2. The tendency to megalomania under the form of pride, and still more of excessive vanity. The remark on the genus irritabile vatum is of old date; but at various epochs the insanity of greatness has raged like an epidemic in the domain of art. It has found its supreme expression in this century in the doctrine of “the divinity of art” proclaimed by the school of Schelling, and surviving among contemporary “æsthetes.” “The beginning of all poetry,” said Schlegel, “is to suspend the march and the laws of reason, to plunge us once more into the beautiful maze of fantasy, the primitive chaos of human nature. The good pleasure of the poet suffers no law above him.” We have gone still farther since then, and an interesting collection might be made of the folly written on this subject. When, sincerely and without prepossessions, we ask ourselves what are the grounds of these high pretensions, of this apotheosis, they are not very evident. Is it because art yields enjoyments far superior to those of the senses? But scientific research, and the love of travelling and exploration, do the same thing. Is it because of its creative function? But we find creation everywhere—in science, mechanic art, politics, commerce, industry: artistic creation is only one form among many others. Is it because it adds an ideal world to the real? Religions do as much, with the advantage that they do not work for the few, the elect, but for the whole world. Malherbe used to say that a good poet is no more useful to the State than a good skittle-player. This is an extreme statement on the other side, for the poet, after all, has a social value; he can foresee, instruct, express the confused feelings of the mass of human beings who arrive through him at the consciousness of life.
If, accepting this form of megalomania as a fact, without discussing its legitimacy, we seek for its psychological causes, we shall find two principal ones.
The first is in the character of the individual, the hypertrophy of his ego. The self-feeling breaks out under an æsthetic mask, as it might do under any other. “Egotist” art is the sincerest expression of this impulse of pride (be it noted in passing that it is the very antipodes of primitive art, which is collective, social, anonymous); but it is an ephemeral form destined to die of inanition. Besides, its expansive force would be, if necessary, limited by the expansion of rival individualities. The production of monsters is a necessity of civilisation. By means of the division of labour, it imposes, in all positions and occupations, an excess of unilateral development, of tendency towards a single aim; it requires specialisation. In primitive times, art was not a profession; the artist, while all the time going on with other work, produced naturally, spontaneously, as a rose-tree gives its roses; it was a superabundance of mental activity which thus found vent. Gradually he fell into the professional track, and now, a victim to his own glory, he is forced to produce, nolens volens, as he can, consciously fabricating works of art as others do articles of commerce, reckless of over-production. It is a hypertrophy of the creative function.
The second cause must be sought in a deeper region than that of consciousness, in that unconscious part of us (whatever opinion may be entertained as to its nature) which produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This state is a positive fact accompanied by physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to itself. First and foremost, it is impersonal and involuntary; it acts like an instinct, when and as it pleases, it may be solicited but not compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply the place of original creation. We have numerous anecdotes relating to the habits of poets, painters, and musicians when composing: striding up and down, lying in bed, seeking complete darkness or full daylight, keeping the feet in water or ice, and the head in the sun, the use of wine, of alcohol, of aromatic drinks, of haschisch or other poisons acting on the intellect. Apart from some oddities not easy to explain, all these proceedings have the same object—viz., to bring about a particular physiological condition, and increase the cerebral circulation in order to provoke or maintain the unconscious activity. The ancients saw in inspiration a supernatural state, a divine action, a possession in which they firmly believed. Certainly, we now look on the Muses, and the various mythological gods of music and poetry, merely as superannuated fictions; yet there remains an impression of mystery, of a superior power, of a rare inborn gift bestowed on a man, which is his special privilege, which acts through him and is unknown to others, something analogous to what we have already met with in the case of theomania. From the vague consciousness of this state of election, this exceptional favour on the part of nature, it is for the artist an easy step to the affirmation of his greatness.
II. The pathology of the creative imagination does not belong to our subject; it is only connected with it through the influence of feeling on its operations. The power of constructing an imaginary world is a human attribute of which no one is devoid, since without it we could never take one step out of the present into the future and form for ourselves an image, however inadequate, of the latter. Observation shows that, from this universal level upward, there are all gradations, from the dry, clear, coherent imagination to incoherent, impalpable reverie and disordered exuberance: now, the increasing predominance of the imagination involves the danger of living entirely in the world of the unreal, which frequently happens. Biographical documents permit us to note the stages in this ascent towards the suprasensible.
There are artists who divide their lives into two parts and keep them distinct; they keep their accounts in double entry; they have their hours of unbridled imagination, and their hours of practical good sense. Ariosto was one of these; it was said of him that he had put his folly into his books and his wisdom into his life.
Others are, for the moment, caught by their own creations, and so violently carried away by them that they are near the state of hallucination. According to the constitution of their minds, they either see their characters or hear them speak; the sounds are in their ears, they breathe odours, taste flavours. On this last point, Flaubert’s declaration, reported by Taine has been doubted, but without sufficient reason.
There are some who appear to be in an almost continuous state of hallucination. Such seems to have been the case of Torquato Tasso. “At certain moments,” Gérard de Nerval used to say, “everything would assume a new aspect to me: secret voices rose from plants, trees, animals, to warn and encourage me. Formless and lifeless objects had mysterious ways, whose meaning I understood.” The “symbolists” of various countries—French, Belgian, English—are now telling us the same thing with more to the like effect. I do not think, however, that we can be deceived by them. They are returning, through a sharpened and refined sympathy, to the primitive period of naïf animism, in which everything in nature has life, sight and voice, in which, as one of them says, the real world assumes the air of fairyland.
Beyond this there is only one step, that of complete and permanent hallucination, such as is to be found in lunatic asylums; the total substitution of an imaginary world for the real, without intermission, doubt, or consciousness of unreality.
This is the clearest part of the subject, but there is one obscure point which must detain us, the more that it is connected with the fundamental phenomenon of emotional life: tendency. If there is one psychological law more firmly established than another, both by facts and argument, it is that every intense representation of an act tends to realise itself; which is inevitable, since the vivid image of a movement is the beginning of a movement—a revival of motor elements included in the image. A man who, standing on the top of a tower, is fascinated by the idea of a possible fall, runs the risk of throwing himself over; the attraction of the abyss is nothing else but this. On the other hand, artists naturally have intense representations and feel things violently; they dream of orgies, love adventures, sanguinary dramas, self-devotion, virtues and vices of all sorts. How comes it that all this is merely imagined, and never passes into action, or becomes a reality?
It is because in their case the law is subject, not to an exception, but to a deviation. The intense representation must be objectivised—i.e., from being internal become external, and it may arrive at this result in two ways: by a real action, as in the case of ordinary people, or by the creation of a work of art which delivers one from the haunting idea: this is the peculiarity of artists. If, besides this, a physiological reason is required, it might be admitted, merely as a hypothesis, that in these cases the motor centres have not, usually, sufficient energy for practical realisation, whence it comes that their satisfaction is a purely æsthetic one.
To keep strictly to our subject, we have a large body of testimony to show that many have only been delivered from their haunting ideas by creative production, as I have already mentioned when treating of memory. It is fixed in a poem, a novel, a drama, a symphony, on the earth, or in stone; we may remember Michelangelo and the sculptures of the Medici chapel, Schiller’s early manner and the “Robbers.” Is not Byron, whose psychological state has been so well analysed by Taine (born for action and adventure, returning, perhaps, to his true vocation when he went to die at Missolonghi), the poet of pirates, of strange and doubtful enterprises? The reader will think it needless for me to enumerate further instances.
This rule, however, is not without exceptions. The law which requires that the intense image shall be actualised is always satisfied; but sometimes this happens in two ways, artistically and practically, at once. Many have lived out their dreams of love, orgies, adventures, violence, and have produced a work of art besides; a double stream has flowed from the same source. Some of the romantic school have revived the aspect of past ages in their houses, their furniture, their lives. Artistic sovereigns have been able to realise their imaginations to the full: Nero, Hadrian, Ludwig II. of Bavaria, and others.
An Italian anthropologist, Ferrero, has pointed out, with some justice, that, in spite of our complaints of the pessimistic, satanic, macabre, or neurotic character of contemporary art, this evil is not without its accompanying good; it is a safety-valve, an overflow channel. Morbid art “is a defence against abnormal tendencies, which, otherwise, would tend to transform themselves into action.” Many content themselves with a literary, plastic, or musical satisfaction. This seems to be indisputable. We may also grant to this author that the suggestion of a work of art has not the power of direct suggestion, that of the actually perceived fact, and that, so far, it is less dangerous. But as it is more widely diffused and acts especially on subjects predisposed to it, it may be questioned whether, in the long run, the gain is serious.
This is a sociological question which it would be out of place to discuss here, and which, consequently, we may dismiss with a bare reference. Our conclusion is that the pathology of the æsthetic sentiment has no independent existence. It is one among many forms of expression (of which we have already pointed out several) of a morbid predisposition which can only follow this track in a small minority of persons—those possessed of the power of creative imagination.
Its origin: the craving for knowledge—Its evolution—Utilitarian period: surprise, astonishment, interrogation—Disinterested period: transition forms—Classification according to intellectual states—Classification according to emotional states: dynamic forms, static forms—Period of passion: its rarity—Pathology—Simple doubt—Dramatic doubt—"Folie du doute"—Mysticism in science: deviation comes, not from the object, but from the method of research.
This name stands for the emotional states—agreeable, disagreeable, or mixed—which accompany the exercise of the intellectual operations. Intellectual emotion may be connected with images, ideas, reasoning, and the logical course of thought; in a word, with all the forms of knowledge. Except in some rare cases, which will be pointed out later on, it scarcely ever rises beyond a medium tone, especially in its higher manifestations.
After having traced it to its origin, we shall have to follow its evolution, which passes through three principal phases: the first, utilitarian and practical; the second, disinterested and scientific; in the third, which is much less frequent, it attains the power and exclusiveness of a passion.
I. This feeling, like all the others, depends on an instinct, a tendency, a craving; it expresses in consciousness its satisfaction or non-satisfaction. This primitive craving—the craving for knowledge—under its instinctive form is called curiosity. It exists in all degrees, from the animal which touches or smells an unknown object, to the all-examining, all-embracing scrutiny of a Goethe; from puerile investigation to the highest speculations; but whatever may be the differences in its object, in its point of application, in its intensity, it always remains identical with itself. Those devoid of it, such as idiots, are eunuchs in the intellectual order.
Assuming this innate craving, how is it developed during the first period?
The first stage is that of surprise. It appears early in the child; quite clearly, at latest, in the twenty-second week, according to Preyer. It is a special emotional state which cannot be traced back to any other, consisting of a shock, a disadaptation. In my opinion, its special and peculiar character lies in its being without contents, without object, save a relation. Its material is a relation, a transition between two states—a mere movement of the mind, and nothing more. The mode of expression and the physiological accompaniments of surprise are very clearly defined. The description of these will be found in Darwin (Expression of the Emotions, ch. xii.); the eyes and mouth are wide open, the eyebrows raised, the sudden shock is followed by immobility, the pulsations of the heart and the respiratory movements are accelerated, etc.
The second stage is that of wonder. I think with Bain and Sully,[229] that the distinction between these two stages is not a vain subtlety. Surprise is momentary, wonder is stable; one is a disadaptation, the other a readaptation; one is without objective material, the other has for its material some strange or unaccustomed object. It is this second stage, no doubt, which Descartes called admiration, and which he placed among his six primary passions:—"Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul which leads it to consider with attention the objects which appear to it rare and extraordinary."[230] In fact, wonder is the awakening of the attention, of which it has the principal characteristics—unity of consciousness, convergence towards a single object, intensity of perception or representation, adaptation of movements.[231] In the beginning, before wonder is accompanied by pleasure (or pain, as the case may be), it has a peculiar character approximating to what we have called the neutral state, or that of simple excitation.
The third stage is that of interrogation, of reflections succeeding to the consternation produced by the first shock. This is the stage of curiosity properly so called, which consists in two questions, put implicitly and explicitly: What is that? What is the use of it? What is the concrete nature of this object? and what can be its utility? Primitive peoples, children, animals, incessantly put to themselves this double question; not, certainly, in clear and analytical terms, but instinctively and by their actions. The dog, brought face to face with an unknown object, looks at it, smells it, approaches, withdraws, ventures to touch it, returns, and begins again; he is pursuing this investigation after his own fashion; he is solving a double problem of nature and utility.[232] The interrogation consists in assimilating the new object to our former perceptions or representations—classing it, in fact.
Is primitive man curious? Herbert Spencer alleges a large number of facts in proof of his distaste for novelty.[233] However, the craving for knowledge seems to be very unequally distributed among the various races; the only universal fact appearing to be that primitive curiosity is limited to very simple things, all of which have, or seem to have, some practical utility. Curiosity and the emotional state which accompanies it have no other end than the preservation of the individual—just as we have seen with regard to the tendency to live in communities, or to revere the gods, in this same initial period of evolution. To be wide awake, to make inquiries as to what will help or harm one, in a word, knowledge in the practical order, is a powerful weapon in the struggle for life; a cause of selection in favour of the curious, and at the expense of the incurious. It is the survival of this entirely utilitarian curiosity which explains why, at the present day, uncultured and even semi-civilised peoples object to the entrance into their country of travellers from a distance for the purpose of geological or other scientific explorations; they are always suspicious of a search for treasure, of espionage, or of some unknown ill deed on the part of the strangers.
II. How did the transition to the disinterested period come about? We may admit, with Sully,[234] that this took place through the natural, innate inclination of the human intellect towards the extraordinary, the strange, the marvellous. The same tendency which, under its creative form, engenders religious, poetical, social myths, attempts under the form of research to discover instead of imagining causes.[235]
We are here at the point of junction between the æsthetic and the intellectual sentiments, which will presently bifurcate, and pursue each its own course. This inquiry is only half disinterested, however, for if man tries to penetrate the mystery of things it is in the hope of profiting thereby.
For the rest, however this transition may have come about, it took place when the struggle for existence became less keen, and it was possible to cultivate disinterested research for its own sake. Next, curiosity became scientific emotion, and gradually extended itself to every kind of investigation: the intellectual sentiment was formed in all its fulness.
It has been studied with a certain favour by psychologists, especially those of the school of Herbart, or those who have felt his influence, under the name of “feelings of relation,” "feelings connected with the cause of representations." I do not intend to follow them through their tedious and uninstructive task of divisions, subdivisions, and distinctions worthy of the schoolmen of the fourteenth century. Besides, the alleged classification of the intellectual feelings varies from one writer to another—one giving fifteen, another sixty. It is an artificial method, a labyrinth, a source, not of clearness, but of obscurity. I defy the subtlest psychologist to note and fix the delicate gradations of feeling which, ex hypothesi, should answer to this endless enumeration.[236] But its most serious defect lies in its including only the intellectual and not the emotional states.
I can only admit one division, which has the advantage of simplicity, and, more especially, of being based on the very nature of the emotional process. This is, into the pleasures and pains accompanying research or the acquisition of knowledge, and those which are attached to its possession, or the state of being without it. The former are dynamic, the second static.
Intellectual emotion, under its dynamic form, depends on the quantity of energy expended. In fact, it is only a particular case of the emotional state accompanying every form of activity directed towards an end compatible with success or failure; it is only one form of self-feeling, differing only in its object, not in its nature, from the feeling of the explorer or the hunter. The search for knowledge is a hunt like any other, truth being the game, and just as many sportsmen find more charm in the vicissitudes of their expedition than in their spoils, so many truth-seekers will accept as their own, Lessing’s well-known saying: “If I were offered the choice between already ascertained truth and the pleasure of finding it out, I would choose the second.”
Under its static form, intellectual emotion is still a particular case of self-feeling, whose principal manifestation is the sense of power, or its opposite. It is one form of this sense, by the same right as the pleasure of physical strength, the pleasure of riches, or their opposites. It approximates especially to the feeling inspired by possession or property; it is felt, under its positive form as augmentation, under its negative as diminution and poverty; ignorance is a retrenchment, a limit.
To sum up, intellectual emotion is simple enough; it is only the transfer of the emotional manifestations already known to us, to a group of mental operations. There is no need, therefore, to insist further on the matter.
III. We have still to follow it into a third stage, which it rarely attains, because pure ideas have little attraction for average human beings—viz., the cases in which it becomes a passion. It is evident that the intellectual passion cannot exist outside the dynamic group, possession being, in the nature of things, a calm pleasure, or, as the ancients said, a pleasure at rest.
We might find numberless instances in the biographies of scientific men and philosophers. Some names suggest themselves at once: Kepler, Spinoza, and many others who devoted their lives strictly and exclusively to the pursuit of truth. It may be objected, however, that, in certain cases and with certain men, nothing proves that the intellectual passion has not been fed or sustained by foreign elements; that the love of learning, though the principal motive, has been the only one; that it has not been adulterated with others—e.g., desire for position, influence, riches, fame, glory, in short, ambition under its manifold aspects. It is not easy to find absolutely pure cases; for, besides the rarity of the intellectual passion, the terms in which the demand is framed are almost contradictory, since the men we want to find must be unknown to fame. The following instance, however, seems to me to answer perfectly to all the conditions. Descuret, in his Médécine des Passions, gives a brief biographical sketch of a Hungarian named Mentelli, a philologist and mathematician, who, without a definite end in view, simply for the pleasure of learning and to satisfy his intellectual cravings, consecrated his whole life to study, having apparently no other want. “Living at Paris, in a filthy lodging, the use of which was allowed him out of charity, he had cut off from his expenditure all that was not absolutely necessary to sustain life. His outlay—apart from the purchase of books—amounted to seven sous a day, three of which went for food and four for light; for he worked twenty hours a day, without intermission, except on one day in the week, when he gave lessons in mathematics, on the fees received for which he subsisted. All he needed was water, which he fetched for himself, potatoes which he cooked over his lamp, oil to feed the latter, and coarse brown bread. He slept in a large packing-case, into which, during the day, he used to put his feet wrapped in a blanket or a little hay. An old arm-chair, a table, a jug, a tin pot, and a piece of tin roughly bent into a convex shape, and serving as a lamp, formed the rest of his furniture. Mentelli saved the price of washing by wearing no linen. A soldier’s coat bought at the barracks and only replaced in the last extremity, a pair of nankeen trousers, a fur cap, and huge sabots composed his entire costume. In 1814 the cannon-balls of the allies fell all round the lodging he was then occupying, but failed to disturb him.... During the first epidemic of cholera at Paris, it was necessary to employ armed force to compel this scientific anchorite to interrupt his studies, so as to clean out his pestilential cell. He lived thus, uncomplainingly, and indeed happily, for thirty years, without a day’s illness. At last (on December 22nd, 1836), at the age of sixty, having gone as usual to fetch water from the Seine, his foot slipped, he fell into the river, then in flood, and was drowned. Mentelli left no work behind him, in fact there remains no trace of his long researches.”[237]
Other instances might be quoted, but they would appear trifling by comparison with this. Great anonymous collaborations, like those of the Benedictines, have certainly enlisted the services of enthusiasts of this kind; thus Dom Mabillon was the type of a worker animated with passionate fervour, modest, unknown, punctually fulfilling his religious duties, and when free from these, travelling about the world on foot to collect historical documents.
Thus we find cases where the love of knowledge alone, untarnished by other motives, has all the characteristics of a fixed and tenacious passion, filling the whole of life, and expressing the whole nature of a man.
The intellectual feeling also has its pathology, in connection with which I have to point out two principal cases: the extreme forms of doubt, and the introduction of mysticism into science.
1. Doubt is a state of unstable equilibrium in which successive contradictory representations neither mutually exclude nor conciliate each other. I distinguish simple doubt, dramatic doubt, and the insanity of doubt.
In simple or limited doubt, intellectual indecision has as its emotional accompaniment a slight uneasiness, a state of discomfort resulting from an unsatisfied desire, a tendency which comes to nothing. Under this form doubt is normal, legitimate, and even necessary; it becomes morbid when it takes a chronic, permanent, and aggressive form, when it produces a violent shock and a long reaction.
This is the doubt which I call dramatic, because it is an internal convulsion, a crisis which often lasts a long time and repeats itself. It precedes great conversions and then subsides, but sometimes lasts through life, as with Pascal. There is nothing surprising in its violence, since it is, in the intellectual order, the equivalent of an intense, incurable, and hopeless love; in the two cases the situation and effects are identical.
The insanity of doubt takes us further into the intricacies of pathology. It is “a chronic disease of the mind, characterised by constant uneasiness.” It presents numerous varieties, which have been classified by alienists. Some do not pass beyond the region of every-day trivialities, as the man who will return twenty times to see whether he has really locked his door. Others exhaust themselves in abstruse and insoluble questions, never able to satisfy themselves or stop, like an ever-turning wheel. Others, the timid, lose themselves in endless scruples and puerilities. But, whatever be the matter to which the mind applies itself, the psychological process remains the same. It is a questioning without pause or limit, accompanied by distress, constriction of the head, epigastric oppression, vaso-motor troubles, etc. There is the ardent desire to find a fixed state for thought without the ability to do so.
Under its gravest form it is “the complete loss of all notion and feeling of reality.” It is absolute scepticism, not theoretic and speculative, after the manner of the Pyrrhonians, but practical, bearing not only on ideas, abstract conceptions, memories, reasonings, but even on perceptions and actions; the exercise of the intellect is not accompanied by any belief—i.e., any state of mind which presupposes a reality. “I exist,” says one of these patients, “but outside real life and in despite of myself ...; something which does not seem to be in my body impels me to act as I formerly did, but I cannot succeed in believing that my actions are real. I do everything mechanically and unconsciously. My individuality has completely disappeared; the way in which I see things makes me incapable of realising them, of feeling that they exist.... Even when I see and touch, the world appears to me like a phantom, a gigantic hallucination.... I eat, but it is a shadow of food entering the shadow of a stomach; my pulse is only the shadow of a pulse.... I am perfectly conscious of the absurdity of these ideas, but cannot overcome them.”[238] This state belongs, in fact, to the category of conscious madness.
But it is not essentially a disease of the understanding: the intellectual element is secondary; this perpetual doubt, these endless questionings are merely the effects; the cause lies in a weakening of the emotional life and the will, rendering them incapable of arriving at a belief—i.e., an affirmation—and, more deeply still, in a disturbance of the organic life, as demonstrated by sensory perversions, motor enfeeblement, and the melancholic state of the patient with its physiological accompaniments, and lowering of the vital functions.
2. The introduction of mysticism into science, though particularly prevalent just now, is an intellectual disease incident to all ages. In the beginning, scientific research had no clear consciousness either of its method or its object.
The earliest Greek philosophers speculated at once on first causes, second causes, and practical applications, without drawing any hard and fast distinction between these subjects. Thales constructed a cosmology and calculated eclipses; Pythagoras reduced the universe to numbers, but he also greatly advanced the study of mathematics, and founded a communistic society on his own principles. By slow degrees the proper domain of science became recognised: the determination of second causes, of natural laws. At the Renaissance, alchemy, astrology, and the occult sciences were discredited, in spite of their provisional services, and some positive discoveries due to them. At present, the methods are fixed, in their main lines; a fact which permits us to determine the anomalies and deviations of the intellectual sentiment.
How does it deviate from the normal track? It is needless to remark that it is not by seeking the unknown, since this is its fundamental task, for every day and for all time. Is it by pursuing the unknowable? This view is scarcely tenable, for how can we determine where the unknowable begins? Let us admit, for the sake of argument, and in order to simplify matters, that this word covers the whole region of first causes, taken as inaccessible; but, having eliminated these, only by an arbitrary act can it be decided that this or that thing is unknowable. The history of science supplies us with proofs in abundance. To give but one example, which is closely connected with psychology: one of the greatest physiologists of the century, J. Müller, declared that the time necessary for perceiving a sensation is not measurable and can never be determined; this, however, did not prevent Helmholtz from measuring it some years later, and it is well known what successful experiments have since been made in that direction.
It is not so much in the object pursued as in the method employed that the love of science may go astray. Scientific mysticism consists in replacing regular methods by intuition and divination; in expecting everything from an inward revelation, a supernatural illumination; in substituting the subjective for the objective, belief for demonstration and verification, individual for universal validity. True, it would be a great mistake to assert that intuition and divination have not played an important part in the discoveries of scientists; they lie at the origin of nearly all, and there is a certain point where the psychological conditions of scientific and of artistic creation coincide; but no scientist worthy of the name will confound the vision of a truth with its demonstration. He does not allow it to rank as scientific till he has furnished his proofs. Mysticism is the reintegration, in science, of the love of the marvellous, and the illusory desire of acting on nature without preliminary research, work, or trouble.
Intellectual emotion, therefore, has two principal morbid forms: doubt, which, at the last extremity, ends in dissolution; and mysticism, which is only a deviation, and whose essence consists in substituting imagination for logical methods.[239]
To sum up, the intellectual emotion moves between two poles: one, where it involves a confused knowledge and plays a preponderant part under that instinctive form which may be called flair, or intuition; the other, where it is only the pale shadow of the exercise of abstract thought. Under this last form it is the type to which all other emotions approximate, when the affective element is impoverished—viz., moral emotion in rationalistic theorists (the Stoics, Kant), æsthetic emotion in critics, and religious emotion in metaphysicians and dogmatic theologians.
Necessity of the synthetic point of view in psychology—Historical summary of theories of character: physiological direction, psychological direction—Two marks of the real character: unity, stability—Elimination of acquired characters—Classificatory procedure: four degrees—Genera: the sensitive, the active, the apathetic—Species—Secondary function of the intellect: its mode of action—Sensitives: the humble, the contemplative, the analytical, the purely emotional—Active type: the medium, the superior—Apathetic type: pure type, intelligent type, calculators—Varieties: the sensitive-active, the apathetic-active, the apathetic-sensitive, the temperate—Substitutes for character: partial characters; (a) intellectual form, (b) emotional form.
Several writers have on various occasions pointed out, with some reason, that the great analytical work carried on in our day, in the domain of psychology, ought to be completed by studies of a directly opposite character; i.e., analytic and abstract psychology has as its indispensable complement a synthetic and concrete psychology. Like every other science, ordinary psychology proceeds by means of generalities. Whether it is concerned with percepts or concepts, with the association of ideas or with movements, with the attention or the emotions, it takes these manifestations, wherever it finds them, in men or in animals, and attempts to explain them by tracing them back to their most general conditions. It starts with the implied assumption that instincts, habits, intellectual, emotional, voluntary phenomena are to be found in every man. But in what proportions are these elements combined in order to constitute the various psychological individualities? What complex assemblages can they produce? Is there a preponderance of emotion, intelligence, or action? Has the preponderance of one any influence on the development of the rest? These questions, and many other analogous ones, are not put by analytical psychology, and justly so, because they do not come within its province. Yet it is worth while to put them, were it only for the sake of practical utility.
It has been said with regard to medicine that “there are no diseases, only diseased persons.” This is why pathological treatises, describing the general characteristics of a disease in the abstract, are necessarily supplemented by those clinical studies which describe concrete, particular cases. In the same way, in psychology, it might be said that there is no such thing as humanity, but only human beings. It is not sufficient to describe the manifestations of the mind in general, we must also take into account the individuals in whom they are incarnated and the varieties which they reveal to us. The synthetic point of view is neither visionary nor negligible, and less so in psychology than elsewhere.
A very widespread error consists in believing that when we have resolved a complex whole into its elements we have all the constituents. We are apt to forget that the greater number of combinations resemble rather chemical combinations than simple mixtures, that they are not formed by simple addition, and that there is more in the synthesis than there can be in the analysis.
The elimination of the synthetic point of view becomes less and less admissible as we rise from inorganic nature to life, consciousness, society. Even in the inorganic world, which contains only the general properties of matter in the rough, certain composite bodies already show a sort of individuality—i.e., a way of acting and reacting peculiar to themselves. This is best seen in crystals; their growth may be interrupted and go on again; when broken or mutilated they can repair their losses; they may undergo disaggregation or profound modification, but so long as one portion remains unaltered it still has the power of growing and escaping “senility.” Two totally different substances, even, may be almost inextricably intertwined, while preserving each its own individuality. In the world of life the cell and the ovule have a very definite individuality; then come aggregates of a vague, unstable, and precarious unity, such as those of vegetables, hydrozoa, and those fixed or wandering animal colonies which have been called federations; but after passing through these stages of evolution, the higher animal forms assert their individuality so decidedly that argument is needless. The same may be said of psychology. What has not been said of the unity and utility of the ego, considered as a simple and indissoluble entity? The present writer will not be suspected of an inclination towards this view. Yet it must be acknowledged that we have been so much occupied of late years with disturbances, alterations, disaggregations, and dissolutions of personality, that the triumph of the analytical method has been complete, and the synthetic side of the subject somewhat neglected.
Without insisting on a question of too great extent to be treated incidentally—viz., the opposition between analytic and synthetic psychology,—we may say that there are two equally legitimate ways of considering all things in nature: the analytic, abstract manner, which recognises only laws, genera, species, generalities; and the synthetic, concrete manner, which sees only particular facts, events, individuals. Each one presupposes and completes the other: they are two stages of the same method.
So far it is clear that, in the new psychology, the analytic process has prevailed. In spite of these unfavourable conditions, some valuable work has been done in the other direction, the principal being the determination of certain types of imagination, visual, auditory, motor, and other varieties. But the chief problem proposed to synthetic psychology is elsewhere, in the region of action, not of knowledge. It is practical, and consists in determining the principal types of individuality from the kind of action and reaction which has its source in the feelings and the will. This is called by a name slightly vague, but consecrated by usage—character.
The aim of the present chapter is not to treat this difficult subject, but simply to attempt a classification of characters, and to show their relations with affective psychology.
I shall pass by in silence the history of the question; it would be long and monotonous. It seems to me that it has developed in two directions, one especially physiological, the other especially psychological.
The physiological theory is very ancient, and was for centuries the only one current. It is summed up in the classical doctrine of the four temperaments, which dates from the Greek physicians. These great observers had deduced it from their long experience, adding, it is true, chimerical hypotheses as to the predominance of the liquids of the organism or the cosmic elements. Criticised, defended, abandoned, taken up again, modified, increased by Cabanis by the addition of the nervous and muscular temperaments, reduced by others to three, it has remained substantially the same up to the present day. Psychology has been content with adapting this arrangement to its own use, and translating the terms into its own language. For the rest, this work was, so to speak, done in advance; for the description of each temperament enumerates not merely physical, but also psychical characteristics. The sanguine is reputed to be light, versatile, superficial, accommodating; the melancholic, deep, self-involved, hesitating; the choleric has an active imagination, and intense, tenacious passions, difficult to supplant; the lymphatic (or phlegmatic) is soft, cold, with slow reactions and dull imagination. The detailed description of these four types may be found almost anywhere, so that I need not dwell on them. I notice that, during the present century, it is mostly in Germany that this psycho-physiological theory has been dominant. Kant adopted and developed it (Anthropologie, Bk. III.). Lotze substitutes the term “sentimental” for that of “melancholic,” as being less equivocal; while Wundt, in his Physiologische Psychologie, reproduces Kant’s divisions almost unchanged.
The psychological theory is more recent, and, I believe, of English origin. We know that J. S. Mill demanded the constitution of a science of character (“Ethology”) to be deduced from the general laws of psychology. Bain seems to have attempted a response to this appeal in his book On the Study of Character (1861). This is not the place to analyse his work. Half of it is devoted to a criticism of the phrenologists, who also, in their way, were making an examination of our subject without paying much attention to the temperaments. It is only of importance to note that Bain’s position is strictly, rigorously psychological; he admits three fundamental types: the intellectual, emotional, and volitional or energetic. More recently, M. B. Perez[241] has proposed a classification of characters, based solely on an objective phenomenon—viz., the movements, their rapidity and energy. He distinguishes, in the first place, the lively, the slow, and the eager; further, as mixed types, the lively-ardent (vifs-ardents), the slow-ardent, and the deliberate (pondérés). Paulhan traces back the law explaining the formation of character to a more general law: that of “systematic association—i.e., the aptitude inherent in every element, desire, idea, or image of exciting other elements which may associate themselves with it in working towards a common end.” He has given a very detailed description of the numerous and varied forms to be met with in ordinary life, illustrating it with a vast multitude of instances. Fouillée makes a separate study of temperaments and characters, and divides the latter into three categories: the “sensitive,” the “intellectual,” and the “voluntary,” with several subdivisions.[242]
If we now try to take up the question again at our own risk, the first thing to be done is clearly to determine the essential marks of a true individuality, a real character. This will permit us to eliminate at once all that resembles it, but is not: appearances, simulacra, phantoms of individuality.
In order to constitute a character, two conditions are necessary and sufficient: unity and stability.
Unity consists in a manner of acting and reacting which is always consistent with itself. In a true individuality the tendencies are convergent, or at least there is one which subdues the others to itself. If we consider man as a collection of instincts, cravings, and desires, they form, here, a tightly fastened bundle acting in one direction only.
Stability is merely unity continued in time. If it does not last, this cohesion of the desires is of no value for the determination of character. It must be maintained or repeated, always the same in identical or analogous circumstances. The special mark of a true character is, that it shall make its appearance in childhood and last through life. We know beforehand what it will or will not do in decisive circumstances. All this is as much as to say that a true character is innate.
This disposition might be found fault with as being too ideal. In truth, invariable characters, all of a piece, are rare enough; yet some exist, and it is the conscious or sub-conscious notion of this type which influences our judgment. There is an instinctive craving for this ideal unity in our psychological, moral, æsthetic conception of character. It does not please us to see a contradiction between a man’s beliefs and his acts. We are annoyed if an ascertained rascal should show a good side, or a very good person some weakness. Yet what more frequent? On the stage, or in a novel, undecided or contradictory characters do not attract us. This is because individuality appears to us as an organisation which must be governed by an inner logic following inflexible laws. We are very ready to put down to duplicity and hypocrisy what is often only a conflict between incoherent tendencies; and it is not the least important among the practical results of recent investigations into personality to have shown that its unity is merely ideal, and that, without going the length of mental dissolution and madness, it may be full of unreconciled contradictions.
These reserves being made, our definition of character has the advantage of supplying us with a criterion which remarkably simplifies our task; for it is clear that, among the innumerable individuals of the human species, there must be some, and these by far the greater number, who have neither unity nor stability nor personal characteristics peculiar to themselves. This immense number of defective cases, which are ruled out of our study, may be divided into two categories—the amorphous and the unstable.
The amorphous are legion. I understand, by this term, those who have no special form of their own, the acquired characters. In these there is nothing innate, nothing resembling a vocation; nature has made them plastic to excess. They are entirely the product of circumstances, of their environment, of the education they have received from men and things. Some other person, or, failing that, the social environment, wills for them, and acts through them. They are not voices, but echoes. They are this or that, according to circumstances. Chance decides on their occupation, their marriage, and other things; once caught in the machinery of life, they act like every one else. They represent, not an individual, but a specific, professional character; they are copies, to an unlimited number, of an original which once existed. It has been said that the production of amorphous people is the speciality of civilisation, to which we owe their present abundance. This is only half true. It is certain that excessive culture rubs down the angles of character, and that, by raising some and lowering others, it tends to a general dead level. But we must not forget that, at the other extreme of social life, in the savage state, where the manners, customs, ritual, traditions of the tribe or clan, which can neither be discussed nor infringed, weigh heavily on each individual, where every innovation is rejected with horror (this is what Lombroso calls misoneism), the conditions are also very unfavourable to individual development. It seems, if we may judge from history, as if the period best suited for the growth of true characters were the half-civilised ages, such as the first centuries of the Roman Republic and of the Middle Ages, or epochs of disturbance like the Italian Renaissance, and, in general, all periods of revolution.
The unstable are the disjecta and scoriæ of civilisation, which may justly be accused of multiplying them. They are the complete antithesis of our definition, having neither unity nor permanence. Capricious, changing from instant to instant, by turns inert and explosive, uncertain and disproportionate in their reactions, acting in the same manner under different circumstances, and varying their actions in the same circumstances, they are indefiniteness itself. These are, in different degrees, morbid forms, expressing the inability of tendencies and desires to attain cohesion, convergence, unity. We shall return to these in the next chapter.
These two categories being excluded, the first because they are simply a product of their environment, and the second as being only an incoherent bundle of almost impersonal impulses, there remain the self-existent characters, which we must attempt to classify. Like every good classification, this must be systematically conducted—i.e., descending, step by step, from the general to the particular. It must determine genera, species, varieties, and thus, at last, reach the individual. The principal defect in the doctrine of the four temperaments (adapted to psychology, as we have already seen) is that of being too general: it remains, as it were, suspended in air, without intermediary, without middle term, or anything to connect it with the individual. It states the genera, nothing more. For the rest, some writers appear to have perceived this lacuna, having described mixed temperaments, but they are far from being agreed as to the nature and number of the latter.
The attempt at classification I am about to make includes four degrees of increasing definiteness and diminishing generality. On the first stage, we have the most general conditions, a mere framework, almost empty, and not corresponding to any concrete reality, but analogous to the zoological and botanical genera. In the second degree (corresponding to species), we have the fundamental types of character, pure forms, but real, this time, and, later on, justified and verified by observation. In the third degree, the mixed or composite forms (corresponding to varieties) are less clearly defined than the preceding. In the fourth degree, we have those substitutes or equivalents for character (they might also be called partial characters) which depart more and more widely from the pure type, but, in many people, take its place.
We may begin by laying down the most general conditions for the determination of character, the main guiding lines, the dominant traits which impress on it a clear and decisive mark.
As the psychic life, considered from the most general point of view, can be reduced to two fundamental manifestations: feeling and acting, we have in the first place, broadly speaking, distinguished two types: the sensitive and the active.
1. The sensitive, who might also be called the affective or emotional, have as their special characteristic the exclusive predominance of sensibility. Impressionable to excess, they are like instruments in a perpetual state of vibration, and their life is for the most part inward. The physiological bases of this type of character are not easy to enumerate; but if we admit what seems to me incontestable—viz., that the internal organic sensations of vegetative life are the principal source of the affective development, as external sensations are the source of the intellectual development,—we must admit also that here the balance inclines in favour of the first. It may be known by the extreme susceptibility of the nervous system to agreeable or disagreeable impressions. In general, this type may be said especially to include the pessimists; for experience as old as the world itself proves that sensitive subjects suffer more from a small misfortune than they enjoy a great happiness. Uneasy, timid, fearful, meditative, contemplative, such are the very vague terms in which they may be for the moment characterised, without passing beyond the region of generalities.
2. The active have as their dominant characteristic a natural and continually renewed tendency to action. They are like machines always in motion, and their life is mostly directed outwards. The physiological basis of this type of character consists in a rich fund of energy, a superabundance of life,—what Bain calls spontaneity,—which is very different from the intermittent and explosive reaction of the unstable, and which, in the end, amounts to a good state of nutrition. Taken in mass, and under their pure form, they are optimists, because they feel strong enough to struggle with obstacles and overcome them, and take pleasure in the struggle. Gay, enterprising, bold, daring, rash—such words describe their principal characteristics.
H. Schneider, in an interesting article on zoological psychology,[243] has attempted to show that all special movements in the higher animals are only differentiations of two simple, primary movements: contraction and expansion. The tendency to contraction is the source of all impulses and reactions, including flight, by which the animal acts in a manner tending towards its own preservation. The tendency to expansion shows itself in impulses and instincts of an aggressive form: feeding, fighting, seizing on a female, etc. The antithesis between the sensitive and the active connects itself also with this fundamental contrast between contraction and expansion, between the tendency towards the inward life in some and that towards the outward life in others.
3. The above classification is not sufficient. No doubt, if we confine ourselves to theory, there is nothing to be taken into account beyond feeling and acting; but observation teaches us that it is necessary to form a third class, that of the apathetic, corresponding, on the whole, to the lymphatic temperament of physiology. Its general characteristics are very well defined; they consist in a state of atony—a lowering of the powers of feeling and acting beneath the ordinary level. The two other classes are positive; this is negative, but very real. The apathetic characters must not be confounded with the amorphous, the first being innate and the second acquired: the special mark of the pure type of apathetic is inertia. He is not plastic, like the amorphous type: there is no hold over him. He cannot feel enough to induce him to act. He is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but indifferent. Idle, sluggish, inert, careless: such are the epithets which usually describe him. The physiological basis of his character is the often-described lymphatic constitution—lowering of the nervous tension, increase of the lymphatic circulation according to some, weakening of the circulation of the blood according to others. However, we must not conclude that it is only a barren soil, on which nothing will grow. Add a third element,—which till now we have purposely refrained from mentioning,—intelligence, and the apathetic character assumes an individuality, as we shall see presently.
In this definition of the genera, of the fundamental types reduced to their most general form, are we to admit a fourth type—the temperate? We might say that when we have (a) predominance of feeling, (b) predominance of action, (c) apathy in the absence of both the foregoing, there is required, as a complement, a fourth state of perfect equilibrium between sensibility and action. This type exists, but I cannot admit that it should be included in a primary definition. It is a mixed, composite form, whose study is consequently out of place here. Besides, we must not allow ourselves any illusions; every character is hypertrophied or atrophied; the “perfectly balanced” character is an ideal analogous to the temperamentum temperatum of physiologists; or else it approaches the amorphous.
Leaving this very general classification, let us enter upon our definition of the second degree. Let us pass from genera to species. Here there enters on the scene a new factor: the intellectual dispositions.
The term feeling is applied to two distinct groups of psychic manifestations, originally confounded—the affective and the representative states. So far, in employing this term we have taken account of the affective states only, because they and the movements are the sole primary constituents of character. They form the lower stratum, which is the first to make its appearance: the intellectual dispositions form a second layer, superimposed on the first. What is fundamental in the character is the instincts, tendencies, impulses, desires, and feelings; all these, and nothing else. This fact is so easily verified, and so obvious, that there would be no need to insist on it if the majority of psychologists had not confused the question by their incurable intellectualist prejudices—i.e., by their efforts to connect everything with intelligence and explain everything by means of it, to lay it down as the irreducible type of mental life. This view is quite untenable, for just as, physiologically, the vegetative life precedes the animal life based on it, so, psychologically, the affective precedes the intellectual life, which is based on it. The groundwork of every animal is “appetite” in Spinoza’s sense, “will” in Schopenhauer’s—i.e., feeling and acting, not thinking. I do not wish to insist on this point, which would require to be developed at great length; I forbear, not on account of the scarcity, but of the superabundance of proof.[244]
Let us confine ourselves to some decisive remarks which belong, in the strictest sense, to our subject. As the character expresses the inmost qualities of the individual, it can only be composed of essentially subjective elements, and these must not be sought among the intellectual qualities, since the intellect, in the ascending evolution from sensations to perceptions, images, concepts, tends more and more towards the impersonal.
We might in addition prove, by means of numerous examples, that the excessive development of the intelligence frequently involves atrophy of the character, clearly establishing their independence. The great manipulators of abstractions, confined to pure speculation, tend to reduce their ordinary life to a monotonous routine, whence emotion, passion, the unforeseen in action, are as far as possible excluded (Kant, Newton, Gauss, and many others). Schopenhauer was right in saying that many men of genius are “monsters by excess,” i.e., by hypertrophy of the intellectual faculties. “If normal man,” he says, “is made up of two-thirds will and one-third intellect, the man of genius consists of two-thirds intellect and one-third will.”[245] There are exceptions, as we all know. They prove, not that the development of the intellect favours that of the character, but that in some cases it does not fetter it. Is it not also a matter of common observation that these two factors, character and intellect, are often discordant? Men think in one way and act in another; they write sublime treatises on a morality which they do not practise; they preach action and remain inactive; they have the tenderest hearts in the world, and dream of plans for universal destruction.[246]
Intellect, then, is not a fundamental constituent of the character; it is its light, but not its life, nor, consequently, its action. The character sends its roots down into the unconscious—i.e., into the individual organism: this is what makes it so difficult to penetrate and modify. The intellectual dispositions can only exercise an indirect action in its constitution. We have now to see by what mechanism they do so.
We know that the various emotions (fear, anger, love, contempt, etc.) show themselves in certain spontaneous movements and attitudes of the body, which constitute their natural expression. Emotion is the cause; the movements are the effect. It is less generally known that movements and attitudes of the body, artificially produced, are capable (in some cases, and to a slighter degree) of exciting the corresponding emotions. Remain for some time in an attitude of sadness, and you will feel sad. By mingling in cheerful society and regulating your outward behaviour in accordance with it, you may awaken in yourself a transient gaiety. If the arm of a hypnotised subject is placed, with clenched fist, in a threatening attitude, the corresponding impression spontaneously appears in the face and in the rest of the body; the same holds good for the expressions of love, prayer, contempt, etc. Here the movement is the cause and the emotion the effect. The two cases are reducible to a single formula. There is an indissoluble association between a given movement and a given feeling. Emotion excites movements, movements excite emotion; but with this very important difference: that movements are not always capable of exciting emotion, and when they do succeed, the states they bring about are neither intense nor permanent. In a word, the action from without inwards is always inferior to the action from within outwards.
It is exactly the same psychological law which governs the relations between the affective and the intellectual dispositions in the manifestations of the character.
Let us (merely in a metaphorical way, and for the sake of making the matter clear) call the action of the feelings on the ideas, action from below upwards, and that of the ideas on the feelings, action from above downwards.
The action from below upwards is solid, tenacious, energetic, efficacious; it has its strength within itself, drawing it from the region of the unconscious—i.e., from the organisation. When it reaches the consciousness, it merely becomes sensible. Thus what is at first a vague sense of discomfort, asserts itself in the consciousness as hunger, and may lead to theft, murder, and all sorts of excesses. Another state of the organism shows itself in floating, indeterminate desires, then asserts itself as love for some particular being, and may in the end break out like a thunderstorm. It would be superfluous to review in like manner the whole of the passions, making the same comments. Whether simple or complex, their evolution is the same. The moral, religious, or æsthetic vocations have their periods of incubation, of revelation, and of action. The saying of Correggio, on looking at the painting of a master, whether true or false historically, is psychologically true.
On the other hand, the action from above downwards is unstable, vacillating, variable, weak, and of doubtful efficacy. It has only a borrowed, extrinsic force. The psychological (and often pedagogic) problem stated is the following: How to bring about intellectual states, ideal images, so that they may, if they can, provoke, by way of reaction, the corresponding feelings. The action is mediate, indirect, and usually fails or shows very poor results. The sensibility produced is entirely intellectual; and who does not know that intellectual passions are mere phantoms, which a real passion sweeps away like a gust of wind?
In conclusion, the action of the emotions on the movements resembles that of the feelings on the ideas; the action of the movements on the emotions is like that of the ideas on the feelings.
Having thus briefly established the secondary and superficial part played by the intellect in the formation of character, let us return to our classification. We are now face to face with real individuals, unequally endowed with energy, sensibility, and intelligence. Let us now take our three great skeleton divisions, and fill them up, one by one.
I. The Sensitive.—In this genus I distinguish three principal species, which I am about to describe, taking the simplest first, and consequently departing more and more from the pure type as we approach the mixed characters.
1. The first species cannot be designated by any proper name; it is that of the humble. Excessive sensibility, limited or moderate intelligence, no energy—such are their constituent elements. Every one knows such persons, for they are frequently met with. Their dominant note is timidity, fear, and all paralysing modes of feeling. Like La Fontaine’s hare, they live in perpetual uneasiness. They are afraid for themselves, for their families, for their small position or business, for the present, for the future. They worry themselves about everybody’s opinion, even that of unknown passers-by. They tremble for their salvation in the other life, and in this they feel their own nothingness, and the weight of the social organism pressing upon them, which, in most cases, they cannot understand. The smallest misadventure gives them a severe shock, because they are conscious of being weak, and without springs of action or the spirit of initiative.
There is no one who cannot affix one or more names to this portrait; but I need mention none in particular, just because they are humble. I have eliminated all pathological cases from this study; but I may point out, by way of illustration, that many hypochondriacs belong to this type, and show it in an exaggerated form.
2. The second species is that of the contemplative, distinguished from the preceding by a much higher intellectual development, so that their constituent elements may be enumerated in the following order: acute sensibility, sharp and penetrating intellect, no activity.
A tolerably large number of varieties may be grouped under this heading; they all resemble one another by having the above three marks in common:
The irresolute, like Hamlet, who feel and think deeply, but cannot pass to action.
Certain mystics, not the great ones, who have acted, and whom we shall find later on, but pure adepts of the Inner Life, such as may be found in all ages and countries—Hindu Yogis, Persian Sufis, Therapeutæ, monks of all creeds—plunged in the beatific vision, writing nothing and founding nothing, and, always in pursuit of their dream, passing through life without leaving a trace behind them.
The analysts, in the purely subjective sense—i.e., those who assiduously and minutely analyse themselves, who keep diaries, noting down from hour to hour the small changes of their inner life, the variations of their feelings according to the prevalent atmospheric influences. Such were Maine de Biran among psychologists and Alfieri among poets. For the rest, it is needless to mention particular names, since this mania for personal analysis has, in recent times, under the influence of excessive nervous excitement, of intellectual refinement, and the enervation of the will, become a disease. It should be noted that these sensitives are nearly all pessimists.
3. There still remains the third species, whom I shall call the emotional type, though not in the wide sense in which the word is used by Bain, who makes them into a class. In this type, which abounds in great names, the category of the sensitives attains its apogee. Activity is here added to the extreme impressionability and the intellectual subtlety of the contemplatives. But their activity has its own special characteristic: it is intermittent and sometimes spasmodic, because arising from an intense emotion, not from a permanent reserve of energy. The purely emotional character, says Bain, is inclined to indolence. Nothing can be juster, under an appearance of paradox. He only acts under the momentary influence of powerful motives, then he falls back into the inaction which is his essential nature; he alternates between impetuous energy and sudden collapse.
To this group belong many great artists: poets, musicians, and painters, capable of feverish activity when sustained by inspiration—i.e., by an unconscious impulse; then undergoing periods of exhaustion and impotence. We may cite, at random, Jean Paul Richter, Mozart, Rousseau. This last, as has frequently been demonstrated, should be regarded as a pathological case. The same may be said of certain orators, those who have “temperament.” It is only on certain occasions that they put forth their full power, when there is a cause, in which their feelings are deeply engaged, to be defended, or enemies to be overthrown.
II. The Active.—I divide this type into two species, according as the intellect is mediocre or powerful.
1. The species of the mediocre active shows us more clearly the distinctive traits of this form of character and the points in which it differs from the sensitive. “The active man does his work better [than the sensitive] because he can do the uninteresting drudgery, while the other neglects whatever has not an intense and sustaining interest. One man can take a walk without any object in view more engrossing than the prospective warding off of ill-health; the other cannot move abroad without a gun, or a fishing-rod, a companion or something to see.”[247]
The active are strongly constructed machines, well supplied with vital force, and still more with potential energy. Look at a small shopkeeper belonging to this type, a man without talent or education; he wears himself out in continual goings and comings, in offers of service, in talk without end or cessation. It is not the love of gain alone which impels him, it is his very nature, he must be active. Put a sensitive in his place, he will do nothing but what is absolutely necessary, or what interests him. To this first group belong all those who have an abundant supply of physical energy and need an outlet for it: sportsmen, those who love an adventurous life without other aim than action, globe-trotters, who hurry about the world as fast as steam will take them, not for the sake of business or of acquiring knowledge, making no attempt to study the countries they pass through, either at the time, or before, or afterwards, hurrying to the end of their journeys in order to begin again. We may add those fighters who are actuated by no resentment or ill-feeling, but are merely letting off their superfluous energy. The mercenary armies of former times must have been recruited almost entirely among men of this type.