Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/397

Rh lower animals, but there is a natural prejudice against applying similar rules to men.

Likewise is this true concerning man from his first growth. He is born with the possibility of various characteristics and individual peculiarities. Just exactly what these will be and how far they will develop depend to a considerable extent upon his environment. Of course, it goes without saying that heredity counts for much, although heredity is not everything. Most of all is it not supreme in view of the fact that our system of education and culture has the strongest tendency for leveling, for mediocrity. Our infant education, our school life, domestic life, social life, all tend to trim away whatever of originality—good or otherwise—the individual may possess. Our methods are mainly inhibitory: we are constantly talking about what one must not do. The decalogue itself, the declaration of our moral and religious code, is couched mostly in terms of negative command. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not worship idols, it says; and this is far different, when reasoned about broadly, from speak the truth, be honest, love God.

Given, then, a tendency to variations from the normal, it follows that our principal care should be to ascertain what this normal is, and to conform to it. But, so far as common experience goes, this is the last thing to be carefully worked out. The tendencies to variation are emphasized by the frequent liability to inferior physical conditions. Some of these are so remote that they would be thought of only by the physician-psychologist, while others are of such common occurrence that every practitioner is familiar with them. Now, one of the most striking of these—unfortunately not frequently noticed except in its ultimate exaggerations—is that disturbance of conception produced locally in the cortex of the brain by which the person is unable to distinguish between the internal processes and their external causal conditions. If the ability to differentiate is impaired, an hallucination is present, dependent upon processes in those parts of the brain which preserve memory pictures of the most varied kinds. As the result of this condition we may have expressions and acts which are seemingly at utter variance with the actual premises from which they start. The familiar example of the different views which two knights looking upon opposite sides of a shield take, is an old and trite attempt at explanation of this condition. In many, many cases it is not merely that people in giving conflicting accounts of a fact see isolated and separate parts thereof; very frequently there is a wider basis: the condition—certainly pathological in its results—of broken connection between internal processes and their external causal conditions. Thus, a child may be reproved by a teacher: we should expect that