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accurate notion of the human self. Whatever progress mankind has made has been largely of the hit-or-miss order, planless, sporadic, more or less unconscious. One great difficulty has been ignorance or neglect of the real significance of the human personality.

If we are to have any conscious, reasonable plan for progress which shall turn our factitious winnings into real improvement of men and conditions, we must proceed apparently by creating a human type with a personality or "self" so modifiable as to render it better fitted for effective social service. Can it be done? I believe it can. I believe it in spite of, and perhaps even because of, the critics of human nature.

One of the most savage of early nineteenth century. critics of the "progressists," Thomas Love Peacock, admonished his contemporaries to beware of trusting too much in their powers of modifying human nature. His "Beech and the Sapling Oak" is a typical example of this preaching :

"For the tender beech and the sapling oak,

That grow by the shadowy rill,

You may cut down both at a single stroke,

You may cut down which you will.

"But this you must know, that as long as they grow,

Whatsoever change may be,

You can never teach either oak or beech

To be aught but a greenwood tree."

But so far as I know, not even the most ardent social reformer (who is moderately sane) ever plans to get anything but greenwood trees out of beeches. He is not so silly as to hope to gather figs from thistles or to turn men into angels. Modern forestry proves, however, that there are ways of getting more good timber out of a given area of

mere greenwood than we used to imagine possible. The most superficial observer gazing idly out of a German railway window cannot fail to notice this. Practically our whole forestry service in the United States is based on this principle. Further, the stock breeder and the botanist, if they do not offer us the means, at least show us certain positive encouraging results. Such processes as budding, grafting, or varying the nutrition, produce marked changes in the plants and animals thus treated. In less than a generation Luther Burbank shears the cactus of its spines. Where is the wizard who will turn thorny, unproductive, selfish, shirking, exploiting, cross-grained human natures into coöperators, good citizens, and members of a great united human brotherhood? He is perhaps even now in our midst. But whoever he is, it is safe to say that his means will be social education, centering about a new concept of the human self. And his philosophy will be a constructive optimism that includes a liberal view of human nature, precisely because human nature and the self are trustworthy when given proper surroundings. "Human nature is all right as it is" declares a modern preacher;

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"Human nature needs no change, and nobody is trying to change it. It only needs a chance. One need not go so far as to say that human nature is all right; it is enough to credit it with being right enough for most present purposes if given proper opportunities. By opportunities. I mean not taking away every let or hindrance to personal whim or the satisfaction of instinct; that is, allowing human nature to "go on the loose." Opportunity to develop includes education to self-control, disciplines, rewards and

1 J. H. Holmes, Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church, pp. 233-4. Cf. for a lively presentation of the thesis that human nature is not inherently evil, and that it is not human but distorted animalized nature which constitutes the real obstacle to progress, R. G. Davis, "Social Inequality and Social Progress," Westminster Review, 170: 388-95.

penalties, inspirations, renunciation, and all the other!

devices for rational social control.

The first part of the present study does not presume to be more than a slender and tentative effort to outline this new concept of the "self." Three main lines of evidence will be tapped. First, ethnography furnishes much illuminating material to demonstrate the savage's hazy and mystical sense of personality and especially of its subordination to the group unity. Next, psychology (and especially pathologic psychology) reveals how the self is fixed, altered, united, dispersed, divided, or even lost. Finally, sociology and social psychology declare in no uncertain terms that the sense of self is a social product and should indicate how the self may be controlled, molded, colored, and adapted for human welfare and progress.

CHAPTER II

PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF THE SELF

MANY of the quaint and superstitious practices of primitive men are referable to a very hazy notion of their 'persons," their "selves." In this they strongly resemble children, who, it is notorious, are frequently very slow to identify themselves with their own physical organism and feelings. A Kafir boy could not tell his European visitor whether a certain pain was within his head or in the roof of his hut. American schoolboys have been known to locate "an awful sore throat" in their stomachs. Such vague definitions of the physical self illustrate the lack of sharp dualisms which is the distinctive mark of rudimentary thought; that is, failure to distinguish between subject and object, in-consciousness and outside-of-consciousness, self and other-self; between imagination or feeling and reality, between belief and knowledge. Hence one need not be surprised to find the primitive man conceiving his self and its changes in, to us, absurd and incongruous terms.

Thus the name has been almost universally considered as part of the self.1 To change his name meant to change a man's character, because the name not only represented him, but was in a sense actually himself. The same principle holds nowadays when initiation into an order or brotherhood involves taking a new name: the name is an

1 For detailed evidence on this and other points to follow see the writer's article in Amer. Jour. Psychol., 27: 171-202, April, 1916.

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ideal to be incorporated. Again, the shadow as a part of the self was an extremely common belief, which survived in European folklore and medieval poetry, and which still occurs among school children. Likewise, the image or likeness or picture is identified with the self by savages and by the modern superstitious who cling to miracleworking icons, pictures, medals, scapularies, relics, and all the paraphernalia of fetish-worship. By whatever means belief in the soul or dream-double of men arose, there is no doubting its influence on their philosophy of the self. Changes in health or character are charged to mishaps suffered by this very material part of the personality: if it loses its way in the dark, I sicken; if somebody steals it, I die. Another fascinating development of the primitive sense of personality is the identification of property as part of the self. A man's tools or weapons, utensils, even his cattle, his slaves, and his wives are counted as part of himself, literally and unequivocally. Hence they are frequently destroyed at his death or buried with him.

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But in all these attempts to define the limits of personality the individual gets his cue from the group to which he belongs folk belief stamps itself upon the individual. Frequently there is a distinct sense of some mystical sort of relationship between the individual self and the larger self, the group personality. Each man is sunk in the matrix of his family or village or tribe. This more or less instinctive subordination of individual to group in both his actions and his thought of himself results from the exigencies of the primitive struggle to live and propagate in the face of a menacing environment. Safety lies along the path of solidarity. It was just this utter like-mindedness, this coalescence of the unit with the mass that permitted the human species to subjugate its rivals; but at the same time it made the process of development almost infinitely slow.

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