Chapter XXV 



THE INTENTIONAL SHAPING OF HUMAN 



OPINION 



H. A. OVERSTREET 



WHAT seems most significant about our human order 

 of life is that we can intentionally reshape our 

 fundamental behavior patterns. In the lower orders 

 these patterns: food-getting, shelter, sex, group-hving, etc., 

 appear to be almost entirely fixed. Generation follows 

 generation with no changes save those slowly wrought by 

 the impersonal forces of Nature. We, on the contrary, seem 

 able to take thought; and while we cannot thereby add a 

 cubit to our stature, we can so alter our ways of doing 

 things as to create for ourselves successively more adequate 

 worlds. On the level of humankind, in short, we seem to 

 discover a type of causal agency, thought, which, for the 

 first time, with a degree of obvious power, makes itself felt 

 in the evolutionary process. 



What thought is, still remains so much a matter of con- 

 troversy that it need not detain us here. But that thought 

 actually exists and that it is productive of far-reaching 

 changes in our behaviors ought to be so obvious as to need no 

 defense. And yet there are those who take but small stock 

 in the power of thought to change our fundamental behav- 

 iors. They are the behevers in the inborn and unchangeable 

 character of human nature. They point to the basic instincts, 

 of pugnacity, food-getting, sex, etc., and assert that these 

 are what govern and will always govern man's hfe. But they 

 fail to make a distinction. Sex may be a fundamental bio- 

 logical pattern, but the ways in which the sex life can operate 

 will be as different as that between the savage who drags 

 his wife home with a club and the modern urbanite who goes 

 a-wooing in his motor car. Food-getting may be fundamental, 

 but the ways will differ from the crude hunting of the 

 primitive to the organized husbandry of the modern. No 

 doubt the raw material of human life remains steadfast, but 



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