like a hot-house plant. This is a
changing, transitional age, and our view is outward rather than
inward. In an age of newspapers, free libraries, and cheap
magazines, we necessarily get a broader horizon than the passing
generation had. We see what is going on in the world, and we get
the clash of different points of view, to an extent which was
impossible to our fathers. We cannot be blamed for acquiring a
suspicion of ideals, which, however powerful their appeal once was,
seem singularly impotent now, or if we seek for motive forces to
replace them, or for new terms in which to restate the world. We
have an eagerness to understand the world in which we live that
amounts almost to a passion. We want to get behind the scenes, to
see how the machinery of the modern world actually works. We are
curious to learn what other people are thinking, and to get at the
forces that have produced their point of view. We dabble in
philanthrophy as much from curiosity to see how people live as from
any feeling of altruism. We read all sorts of strange philosophies to
get the personal testimony of men who are interpreting the world. In
the last analysis, we have a passion to understand why people act as
they do.
We have, as a result, become impatient with the conventional
explanations of the older generation. We have retained from
childhood the propensity to see through things, and to tell the truth
with startling frankness. This must, of course, be very disconcerting
to a generation, so much of whose activity seems to consist in
glossing over the unpleasant things or hiding the blemishes on the
fair face of civilization. There are too many issues evaded which we
would like to meet. Many of us find, sooner or later, that the world is
a very different sort of place from what our carefully deodorized and
idealized education would have us believe.
When we find things simply not as they are painted, is it any
wonder that we turn to the new prophets rather than to the old? We
are more than half confident that the elder generation does not itself
really believe all the conventional ideals which it seeks to force upon
us, and much of our presumption is a result of the contempt we
naturally feel for such timorousness. Too many of your preachers
seem to be whistling simply to keep up your courage. The plain truth
is that the younger generation is acquiring a positive faith, in contact
with which the elder generation with its nerveless negations feels its
helplessness without knowing just what to do about it except to
scold the young.
This positive aspect is particularly noticeable in the religion of the
rising generation. As our critic says, the religious thinking of the
preceding generation was destructive and uncertain. We are
demanding a definite faith, and our spiritual centre is rapidly shifting
from the personal to the social in religion. Not personal salvation,
but social; not our own characters, but the character of society, is
our interest and concern. We feel social injustice as our fathers felt
personal sin. Settlement work and socialist propaganda, things done
fifty years ago only by rare and heroic souls like Kingsley, Ruskin,
and Maurice, are now the commonplaces of the undergraduate.
The religion that will mean anything to the rising generation will
be based on social ideals. An essay like ex-President Eliot’s “Religion
of the Future,” which in a way synthesizes science and history and
these social ideals and gives them the religious tinge which every
age demands, supplies a real working religious platform to many a
young man and woman of the rising generation, and an inspiration
of which our elders can form no conception. Perhaps it is unfair to
call this religion at all. Perhaps it is simply the scientific attitude
toward the world. But I am sure that it is more than this; I am sure
that it is the scientific attitude tinged with the religious that will be
ours of the rising generation. We find that we cannot keep apart our
religion, our knowledge, our practice, and our hopes in water-tight
compartments, as our ancestors did. We are beginning to show an
incorrigible tendency to work our spiritual assimilations into one
intelligible, constructive whole.
It is to this attitude rather than to a softening of fibre that I think
we may lay our growing disinclination to deify sacrifice and suffering.
A young chemistry student said to me the other day, “Science means
that nothing must be wasted!” This idea somehow gets mixed up
with human experience, and we come to believe that human life and
happiness are things that must not be wasted. Might it not be that
such a belief that human waste of life and happiness was foolish and
unnecessary would possibly be of some avail in causing that waste
to disappear? And one of the most inspiring of the prophets to the
rising generation, William James, has told us that certain “moral
equivalents” of these things are possible which will prevent that
incurable decaying of fibre which the elder generation so anxiously
fears.
Another result of this attitude is our growing belief in political
machinery. We are demanding of our preachers that they reduce
quality to quantity. “Stop talking about liberty and justice and love,
and show us institutions, or concerted attempts to model institutions
that shall be free or just or lovely,” we cry. You have been trying so
long to reform the world by making men “good,” and with such little
success, that we may be pardoned if we turn our attention to the
machinery of society, and give up for a time the attempt to make the
operators of that machinery strictly moral. Indeed, the charm of
Socialism to so many of the rising generation is just that scientific
aspect of it, its claim of historical basis, and its very definite and
concrete organization for the attainment of its ends. A philosophy
which gives an illuminating interpretation of the present, and a
vision of the future, with a definitely crystallized plan of action with
concrete methods, however unsound it may all be, can hardly be
said to appeal simply to the combination of “a weak head, a soft
heart, and a desire to shirk.”
Placed in such a situation as we are, and with such an attitude
toward the world, we are as interested as you and the breathless
generations behind you to see what destinies we shall work out for
ourselves. An unpleasantly large proportion of our energy is now
drained off in fighting the fetishes which you of the elder generation
have passed along to us, and which, out of some curious instinct of
self-preservation, you so vigorously defend. We, on the other hand,
are becoming increasingly doubtful whether you believe in
yourselves quite so thoroughly as you would have us think. Your
words are very brave, but the tone is hollow. Your mistrust of us,
and your reluctance to convey over to us any of your authority in the
world, looks a little too much like the fear and dislike that doubt
always feels in the presence of conviction, to be quite convincing.
We believe in ourselves; and this fact, we think, is prophetic for the
future. We have an indomitable feeling that we shall attain, or if not,
that we shall pave the way for a generation that shall attain.
Meanwhile our constructive work is hampered by your distrust,
while you blame us for our lack of accomplishment. Is this an
attitude calculated to increase our responsibility and our self-
respect? Would it not be better in every way, more constructive and
more fruitful, to help us in our aspirations and endeavors, or, failing
that, at least to strive to understand just what those aspirations and
endeavors are?

FOOTNOTES:
[2] The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1911.
III
THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OF
LIFE
Each season of life has its proper virtues, as each season of the
year has its own climate and temperature. If virtue is the excellent
working of the soul, then youth, middle age, and old age, all have
their peculiar ways of working excellently. When we speak of a
virtuous life, we should mean, not a life that has shown one single
thread of motive and attitude running through it, but rather one that
has varied with the seasons, as spring grows gently into summer
and summer into autumn, each season working excellently in
respect to the tilling and harvest of the soul. If it is a virtue to be
contented in old age, it is no virtue to be contented in youth; if it is
a virtue for youth to be bold and venturesome, it is the virtue of
middle life to take heed and begin to gather up the lines and nets so
daringly cast by youth into the sea of life. A virtuous life means a life
responsive to its powers and its opportunities, a life not of
inhibitions, but of a straining up to the limit of its strength. It means
doing every year what is fitting to be done at that year to enhance
or conserve one’s own life or the happiness of those around one.
Virtue is a word that abolishes duty. For duty has steadily fallen into
worse and worse opprobrium; it has come to mean nothing but
effort and stress. It implies something that is done rightly, but that
cuts straight across the grain of all one’s inclinations and motive
forces. It is following the lines of greatest resistance; it is the
working of the moral machine with the utmost friction possible. Now
there is no doubt that the moral life involves struggle and effort, but
it should be the struggle of adequate choice, and not of painful
inhibition. We are coming to see that the most effective things we do
are those that have some idea of pleasure yoked up with them. In
the interests of moral efficiency, the ideal must be the smooth and
noiseless workings of the machine, and not the rough and grinding
movements that we have come to associate with the word “duty.”
For the emphasis on the negative duty we must substitute emphasis
on the positive virtue. For virtue is excellence of working, and all
excellence is pleasing. When we know what are the virtues
appropriate to each age of life, we can view the moral life in a new
light. It becomes not a claim upon us of painful obligation, but a
stimulus to excellent spontaneity and summons to self-expression.
In childhood we acquire the spiritual goods that we shall take with
us through life; in youth we test our acquisitions and our tools,
selecting, criticizing, comparing; in old age, we put them away
gently into the attic of oblivion or retire them honorably, full of years
and service. Our ideas, however, of what those spiritual goods were
that childhood acquired have been very much confused. We have
imagined that we could give the child “the relish of right and wrong,”
as Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been made to train up
the child in the moral life, by telling him from his earliest years what
was right and what was wrong. It was supposed that in this way he
absorbed right principles that would be the guiding springs of his
youthful and later life. The only difficulty, of course, with this theory
is that the moral life hardly begins before the stresses and crises of
youth at all. For really moral activity implies choice and it implies
significant choice; and the choices of the child are few in number
and seldom significant. You can tell a child that a certain thing is
wrong, and he will believe it, but his belief will be a purely
mechanical affair, an external idea, which is no more woven into the
stuff of his life than is one of those curious “post-hypnotic
suggestions,” that psychologists tell about, where the subject while
hypnotized is told to do something at a certain time after he awakes.
When the time comes he does it without any consciousness of the
reason and without any immediate motive. Now most moral ideas in
a child’s mind are exactly similar to these suggestions. They seem to
operate with infallible accuracy, and we say,—“What a good child!”
As a fact the poor child is as much under an alien spell as the
subject of the hypnotist. Now all this sort of hypnotized morality the
younger generation wants to have done with. It demands a morality
that is glowing with self-consciousness, that is healthy with
intelligence. It refuses to call the “good” child moral at all; it views
him as a poor little trained animal, that is doomed for the rest of his
life to go through mechanical motions and moral tricks at the crack
of the whip of a moral code or religious authority. From home and
Sunday-school, children of a slightly timid disposition get moral
wounds, the scars of which never heal. They enter a bondage from
which they can never free themselves; their moral judgment in
youth is warped and blighted in a thousand ways, and they pass
through life, seemingly the most moral of men and women, but
actually having never known the zest of true morality, the relish of
right and wrong. The best intentions of parents and teachers have
turned their characters into unnatural channels from which they
cannot break, and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless inhibitions
and cautions which they find they cannot dissolve, even when
reason and common sense convince them that they are living under
an alien code. Looked upon from this light, childish goodness and
childish conscientiousness is an unhealthy and even criminal forcing
of the young plant, the hot-house bringing to maturity of a young
soul whose sole business is to grow and learn. When moral
instruction is given, a criminal advantage is taken of the child’s
suggestibility, and all possibility of an individual moral life, growing
naturally and spontaneously as the young soul meets the real
emergencies and problems that life will present to it, is lost. If, as we
are coming more and more to realize, the justification of knowledge
is that it helps us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the
world, so the justification of virtue is that it enables us to get along
with and enjoy and grapple with the spiritual world of ideals and
feelings and qualities. We should be as careful about giving a child
moral ideas that will be of no practical use to him as we are in giving
him learning that will be of no use to him.
The virtues of childhood, then, we shall not find in the moral
realm. The “good” child is not cultivated so much to-day as he was
by the former generation, whose one aim in education and religion
was to bind the young fast in the fetters of a puritan code; but he is
still, in well-brought-up families, an appalling phenomenon. The
child, who at the age of five has a fairly complete knowledge of what
God wants him and all around him to do and not to do, is an
illustration of the results of the confusion of thought that would
make childhood instead of youth the battle-ground of the moral life.
We should not dismiss such a child as quaint, for in him have been
sowed the seeds of a general obscurantism and conservatism that
will spread like a palsy over his whole life. The acceptance of moral
judgments that have no vital meaning to the young soul will mean in
later life the acceptance of ideas and prejudices in political and
religious and social matters that are uncriticized and unexamined.
The “good” child grows up into the conventional bigoted man. The
duties and tastes which are inculcated into him in childhood, far
from aiding the “excellent workings of his soul,” clog and rust it, and
prevent the fine free expression of its individuality and genius. For
the child has not yet the material of experience that will enable him
to get the sense of values which is at the bottom of what we call the
spiritual life. And it is this sense that is so easily dulled, and that
must be so carefully protected against blunting. That the child
cannot form moral judgments for himself, however, does not mean
that they must be formed for him by others; it means that we must
patiently wait until he meets the world of vivid contrasts and shocks
and emergencies that is youth. It is not repairing his lack of moral
sensitiveness to get him to repeat parrot-like the clean-cut and easily
learned taboos and permissions of the people around him. To get
him to do this is exactly like training an animal to bolt any kind of
food. The child, however, has too weak a stomach to digest very
much of the moral pabulum that is fed him. The inevitable result is a
moral indigestion, one form of which is the once fashionable sense
of sin. The youth, crammed with uncriticized taboos delivered to him
with the awful prestige of an Almighty God, at a certain age revolts,
and all the healthy values of life turn sour within him. The cure for
this spiritual dyspepsia is called conversion, but it is a question
whether the cure is not often worse than the disease. For it usually
means that the relish of right and wrong, which had suddenly
become a very real thing, has been permanently perverted in a
certain direction. By a spiritual operation, the soul has been forced
to digest all this strange food, and acquires the ability to do so
forever after. Those who do not suffer this operation pass through
life with an uneasiness of spirit, the weight and burden of an
imperfectly assimilated moral life. Few there are who are able to
throw off the whole soddenness, and if they do they are fortunate if
they are not left without any food at all. Religious teachers have
always believed that all these processes were necessary for the
soul’s health. They have believed that it was better to have
mechanical morals than no morals at all. When the younger
generation sees the damage such morals work, it would prefer to
have none.
Discarding the “good” child, then, we will find the virtues of
childhood in that restless, pushing, growing curiosity that is the
characteristic of every healthy little boy or girl. The child’s life is
spent in learning his way around the world; in learning the ropes of
things, the handles and names of whatever comes within the range
of his experience. He is busy acquiring that complex bundle of
common-sense knowledge that underlies all our grown-up acts, and
which has become so automatic with us that it hardly seems possible
to us that we have slowly acquired it all. We do not realize that
thousands of facts and habits, which have become stereotyped and
practically unconscious in our minds, are the fresh and vital
experiences of the mind of the little child. We cannot put ourselves
back into that world where the absorbing business is to give things a
position and a name and to learn all the little obvious facts about the
things in the house and the yard and the village, and in that far land
of mystery beyond. What sort of sympathy can we have with these
little people,—we, to whom all this naïve world of place and
nomenclature is so familiar as to seem intuitive? We should have to
go back to a world where every passing railroad train was a marvel
and a delight, where a walk to the village meant casting ourselves
adrift into an adventurous country where anything was likely to
happen and where all calculations of direction or return were upset.
It takes children a long time to get accustomed to the world. This
common workaday knowledge of ours seems intuitive to us only
because we had so many years during which it was reiterated to us,
and not because we were unusually sensitive to impressions.
Children often seem almost as stupid as any young animal, and to
require long practice before they know their way around in the
world, although, once obtained, this common sense is never
forgotten. That child is virtuous who acquires all he can of it.
This curiosity of childhood makes children the first scientists. They
begin, as soon as their eyes are open, dissolving this confused
mystery of the world, distinguishing and classifying its parts
according to their interests and needs. They push on and on, ever
widening the circle, and ever bringing more and more of their
experience under the subjugation of their understanding. They begin
the process that the scientist completes. As children, after several
years we came to know our house and yard, although the attic and
cellar were perhaps still dim and fearsome places. Inside the
household things were pretty well tabulated and rationalized. It was
only when we went outside the gate that we might expect
adventures to happen. We should have been very much shocked to
see the fire leap from the stove and the bread from the table, as
they did in the “Blue Bird,” but in walking down to the village we
should not have been surprised to see a giant or a fairy sitting on
the green. When we became familiar with the village, the fairies
were, of course, banished to remoter regions, until they finally
vanished altogether. But it is not so long ago that I lost the last
vague vestige of a feeling that there were fairies in England.
The facility, one might almost say skill, which children show in
getting lost, is the keynote of childhood’s world. For they have no
bearings among the unfamiliar, no principles for the solution of the
unknown. In their accustomed realm they are as wise and canny and
free from superstition as we are in ours. We, as grown-ups, have not
acquired any magical release from fantasy. The only difference is
that we are accustomed to make larger hazards of faith that things
will repeat themselves, and that we have a wider experience to
check off our novelties by. We have charted most of our world; we
unfortunately have no longer any world to get lost in. To be sure, we
have opened up perhaps an intangible world of philosophy and
speculation, which childhood does not dream of, and heaven knows
we can get lost there! But the thing is different. The adventure of
childhood is to get lost here in this everyday world of common sense
which is so familiar to us. To become really as little children we
should have to get lost again here. The best substitute we can give
ourselves is to keep exploring the new spiritual world in which we
may find ourselves in youth and middle life, pushing out ever, as the
child does, our fringe of mystery. And we can gain the gift of
wonder, something that the child does not have. He is too busy
drinking in the facts to wonder about them, or to wonder about what
is beyond them. We may count ourselves fortunate, however, that
we are able to retain the child’s virtue of curiosity, and transmute it
into the beauty of spiritual wonder.
It is facts and not theories that the child is curious about, and
rightly. He cannot assimilate moral theories, nor can he assimilate
any other kind of theories. It is his virtue to learn how the world
runs; youth will be time enough to philosophize about that running.
It is the immediate and the present that interest children, and they
are omnivorous with regard to any facts about either. What they
hear about the world they accept without question. We often think
when we are telling them fairy stories or animal stories that we are
exercising their poetic imagination; but from their point of view we
are telling them sober facts about the world they live in. We are
often surprised, too, at the apathy they show in the midst of
wonders that we point out to them. They are wonders to us because
we appreciate the labor or the genius that has produced them. In
other words, we have added a value to them. But it is just this value
which the child-mind does not get and can never get. To the child
they are not surprising, but simply some more information about his
world. All is grist that comes to the child’s mill. Everything serves to
plot and track for him a new realm of things as they are.
The child’s mind, so suggestible to facts, seems to be almost
impervious to what we call spiritual influences. He lives in a world
hermetically sealed to our interests and concerns. Parents and
teachers make the most conscientious efforts to influence their
children, but they would better realize that they can influence them
only in the most indirect way. The best thing they can do for the
children is to feed their curiosity, and provide them with all the
materials that will stimulate their varied interests. They can then
leave the “influence” to take care of itself. The natural child seems to
be impregnable to any appeals of shame, honor, reverence, honesty,
and even ridicule,—in other words, to all those methods we have
devised for getting a clutch on other people’s souls, and influencing
and controlling them according to our desires. And this is not
because the child is immoral, but simply because, as I have tried to
show, those social values mean as yet nothing to him. He lives in a
splendid isolation from our conventional standards; the influences of
his elders, however well-directed and prayerful they may be, simply
do not reach him. He lives unconscious of our interests and motives.
Only the “good” child is susceptible, and he is either instinctively
submissive, or is the victim of the mechanical imposition of
standards and moral ideas.
The child works out what little social morality he does obtain, not
under the influence of his elders, but among his playmates. And the
standards worked out there are not refined and moral at all, but
rough ones of emulation and group honor, and respect for prowess.
Even obedience, which we all like to think of as one of the
indispensable accomplishments of a well-trained child, seems to be
obtained at the cost of real moral growth. It might be more
beneficial if it were not too often merely a means for the spiritual
edification of the parents themselves. Too often it is the delight of
ruling, of being made obeisance to, that is the secret motive of
imposing strict obedience, and not our desire simply that they shall
learn the excellent habits that are our own. One difficulty with the
child who has “learned to mind” is that, if he learns too successfully,
he runs the risk of growing up to be a cowardly and servile youth.
There is a theory that since the child will be obliged in later life to do
many things that he does not want to do, he might as well learn
how while he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that learning
to do one kind of a thing that you do not want to do does not
guarantee your readiness to do other kinds of unpleasant things.
That art cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion, unless the
spirit is completely broken, will have its own peculiar quality of
bitterness, and no guarantee against it can be inculcated. Life will
present so many inevitable necessities to the child when he gets out
into the world that it seems premature to burden his childhood with
a training which will be largely useless. So much of our energy is
wasted, and so much friction created, because we are unwilling to
trust life. If life is the great demoralizer, it is also the great moralizer.
It whips us into shape, and saddles us with responsibilities and the
means of meeting them, with obligations and the will to meet them,
with burdens and a strength to bear them. It creates in us a
conscience and the love of duty, and endows us with a morality that
a mother and father with the power and the love of angels working
through all the years of our childhood could not have created within
us. Trust life and not your own feeble efforts to create the soul in the
child!
The virtue of childhood, then, is an exhaustless curiosity and
interest in the world in which the child finds himself. He is here to
learn his way around in it, to learn the names of things and their
uses, how to use his body and his capacities. This will be the most
excellent working of his soul. If his mind and body are active, he will
be a “good” child, in the best sense of the word. We can almost
afford to let him be insolent and irreverent and troublesome as long
as he is only curious. If he has a temper, it will not be cured by
curbing, but by either letting it burn out, or not giving it fuel to feed
on. Food for his body and facts for his mind are the sustenance he
requires. From the food will be built up his body, and from the facts
and his reactions to them will slowly evolve his world of values and
ideals. We cannot aid him by giving him our theories, or shorten the
path for him by presenting him with ready-made standards. In spite
of all the moral teachers, there is no short cut to the moral life of
youth, any more than there is a royal road to knowledge. Nor can
we help him to grow by transferring some of our superfluous moral
flesh to his bones. The child’s qualities which shock our sense of
propriety are evidences not of his immorality, but of his pre-morality.
A morality that will mean anything to him can only be built up out of
a vast store of experience, and only when his world has broadened
out into a real society with influences of every kind coming from
every side. He cannot get the relish of right and wrong until he has
tasted life, and it is the taste of life that the child does not have.
That taste comes only with youth, and then with a bewildering
complexity and vividness.
But between childhood and youth there comes a trying period
when the child has become well cognizant of the practical world, but
has as yet no hint of the gorgeous colors of youth. At thirteen, for
instance, one has the world pretty well charted, but not yet has the
slow chemistry of time transmuted this experience into meanings
and values. There is a crassness and materiality about the following
three or four years that have no counterpart until youth is over and
the sleek years of the forties have begun. How cocksure and familiar
with the world is the boy or girl at this age! They have no doubts,
but they have no glow. At no time in life is one so unspiritual, so
merely animal, so much of the earth, earthy. How different is it to be
a few years later! How shaken and adventurous will the world
appear then! For this waiting period of life, the virtues are harder to
discover. Curiosity has lapsed, for there do not seem to be many
things left to be curious about. The child is beautifully unconscious
of his own ignorance. Similarly has the play activity diminished; the
boy has put away his Indian costumes, and the girl her dolls. At this
season of life the virtue would seem to consist in the acquirement of
some skill in some art or handicraft or technique. This is the time to
search for the budding talents and the strong native bents and
inclinations. To be interesting is one of the best of virtues, and few
things make a person more interesting than skill or talent. From a
selfish point of view, too, all who have grown up with unskillful
hands will realize the solid virtue of knowing how to do something
with the hands, and avoid that vague restlessness and desire to get
at grips with something that haunts the professional man who has
neglected in youth to cultivate this virtue of technique. And it is a
virtue which, if not acquired at that time, can never be acquired. The
deftness of hand, alertness of mind, are soon lost if they are not
taken advantage of, and the child grows up helpless and unskillful,
with a restless void where a talent and interest should be.
It is with youth, then, that the moral life begins, the true relish of
right and wrong. Out of the crucible of passion and enthusiasm
emerge the virtues of life, virtues that will have been tested and
tried in the furnace of youth’s poignant reactions to the world of
possibilities and ideals that has been suddenly opened up to it.
Those young people who have been the victims of childish morality
will not feel this new world so clearly or keenly, or, if there did lurk
underneath the crust of imposed priggishness some latent touch of
genius, they will feel the new life with a terrible searing pain that
maddens them and may permanently distort their whole vision of
life. To those without the spark, the new life will come stained by
prejudice. Their reactions will be dulled; they will not see clearly;
and will either stagger at the shock, or go stupidly ahead oblivious of
the spiritual wonders on every side. Only those who have been
allowed to grow freely like young plants, with the sun and air above
their heads, will get the full beauty and benefit of youth. Only those
whose eyes have been kept wide open ceaselessly learning the facts
of the material and practical world will truly appreciate the values of
the moral world, and be able to acquire virtue. Only with this fund of
practical knowledge will the youth be able to balance and contrast
and compare the bits of his experience, see them in the light of their
total meaning, and learn to prefer rightly one bit to another. It is as
if silent forces had been at work in the soul during the last years of
childhood, organizing the knowledge and nascent sentiments of the
child into forms of power ready for the free expression of youth.
Youth expresses itself by falling in love. Whether it be art, a girl,
socialism, religion, the sentiment is the same; the youth is swept
away by a flood of love. He has learned to value, and how
superlative and magnificent are his values! The little child hardly
seems to love; indeed, his indifference to grown people, even to his
own parents, is often amazing. He has the simple affection of a
young animal, but how different his cool regard from the passionate
flame of youth! Love is youth’s virtue, and it is wide as well as deep.
There is no tragic antithesis between a youth’s devotion to a cause
and his love for a girl. They are not mutually exclusive, as
romanticists often love to think, but beautifully compatible. They
tend to fuse, and they stimulate and ennoble each other. The first
love of youth for anything is pure and ethereal and disinterested. It
is only when thwarted that love turns sensual, only when mocked
that enthusiasm becomes fanatical or mercenary. Worldly opinion
seems to care much more for personal love than for the love of
ideals. Perhaps it is instinctively more interested in the perpetuation
of the race than in its progress. It gives its suffrage and approval to
the love of a youth for a girl, but it mocks and discredits the
enthusiast. It just grudgingly permits the artist to live, but it piles
almost insurmountable obstacles in the path of the young radical.
The course of true love may never run smooth, but what of the
course of true idealism?
The springs that feed this love are found, of course, in hero-
worship. Sexual love is objectified in some charming and appealing
girl, love for ideals in some teacher or seer or the inspiring
personality of a friend. It is in youth that we can speak of real
influence. Then is the soul responsive to currents and ideas. The
embargo which kept the child’s mind immune to theory and opinion
and tastes is suddenly lifted. In childhood, our imitation is confined
to the external; we copy ways of acting, but we are insensitive to
the finer nuances of personality. But in youth we become sensitive to
every passing tone and voice. Youth is the season when, through
this sensitiveness, the deadly pressures get their purchase on the
soul; it is also the season for the most momentous and potent
influences for good. In youth, if there is the possibility that the soul
be permanently warped out of shape, there is also the possibility
that it receive the nourishment that enables it to develop its own
robust beauty. It is by hero-worship that we copy not the externals
of personality, as in childhood, but the inner spirit. We feel ourselves
somehow merged with the admired persons, and we draw from
them a new stimulating grace. We find ourselves in them. It is not
yielding to a pressure that would force us to a type, but a drawing
up of ourselves to a higher level, through the aid of one who
possesses all those qualities which have been all along, we feel, our
vague and hitherto unexpressed ideal. We do not feel that our
individualities are being lost, but that they are for the first time
being found. We have discovered in another personality all those
best things for which our hearts have been hungering, and we are
simply helping ourselves to that which is in reality our own. Our hero
gives of himself inexhaustibly, and we take freely and gladly what we
need. It is thus that we stock up with our first store of spiritual
values. It is from the treasury of a great and good personality that
we receive the first confirmation of ourselves. In the hero-
personality, we see our own dim, baby ideals objectified. Their
splendor encourages us, and nerves us for the struggle to make
them thoroughly our own.
There is a certain pathos in the fact that parents are so seldom
the heroes from whom the children derive this revelation of their
own personality. It is more often some teacher or older friend or
even a poet or reformer whom the youth has never seen and knows
only through his words and writings. But for this the parents are
partly responsible. They are sufficiently careful about the influences
which play upon their young children. They give care and prayers
and tears to their bringing-up in the years when the children are
almost immune to any except the more obvious mechanical
influences, and learn of ideals and values only in a parrot-like
fashion. But when the child approaches youth, the parent is apt to
relax vigilance and, with a cry of thanksgiving and self-
congratulation that the child has been brought safely through so
many perils to the desired haven, to surrender him to his own
devices. Just at the time when he becomes really sensitive for the
first time to spiritual influences, he is deprived of this closest and
warmest influence of the home. But he has not been brought into a
haven, but launched into a heaving and troubled sea. This is the
time when his character lies at stake, and the possibility of his being
a radical, individual force in the world hangs in the balance. Whether
he will become this force depends on the pressures that he is able to
dodge, and on the positive ideals he is able to secure. And they will
depend largely on the heroes he worships, upon his finding the
personalities that seem to contain all the best for which he yearns.
Hero-worship is the best preservative against cheapness of soul, that
besetting sin of modern youth. It directs our attention away from the
light and frothy things of the world, which are wont to claim so
much of youth’s interest, to qualities that are richer and more
satisfying. Yet hero-worship is no mere imitation. We do not simply
adopt new qualities and a new character. We rather impregnate our
hitherto sterile ideals with the creative power of a tested and
assured personality, and give birth to a new reliance and a new faith.
Our heroes anticipate and provide for our doubts and fears, and
fortify us against the sternest assaults of the world. We love our
heroes because they have first loved us.
Out of this virtue of love and the clashing of its clear spirit with
the hard matter of established things come the sterner virtues. From
that conflict, courage is struck off as youth feels the need of keeping
his flame steady and holding to his own course, regardless of
obstacles or consequences. Youth needs courage, that salt of the
virtues, for if youth has its false hopes, it has its false depressions.
That strange melancholy, when things seem to lose their substance
and the world becomes an empty shell, is the reverse shield of the
elation of youth. To face and overcome it is a real test of the
courage of youth. The dash and audacity, the daring and self-
confidence of youth, are less fine than this simple courage of
optimism. Youth needs courage, too, when its desires do not come
true, when it meets suspicion or neglect, and when its growth seems
inexorably checked by circumstance. In these emergencies, the
youth usually plays the stoic. He feels a savage pride in the thought
that circumstance can never rob him of his integrity, or bring his best
self to be dependent on mere change of fortune. Such a courage is a
guarantor of youth. It forms a protecting crust over life and lessens
the shock of many contingencies. The only danger is that it may
become too perfect a shell and harden the character. It is not well
for youth to shun the battle. Courage demands exposure to assault.
And besides courage, youth needs temperance. The sins and
excesses of hot-blooded youth are a byword; youth would not seem
to be youth without its carnality and extravagance. It is fortunate
that youth is able to expend that extravagance partly in idealism.
Love is always the antidote to sensuality. And we can always, if we
set ourselves resolutely to the task, transmute the lower values into
higher. This, indeed, is the crucial virtue of youth, and temperance is
the seal and evidence of the transmutation. Temperance in things of
the flesh is ordained not through sentimental reasons, but on the
best of physiological and psychological motives. Temperance is a
virtue because of the evil consequences to one’s self and others
which follow excess of indulgence in appetite.
But this temperance does not mean quite the same thing as the
rigid self-control that used to be preached. The new morality has a
more positive ideal than the rigid mastery which self-control implies.
We are to fix our attention more in giving our good impulses full play
than in checking the bad. The theory is that if one is occupied with
healthy ideas and activities, there will be no room or time for the
expression of the unhealthy ones. Anything that implies an inhibition
or struggle to repress is a draining away into a negative channel of
energy that might make for positive constructive work in the
character. The repressed desires and interests are not killed, but
merely checked, and they persist, with unabated vigor, in struggling
to get the upper hand again. They are little weakened by lying
dormant, and lurk warily below, ready to swarm up again on deck,
whenever there is the smallest lapse of vigilance. But if they are
neglected they gradually cease from troubling, and are killed by
oblivion where they could not have been hurt by forcible repression.
The mortification of the flesh seems too often simply to strengthen
its pride.
In the realm of emotion, the dangers of rigid self-control are
particularly evident. There are fashions in emotion as well as in
dress, and it seems to have become the fashion in certain circles of
youth to inhibit any emotional expression of the sincere or the
serious. There is a sort of reign of terrorism which prevents personal
conversation from being carried on upon any plane except one of
flippancy and insincerity. Frankness of expression in regard to
personal feelings and likes and dislikes is tabooed. A strange new
ethics of tact has grown up which makes candor so sacrilegious a
thing that its appearance in a group or between two young people of
the opposite sex creates general havoc and consternation. Young
people who dare to give natural expression to their feelings about
each other or about their ideals and outlook on life find themselves
genuinely unpopular. When this peculiar ethics works at its worst, it
gives a person a pride in concealing his or her feelings on any of the
vital and sincere aspects of life, the interests and admirations and
tastes. But this energy, dammed up thus from expression in its
natural way, overflows in a hysterical admiration for the trivial, and
an unhealthy interest in the mere externals, the “safe” things, of life.
Such self-control dwarfs the spirit; it results only in
misunderstandings and a tragic ignorance of life. It is one of the
realest of the vices of youth, for it is the parent of a host of minor
ailments of the soul. It seems to do little good even to repress
hatred and malice. If repressed, they keep knocking at the door of
consciousness, and poison the virtues that might develop if the soul
could only get rid of its load of spleen. If the character is thickly
sown with impersonal interests and the positive virtues are carefully
cultivated, there will be no opportunity for these hateful weeds to
reach the sun and air. Virtue should actually crowd out vice, and
temperance is the tool that youth finds ready to its hand.
Temperance means the happy harmonizing and coördinating of the
expression of one’s personality; it means health, candor, sincerity,
and wisdom,—knowledge of one’s self and the sympathetic
understanding of comrades.
Justice is a virtue which, if it be not developed in youth, has little
chance of ever being developed. It depends on a peculiarly sensitive
reaction to good and evil, and it is only in youth that those reactions
are keen and disinterested. Real justice is always a sign of great
innocence; it cannot exist side by side with interested motives or a
trace of self-seeking. And a sense of justice is hard to develop in this
great industrial world where the relations of men are so out of joint
and where such flaunting anomalies assail one at every turn. Yet in
the midst of it all youth is still pure of heart, and it is only the pure
of heart who can be just. For in youth we live in a world of clean
disinterestedness. We have ambitions and desires, but not yet have
we learned the devious way by which they may be realized. We have
not learned how to achieve our ends by taking advantage of other
people, and using them and their interests and necessities as means.
We still believe in the possibility of every man’s realizing himself side
by side with us. In early youth, therefore, we have an instinctive and
almost unconscious sense of justice. Not yet have we learned the
trick of exploiting our fellow men. If we are early assailed with the
reality of social disorder, and have brought home to our hearts the
maladjustments of our present order, that sense of justice is
transformed into a passion. This passion for social justice is one of
the most splendid of the ideals of youth. It has the power of keeping
alive all the other virtues; it stimulates life and gives it a new
meaning and tone. It furnishes the leit-motiv which is so sadly
lacking in many lives. And youth must find a leit-motiv of some kind,
or its spirit perishes. This social idealism acts like a tonic upon the
whole life; it keeps youth alive even after one has grown older in
years.
With justice comes the virtue of democracy. We learn all too early
in youth the undemocratic way of thinking, the divisions and
discriminations which the society around us makes among people.
But youth cannot be swept by love or fired by the passion for justice
without feeling a wild disgust at everything that suggests artificial
inequalities and distinctions. Democracy means a belief that people
are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the
average man. The chief reason why the average man is not now
worthy of more trust, the democrat believes, is simply that he has
not been trusted enough in the past. Democracy has little use for
philanthropy, at least in the sense of a kindly caring for people, with
the constant recognition that the person who is kind is superior to
the person who is being done good to. The spirit of democracy is a
much more robust humanity. It is rough and aggressive; it stands
people up on their own feet, makes them take up their beds and
walk. It prods them to move their own limbs and take care of
themselves. It makes them strong by giving them something to do.
It will have nothing more to do with the superstition of trusteeship
which paralyzes now most of our institutional life. It does not believe
for a minute that everybody needs guardians for most of the serious
concerns of life. The great crime of the past has been that
humankind has never been willing to trust itself, or men each other.
We have tied ourselves up with laws and traditions, and devised a
thousand ways to prevent men from being thrown on their own
responsibility and cultivating their own powers. Our society has been
constituted on the principle that men must be saved from
themselves. We have surrounded ourselves with so many moral
hedges, have imposed upon ourselves so many checks and balances,
that life has been smothered. Our liberation has just begun. We are
far from free, but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will
free us. No virtue is more potent for youth.
And the last of these virtues, redolent of the old Greek time, when
men walked boldly, when the world was still young, and gods and
nymphs not all dead, is wisdom. To be wise is simply to have
blended and harmonized one’s experience, to have fused it together
into a “philosophy of life.” Wisdom is a matter not of quantity, but of
quality of experience. It means getting at the heart of it, and
obtaining the same clear warm impression of its meaning that the
artist does of the æsthetic idea that he is going to represent.
Wisdom in youth or early middle life may be far truer than in later
life. One’s courage may weaken under repeated failure, one’s sense
of justice be dulled by contact with the wrong relations between
men and classes, one’s belief in democracy destroyed by the
seeming failure of experiments. But this gathering cynicism does not
mean the acquiring of wisdom, but the losing of it. The usefulness
and practicability of these virtues of youth are not really vitiated by
the struggles they have in carrying themselves through into practice;
what is exhibited is merely the toughness of the old forces of
prejudice and tradition, and the “pig-headedness” of the old
philosophy of timorousness and distrust. True wisdom is faith in love,
in justice, in democracy; youth has this faith in largest measure;
therefore youth is most wise.
Middle age steals upon a youth almost before he is aware. He will
recognize it at first, perhaps, by a slight paling of his enthusiasms, or
by a sudden consciousness that his early interests have been
submerged in the flood of routine work and family cares. The later
years of youth and the early years of middle life are in truth the
dangerous age, for then may be lost the virtues that were acquired
in youth. Or, if not lost, many will be felt to be superfluous. There is
danger that the peculiar bias of the relish of right and wrong that
the virtues of youth have given one may be weakened, and the soul
spread itself too thin over life. Now one of the chief virtues of middle
life is to conserve the values of youth, to practice in sober earnest
the virtues that came so naturally in the enthusiasm of youth, but
which take on a different hue when exposed to what seem to be the
crass facts of the workaday world. But there is no reason why work,
ambition, the raising of a family, should dull the essential spirit of
youthful idealism. It may not be so irrepressible, so freakish, so
intolerant, but it should not be different in quality and significance.
The burdens of middle life are not a warrant for the releasing of the
spiritual obligations of youth. They do not give one the right to look
back with amused regret to the dear follies of the past. For as soon
as the spirit of youth begins to leave the soul, that soul begins to
die. Middle-aged people are too much inclined to speak of youth as a
sort of spiritual play. They forget that youth feels that it itself has the
serious business of life, the real crises to meet. To youth it is middle
age that seems trivial and playful. It is after the serious work of
love-making and establishing one’s self in economic independence is
over that one can rest and play. Youth has little time for that sort of
recreation. In middle age, most of the problems have been solved,
the obstacles overcome. There is a slackening of the lines, a satisfied
taking of one’s reward. And to youth this must always seem a
tragedy, that the season of life when the powers are at their highest
should be the season when they are oftener turned to material than
to spiritual ends. Youth has the energy and ideals, but not the
vantage-ground of prestige from which to fight for them. Middle age
has the prestige and the power, but too seldom the will to use it for
the furtherance of its ideals. Youth has the isolation, the
independence, the disinterestedness so that it may attack any foe,
but it has not the reserve force to carry that attack through. Middle
age has all the reserve power necessary, but is handicapped by
family obligations, by business and political ties, so that its power is
rarely effective for social or individual progress.
The supreme virtue of middle age will be, then, to make this
difficult fusion,—to combine devotion to one’s family, to one’s chosen
work, with devotion to the finer idealism and impersonal aims that
formed one’s philosophy of youth. To keep alive through all the
twistings and turnings of life’s road the sense of a larger humanity
that needs spiritual and material succor, of the individual spiritual life
of ideal interests, is a task of virtue that will tax the resources of any
man or woman. Yet here lies the true virtue of middle age,—to use
its splendid powers to enhance the social and individual life round
one, to radiate influence that transforms and elevates. The secret of
such a radiant personality seems to be that one, while mingling
freely in the stress of everyday life, sees all its details in the light of
larger principles, against the background of their social meaning. In
other words, it is a virtue of middle life to be socially self-conscious.
And this spirit is the best protector against the ravages of the tough
material world. Only by this social consciousness can that toughness
be softened. The image of the world the way it ought to be must
never be lost sight of in the picture of the world the way it is.
This conservation of the spirit is even more necessary for the
woman than for the man. The active life of the latter makes it fairly
certain that he, while he may become hard and callous, will at least
retain some sort of grip on the world’s bigger movements. There is
no such certainty for the mother. Indeed, she seems often to take a
real pleasure in voluntarily offering up in sacrifice at the time of
marriage what few ideal interests and tastes she has. The spectacle
of the young mother devoting all her time and strength to her
children and husband, and surrendering all other interests to the
interests of the home, is usually considered inspiring and attractive,
especially by the men. Not so attractive is she thirty years later,
when, her family cares having lapsed and her children scattered, she
is left high and dry in the world. If she then takes a well-earned rest,
it seems a pity that that rest should be so generally futile and
uninteresting. Without interests and tastes, and with no longer any
useful function in society, she is relegated to the most trivial
amusements and pursuits. Idle and vapid, she finds nothing to do
but fritter away her time. The result is a really appalling waste of
economic and social energy in middle age. Now it is the virtue of this
season of life to avoid all this. The woman as well as the man must
realize that her home is not bounded by the walls of the house, that
it has wider implications, leading out into all the interests of the
community and the state. That women of this age have not yet
learned to be good mothers and good citizens at the same time,
does not show that it is impossible, but that it is a virtue that
requires more resolution than our morality has been willing to
exhibit. The relish of right and wrong must be a relish of social right
and wrong as well as of individual.
As middle age passes on into old age, however, one earns a
certain right of relaxation. If there is no right to let go the sympathy
for the virtues of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there
comes the right to give over some of the aggressive activity. To
youth belongs the practical action. At no other age is there the same
impulse and daring. The virtue of later middle age is to encourage
and support, rather than actively engage. It is true we have never
learned this lesson. We still surrender to semi-old men the authority
to govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow them with spiritual
as well as practical leadership, and allow them to strip youth of its
opportunities and powers. We permit them to rule not only their own
but all the generations. If we could be sure that their rule meant
progress, we could trust them to guide us. But, in these times at
least, it seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight for a
discredited undemocratic philosophy that modern youth are
completely through with. From this point of view one of the virtues
of this middle season of life will be the imaginative understanding of
youth’s purposes and radical ideals. At that age, one no longer needs
the same courage to face the battles of life; they are already most of
them irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same claim of
temperance; the passions and ambitions are relaxed. The sense of
justice and democracy will have become a habit or else they will
have been forever lost. Only the need of wisdom remains,—that
unworldly wisdom which mellowing years can bring, which sees
through the disturbance and failure of life the truth and efficacy of
youth’s ideal vision.
Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be justly relieved of
any burden of virtues or duties; it is so unique and beautiful that the
old should be given the perfect freedom of the moral city. So
splendid a victory is old age over the malign forces of disease and
weakness and death that one is tempted to say that its virtue lies
simply in being old. Those virtues of youth which grew out of the
crises and temptations, physical and spiritual, of early life, are no
longer relevant. There may come instead the quieter virtues of
contentment and renunciation. Old people have few crises and few
temptations; they live in the past and not in the future, as youth
does. They cannot be required, therefore, to have that scorn for
tradition which is the virtue of youth. They can keep alive for us the
tradition that is vital, and from them we can learn many things.
The value of their experience to us is not that it teaches us to
avoid their mistakes, for we must try all things for ourselves. The
older generation, it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes
somehow make for our benefit, because we learn from their errors
to avoid the pitfalls into which they came. But there is no making
mistakes by the proxy of a former generation. The world has moved
on in the mean time; the pitfalls are new, and we shall only entangle
ourselves the more by adopting the methods of our ancestors in
getting out of the difficulties. But the value of an old man’s
experience is that he has preserved in it the living tradition and
hands down to us old honesties, old sincerities, and old graces, that
have been crushed in the rough-and-tumble of modern life. It is not
tradition in itself that is dangerous, but only dead tradition that has
no meaning for the present and is a mere weight on our progress.
Such is the legal and economic tradition given to us by our raucous,
middle-aged leaders of opinion, adopted by them through motives of
present gain, and not through sincere love of the past.
But old men, looking back over the times in which they have lived,
throw a poetic glamour over the past and make it live again. They
see it idealized, but it is the real that they see idealized. An old man
of personality and charm has the faculty of cutting away from the
past the dead wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which we
can graft profitably on our own growing present. Old men have
much of the disinterestedness of youth; they have no ulterior motive
in giving us the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them
instinctively select what is vital for our present nourishment. It is not
old men that youth has to fear, but the semi-old, who have lost
touch with their youth, and have not lived long enough to get the
disinterested vision of their idealized past. But old men who have
lived this life of radical virtue are the best of teachers; they distill the
perfume of the past, and bring it to us to sweeten our present. Such
men grow old only in body. The radical spirit of youth has the power
of abolishing considerations of age; the body changes, but the spirit
remains the same. In this sense, it is the virtue of old age not to
become old.
The besetting sin of this season of life is apathy. Old age should
not be a mere waiting for death. The fact that we cannot reconcile
death with life shows that they ought not to be discussed in the
same terms. They belong to two different orders. Death has no part
in life, and in life there can be no such thing as preparation for
death. An old man lives to his appointed time, and then his life ends;
but the life up to that ending, barring the loss of his faculties, has
been all life and not a whit death. Old men do not fear death as
much as do young men, and this calmness is not so much a result of
disillusionment with life as a recognition that their life has been
lived, their work finished, the cycle of their activity rounded off. One
virtue of old age, then, is to live as fully at the height of one’s
powers as strength will permit, passing out of life serene and
unreluctant, with willingness to live and yet with willingness to die.
To know an old man who has grown old slowly, taking the seasons
as they came, conserving the spirit of his youthful virtues, mellowing
his philosophy of life, acquiring a clearer, saner, and more beautiful
outlook on human nature and all its spiritual values with each
passing year, is an education in the virtues of life. The virtues which
produce an old age such as this do not cut across the grain of life,
but enhance and conserve the vital impulses and forces. Such an old
age is the crowning evidence of the excellent working of the soul. A
life needs no other proof than this that each season has known its
proper virtue and healthful activity.
IV
THE LIFE OF IRONY
I could never, until recently, divest myself of the haunting feeling
that being ironical had something to do with the entering of the iron
into one’s soul. I thought I knew what irony was, and I admired it
immensely. I could not believe that there was something metallic
and bitter about it. Yet this sinister connotation of a clanging,
rasping meanness of spirit, which I am sure it has still in many
people’s minds, clung about it, until one happy day my dictionary
told me that the iron had never entered into the soul at all, but the
soul into the iron (St. Jerome had read the psalm wrong), and that
irony was Greek, with all the free, happy play of the Greek spirit
about it, letting in fresh air and light into others’ minds and our own.
It was to the Greek an incomparable method of intercourse, the rub
of mind against mind by the simple use of simulated ignorance and
the adoption, without committing one’s self, of another’s point of
view. Not until I read the Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that
this irony,—this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent
judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities,
of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less
heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world
being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible
only by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms,—
that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might suddenly
discover one’s self living all unawares. And if one could judge one’s
own feeble reflection, it was a life that had no room for iron within
its soul.
We should speak not of the Socratic method but of the Socratic
life. For irony is a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken
off and put on again at will; a method can. To be sure, some people
talk of life exactly as if it were some portable commodity, or some
exchangeable garment. We must live, they cry, as if we were about
to begin. And perhaps they are. Only some of us would rather die
than live that puny life that they can adopt and cover themselves
with. Irony is too rich and precious a thing to be capable of such
transmission. The ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude
towards life, this delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not
a pose or an amusement. It is something that colors every idea and
every feeling of the man who is so happy as to be endowed with it.
Most people will tell you, I suppose, that the religious conviction of
salvation is the only permanently satisfying coloring of life. In the
splendid ironists, however, one sees a sweeter, more flexible and
human principle of life, adequate, without the buttress of
supernatural belief, to nourish and fortify the spirit. In the classic
ironist of all time, irony shows an inherent nobility, a nobility that all
ages have compared favorably with the Christian ideal. Lacking the
spur of religious emotion, the sweetness of irony may be more
difficult to maintain than the mood of belief. But may it not for that
very reason be judged superior, for is it not written, He that
endureth unto the end shall be saved?
It is not easy to explain the quality of that richest and most
satisfying background of life. It lies, I think, in a vivid and intense
feeling of aliveness which it gives. Experience comes to the ironist in
little darts or spurts, with the added sense of contrast. Most men, I
am afraid, see each bit of personal experience as a unit, strung more
or less loosely on a string of other mildly related bits. But the man
with the ironical temperament is forced constantly to compare and
contrast his experience with what was, or what might be, or with
what ought to be, and it is the shocks of these comparisons and
contrasts that make up his inner life. He thinks he leads a richer life,
because he feels not only the individual bits but the contrasts
besides in all their various shadings and tints. To this sense of
impingement of facts upon life is due a large part of this vividness of
irony; and the rest is due to the alertness of the ironical mind. The
ironist is always critically awake. He is always judging, and watching