THE RENAISSANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY 



would not be delighted to have himself so conditioned 

 from early childhood and by later training that when- 

 ever a bell rang or a chord in G major were struck, he 

 would respond by productive composition! A glorious 

 but futile dream, and how inconvenient if the signal came 

 inopportunely ! 



There is no salvation in conditioning. Indeed the more 

 helpful concept for that process comes from the Freudian 

 angle and receives the name of "fixation," an undesirable 

 and emotionally overloaded attachment or complex or 

 idiosyncracy. It there assumes the complexion of something 

 to be avoided by keeping attachments flexible and in 

 perspective. Yet equally is that an environmentalist 

 conclusion. As a fact there is no phase of the mind's 

 activities, above the most rudimentary, which is not 

 subject to the combined influences of nature and nurture, 

 of dispositioning and conditioning, each rather flexibly 

 interpreted. Even the relative constancy of the intelligence 

 quotient is not wholly a matter of endowment, but results 

 from a relative equality of environmental stimulation; 

 hence the statistical regularity and the individual vari- 

 ability. The superiority of the average I.Q. among the 

 children of the well-to-do as compared to those of the 

 poorer classes, is an example of the dual set of causes. 

 Psychology is so intimately biological that its principles 

 and practices depend upon the issues of patterns more 

 definitely traceable in bodily traits. 



In further illustration of the controversial character of 

 issues in psychology which must find their illumination 

 under biological principles, there is the eternal problem 

 of the eternal feminine — the correct view of the differences 

 in mental organization of men and women. For here are 

 three vital determinations of original nature which shape 

 the fate of humanity and the course of civilization — the 

 race, the sex, the individual or familial stock. 



[87] 



