Normal

“ It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal: peculiar excellence, as well as peculiar viciousness, must obviously be not normal but abnormal. ”

“ We can realize now how superficial are those who tell us "we learn but little from the abnormal, for first of all comes the normal." We realize now how detrimental to scientific investigation such a contention is. As a matter of fact the progress of science is not from the normal to the abnormal, but the very reverse, from the abnormal to the normal ”

“ No part of the life of the individual should be studied as dissociated from the whole of his life, the abnormal as separated from the normal, and abnormal groups should be studied in comparison with the remaining groups which we call normal. ”

“ Or a healthy man? What is health? I sometimes wonder who is a normal man? Not that I have a question.
Q: What is 'normal' is set by each society. The ordinary man wants to be with others all the time, and not alone, therefore he makes certain accommodations — that's the only definition I have. ”

“ Nevertheless, it is possible, in a rough way, to outline certain features which are more or less common even to sub-normal people, and from which, therefore, certain general rules of conduct may be inferred. ”

“ We are too unfamiliar with normal social processes to distinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of everyone that it would seem easy to understand. ”

“ Alternations of personality and hysterical phenomena generally are in this connection the most instructive to us.
In the third chapter we utilize the insight thus gained and discuss the line of evolution which enables man to maintain and intensify his true normality. What type of man is he to whom the epithet of normal,—an epithet often obscure and misleading,—may be most fitly applied? I claim that that man shall be regarded as normal who has the fullest grasp of faculties which inhere in the whole race. ”

“ The characteristics of persistency, and of tendency to action, are therefore normal characteristics of presentations, though they may belong in an unusual degree to some ideas from the relation these hold to the dominant cluster of ideas in the individual consciousness. ”

“ The ancients who looked to the ordinary phenomena of common life, that is to the normal, considered that bodies are bound to stop. The ancient physicists, relying on their observations of the normal, believed that bodies in falling traverse space in proportion to their weight ”

“ The arrangement with which we habitually identify ourselves—what we call the normal or primary self—consists, in my view, of elements selected for us in the struggle for existence with special reference to the maintenance of ordinary physical needs, and is not necessarily superior in any other respect to the latent personalities which lie alongside of it—the fresh combinations of our personal elements which may be evoked by accident or design, in a variety to which we at present can assign no limit. ”

“ Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. ”

“ Upon whatever character the attention be fixed, whether size, number, form of the whole or of the parts, proportion, distribution of differentiation, sexual characters, fertility, precocity or lateness, color, susceptibility to cold or to disease—in short, all the kinds of characters which we think of as best exemplifying specific difference, we are certain to find illustrations of the occurrence of departures from normality, presenting exactly the same definiteness elsewhere characteristic of normality itself. ”

“ When their causation is traced, their normality observed, and their utility understood, the weirdness and seeming abnormity which have been put upon them will be removed from the human lens, and the true place and use of uncommon phenomena become evident. ”

“ Normally there is a certain equilibrium to which they return, and which, we may suppose, determines the so-called temperament, naturel or disposition, thus securing some tolerable uniformity and continuity in the presentation of self. ”

“ The postulated objective reality acts upon the given individual consciousness and gives rise to mental states which along with the objective representation of that reality has also its own coloring, its own subjective side. ”

“ For a purpose is the tendency to realize some external action which is useful or indispensable to the life-existence of the particular individual being. The tendency to the maintenance of a definite activity in opposition to the onset of disturbing forces of the environment in order to restore the lost equilibrium, may be considered as the universal formula for purposive life in general. ”

“ The fact that psychology postulates an external material world and studies it in so far as it comes to be reflected in consciousness, points to another postulate which psychology must assume in addition, namely, the existence of an inner world consciousness. ”

“ Psychology must postulate uniformity of interrelation of physical, physiological, and psychic processes. ”

“ Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. ”

“ But what sometimes strikes me with some surprise is, not that the present condition of the world, with one sole master, should seem the common-place and natural condition, but that it should have come to seem so common-place and natural—in nine months. ”

“ There are other external things which nature intended for signs; and we find this common to them all, that the mind is disposed to overlook them, and to attend only to the things signified by them. Thus there are certain modifications of the human face, which are natural signs of the present disposition of the mind. ”

“ And are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that develop mental habits—habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, recur and follow ‘law’? ”

“ This question cannot be settled by any philosophy, religion or good advice, but solely by an unprejudiced review of the psychological germs of life which have resulted from the natural co-operation of the conscious and unconscious on the one hand, and of the individual and the collective on the other. ”

“ May we not welcome, as at least a step in the right direction, a change in our conventional habits, which may extend, though in ever so small a degree, the region of common thoughts and aims, common hopes and disappointments, common joys and common sorrows? ”

“ The balance of mental and social, as well as of physiological, functions, is implied in the complex life of whose evolution we form a part. To say that we are to promote this balance of various functions, is to say nothing more than that we are to promote the life into which physical and mental and social factors enter. ”

“ We may, then, add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature; we may fill in our picture of what is and has been, as experience gives it us, in such a way as to make the whole consistent with this uniformity. ”

“ So vastly do the circumstances of our daily and hourly lives, the atmosphere of the society which we meet, the tone of the books and newspapers which we read, mould every thought which we think and modify every view which we take of the occurrences which surround us, that it is all but an impossibility to judge how those best known to us, or how even we ourselves, would think or speak or act in a set of circumstances widely different from those in which our actual experience has been cast. ”

“ I suppose it’s the natural constitution of the mind.”
“The ‘natural constitution of the mind’ is a conversational counter with whose value I am not acquainted. That you can get into the way of doing almost anything, is simple fact; but you must add, of thinking anything, of feeling anything, before you begin to limit the force of habit.” ”

“ Disposition or Mood systems.—Among the loosely organized complexes in many individuals, and possibly in all of us, there are certain dispositions toward views of life which represent natural inclinations, desires, and modes of activity, which, for one reason or another, we tend to suppress or are unable to give full play to. ”

“ Social reality in its every aspect is shot through and through with feeling. Whatever be the categories according to which we divide social phenomena, feeling of some sort will have to be recognized in each and all of them. ”

“ If I understand you aright, from beginning to end it is a question of dealing directly and openly with the basic forces of the human soul, so that the analysed person, be he sick or sound or in some stage between—for health and sickness flow over by imperceptible degrees into one another—shall gradually have his eyes opened to the drama that is being acted within him. ”

“ These fundamental tendencies have issued phylogenetically in specific reactions that enter into the social life at all its levels, and in the life of the individual these reactions, expressing needs and desires, issue in highly complex moods, in which fundamental feelings are present but do not constitute the whole of the social moods. ”

“ Similarly with most of our mental actions, they are compounds of feeling and intellect, and produced by many causes, such as hereditary tendency, acquired habit, internal and external mental excitants, dogmatic belief, knowledge of empirical rules, and occasionally of verified principles. Several of these causes also frequently conspire to produce a single idea or decision. ”

“ In the one class, that of our internal affections, the phenomena depend on the laws which regulate the successive changes of state of the mind itself. In the other class, that of our external affections, they depend on the laws of the mind, indeed, which is susceptible of these peculiar changes of state; but they depend, in an equal degree, on the laws which give to matter its peculiar qualities, and, consequently, its peculiar influence on this mental susceptibility. ”

“ In this connection I may observe that physical and social conditions have a greater or a less influence in proportion as the physical and psychical constitution of the individual is more or less sound and vigorous. ”

“ The terms cause and effect, and others of that kind, which the imperfection of psychological language compels us to use in speaking of the mental connection between action and its antecedents, are steeped from their employment in connection with physical science, in physical association, and the import with them into the moral sphere the notion of physical enchainment, for which the representations of consciousness, the sole authority, afford no warrant whatever. ”

“ These indications of a highly standardized life, revealing almost universal imperfections of some kind in our bodies and their functions, are now so common, so much a commonplace in our midst, that nobody notices them, nobody mentions them as odd, and certainly nobody seems to show any concern or alarm about their monotonous frequency. ”

“ Thus natural science has in its objective measurements the possibility of describing every part of the physical world. The psychical world, on the other hand, is as we saw, the world which is private property. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every healthy society falls into three distinct types, which reciprocally [Pg 218] condition one another and which gravitate differently in the physiological sense; and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special feeling of perfection, and its own mastership. ”

“ The original or primary divergence of mental type between any two peoples must, then, have been due to these fundamental causes—namely, differences of physical environment and spontaneous variations of mental structure, the latter adding to the traditional stock of knowledge and belief, of moral precepts and sentiments. ”

“ And if this be true of the physical constitution of man, in how much higher degree is it true of his mental constitution? All our physical parts we bring with us into the world; but the mind develops afterwards. ”

“ But when we speak of a man's habitual condition, we mean his constant and absolute completeness of mind or body, in some particular point—as for instance, his perception of virtue, or of some art, or else some science or other. ”

“ It is a common circumstance, both in physical, mental, and moral subjects, for the apparent to be the very opposite of the real. This general truth has been repeatedly illustrated in an incidental manner in this book, and need not be much further elucidated. ”

“ The properties of human behaviour are taken to be relatively invariant, of the same general character but of a specifically different subject matter as the properties investigated by any natural science. ”