Plasticity (philosophy)

“ When the structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition of its comparative permanence in the new form, and of the new habits the body then manifests. Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. ”

“ Whatever the extent of these bodily changes may be, if we grant the correctness of our inferences in regard to the plasticity of human types, we are necessarily led to grant also a great plasticity of the mental make-up of 65human types. We have observed that features of the body which have almost obtained their final form at the time of birth show modifications of great importance in new surroundings. ”

“ What I have called the elasticity and plasticity of the organs means in fact the rights, interest, happiness, and prosperity of the one set of human beings versus the same interests of another set of human beings. ”

“ And, as in each individualized expression of substance there is a quality which may be termed plasticity, it follows that through inheritance and environment entities evolve in various directions, thus manifesting the scientific, the artistic and other tendencies. ”

“ The plasticity of the living material of our nervous system is, to put it briefly, the reason why we do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, we do it half mechanically, or almost without any consciousness. ”

“ If habits are due to the plasticity of materials to outward agents, we can immediately see to what outward influences, if to any, the brain-matter is plastic. Not to mechanical pressures, not to thermal changes, not to any of the forces to which all the other organs of our body are exposed; for nature has carefully shut up our brain and spinal cord in bony boxes, where no influences of this sort can get at them. ”

“ Consequently docility has been identified with imitativeness, instead of with power to re-make old habits, to re-create. Plasticity and originality have been opposed to each other. That the most precious part of plasticity consists in ability to form habits of independent judgment and of inventive initiation has been ignored. ”

“ The study of evolution may give us a further help. We have seen how the final steps of the highest forms of animals have been in the direction of plasticity of organization: we see it in the rise of man from mammals, in higher as against more primitive levels of human culture, in great men as against ordinary men. There can be no doubt that its acquisition constitutes a step in evolutionary progress. Plasticity is needed in any new religion. And plasticity means tolerance, means the reduction of fixity of ritual, of convention, of dogma, of clericalism. ”

“ As life evolves, that is to say changes, by being handed on from certain forms to certain other forms, a partial rigidity marks the process together with a partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keeps the life-force up to a point true to its old direction ”

“ Relative plasticity.—Is there any relation between the degree of mental modifiability which remains in adult life, and the character of the mental evolution in respect of mass, complexity, and rapidity? The animal kingdom at large yields reasons for associating an inferior and more rapidly-completed mental structure, with a relatively automatic [356] nature. Lowly organized creatures, guided almost entirely by reflex actions, are in but small degrees changeable by individual experiences. ”

“ The plasticity of a psychic group is due to the plasticity of the infant mind and brain, which is wonderfully capable of acquiring the language, thought forms, and differentiating characteristics of any group in which it may be reared. ”

“ Truly is it akin to human intelligence, inasmuch as it is the parent of human intelligence, the latter being the child that is developing the parental powers. This building goes on through stages on which we must not tarry, through the whole of the mineral world, gradually giving to matter the power to change shape between larger and larger limits without losing cohesion. This is what is called plasticity, the power of [144] changing shape without disintegration. Matter also gains that which science speaks of as elasticity. Now what is elasticity? ”

“ The evolution of intelligence as such runs parallel with the evolution of plastic behaviour; and this plasticity is necessitated by the variety and the complexity of the conditions of life—a variety and a complexity requiring many subtle modifications of response to enable the behaviour to reach accommodation to the changeful exigencies of diverse circumstances. ”

“ Later, of course, when we cool off and harden and radiate into space most of our present mobility, which expresses in modesty and plasticity, we shall acknowledge no scaffoldings, gropings or tentativenesses, but think we utter absolute facts. ”

“ The period of plasticity is evidently prolonged in proportion to the degree in which conscious intelligence has superseded mere brute force in promoting successful survival—that is to say, the transmission of mental ability rather than of physical strength postpones maturity. ”

“ The present lack of plasticity in such things involves a growing danger. Human conditions and possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality. ”

“ The histories of the most civilized nations show us that in their earlier times the modifiability of ideas and habits was less than it is at present. And, if we contrast classes or individuals around us, we see that the most developed in mind are the most plastic. To inquiries respecting this trait of comparative plasticity, in its relations to precocity and early completion of mental development, may be fitly added inquiries respecting its relations to the social state, which it helps to determine, and which reacts upon it. ”

“ Nothing modifies them, nothing impairs them; good or bad, they are solid as the diamond. At the other end of the scale let us place the amorphous, who, by their very definition, are plasticity incarnate. Between these two extremes we may arrange seriatim all modes of character, so as to pass by imperceptible gradations from one end to the other. It is clear that, as we descend towards the amorphous, the individual becomes less refractory to the influences of his environment, and the proportion of acquired character increases in the same ratio. ”

“ But the sense of plastic beauty—though that’s, of course, also an inborn faculty—is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It’s an affair of the mind; experience and thought have to draw it out. ”

“ Natural selection which, under a uniform and constant environment, leads to the survival of relatively fixed and definite modes of response, under an environment presenting a wider range of varying possibilities leads to the survival of plastic accommodation through intelligence. This plasticity is, however, itself hereditary. All intelligent procedure implies the inherited capacity of profiting by experience. Instinctive in the popular sense, it does not fall within the narrower definition of the term ”

“ The plastic forces on one side, with their uniform action, and, on the other, the affections which depend on no law, dispute incessantly the ground; and that which nature, in its dumb and indefatigable activity, has succeeded in raising up, often is overturned by liberty, as a river that overflows and spreads over its banks: the mind when it is gifted with vivacity acquires influence over all the movements of the body, and arrives at last indirectly to modify by force the sympathetic play as far as the architectonic and fixed forms of nature, upon which the will has no hold. ”

“ Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home. ”

“ The same physiologist suggests, that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the developement theory seem to do, that each advance in psychical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may not the soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties, play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme? ”

“ Differences of opinion certainly exist as to the share which the internal constitution of the living being plays in the drama of life and progress. It seems, however, most reasonable to conclude that two parties exist to this, as to every other bargain; and, regarding the animal or plant as plastic in its nature, we may assume such plasticity to be modified on the one hand by outside forces, and on the other by internal actions proper to the organism as a living thing. Examples of such tendencies of life are freely scattered everywhere in Nature's domain. ”

“ Plasticity, then, is that quality which, in suddenly enforced physical change, is the key to survival and prosperity. And the survival of the plastic, that is, of the rapidly and healthily modifiable during periods when terrestrial revolution offers to species the rigorous dilemma of prodigious change or certain death, is a widely different principle from the survival of the fittest in a general biological battle during terrestrial uniformity. ”

“ REASON IN ART CHAPTER I THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE
Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.
Man exists amid a universal ferment of being, and not only needs plasticity in his habits and pursuits but finds plasticity also in the surrounding world. Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by accepting modification and now by imposing it. ”

“ They are merely, in the most complete sense, experiments in the collective purpose, and their creator has toward them just the attitude of an anatomist toward the animals upon which he is experimenting; not indifferent to their suffering as suffering, but ignoring it in the spirit of scientific detachment necessary to subordinate means to an end. "I wanted—it was the only thing I wanted—to find out the limit of plasticity in a living form," says Dr. ”

“ Moulding the supple earth with 'hand obedient to the brain,' the plasticatore has impressed his most fugitive dreams of beauty on it without effort; and what it cost him but a few fatigueless hours to fashion, the steady heat of the furnace has gifted with imperishable life. Such work, no doubt, has the defects of its qualities. ”

“ What is to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost the same thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolution of life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limiting or obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the old pre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and thereby simply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would never do. Body and soul are, for the working purposes of science, to be conceived as in perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of life, and as such subject to a common development. ”

“ These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it. ”

“ Unless we permit ourselves to go behind the mere facts, the mere mechanics and chemistry of life phenomena, and interpret them in the light of immaterial principles, in short, unless we apply some sort of philosophy to them, the result of our analysis will be but dust in our eyes, and ashes in our mouths. Unless there is something like mind or intelligence pervading nature, some creative and transforming impulse that cannot be defined by our mechanical concepts, then, to me, the whole organic world is meaningless. ”

“ If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organization which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. ”

“ Are we not aided in our work by vicious sculptors and hideous forms? Do we not hear, from all mankind, of the imperfect model? Is the world not holding it before our gaze continually? The result is that we follow those lower patterns, limit our life-work, and adopt into our own experience the angular outline and deformity of material models. ”

“ This initial state puts into action a mechanism determined by the nature of each species, and ends in creations of special kinds. However, variations of instinct, its adaptation to various conditions, show that the conditions of the determinism are less simple, that the creative activity is endowed with a certain plasticity. ”

“ But the frames which they have traced are fixed and rigid; nature with her infinite plasticity escapes from them. We render a great homage to the classifiers when we say that they have confined the facts as closely as it is possible to do. ”

“ We do not sufficiently realise the part which illusion has played in our development. p. 44One of the prime requisites for evolution is a certain power for adaptation to varying circumstances, that is to say, of plasticity, bodily and mental. ”