20 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



New Psychology 



There are the claims and outcries and promises of the 

 psychologists — the specialists in the probing of the human soul 

 and human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic 

 psychology of process and becoming, psychology with an energy 

 in it, has split them into two schools — the emphasizers of instinct 

 and the subconscious, the McDougallians, and the pleaders for 

 sex and the unconscious, the Freudians. A synthesis between 

 these two groups is latent, since their differences are those of 

 horizon merely. For the McDougallians look upon the world 

 with two eyes and see it whole and broad — the Freudians see 

 through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they 

 behold the universe. It is true that they own a telescope. 



But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future 

 of the species? Nothing very much. Thus, to turn to the dis- 

 ciples of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human 

 Nature and its Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking 

 of Harvard contends that Man, all axioms about his nature to 

 the contrary, is but a creature of habit, and so the most plastic 

 of living things, since habit is self-controlled and self-determined. 

 By the self-determination of the habits of the race will the new 

 freedom be reborn. It sounds old, very old. And pathetic be- 

 cause it recognizes original and permanent ingredients of our 

 composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear, as elements 

 to be accepted in any system of the principles of civilization. 

 It is the bubble of education all over again. What in our cells ia 

 pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our blood is 

 sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are 

 respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding 

 must remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the 

 regimental barracks. 



Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new 

 universe. They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. 

 Layer upon layer, cross-section upon cross-section have been piled 

 before us. And what a melodramatic cinema of thrills and 

 shivers, villains and heroes, heroines and adventuresses have they 

 not unfolded. Each motive, as the stiff psychologist of the nine- 

 teenth century, with his plaster-of-Paris categories and pigeor 

 holes and classifications, labelled the teeming creatures of th> 

 mind, becomes anon a strutting actor upon a multitudinous 

 stage, and an audience in a crowded playhouse. Scenes art 



