appears to have more endurance. We are familiar with differences in 

 muscular capacity, as well as in ability to acquire various skills: one does 

 better in basketball or hockey; another does better in tennis or in marks- 

 manship. 



In most of our work, games, sports and hobbies, we are constantly 

 aware of differences among people. We select members for our teams, try- 

 ing to get the best players, or the potentially best players. Then we assign 

 each one to the particular task for which he is best fitted. Whatever quali- 

 ties we consider of value, however, we seldom think of them as chemical 

 and physical peculiarities in the materials and organs of people. 



What Is Normal? 



The One and the Many Twenty thousand people attend a great ball 

 game. The players are carefully picked and trained. But nobody cares 

 who the spectators are — except each one himself. For certain purposes, we 

 are all alike. We are so many million mouths to feed, or so many custom- 

 ers, or so many passengers carried so many miles. Particular persons appear 

 to be overlooked. In most cases, when something happens to one of these, 

 nobody cares whether it happens to this one or to another — except the par- 

 ticular person himself and his immediate relatives and friends. For himself 

 each one is somebody in particular. Each one feels himself to be unique: 

 he wants to be himself and he can admit no substitute. 



There seems to be a contradiction between wanting to be like every- 

 body else and wanting to be different. If we were all actually alike in every 

 respect, problems of personality would never arise. What you consider your 

 self probably comes into being only as you discover that you are separate 

 from and different from other persons. Yet you do not want to be so dif- 

 ferent as to be classed in-human, or even as super-human. 



In everyday life we accept variation in a hundred details, and we make 

 use of the differences — in selecting our friends, our public officers or our 

 favorite artists and authors. But how much variation can we accept in 

 others? or in ourselves? How do we measure degrees of variation? What 

 could we use as a standard? 



The Average and the Normal We ordinarily judge other people by 

 ourselves — by how far they agree with us in appearance, in behavior, in 

 speech, in ideas. Yet hardly anybody is so pleased with himself as to sug- 

 gest that he should be considered the standard. We commonly speak of 

 the "average" as if that were a clearly understood standard. Almost anyone 

 is "average" in most respects. Yet we would hardly take any individual at 

 random as the standard by which to judge the rest of us. 



We look for a standard by comparing large numbers of individuals. A 



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