234 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
contriving rating-scales*° for the registration of such facts in terms of 
a comparable scheme. 
1. Inborn Emotional Qualities. 
As with intellectual qualities, so with emotional, it is both con- 
venient and legitimate to distinguish at the outset the inborn from the 
acquired; and, so far as possible, to judge each level independently. 
In both directions much light has recently been thrown by the work 
of living authors. ‘The inborn mechanisms have been tentatively cata- 
logued and defined by McDougall; the acquired mechanisms by Freud 
and his school. The former lays stress upon hereditary factors; the 
latter upon developmental. But their views, however much opposed in _ 
general standpoint, are not so much incompatible as complementary. 
And they have this in common: both agree with one another in 
emphasising the dynamic elements in mental life, in contrast to the 
excessively intellectualistic preoccupation of the traditional psychology 
of the past. Hach doctrine, although developed primarily as a correc- 
tion of general psychological theory, is of the utmost practical value 
in studying the individual mind. 
To sift and winnow inborn tendencies from those that are acquired 
is even harder in the realm of character than in the field of intellect. 
With adults it is all but impossible. With the young a few suggestions 
can at times be gleaned from the family history, or from the early 
personal history of the child himself. With children, too, the dis- 
crimination is more important practically. To know whether a spiteful 
boy is inherently ill-tempered, or only venting some half-hidden griev- 
ance; to know whether an erring girl is constitutionally oversexed, or 
merely putting into practice what she has picked up from corrupt com- 
panions; to separate the nervousness left by a shock from a chronic neu- 
rosis rooted in the system and likely to merge into madness or hysteria ; 
to discriminate the excitability that is but a brief and transitory episode 
of some pubertal crisis from the excitability that began at birth and may 
last a lifetime—these are distinctions that make a world of difference in 
the treatment of the delinquent or neurotic while he is young. 
a. Specific Inborn Emotions and Instincts. 
English writers, McDougall, Shand, Drever, and others, find the 
foundations of human character in the instincts with their correlated 
emotions; and, taking their cue very largely from William James, they 
have given us useful working classifications for our common instinctive 
tendencies—inyentories sufficiently identical for the purposes of the 
practical man. ‘The strength with which each instinct is inherited is 
of necessity itself inborn. Accordingly, before estimating the character 
of a given individual, the first step is to take the universal human 
26 On rating persons either by ‘ relative position’ or by reference to ‘ key- 
subjects’ (a method elaborated with some success by the psychologists of the 
American Army) a rich literature has grown up. See, among other references, 
The Personnel System of the U.S. Army, vols. i. and ii. ; Scott, Psych. Bull. xv. 
(1918); Thorndike, J. Appl. Psych., ii. and iv. (1918 and 1920); and Rugg, 
J. Educ, Psych., xii. and xiii. (1921 and 1922). 
