However, granted these permanent difficulties, there are others which
may be reduced or made to disappear. Granted that we have to organize
our minds into a whole, we can see the general plan on which we
should aim at organizing it. We must aim first at having no barriers
between different parts of the mind. Every attempt must be made in
the education of children to prevent there being a stigma attached
to one whole section of mental life, and so to avoid its partial or
total dissociation from the rest. On the other hand, the absence of
barriers does not imply the absence of any relation of subordination or
dominance of one part to another. One of the most important biological
generalizations is that progressive evolution is accompanied by the
rise of one part to dominance and, whenever there are many parts to be
considered, by the arrangement of the rest in some form of hierarchy,
each part being subordinate to one above, dominant to one below. It
is such a hierarchy which we must try to construct in our mental
organization.
It is obviously impossible here to go into the whole question of
values and ideals, but it is clear to any one who has given the
briefest reflection to the subject that there are certain values,
æsthetic, intellectual, and moral, which are ultimate for the mind of
man, certain ideals--of truth and honesty, intellectual satisfaction,
righteousness or at least freedom from the sense of sin or guilt,
completeness and self-realization, unselfishness and serviceableness
and so forth--which (though perhaps in varying proportions) are by
common consent accepted as the highest: and further that the greater
the attempt to deepen and broaden these, to increase their mental
intensity and to widen their range and association, the more they
tend to emerge into something increasingly unitary, in which it is
seen that honesty is also beautiful and useful, that intellectual
satisfaction is in the long run serviceable to the community, that
unselfishness to be effective requires thought and will besides mere
altruistic emotion, that one of the greatest aids to any genuine
righteousness is an æsthetic love of beautiful things that prevents our
doing ugly things, and so _ad infinitum_.
The proper way, then, to build the sex instinct into the mental system
is not to have its stimulation cause a merely physiological and
uninhibited desire for its gratification, nor to bring about a forcible
repression and an attempt to break connection between it and the other
parts of the mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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