China Learn

On Having a Mind

The human mind, you say, is probably the noblest product of the Creation. This is a proposition that most people will admit, particularly when it refers to a mind like Albert Einstein’s that can prove curved space by a long mathematical equation, or Edison’s that can invent the gramaphone and the motion picture, or the minds of other physicists who can measure the rays of an advancing or receding star or deal with the constitution of the unseen atoms, or that of the inventor of natural-color movie cameras. Compared with the aimless, shifting and fumbling curiosity of the monkeys, we must agree that we have a noble, a glorious intellect that can comprehend the universe in which we are born.

The average mind, however, is charming rather than noble. Had the average mind been noble, we should be completely rational beings without sins or weaknesses or misconduct, and what an insipid world that would be! We should be so much less charming as creatures. I am such a humanist that saints without sins don’t interest me. But we are charming in our irrationality, our inconsistencies, our follies, our sprees and holiday gaieties, our prejudices, bigotry and forgetfulness. Had we all perfect brains, we shouldn’t have to make new resolutions every New Year. The beauty of the human life consists in the fact that, as we review on New Year’s Eve our last New Year resolutions, we find we have fulfilled a third of them, left unfulfilled another third, and can’t remember what the other third was. A plan that is sure to be carried out down to its last detail already loses interest for me. A general who goes to battle and is completely sure of his victory beforehand, and can even predict the exact number of casualties, will lose all interest in the battle, and might just as well throw up the whole thing. No one would play chess if he knew his opponent’s mind-good, bad or indifferent-was infallible. All novels would be unreadable did we know exactly how the mind of each character was going to work and were we able consequently to predict the exact outcome. The reading of a novel is but the chase of a wayward and unpredictable mind making its incalculable decisions at certain moments, through a maze of evolving circumstances. A stern, unforgiving father who does not at some moment relax ceases to impress us as human, and even a faithless husband who is forever faithless soon forfeits the reader’s interest. Imagine a renowned, proud composer, whom no one could induce to compose an opera for a certain beautiful woman, but who, on hearing that a hated rival composer is thinking of doing it, immediately snatches at the job; or a scientist who in his life has consistently refused to publish his writings in newspapers, but who, on seeing a rival scientist make a slip with one single letter, forgets his own rule and rushes into print. There we have laid our finger upon the singularly human quality of the mind.

The human mind is charming in its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability. If we haven’t learned this truth, we have learned nothing from the century of study of human psychology. In other words, our minds still retain the aimless, fumbling quality of simian intelligence.

Consider the evolution of the human mind. Our mind was originally an organ for sensing danger and preserving life. That this mind eventually came to appreciate logic and a correct mathematical equation I consider a mere accident. Certainly it was not created for that purpose. It was created for sniffing food, and if after sniffing food, it can also sniff an abstract mathematical formula, that’s all to the good. My conception of the human brain, as of all animal brains, is that it is like an octopus or a starfish with tentacles, tentacles for feeling the truth and eating it. Today we still speak of “feeling” the truth, rather than “thinking” it. The brain, together with other sensory organs, constitutes the feelers. How its tentacles feel the truth is still as great a mystery in physics as the sensitivity to light of the purple in the eye’s retina. Every time the brain dissociates itself from the collaborating sensory apparatus and indulges in so-called “abstract thinking,” every time it gets away from what William James calls the perceptual reality and escapes into the world of conceptual reality, it becomes devitalized, dehumanized and degenerate. We all labor under the misconception that the true function of the mind is thinking, a misconception that is bound to lead to serious mistakes in philosophy unless we revise our notion of the term “thinking” itself. It is a misconception that is apt to leave the philosopher disillusioned when he goes out of his studio and watches the crowd at the market. As if thinking had much to do with our everyday behavior!

The late James Harvey Robinson has tried to show, in The Mind in the Making, how our mind gradually evolved from, and is still operating upon, four underlying layers: the animal mind, the savage mind, the childish mind and the traditional civilized mind, and has further shown us the necessity of developing a more critical mind if the present human civilization is to continue. In my scientific moments, I am inclined to agree with him, but in my wiser moments, I doubt the feasibility, or even the desirability, of such a step of general progress. I prefer to have our mind charmingly unreasonable as it is at present. I should hate to see a world in which we are all perfectly rational beings. Do I distrust scientific progress? No, I distrust sainthood. Am I anti-intellectualistic? Perhaps yes; perhaps no. I am merely in love with life, and being in love with life, I distrust the intellect profoundly. Imagine a world in which there are no stories of murder in newspapers, everyone is so omniscient that no house ever catches fire, no airplane ever has an accident, no husband deserts his wife, no pastor elopes with a choir girl, no king abdicates his throne for love, no man changes his mind and everyone proceeds to carry out with logical precision a career that he mapped out for himself at the age of ten-good-by to this happy human world! All the excitement and uncertainty of life would be gone. There would be no literature because there would be no sin, no misbehavior, no human weakness, no upsetting passion, no prejudices, no irregularities and, worst of all, no surprises. It would be like a horse race in which everyone of the forty or fifty thousand spectators knew the winner. Human fallibility is the very essence of the color of life, as the upsets are the very color and interest of a steeplechase. Imagine a Doctor Johnston without his bigoted prejudices! If we were all completely rational beings, we should then, instead of growing into perfect wisdom, degenerate into automatons, the human mind serving merely to register . certain impulses as unfailingly as a gas meter. That would be inhuman, and anything inhuman is bad.

My readers may suspect that I am trying a desperate defense of human frailties and making virtues of their vices, and yet it is not so. What we gained in correctness of conduct through the development of a completely rational mind, we should lose in the fun and color of life. And nothing is so uninteresting as to spend one’s life with a paragon of virtue as a husband or wife. I have no doubt that a society of such perfectly rational beings would be perfectly fitted to survive, and yet I wonder whether survival on such terms is worth having. Have a society that is well-ordered, by all means -but not too well-ordered! I recall the ants, who, to my mind, are probably the most perfectly rational creatures on earth. No doubt ants have evolved such a perfect socialist state that they have been able to live on this pattern for probably the last million years. So far as complete rationality of conduct is concerned, I think we have to hand it to the ants, and let the human beings come second (I doubt very much whether they deserve that). The ants are a hard-working, sane, saving and thrifty lot. They are the socially regimented and individually disciplined beings that we are not. They don’t mind working fourteen hours a day for the state or the community; they have a sense of duty and almost no sense of rights; they have persistence, order, courtesy and courage, and above all, self-discipline. Weare poor specimens of self-discipline, not even good enough for museum pieces.

Run across any hall of honor, with statues of the great men of history lining the corridor, and you will perceive that rationality of conduct is probably the last thing to be recalled from their lives. This Julius Caesar, who fell in love with Cleopatra-noble Julius Caesar, who was so completely irrational that he almost forgot (as Anthony did entirely forget) an empire for a woman. That Moses, who in a fit of rage shattered the sacred stone tablets which had taken him forty days on Mount Sinai to inscribe in company with God, and in that he was no more rational than the Israelites who forsook God and took to worshiping the Golden Calf during his absence. That King David, who was alternately cruel and generous, alternately religious and impious, who worshiped God and sinned and wrote psalms of repentance and worshiped God again. King Solomon, the very image of wisdom, who couldn’t do a thing about his son… Confucius, who told a visitor he was not at home and then, as the visitor was just outside the door, sang upstairs in order to let him know that he was at home… Jesus, with his tears at Gethsemane and his doubts on the cross . . . Shakespeare, who bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife… Milton, who couldn’t get along with his seventeen-year-old wife and therefore wrote a treatise on divorce and, being attacked, then burst forth into a defense of the liberty of speech in Areopagitica…

Goethe, who went through the Church’s wedding ceremony with his wife, their nineteen-year-old son standing by their side… Jonathan Swift and Stella… Ibsen and Emilie Bardach (he kept rational-good for him) …

Is it not plain that passion rather than reason rules the world?

And that what made these great men lovable, what made them human, was not their rationality, but their lack of rationality? Chinese obituary notices and biographical sketches of men and women written by their children are so unreadable, so uninteresting and so untrue, because they make all their ancestors appear abnormally and wholly virtuous beings … The great criticism of my book on China by my countrymen is that I make the Chinese too human, that I have painted their weaknesses as well as their strength. My countrymen (at least the little bureaucrats) believe that if I had painted China as a paradise inhabited by Confucianist saints only, living in a millennium of peace and reason, I could have done more effective propaganda for my country! There is really no limit to the stupidity of bureaucrats… But the very charm of biography, its very readability, depends on showing the human side of a great character which is so similar to ours. Every touch of irrational behavior in a biography is a stroke in convincing reality. On that alone, the success of Lytton Strachey’s portraits depends.

An excellent illustration of a perfectly sound mind is provided

by the English. The English have got bad logic, but very good tentacles in their brains for sensing danger and preserving life. I have not been able to discover anything logical in their national behavior or their rational history. Their universities, their constitution, their Anglican Church are all pieces of patchwork, being the steady accretions of a process of historical growth. The very strength of the British Empire consists in the English lack of cerebration, in their total inability to see the other man’s point of view, and in their strong conviction that the English way is the only right way and English food is the only good food. The moment the Englishmen learn to reason and lose their strong confidence in themselves, the British Empire will collapse. For no one can go about conquering the world if he has doubts about himself. You can make absolutely nothing out of the English attitude toward their king, their loyalty to, and their quite genuine affection for, a king who is deprived by them of the liberty of speech and is summarily told to behave or quit the throne… When Elizabethan England needed pirates to protect the Empire, she was able to produce enough pirates to meet the situation and glorified them. In every period, England was able to fight the right war, against the right enemy, with the right ally, on the right side, at the right time, and call it by a wrong name. They didn’t do it by logic, did they? They did it by their tentacles.

The English have a ruddy complexion, developed no doubt by the London fog and by cricket. A skin that is so healthy cannot but help playing an important part in their thinking, that is, in the process of feeling their way through life. And as the English think with their healthy skin, so the Chinese think with their profound intestines. That is a pretty generally established matter in China. We Chinese know that we do think with our intestines; scholars are said to have “a bellyful of ideas,” or “of scholarship,” “of poetry and literature,” or “a bellyful of sorrow,” or “of anger,” “remorse,” “chagrin,” or ‘longing.” Chinese lovers separated from each other write letters to say that “their sorrowful intestines are tied into a hundred knots,” or that at their last parting “their intestines were broken.” Chinese scholars who have arranged their ideas for an essay or a speech, but have not written them down on paper, are said to have their “belly manuscript” ready. They have got their ideas all arranged down there. I’m quite sure they have. This is, of course, all strictly scientific and capable of proof, especially when modern psychologists come to understand better the emotional quality and texture of our thought. But the Chinese don’t need any scientific proof. They just feel it down there. Only by appreciating the fact that the emotional quality of Chinese melodies all starts from below the diaphragm of the singers, can one understand Chinese music with its profound emotional color.

One must never deprecate the capacity of the human mind when dealing with the natural universe or anything except human relationships. Optimistic about the conquests of science, I am less hopeful about the general development of a critical mind in dealing with human affairs, or about mankind reaching a calm and understanding far above the sway of passions. Mankind as individuals may have reached austere heights, but mankind as social groups are still subject to primitive passions, occasional back-slidings and outcroppings of the savage instincts, and occasional waves of fanaticism and mass hysteria.

Knowing then our human frailties, we have the more reason to hate the despicable wretch who in demagogue fashion makes use of our human foibles to hound us into another world war; who inculcates hatred, of which we already have too much; who glorifies self-aggrandizement and self-interest, of which there is no lack; who appeals to our animal bigotry and racial prejudice; who deletes the fifth commandment in the training of youth and encourages killing and war as noble, as if we were not already warlike enough creatures; and who whips up and stirs our mortal passions, as if we were not already very near the beast. This wretch’s mind, no matter how cunning, how sagacious, how worldly-wise, is itself a manifestation of the beast. The gracious spirit of wisdom is tied down to a beast or a demon in us, which by this time we have come to understand is nothing but our animal heritage, or rather it ties this demon down by an old and worn leash and holds it but in temporary submission. At any time the leash may snap, and the demon be unleashed, and amidst hosannas the car of Juggernaut will ride roughshod over us, just to remind us once more how terribly near the savage we have been all this time, and how superficial is our civilization. Civilization will then be turned into a magnificent stage, on which Moors will kill Christians and Christians kill Moors and Negroes fall upon whites and whites stab Negroes and field mice emerge from sewers to eat human corpses and hawks circle in the air over an abundant human feast-all just to remind ourselves of the brotherhood of animals. Nature is quite capable of such experiments.

Psychoanalyists often cure mental patients by making them review their past and see their life objectively. Perhaps if mankind will think more of their past, they will also have a better mastery over themselves. The knowledge that we have an animal heritage and that we are very near the beasts might help to check our behaving like beasts. This animal heritage of ours makes it easier to see ourselves as we are in animal fables and satires, as in Aesop’s Fables, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Anatole France’s Penguin Island. These animal fables were good in Aesop’s day and will still be good in the year A. D. 4000•

How can we remedy the situation? The critical mind is too thin and cold, thinking itself will help little and reason will be of small avail; only the spirit of reasonableness, a sort of warm, glowing, emotional and intuitive thinking, joined with compassion, will insure us against a reversion to our ancestral type. Only the development of our life to bring it into harmony with our instincts can save us. I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas.