Human Traits and their Social Significance

ed with too much eating, and irritated by too much inactivity, so men become "fed up" with companionship. The demand for solitude and privacy is thus fundamentally a physiological demand, like the d

ople, and the total inability of most city dwellers to secure privacy for any considerable length of time. In some people a lifelong habit of close contact with large numbers of people makes them abnormally gregarious, so that solitude, the normal method of recuperation from compani

the literature of the Elizabethan period the amazing lack of a sense of privacy there exhibited. In contemporary society this sense and the possibility of its satisfaction are variously displayed on different economic and

ve thought. There are some men who find it impossible to write when there is another person, even one of whom they are fond, in the same room. "No man," writes Mr. Graham Wallas, "is likely to produce creative thoughts (either consciously or subconsciously) if he is constantly interrupted by irregular

t tell," and older people, especially sensitive and intelligent ones, feel a peculiar sense of irritation at having their personal affairs and feelings publicly displayed. Nearly everyone must recall occasions where he was vividly communicative and loquacious with a friend, only to relapse into a clam-like silence on the en

t are their own. Both animals and humans, apart from training, display a tendency to get and hold objects. This tendency may take extreme forms, as in the case of miserliness or kleptoma

In primitive tribes under the patriarchal system, the patriarch practically owns the tribe. Our laws not so

to the value of the objects. Especially will this be the case if the object possessed has become surrounded with other emotional attachments, so that an individual may be as bitterly chagrined and piqued by being deprived of some s

factories, machinery, or private estates is, in a sense, regarded by him as an extension of his personality. He is confirmed in this impression because it is so regarded by his neighbors and the whole social group. A great landowner i

by the individual or the group, provokes often fierce anger and bitter combat. The history of wars of aggrandizemen

acquisitive instinct. The acquisition of material wealth or capital, the development of the institution of private property with its conc

ws, the larger share of all human energy has been absorbed. The ruling passion has for a time long anterior to any recorded annals always been proprietary acquisition.... Bo

d: The Psychic Factors

rking long after they have money enough to enable them to live in comfort, merely for the further satisfaction of this impulse. "While in the course of sa

cDougall: loc.

body owns anything, but where all is owned in common-an idea which has been repeated in many modern forms of socialism and communism, fails to note this powerful human difficulty. Many sociali

attachment that they exhibit with regard to their physical possessions. Like the latter, these come to be regarded as an e

else's conduct, and society has never been much concerned about opinions that an individual harbored strictly in his own bosom. Silence, socially, is as good as assent. The insistence on the right to one's own opinions becomes, therefore, an insistence on the right or the freedom to express them.[2] This

l possessions in themselves, as in the case of rival claimants to some theory

sed in connection with man's instinctive gregariousness and the emotional sway which habits of thought have over men, dissent is regarded with suspicion. Especially is this the case where t

on of its traditions and institutions unchanged. Wherever that belief prevails, novel opinions are felt to be dangerous as well as annoyi

History of Freedo

on on religious matters was regarded both as abominable and socially dangerous, and was severely punished. Since the middle of the nineteenth century there has been no legal punishment provided for dissent from established opinions in religion, although penalties for heterodoxy in countr

ess during the Great War, when suppression of opinion was, for

actions. They can argue that a man may do far more harm by propagating anti-social doctrines than by stealing his neighbor's horse or making love to his neighbor's wife. They are

Bury: loc.

e loser by permitting and encouraging individuality in thought and belief. The following, taken from one of the most famous of these, John Stuart Mill's

most virtuous man in it.... This acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived-whose fame, still growing after two thousand years, all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious-was put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and immorality. Impiet

. Mill: Essay on

pted beliefs are wrong. Galileo thought differently from the accepted Ptolemaic astronomy of his day, and the demonstration of his diverging belief proved the Ptolemaic astronomy to be wrong. The evolutionary theory, bitterly attacked in its day, replaced Cuvier's doctrine of the forms of life upon earth coming abo

1644, protesting against the censorship of printing, stressed the impor

n our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured us by their bushel? ... That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the i

: Milton: A

spect or point of view which prevailing theories fail to note. Thus the possible over-emphasis of certain contemporary writers on the socialization of man's life is a valuable corrective to the equal over-emphasis on individualism which was current among so many thinkers during the nineteenth century. Th

xims of conventional morality and religion which everybody believes and few practice are solemnly bandied about with little comprehension of their meaning and no tendency to act upon them. A belief becomes, as Mill pointed out, livin

l. The martyr stoned to death by one generation becomes the hero and prophet of the next. One has but to look back at the co

those who witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent cen

ll: Essay on Li

uppressed with the bitterest cruelty in one generation, have been in effect, and sometimes in fact, canonized by posterity. And a certain degree of tolerance and receptiveness has come to be the result. But while we no longer burn religious and social heretics, condemnatio