Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychologyDewey, John
Philosophy
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Dewey, John
Habit; Social psychology
For any activity is original when it first occurs. As conditions are
continually changing, new and _primitive_ activities are continually
occurring. The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition
of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which
specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality
are lost from view. This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much
more illuminating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct
than the schematizing psychologist. The artist makes perceptible
individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature
evoked in new situations. In putting the case visibly and dramatically
he reveals vital actualities. The scientific systematizer treats each
act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical
combination of elements drawn from a ready-made inventory.
When we recognize the diversity of native activities and the varied ways
in which they are modified through interactions with one another in
response to different conditions, we are able to understand moral
phenomena otherwise baffling. In the career of any impulse activity
there are speaking generally three possibilities. It may find a surging,
explosive discharge--blind, unintelligent. It may be sublimated--that
is, become a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a
continuing course of action. Thus a gust of anger may, because of its
dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding
conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic
to carry the conviction into execution. Or an excitation of sexual
attraction may reappear in art or in tranquil domestic attachments and
services. Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning
of impulse; in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates
as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive
activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic
action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be
"suppressed."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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