The Foundations of Personality [52]
both of which are usually considered as part of willing, we must seek to find motives and influences that will help us. We must realize that each choice, each act, changes the world for us and every one else and seek to harmonize our choice and acts with the purposes we regard as our best. If we seek to influence others, then this view of the will is the only hopeful one, for if will is a free entity how can it possibly be influenced by another agent? The very essence of freedom is to be noninfluenced. Seeking to galvanize the will of another, there is need to search for the influences that will increase the energy of his better purposes, to "appeal to his better self," meaning that the spurs to his good conduct are applied with greater force, but that first the nature of the particular things that spur him on must be discovered. Praise? Blame? Reward? Punishment? Education? Authority? Logic? Religion? Emotional appeal? Substitution of new motives and associations? The will is therefore no unit, but a sum total of things operating within the sphere of purpose. Purpose we have defined as arising from instinct and desire and intellectualized and socialized by intelligence, education, training, tradition, etc. Will is therefore best studied under the head of purpose and is an outgrowth of instinct. Each instinct, in its energy, its fierceness, its permanence, has its will. He who cannot desire deeply, in whom some powerful instinct does not surge, cannot will deeply. If we look at character from the standpoint of emotion, instinct, purpose and intelligence, we find that emotion is an internal discharge of energy, which being FELT by the individual becomes an aim or aversion of his life; that instinctive action is the passing over of a stimulus directly into hereditary conduct along race-old motor pathways for purposes that often enough the individual does not recognize and may even rebel against; that instinct is without reflection, but that purpose, which is an outgrowth of instinct guided and controlled by intelligence, is reflective and self-conscious. Purpose seeks the good of the individual as understood by him and is often against the welfare of the race, whereas instinct seeks the good of the race, often against the welfare of the individual. Intelligence is the path of the stimulus or need cerebrally directed, lengthened out, inhibited, elaborated and checked. Often enough faulty, it is the chief instrument by which man has become the leading figure on the world stage.
CHAPTER VII. EXCITEMENT, MONOTONY AND INTEREST No matter what happens in the outside world, be it something we see, hear or feel, in any sense-field there is an internal reverberation in our bodies,--excitement. Excitement is the undifferentiated result of stimuli, whether these come from without or from within. For a change in the glands of the body heaps up changes within us, which when felt, become excitement. Thus at the mating period of animals, at the puberty of man, there is a quite evident excitement demonstrated in the conduct of the animal and the adolescent. He who remembers his own adolescence, or who watches the boy or girl of that age, sees the excitement in the readiness to laugh, cry, fight or love that is so striking. Undoubtedly the mother-stuff of all emotion is the feeling of excitement. Before any emotion reaches its characteristic expression there is the preparatory tension of excitement. Joy, sorrow, anger, fear, wonder, surprise, etc., have in them as a basis the same consciousness of an internal activity, of a world within us beginning to seethe. Heart, lungs, blood stream, the great viscera and the internal glands, cerebrum and sympathetic nervous system, all participate in this activity, and the outward visage of excitement is always the wide-open eye, the slightly parted lips, the flaring nostrils and the slightly tensed muscles of the whole body. Shouts, cries, the waving of arms and legs, taking the specific direction of some emotion, make of excitement a fierce discharger of energy, a fact of great importance in the understanding
CHAPTER VII. EXCITEMENT, MONOTONY AND INTEREST No matter what happens in the outside world, be it something we see, hear or feel, in any sense-field there is an internal reverberation in our bodies,--excitement. Excitement is the undifferentiated result of stimuli, whether these come from without or from within. For a change in the glands of the body heaps up changes within us, which when felt, become excitement. Thus at the mating period of animals, at the puberty of man, there is a quite evident excitement demonstrated in the conduct of the animal and the adolescent. He who remembers his own adolescence, or who watches the boy or girl of that age, sees the excitement in the readiness to laugh, cry, fight or love that is so striking. Undoubtedly the mother-stuff of all emotion is the feeling of excitement. Before any emotion reaches its characteristic expression there is the preparatory tension of excitement. Joy, sorrow, anger, fear, wonder, surprise, etc., have in them as a basis the same consciousness of an internal activity, of a world within us beginning to seethe. Heart, lungs, blood stream, the great viscera and the internal glands, cerebrum and sympathetic nervous system, all participate in this activity, and the outward visage of excitement is always the wide-open eye, the slightly parted lips, the flaring nostrils and the slightly tensed muscles of the whole body. Shouts, cries, the waving of arms and legs, taking the specific direction of some emotion, make of excitement a fierce discharger of energy, a fact of great importance in the understanding