The Foundations of Personality [157]
wars, large or small according to their influence, intelligence and other circumstances. The type of the trusting need not be here illustrated by any case history. Dickens has given us an immortal figure in the genial, generous and impulsive Mr. Pickwick, and Cervantes satirized knighthood by depicting the trusting, credulous Don Quixote. We laugh at these figures, but we love them; they preserve for us the sweetness of childhood and hurt only themselves and their own. Trust in one's fellows is not common, because the world is organized on egoism more than on fellowship. Where fellowship becomes a code, as in the relations of men associated together for some great purpose, then a noble trust appears. So I pass over those whose mood runs all one way the hopeful, the despondent, the pessimist and the optimist--to other types. We shall then consider the two great directions of interest, introspection and extrospection, and those whose lives are characterized by one or the other direction. 1. The introspective personality is no more of a unit than any other type. Intelligence, energy and a host of other matters play their part in the sum total of the character here as elsewhere. H. I. is what might be called the intellectual introspective personality. From the very earliest days he became interested in himself as a thinker. "How do my words mean anything?" he asked of his perplexed father at the investigative age of five. "Where do my thoughts go to when I do not think them?" was the problem he floored a learned uncle with a year later. This type of curiosity is not uncommon in children; in fact, it is the conventionality and laziness of the elders that stops children in their study of the fundamentals. H. was not stopped, for the zeal of his interest was heightened as time went on. He played with other boys but early found their conclusions and discussions primitive. He became an ardent bookworm, reading incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted, for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the other was the inner world of thoughts and moods, deeply, fascinatingly interesting. It seemed to H. I. that there were "two I's, one of which sat just over my head and looking down on the other I, watching its strivings, its emotions, its thoughts with a detached and yet palpitating interest. When I watched the other boys at play I wondered whether they too had this dual existence, whether they chewed the cud of life over and over again as I did." Came puberty with the great sex passions. The vibrating life within him suddenly became tinged with new interests. One day at a party a vixen of a girl threw herself boldly in his arms and tried to push him into a chair. The bodily contact and the swift bodily reaction threw him into a panic, for the passion that was aroused was so powerful that he seemed to himself stripped of all thought and reflection and impelled to actions against which he rebelled. For he was fully acquainted, at second hand, with sex; he knew boys and girls who had made excursions into its most intimate practices and despised them. This episode gave his introspective trends a new direction. From now on sex was the theme his fancy embroidered. Curiously enough, he became more austere than ever, shunned girls and especially the heroine of his adventure, and even avoided the company of boys who spoke habitually and "vulgarly" of sex. His mind built up sex phantasies, sex adventures in which he was the hero and in which girls he knew and those he imagined were the heroines, but at the same time, standing aloof as it were, another part of him seemed to watch his own reactions until "I nearly went crazy." He became obsessed by a feeling of unreality and adopted a Berkleyan philosophy of idealism: nothing seemed to exist except his own consciousness,