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CHILDISHNESS IN ADULT LIFE1

BY D. FRASER HARRIS

MOST people, if asked to say what characterizes the social life of the present day, would reply, "The applications of natural science to our pleasures and convenience.' And yet it is abundantly evident that along with these notable and astounding developments of science there is a very great deal of what can only be described as childishness. If ever there was an age when a rational view of knowledge seemed paramount, it is the present, and yet coexistent with this there is a vast underlying substratum of the irrationality of the immature mind. The particular variety of mental immaturity of which we are thinking is the incapacity to grasp the universality of the doctrine of cause and effect. The post hoc is everywhere mistaken for the propter hoc, and this not only among the uneducated masses, but among those whose training should have disposed them to think far otherwise.

The persistence of superstition in the life of to-day is due mainly to two causes, one the receptivity and suggestibility of minds which have never grasped the meaning of causation, the other the perpetuation of the superstitions themselves through the working of racial psychic momentum. It is chiefly in the female mind that these superstitions are preserved. When women get into a panic because thirteen people are at table, when they think it

It is

1 From the Contemporary Review (London Liberal monthly), January

Publication rights in America controlled by the Leonard Scott Publication Company

unlucky to go under a ladder, to spill salt, to break a mirror, to open an umbrella in the house, to see the moon through glass, or a spider in the morning, to wear green at weddings, they are carrying on into adult life an infantile conception of cause and effect. A very large number of people confuse 'chance' in the mathematician's sense with 'good luck' or 'bad luck.' By 'bad luck' they do not mean 'chance' as amenable to mathematical analysis, but a malevolent influence which follows them through life, destroys their schemes, and ruins their prospects. In fact, they still believe in a modern form of 'witch's curse' or the 'evil eye.'

People who really believe that a horseshoe hung on the door brings good luck, or that a small figureusually ugly stuck on the bonnet of their car as a 'mascot' can do anything to ward off bad luck, are still in the stage of those who believed that evil spirits bringing calamities could be frightened away by some particularly hideous image the idol. The Chinese believe that their crackers and bellringing have the same power. The 'mascot' of to-day is the idol of the savage or the pagan. But the belief in bad luck as caused by inanimate things and things wholly outside our control is not confined to women; it is stated by a prominent London lawyer that he never arranges for any men among his clients to sign a will on a Friday. This belief in bad luck is, then, not confined to Irish peasants and Chinese laborers; it still flourishes in the drawing

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rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia. The puerilities of the belief in ghosts, in persons possessed of mediumistic, supernormal power, in evil spirits, 'emanations,' astral bodies, 'ectoplasm,' spirit photographs, et hoc genus omne, really represent in the age of science the beliefs that belonged to the very dark ages before Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, or Newton had ascertained some of the general principles on which the workings of the universe in general, and the human body in particular, are conducted. The same applies very largely to the childishness about the weather, to old wives' tales and folklore about signs in the sky. Those who continue to believe, for instance, that the moon affects the weather have no notion of the real factors that go to produce meteorological changes, have never understood barometric pressure, pressure gradients, anticyclonic and cyclonic types of weather, nor the effects of the temperature of the air and its moisture as the sources of winds.

And yet it may be said, "These people are educated.' Possibly; but the fact is that education in itself does not eradicate hereditary tendencies to superstition; education may mask, but it does not abolish, the influence of racial functional momentum. The truth is, however, that many of these people are not educated in the real sense of the word; for education is the process whereby we learn how to acquire knowledge rather than the mere acquiring of it. The knowing about things is not being educated; it is being instructed. Education is the appreciation of the value of knowledge, of its quality rather than its quantity. It is the conviction that we are forced to recognize a rational principle underlying all things. Education is, of course, to be distinguished, but often is not, from civilization on the one hand and culture on the other. And 'civilization' is often

Culture is something far beyond both education and civilization. It is the desire that all the activities of mind and body should be interpenetrated by the enjoyment of the beautiful; it is the suffusing of the commonplace with the gracious spirit of beauty until the natural man becomes transfigured into a being of a higher and more exquisite order. Clearly culture has to be based on education; a cultured person must be an educated person, but an educated person need not be a cultured one. You can have an educated devil, and a civilized devil, but you cannot have a cultured one; for the love of beautyculture- pervades everything in the life physical, mental, and moral. You can have educated savages with the veneer of civilization, but 'cultured savages' is a contradiction in terms. Thus the so-called 'Teutonic Kultur' was scientific education, not culture at all, for it sacrificed beauty ruthlessly to the supposed exigencies of military necessity. The cultured person dare not destroy beauty; he realizes too intensely that there is so little of it in the world, and what there is is a joy forever. Civilization without culture is indeed a veneer; it does not remove the primitive, ancestral, social traits and tendencies which shall endure through the operation of physiological momen

tum as long as man shall endure. Now childishness is one of these ancestral traits, and inevitably it will be perpetuated by the same social momentum. It expresses itself even in those highly educated people who walk about with an iron ring round a finger or a raw potato in their pocket to ward off rheumatism, or who believe that a piece of red flannel has much more efficacy than a white one tied round the neck for sore throat. But are not the masses still children, and still to be amused as such? One may pass over the 'Amusements Park' at an exhibition, but for what purpose other than to attract the attention of grown-up children is all this disfiguring of cities at night with flaring electric lights, devices showing the wheels of a motorcar going round, or a glass being filled from a gin-bottle? It is a crude, largescale, visual appeal to childishness in adult life. What a commentary on civilization in Britain after two thousand years is Piccadilly Circus at night!

Egregious childishness can

exist

alongside the most marvelous applications of the knowledge of the hidden forces of nature, such as are witnessed, for instance, in wireless telephony, the airplane, and the submarine boat. There is no doubt that the amount of exact physicochemical and biological knowledge diffused among the people is small: many people to-day do really believe the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it, although they do not like to admit this belief because there seems to be a general prejudice against it. One very marked mode of expressing the childishness of adults is the uncritical acceptance of the statements in advertisements of 'quack' medicines. A great many people will believe anything that is told them sufficiently often with sufficient emphasis. The quantity of impotent drugs swallowed

at the present day is enormous. No statements about their omnipotence are too absurd to be accepted, no amount of adverse criticism of their worthlessness carries any conviction.

Some years ago, while the trial involving some disputed point about a patent pill was proceeding, and while it was being demonstrated in court that the pill contained no substance of any efficacy whatever, the notices of the virtues of the panacea continued to appear in the newspapers, and the volume of the sales was scarcely diminished. It is as true to-day as the day when it was written: populus vult decipi. A very great deal of the excessive novel-reading of the present day is nothing more or less than the revival of the childish love of being 'told a story.'

The appeal made to a certain type of mind by some phases of religion and some fantastic Transatlantic 'isms' is largely because these minds have arrived at no adequate conception of cause and effect. Only to an uncritical, childish mentality can this sort of thing appeal. While there is no doubt that much good can come from the attitude of mind advocated by Monsieur Coué, yet in some quarters the practical result of his method is perfectly absurd, as when we have seen a number of hopelessly incurable general paralytics mumbling unceasingly through their anarthria, 'Every day and in every way, I am getting better.' It was pathetic in its hopelessness and puerility; it was childishness in excelsis.

A notable expression of childishness in adult life is the way in which women will follow a fashion whether it suits them or not. If the vogue is to build up the hair congenital or acquired into a pyramid, or to cut most of it off, all save a few discriminating women will follow the fashion uncomplainingly. Forty years ago the decree was to look

like a wasp; now it is to appear almost unidimensional; but whatever it is, it is adopted at the risk of discomfort, and even of pain. Perhaps the most irritating result of trying to look very thin is that no pockets are allowed in any garment, with the result that all things needful are carried in a receptacle which, not being an organic part of the costume, is apt to be lost, stolen, or mislaid with disastrous facility.

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The imitative faculty so noticeable in children is responsible for the ease with which a phrase often half understood spreads through the community. Thus the words 'psychological moment,' which as a joke were originally tolerable, have been used in season and out of season until the repetition is unbearable. To some extent the phrase is illiterate, for if translated out of Greek it means the study-of-the-mind moment.' What Oscar Wilde intended his character to say was the critical, right, suitable, or opportune moment more than that. 'Psychological' is not the synonym for any of these terms. Another silly phrase which has caught the fancy of our grown-up children is, 'I had a brain wave,' when all that is meant is, 'it suddenly occurred to me.' This is oftenest used by those who know little or nothing about the brain or about waves. There is a third- or fourth-rate type of mind which rejoices in phrases and proverbs such as 'the aching void,' 'the better the day the better the deed,' and other superficial non-sequiturs.

Closely allied to this sort of thing is the childishness of shibboleths which flourishes from the reciprocally reënforcing influences of childishness and snobbery. These often go hand in hand. It is well known that there is no greater snob than the schoolboy, and many adults are still in that stage. Each class has its own shibboleth; and the unreflecting acceptance of one of

these, as the final word in all that is right or fitting, is the sign of an undeveloped sense of values and of a crude mentality: it is social Peter-Panism. Many things that pass for humor are the most puerile ineptitudes. Much of the old-fashioned music-hall' stage humor was in itself so silly that, when separated from the comical dress, attitudes, speech, and gestures of the comedian, it became emetical. Each few years develops a new phrase indicative of the inanity of its humor, as when people keep on saying, 'Now we shan't be long,' 'Everything in the garden's lovely,' 'A little bit off the top,' and so on in an endless series of cacophonies.

There is much childishness on a large scale in contemporary life when processions pass through the streets of a city with the leaders waving flags. Doubtless these perambulators are intended to impress the public with the importance of their cause or movement, seeing that they have employed the obvious method of muscular locomotion. The childish intolerance which decides that no man shall wear a straw hat before or after a certain day in the year is an example of childishness in adult life, as expressed in an impertinent interference in other people's affairs. From their lack of sympathetic imagination, children are very intolerant. The apparent necessity for 'rat' weeks, 'swat-the-fly' weeks, 'clean-up' weeks, pure-milk weeks, fire-prevention weeks, and so on, is another proof on a huge scale that we are all children of a larger growth, and that we cannot kill rats or flies, or keep our cellars clean, or Pasteurize milk, as individuals, but must be impelled thereto by the infectivity of a slogan or hygienic 'Fiery Cross.'

The success that attends fortunetelling, crystal-gazing, the revelations of the fashionable palmist, the predictions of gypsies, and other itinerant

irresponsibilities, is wholly due to the strong vein of childishness that runs through the mental constitution of even the most mature of us. What is Moore's Almanac in its astrological aspect but an annual appeal to childishness? For it is supremely childish in 1926 to continue to believe in the influences of the stars, in having one's horoscope 'cast,' in lucky and unlucky conjunctions of the planets on one's birthday, in the baleful influence of comets and that sort of thing that was honestly believed when astrology had not as yet given place to astronomy, nor alchemy to chemistry. There was a day about seven hundred years ago - when the first intellects of Europe believed that the heavenly bodies did really influence human destiny, when 'ill-starred' did actually refer to the stars, when the music of the spheres' and 'the stars in their courses' were axioms in physics, but nous avons changé tout cela, or think we have.

One expression of childishness in adult life which may actually be a serious menace to the welfare of the community is the activities of the antivaccinators. This particular form of childishness is that these people are unable to appreciate the import of the historical and statistical evidence in favor of vaccination against smallpox. The antivaccinators do not believe that the question whether there shall or shall not be universal vaccination is one for the medical expert, and not for the layman at all. These antivaccinating members of the laity are impervious to evidence, and are constantly making mistakes about cause and effect. They are the present-day representatives of that class of person who throughout the ages has opposed everything new. Edward Jenner was by no means the only promulgator of a discovery who suffered opposition and misrepresentation, for Galileo, Harvey, Simpson,

Semmelweiss, and Lister were all, at first at least, ridiculed, thwarted, and opposed. This form of childishness, as an expression of social psychological inertia, may be a very serious thing for the public health. Possibly some of the leaders of antivaccination are ineducable, which is an expression of physiological inertia.

Childishness in adult life occasionally expresses itself in morbid emotionalism, as when a whole community signs a petition to reprieve a murderer. The unreasoning and irresponsible adult childishness overlooks the fact that legal experts have considered all the aspects of the case and deliberately come to the conclusion that the prisoner is guilty of murder, and that, as the law stands, the death sentence must be carried out. But just as the child who happens to want something very much totally ignores your explanations of why he cannot have it, so a community in virtue of its childishness will brush aside the whole logical chain of reasons whereby the criminal was convicted, and simply cry out that the sentence must be commuted.

Many people never grow up. The childishness of the present-day adult may be concealed or repressed by the conventions of society, but it quickly rises to the surface when any great crisis is being passed through or momentous event witnessed. The extravagances known as ‘Mafficking' are the violent uprushing through the veneer of civilization of the latent childishness deep in the emotional nature of ninetynine per cent of us. Just as the hashishpoisoned Oriental 'runs amuck' in his murderous career, so the educated adult of 1926 returns on occasions at one leap to the irrepressible violence and buffoonery of his irresponsible childhood. The Armistice was the occasion for the ebullition of emotional infantilism on a scale hitherto unknown.

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