Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/551

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 533

diet the choices of people. At the lower animal levels action is easy to gauge, because life consists in an interplay of stimulus and reaction. Higher up this is complicated by the associative memory, and the response to inner* or outer stimuli is not so sure or uniform. Yet the simplicity and uniformity of the organism's relations with its environment are such that the influence of remembered experience upon present reactions is slight. At the level of primitive man we find successive individual experiences and reactions fusing and giving rise to processes of conscious- ness which yield such constants as language, custom, and myth. Moreover, a considerable portion of psychic energy has become emancipated from stimulus and manifests itself in spontaneous activities of a festal character.

In the civilized man we miss that mechanical simplicity which makes the lower psychic life so transparent and predictable. The key to his behavior lies no longer in the play of stimuli upon him, but in his consciousness. This has gathered in volume and consistency until his center of gravity lies here rather than in current impressions. The mental content has acquired such mass, and experience has been wrought up into such forms idea, concept, formula, ideal that at each moment they are more determinative than are the external conditions. Stable character becomes possible. A quantitative relation between stimulus and reaction may no longer be assumed. The specific response is now repressed, now many times greater than one would expect. Energy no longer flows freely away in the form of play, but is largely absorbed in series of volitional acts, planned with reference to an end.

With the growth in the diameter and complexity of con- sciousness, the man's actions become ever more incalculable to those who attend only to the non-psychic factors, such as physique, temperament, state of health, climate, aspect of nature, the solicitation of the moment. The reason is that life has become spiritualized. The non-psychic factors have become less deci- sive than that organized body of experience we call the person- ality. Hence, in order to anticipate action, it is more important to explore the personality than to attend to the external factors.