3
Into the making of a man's characters there enters a variety of
influences not easily separated. [Footnote: For an interesting sketch
of the more noteworthy early attempts to explain character, see the
chapter called "The Antecedents of the Study of Character and
Temperament," in Joseph Jastrow's _The Psychology of Conviction_.]
The analysis in its fundamentals is perhaps still as doubtful as it
was in the fifth century B. C. when Hippocrates formulated the
doctrine of the humors, distinguished the sanguine, the
melancholic, the choleric, and the phlegmatic dispositions, and
ascribed them to the blood, the black bile, the yellow bile, and the
phlegm. The latest theories, such as one finds them in Cannon,
[Footnote: _Bodily Changes in Pleasure, Pain and Anger_.] Adler,
[Footnote: _The Neurotic Constitution_.] Kempf, [Footnote: _The
Autonomic Functions and the Personality; Psychopathology. Cf_. also
Louis Berman: _The Glands Regulating Personality_.] appear to
follow much the same scent, from the outward behavior and the inner
consciousness to the physiology of the body. But in spite of an
immensely improved technique, no one would be likely to claim that
there are settled conclusions which enable us to set apart nature from
nurture, and abstract the native character from the acquired. It is
only in what Joseph Jastrow has called the slums of psychology that
the explanation of character is regarded as a fixed system to be
applied by phrenologists, palmists, fortune-tellers, mind-readers, and
a few political professors.
Pages:
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189