Mental trait

“ Every one’s mental life may fairly be said to be divided between those ideas, thoughts, and feelings which he receives from and gives out to his social world, the social environment in which he lives, and those which belong more properly to his inner life and the innermost sanctuary of his personality and character. ”

“ It is because they are in their proper and almost inextricable entanglement with our individual or temperamental functions, absolutely essential elements of all our rationality, of all our mental developments, of all our worth as thinkers, as workers or as producers ”

“ Little by little, A and B became less in evidence, until at length they were heard from no more, and C—the normal self—was left dominant, with a complete restoration to physical as well as mental health.
But, the reader may well ask, what does all this mean? Can there really be more than one self, one personality, in human beings? If so, [289] what are we? What is the true nature of man? ”

“ I employ this word “tendency” as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of 3the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ Having journeyed around the earth house, each should study himself; his body as an engine of mental thought, an instrument of conduct and character; the number and nature and uses of the forty and more faculties of mind and heart with which he is endowed. ”

“ We shall analyse that complication of mental qualities which form what, in common life, we call personal merit: We shall consider every attribute of the mind, which renders a man an object either of esteem and affection, or of hatred and contempt ”

“ You will see, therefore, that any sorrow or trouble which may fall upon the personality of the living man, and may conceivably influence his mental body, will not in the least affect his other thought-form which his ego is using as an additional mental body. ”

“ With the affectional experiences which we are considering, the relatively ‘pure’ condition lasts. In practical life no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical facts. ”

“ This, no occasional or hypothetical action of the mind, is inextricably bound in with that primitive mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will. ”

“ His guide to character is in reality the face, not the brain-pan. The dress, manners, and deportment of his clients, and not the gray matter of the cerebrum, form the real basis of his observations. If any one may be found to doubt how accurately one's character may be mapped out from its outward manifestations, let him endeavor to study for a while the acts and deportment of those with whose "mind's construction" he may be even slightly acquainted, and he will speedily discover numerous clews to the mental disposition in common acts and traits which previously had passed utterly unnoticed. ”

“ One having the mental temperament predominant, the motive full or large, and the vital average to full, will differ in build from the preceding description only in his being smaller, taller in proportion, and more spare. ”

“ One of these states is called the primary or superliminal consciousness,—the personality by which a man is known to his objective associates, which takes cognizance through the senses of the outside world, and carries on the ordinary business of every-day life. The second or subliminal personality is the superior spiritual self, the man's own oversoul, which automatically superintends all physical functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral attitudes. ”

“ Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways. ”

“ You will see that the mental power you most wish to train and augment is distinguishable enough even in the commonest affairs of life. Take a case of feeling. Some object—no matter what—kindles an emotion within you—anger, wish affection, pursuit, dislike, avoidance—and you feel strongly impelled to take action thereupon. ”

“ ...I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" ”

“ In mental constitution, also, and its manifestations, such as manners, docility, voice, and gait, a similar temperament is discoverable. For as we say of a certain mixture, that it is composed of elements, because their qualities or virtues, such as heat, cold, dryness, and moisture, are there discovered associated in a certain similar compound body, so, in like manner, the work of the father and mother is to be discerned both in the body and mental character of the offspring, and in all else that follows or accompanies temperament. ”

“ But his great mental characteristic seems to have been wisdom—that fine, just inward sense of things, which, like poetry, is born in a man, not acquired—the result, generally, as in his case, of an innate power, combined with large, varied, and calming experience. ”

“ My conception will also be of great service in helping us to discriminate between the different mental qualities, and to throw some light into what has always been a dark corner for psychologists—the differences between different individuals. ”

“ The higher feelings of pure morality and refined emotion, and the power of abstract reasoning and ideal conception, are useless to them; are rarely, if ever, manifested; and have no important relations to their habits, wants, desires, and well-being. They possess a mental organ beyond their needs. ”

“ With the mental temperament well developed, a strong mind will be manifested; with the vital and motive temperaments, strong physical and muscular functions. The relative absence of this quality will be marked by corresponding weakness, and although we may have a pronounced mental temperament, the individual will exhibit but little mental strength, and with a pronounced motive temperament he will be incapable of strong muscular action. ”

“ As regards our own mental organization, psychological science has recently shown us the enormous importance of what we may call the extra-personal portion of our mind—all that which is normally [Pg 220] subconscious, or has not been during our mental growth incorporated to form an integral part of our private personality. ”

“ Whatever personality the objective mind impresses upon it, that personality it assumes and acts up to; and since it is the builder of the body it will build up a body in correspondence with the personality thus impressed upon it. These two laws of the subjective mind form the foundation of the axiom that our body represents the aggregate of our beliefs. ”

“ There was a time when the inherent personality of a man, the color of his eyes, the capacity of his mind, the quality of his character, seemed clearly subject to the caprice of forces beyond the reach of mortal perception. ”

“ Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. I know directly, and of my own knowledge, that I was vexed yesterday, or that I am hungry to-day. ”

“ It has been suggested in recent years that such flashes of intelligence are due to the secondary personality or the subliminal self or the other self, and it is often added that it is the development of our knowledge of these phases of psychology that represents modern progress in the science of mind. ”

“ But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them “nothing but” expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations [pg 013] of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue. ”

“ If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. ”

“ If we regard the human subject, in the ordinary psychological way, as a being whose conscious life runs parallel with the highest physical processes of his organism, we get a view of the relation between the intellect and the will which is far more just, at once to the natural history of the mind, and to the deeper meaning of the inner life of our consciousness. View man as a natural being, and you find him adjusting himself to his environment, acting, as they say, in response to stimuli. ”

“ The growth of intellection and self-consciousness reacts powerfully upon the emotional and active side of mind. To Conduct. describe the various sources of feeling and of desire that thus arise—aesthetic, social and religious sentiments, pride, ambition, selfishness, sympathy, &c.—is beyond the scope of systematic psychology, and certainly quite beyond the limits of an article like the present. But at least a general résumé of the characteristics of activity on this highest or rational level is indispensable. ”

“ But the psychologist has yet more to tell us about the nature of personality. Although helped to distinctiveness of self-conscious expression by means of its experience of the struggle under present material conditions, it is not the whole of it that can be thus expressed. ”

“ For the object of consciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this stability and immutability. What we think is that and no other, whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous change.
But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, in his body. ”

“ We may say the relation of brain-matter and consciousness is one of correlation, conversion—or we may say it is one of instrument to personality. Personality is here, as everywhere, a term chosen to represent a series of manifestations so alike among themselves and so unlike all other manifestations as to necessitate a specific designation. By adopting the term personality, we should affirm our belief in the existence of some form of being, which, for us, is persistently unlike every other form of being with which we come into relation. ”

“ Is psychology able to explain, or is any human being competent to know what these qualities are, apart from his perceptions of them? It is always our perceptions of the primary qualities, and not these qualities themselves, which come before the mind, just as it is always our sensations resulting from the secondary qualities, and not the secondary qualities themselves, that we are cognisant of. ”

“ If I am not a trained psychologist, I shall not have the proper terms, or shall confuse different terms; and if I am a trained psychologist, I may too probably be misled by my own theories, and I shall certainly find that all the common phrases by which we describe character are too vague and shifting to reflect the vast variety of delicate shades of emotional temperament which we can yet recognise in observation. ”

“ Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like—"the Real and its Image," "the Spiritual and its Material Shadow," or "the Transcendental and its Physical Ego." ”

“ To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. ”

“ It seems reasonable to me—upon the hypothesis that it is a person using another's mind or brain—that there must be more or less of that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. ”

“ But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. ”

“ Now it is this selective character of every rational conscious process, a character as manifest to consciousness as it is ultimately significant for the constitution of all Being, — it is this character, I say, which to my mind is responsible above all for the Individuality which we have already characterized as belonging to the whole of Being, and which we shall now find as equally characistic of every region of finite Being. ”