The Career of the Soul

If our scientific knowledge of human nature were adequate, we could achieve in the humanistic culture that which all theologies have tried to achieve: we could found our morality on tested truths.

They would be truths about the development of human nature, and not, as in the popular religions, truth of physics and of history. But our knowledge of human nature is inadequate, and therefore, like the teachers of popular religion, we have in place of exact knowledge to invent imaginative fictions in the hope that the progress of science will confirm and correct, but will not utterly contradict, our hypotheses. We can claim no more than this: for our understanding of human nature we are compelled to use our insight and the best available psychological science of our age, exactly as Dante, for his understanding of the divine constitution of the universe, had to use the accepted astronomy of his day. If our psychology turns out to be wrong, the only difference will be that we shall have to discard an hypothesis whereas our forefathers had to discard a revealed dogma.

The sketch which I am about to make of the progress from infancy to maturity is to be taken, then, not as tested scientific truth, but as an imaginative construction. It will be, if you like, a modern fable which symbolizes rather than describes, as the primitive legends of the sun god symbolized, rather than described, the observed facts. Because it is an imaginative construction, the same meaning might be expressed in other ways and with many variations of detail. But though the fiction itself is of no consequence, the meaning it conveys is of the highest consequence, and it is confirmed, as I shall attempt to show, not only by ordinary insight but by the deepest wisdom of the greatest teachers.

Freud, in a famous paper, has described the passage from infancy to maturity as a transition from the dominion of momentary pleasure and pain to the dominion of reality. This theory is not peculiar to psychoanalysis in any of its several schools, and it does not depend upon the controverted points of doctrine. It is, in fact, more or less of a commonplace in psychological thought. I am employing it here because a distinguished colleague of Freud's, Dr. S. Ferenczi of Budapest, has made an attempt to indicate the chief stages in the development between these two poles of experience. It is a most useful bit of speculation, and while I believe it could be duplicated in terms either of behaviorism or of the gestalt-theorie, I do not happen to have come across any portrait of the idea which is as vivid as Dr. Ferenczi's.

The first stage of human development, says Ferenczi, takes place in the womb where the embryo lives as a parasite of the mother's body. An outer world exists for it only in a very restricted degree; all it needs for protection, warmth, and nourishment is assured by the mother. Because everything is there which is necessary for the satisfaction of the instincts, Ferenczi calls this the Period of Unconditional Omnipotence.

It is, therefore, rather disagreeable and perhaps terrifying to be born, for with the detachment from the mother and the rude disturbance of the wish-less tranquillity he had enjoyed in the womb, the trouble of living begins, and evokes feelings which might perhaps be described as a longing to recover the perfect pre-natal adjustment. Nurses instinctively recognize this longing, says Ferenczi, and as soon as the infant expresses his discomfort by struggling and crying, they deliberately create a situation which resembles as closely as possible the one he has just left. They lay him down by the warm body of the mother, or wrap him up in soft, warm coverings, shield his eyes from the light and his ears from noise. The illusion is more or less complete, for, of course, the infant is unaware of the activities of the nurse. For all he knows "his wishes are realized simply by imagining the satisfaction of them." Ferenczi calls this the Period of Magical-Hallucinatory Omnipotence.

But this period does not last very long, since the nurse is unable to anticipate every desire that the growing infant feels. "The hallucinatory representation of the wish-fulfilment soon proves inadequate to bring about any longer a real wish-fulfilment." So the infant has to give signals, and the more complicated his wishes become the more signals he has to give. He begins to use a gesture-language, and if there is a willing nurse always at hand without too many new-fangled notions, the child gets what he wants for the mere trouble of expressing his wants. Ferenczi calls this the Period of Omnipotence by the Help of Magic Gestures.

But as time goes on and as the number of his wants increase these gestures lose some of their magic. The number of the conditions increase to which he has to submit. "The outstretched hand must often be drawn back empty.... Indeed, an invincible hostile power may forcibly oppose itself to this gesture and compel the hand to resume its former position." At this point his sense of reality begins; the sense, that is to say, of something outside himself which does not submit to his wishes. "Till now the 'all-powerful' being has been able to feel himself one with the world that obliged him and followed his every nod, but gradually there appears a painful discordance in his experiences." Because all experiences are no longer incorporated in the ego, Ferenczi calls this the Projection Phase.

But though the child has now begun to discern the existence of reality, his sense of that reality is still quite imperfect. At first, perhaps, he regards this outer world, though it opposes his wishes, as having qualities like his own. Ferenczi calls this the Animistic Period. The child then begins to talk and to substitute for gestures actual statements of what he desires. Provided he lives in a household bent on fulfilling his wants as soon as possible, he retains to a very great degree the illusion that his wishes are sovereign. Ferenczi calls this the Period of Magic Thoughts and Magic Words

Finally, if he matures successfully, he passes into the last period where he is no longer under the domination of the pleasure-principle: the feeling of omnipotence gives way to the full appreciation of the force of circumstances. Now unfortunately neither Freud nor Ferenczi, nor, so far as I know, any other psychoanalyst, devotes much attention to this last phase of maturity in which the sense of reality has become perfected. They are preoccupied with pathology; that is to say, with the problems which arise out of a failure to attain this last stage in which the adult makes a complete adjustment with his world because his wishes are matured to accept the conditions which reality imposes.

Yet it is this last stage which plainly constitutes the goal of moral effect, for here alone the adult once again recovers that harmony between himself and his environment which he lost in that period of infancy when he first discovered that his wishes were no longer sovereign. It is the memory of that earliest harmony which he carries with him all his days. This is his memory of a golden age, his intimation, as Wordsworth says, of immortality. But insofar as he expects by an infantile philosophy to recover that heaven which lay about him in his infancy, he is doomed to disappointment. In the womb, and for a few years of his childhood, happiness was the gratification of his naive desires. His family arranged the world to suit his wishes. But as he grows up, and begins to be an independent personality, this providence ministering to his wishes disappears. He can then no longer hope that the world will be adjusted to his wishes, and he is compelled by a long and difficult process of learning and training to adjust his wishes to the world. If he succeeds he is mature. If he is mature, he is once again harmonious with the nature of things. He has virtue. And he is happy.

The process of maturing consists then of a revision of his desires in the light of an understanding of reality. When he is completely infantile there is nothing in the world but his wishes. Therefore, he does not need and does not have an understanding of the outer world. It exists for him merely as gratification or denial. But as he begins to learn that the universe is not composed of his wishes, he begins to see his wishes in a context and in perspective. He begins to acquire a sense of space and to learn how much there is beyond his reach, until at last he realizes how small a figure he is on this earth, and how small a part of the universe is the solar system of which ours is one of the smaller planets. He has learned a lot from the days when he put out his hand and reached for the moon. He begins, also, to acquire a sense of time and to realize that the moment in which he feels the intense desire to seize something is an instant in a lifetime, an infinitesimal point in the history of the race. He acquires a sense of birth and decay and death, a knowledge that that which he craves, his craving itself, and he himself who feels that craving, did not have this craving yesterday and will no longer have it tomorrow. He acquires a sense of cause and effect, a knowledge, that is to say, that the sequences of events are not to be interrupted by his preferences. He begins to discern the existence of other beings beside himself, and to understand that they too have their preferences and their wishes, that these wishes are often contrary to his own, and that there is not room enough in the world, nor are there things enough, to gratify all the wishes of everybody.

Thus to learn the lessons of experience is to undergo a transvaluation of the values we bring with us from the womb and to transmute our naive impulses. The breakdown of the infantile adjustment in which providential powers ministered to every wish compels us either to flee from reality or to understand it. And by understanding it we create new objects of desire. For when we know a good deal about a thing, know how it originated, how it is likely to behave, what it is made of, and what is its place amidst other things, we are dealing with something quite different from the simple object naively apprehended.

The understanding creates a new environment. The more subtle and discriminating, the more informed and sympathetic the understanding is, the more complex and yet ordered do the things about us become. To most of us, as Mr. Santayana once said, music is a pleasant noise which produces a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills. But the trained musician hears what we do not hear at all; he hears the form, the structure, the pattern, and the significance of an ideal world. A naturalist out of doors perceives a whole universe of related life which the rest of us do not even see. A world which is ordinarily unseen has become visible through the understanding. When the mind has fetched it out of the flux of dumb sensations, defined it and fixed it, this unseen world becomes more real than the dumb sensations it supplants. When the understanding is at work, it is as if circumstance had ceased to mutter strange sounds and had begun to speak our language. When experience is understood, it is no longer what it is wholly to the infant, very largely to youth, and in great measure to most men, a succession of desirable objects at which they instinctively grasp, interspersed with undesirable ones from which they instinctively shrink. If objects are seen in their context, in the light of their origin and destiny, with sympathy for their own logic and their own purposes, they become interesting in themselves, and are no longer blind stimuli to pleasant and unpleasant sensations.

For when our desires come into contact with the world created by the understanding, their character is altered. They are confronted by a much more complex stimulus which evokes a much more complex response. Instead of the naive and imperious lust of our infantile natures which is to seize, to have and to hold, our lusts are offset by other lusts and a balance between them is set up. That is to say, they are made rational by the ordered variety with which the understanding confronts them. We learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than we dreamed of in our immature philosophy, that there are many choices and that none is absolute, that beyond the mountains, as the Chinese say, there are people also. The obviously pleasant or unpleasant thus becomes less obviously what we felt it was before our knowledge of it became complicated by anticipation and memory. The immediately desirable seems not quite so desirable and the undesirable less intolerable. Delight is perhaps not so intense nor pain so poignant as youth and the romantics would have them. They are absorbed into a larger experience in which the rewards are a sustained and more even enjoyment, and serenity in the presence of inescapable evil. In place of a world, where like children we are ministered to by a solicitous mother, the understanding introduces us into a world where delight is reserved for those who can appreciate the meaning and purpose of things outside ourselves, and can make these meanings and purposes their own.