[1] It would be amusing were it not sad to see how remarkably well some philosophers use their intelligence and logic to prove the invalidity of intelligence and logic. They praise emotion, instinct and "intuition" and such modes of knowing and acting, yet their works are closely argued, reasoned and appeal throughout to the intelligence of their readers for acceptance.
True religion in the sense I have used the word has faith in it, the faith that there is a purpose in the universe, though it seems impossible for us to discover it. In the personal character it seeks to establish altruistic feeling and conduct, though it does not rule out as unworthy self-feeling or seeking. It merely subordinates them. It does not deny the validity of pleasure, of the sensuous pleasures; it does not set its face against drinking, eating, sexual love, play and entertainment, but it urges a valid purpose as necessary for happiness and morality. It does not glorify faith as against reason, emotion as against intelligence; on the contrary, it holds that reason and intelligence are the governing factors in human life and only by use of them do we rise from the beast.
So the religious life of those we study will be of great importance to us. In the majority of cases we shall find that social heredity, tradition and backing will play the dominant role, in that most, in name at least, live and die in the faith in which they were born. We find those who identify form and ceremonial with religion (the majority), others who identify it with ethics and morality, and who can conceive no righteousness out of it. Then there is the strictly modern type of person to whom right conduct is held to have nothing to do with religious belief and who measures Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and agnostic by their acts and not at all by their dogma, and who thus relegates religion, in the ordinary use of the word, to a rather useless place in human life. Orthodoxy, piety, tolerance and skepticism represent attitudes towards organized religion: altruism, sympathy, good will, and fellowship are the measurements of the unorganized religion whose mission it is to find the purpose of life.
We have spoken throughout of man as a mosaic of character, and we must modify this statement. A mosaic is a static collection, whereas a man has character struggles, balance and overbalance.
Really to know a man is to get at the proportionate power of his various trends, to understand his harmonies and disharmonies.
Character development is the story of the unification of the traits or characters. Disharmony, disproportion of traits and characters may be progressive and lead to disaster and mental disease, or a balance may be reached after a struggle and what we call reform takes place. Though our social life tends to narrow and repress character, it also tends to harmonize it by the preventing of excess development of certain traits. The social person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre.
On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric.
What are the chief disharmonies? I mean, of course, glaring disharmonies, for no one is of harmonious development, with intelligence, emotions, instincts, desires, purposes in cooperation with each other. This I propose to consider in more detail in the next chapter, on some character types, but it will be of use to sketch the great disharmonies.
Character is dynamic, and a fundamental disharmony, even if not noticeable early in life, may progress to the point of disruption of the personality. Thus an individual who is strongly egoistic in his purposes and aims may succeed if at the same time he is determined intelligent and shrewd. But let us suppose he has a son who is as strongly egoistic, is as determined, but lacks intelligence and shrewdness. Not becoming successful, this person ascribes his failure to others and develops ideas of persecution.
Again, a true poet is a person of keen sensibilities, but he must possess at the same time imaginative intelligence and the power of words. Let these be joined in proper proportions, and his verse becomes ours and we hail him as a poet. But let him lack the power of words, and though he sweat with a desire to write he is a failure or a hack poet, ****** up by industry what he lacks in beauty. Suppose there is a man deeply passionate, thrilled by the beauty of women and desiring them with a fierce ardor, and yet he has strong inhibitions, great purposes which hold him steady. Then throughout life he seems calm, chaste and controlled, and no one knows of the turmoil and battle within him. We may suppose that old age[1] or a sickness lowers his inhibiting qualities, and a startling change in conduct results, one that we can scarcely believe and which we are inclined to call a complete transformation of personality. In reality, a disharmony has occurred, some trend has been released, and conduct, which is a resultant, changes its direction.
[1] Sexual misdemeanor is not uncommon in old men who have hitherto been of hallowed reputation.
