BY IRWIN EDMAN, Ph.D. INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BOSTON   NEW YORK   CHICAGO HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE...

This book was written, originally and primarily, for use in a course entitled "Introduction to Contemporary Civilization," required of all Freshmen in Columbia College. It is an attempt to give a bird's-eye view of the processes of human nature, from man's simple inborn impulses and needs to the most complete fulfillment of these in the deliberate activities of religion, art, science, and morals. It is hoped that the book may give to the student and general reader a knowledge of the fundamentals

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR The human animal—The number and variety of man's instincts—Learning in animals and men—The prolonged period of infancy—Consciousness of self and reaction to ideas—Human beings alone possess language—Man the only maker and user of tools. CHAPTER II TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE—INSTINCT, HABIT, AND EMOTION Instinctive behavior—The necessity for the control of instinct—Habitual behavior—The mechanism of habit—The acquisition of new modes of response—

Human traits and civilization. Throughout the long enterprise of civilization in which mankind have more or less consciously changed the world they found into one more in conformity with their desires, two factors have remained constant: (1) the physical order of the universe, which we commonly call Nature, and (2) the native biological equipment of man, commonly known as human nature. Both of these, we are almost unanimously assured by modern science, have remained essentially the same from the

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR The human animal. Any attempt to understand what the nature of man is, apart from its training and education during the life of the individual, must start with the realization that man is a human animal. As a human being he is strikingly set off by his upright posture and his large and flexible hand. But chiefly he is distinguished by his plastic brain, upon which depends his capacity to perform the complex mental activities—from administering a railroad to solving proble

TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE—INSTINCT, HABIT, AND EMOTION Instinctive behavior. We have already noted the fact that both men and animals are equipped with a wide variety of unlearned responses to given stimuli. In the case of human beings, this original equipment varies from such a specific reaction as pulling away the hand when it is pinched or burned, to such general innate tendencies as those of herding or playing with other people. In a later stage of this discussion

REFLECTION. Instinct and habit versus reflection. In the two types of behavior already discussed, man is, as it were, "pushed from behind." In the case of instinct he performs an action simply because he must perform it. Willy-nilly he withdraws his hand from fire, eats when hungry, and sleeps when tired. In the case of habits, once they are acquired, he is also largely dominated by circumstances beyond his own control. The bottle is to the confirmed drunkard almost an irresistible command to dr

THE BASIC HUMAN ACTIVITIES Food, shelter, and sex. Thus far our analysis has been confined to the general types of human behavior. We have found that all human activity is conditioned by a native equipment consisting of certain more or less specific tendencies to action, and that these may be modified into acquired tendencies called "habits." We have found that through the processes of reflection, through imaginative trial and error, both of these may, within limits, be controlled. We must now p

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN Man as a social being. Man has long been defined as the "social animal," and it is certainly characteristic of human activity that it takes place largely with reference to other people. Many of man's native tendencies, such as those of sex, self-assertiveness, and the like, require the presence and contact of other people for their operation. Nineteenth-century philosophers attempted frequently to explain how individuals who were natively self-seeking ever came to act so

CRUCIAL TRAITS IN SOCIAL LIFE The interpenetration of human traits. This chapter is devoted to a consideration of a number of individual human traits—curiosity, pugnacity, leadership, fear, love, hate, etc., and some of their more important social consequences. These are seldom present in isolation. A man is not, under normal circumstances, simply and solely pugnacious, curious, tired, submissive, or acquisitive. One's desire to own a particular house at a particular location may be complicated

THE DEMAND FOR PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALITY Privacy and solitude. Although one of man's most powerful tendencies, as has already been pointed out, is his desire to be with his fellows, this desire is not unqualified. Just as men can be satiated with too much eating, and irritated by too much inactivity, so men become "fed up" with companionship. The demand for solitude and privacy is thus fundamentally a physiological demand, like the demand for rest. "The world is too much with us," especially the

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "SELF" Origin and development of a sense of personal selfhood. The expression of individuality in opinion is only one way men have of expressing their personality, individuality, or self. From the beginnings of childhood, men experience an increasing sense of "personal selfhood" which finds various outlets in action or thought. So familiar, indeed, in the normal man is his realization that he is a "self," that it seldom occurs to him that this conception was an attainment

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES The meaning of individual differences. The major part of this volume has been devoted to a consideration of those traits, interests, and capacities which all individuals share, and which may in general be described as the "original nature of man." These distinctive inborn tendencies were treated, for purposes of analysis, in the most general terms, and, on the whole, as if they appeared in the same strength and variety in all individuals. When we thus stand off and abstrac

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION[1] [Footnote 1: Much of the technical material for this chapter is drawn from Leonard Bloomfield's The Study of Language , and W. D. Whitney's The Life and Growth of Language .] It was earlier pointed out that human beings alone possess language. They alone can make written symbols and heard sounds stand for other things, for objects, actions, qualities, and ideas. In this chapter the consideration of language may best be approached from the spoken tongue, under the in

RACIAL AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY That the history of the race is an unbroken continuum goes without saying. What this means in the way of transmission of the arts, the sciences, the religion, the ideas, the customs of one generation to the next, we shall presently see. Cultural continuity is made possible by the more fundamental fact of the actual biological continuity of the race. This biological continuity extends back, as far as we can infer from the scientific evidence, unbrokenly through the

RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The religious experience. Since human nature remains constant in its essential traits, despite the variations it exhibits among different individuals, it is to be expected that certain experiences should be fairly common and recurrent among all human beings. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, jubilance and despair, disillusion and rapture, triumph and frustration, these occur often, and to every man. They are, as it were, the sparks generated by the friction of

ART AND THE ÆSTHETIC EXPERIENCE Art versus nature. In the Career of Reason man has gradually learned to control the world in which he lives in the interests of his own welfare as he imaginatively contemplated it. Deliberate control has been made necessary because of the fact that man is born into a world which was not made for him, but in which he must, if anywhere, grow; in a world which was not designed to fulfill his desires, but where alone his desires can find fulfillment. Art may thus, in

SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD What science is. Science may be considered either as the product of a certain type of human activity, or as a human activity satisfactory even apart from its fruits. As an activity, it is a highly refined form of that process of reflection by which man is, in the first place, enabled to make himself at home in the world. It differs from the ordinary or common-sense process of thinking, as we shall presently see, in being more thoroughgoing, systematic, and sustained

MORALS AND MORAL VALUATION The pre-conditions of morality—Instinct, impulse, and desire. In Art and Science, man attempts to transform the world of nature into conditions more in conformity with his desires. In the enterprise of Morals, man attempts to discover how to control his own nature in the attainment of happiness. We have already had occasion to see that Art, in the broad sense of human contrivance, is made necessary by the incongruity between nature and human nature. We shall examine no