Inhibition control, may develop later than it should, as I have already mentioned. At adolescence sex desire comes suddenly into play, but usually in one way or another there are checks upon its effects already established. But often there is not, and the boy or girl plunges into a sex life that brings them into violent conflict with themselves and society. Despite their efforts the non-ethical conduct continues; despite their tears and vows to reform they are swept by "temptation" into difficulty. Then suddenly or gradually, perhaps long after every one despairs of them, the inhibition appears, and they settle down to a controlled life. What has happened? We cannot say in anatomical terms, but from a psychological standpoint the function of inhibition, delayed in its appearance, finally comes on the scene. We see this delay in other phases of character; there is often delay in sex feeling, in the interest in work, in love of the beautiful, in control of anger, etc. Take the last mentioned: an irascible child grows into an irascible adolescent and even into a similar adult, flaring up under the least provocation, to the dismay and disgust of others and himself. "He can't control himself," so say others, and so thinks he. He vows reform, but nothing seems to help. Then like a miracle comes the longed-for inhibition; anger is still there when his will is crossed or his opinion scouted, but a firm hand is on it, and he maintains a calm he had despaired of reaching.
Man is a bundle of disharmonies, as the great Eli Metchnikoff pointed out, physically, psychologically and sociologically. When these disharmonies are within average limits we do not notice them; when they are greater in degree they bring about conduct that at once claims attention. Sometimes a disharmony is merely an excess development of some ability, in which case, if the ability is socially valuable, we have the talented person or the genius. This is often the case with the artistic abilities and also with the physical powers. If the disharmony involve an instinct, an emotion or certain phases of the intelligence, we are brought face to face with the abnormal.
There is, of course, disharmony through ordinary defect as in feeble-mindedness, as in absence of some essential emotion or instinct. These are hopeless situations and belong in the grim field of psychopathology. Often what seems to be a defect is a "sleeping" quality, and one that will awaken under appropriate circumstance. Conspicuously, maternal love is of this nature. One sees a girl who has no interest in children, considers them bores and nuisances, who marries with the hope she will be childless, and with the first baby becomes a passionately devoted mother, even fiercely maternal.
In the following pages I shall sketch some prominent character types. This has been done by such masters as Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, La Bruyere, Stewart, Ribot, Mill, etc., but with a different purpose and starting point than mine.
Every great novelist is a professor of character depiction.
Witness Scrooge, Pecksniff, Mark Tapley, Pickwick, Sam Weller and his father, created by Dickens; the four musketeers, especially D'Artagnon, of Dumas; Amelia and Rebecca Sharp, George, and the Major of Thackeray; Jane Austen's heroines and George Eliot's men and women; the narrators in the famous Canterbury Inn, the soldiers of Kipling, the Shylocks, Macbeths, Rosalinds and Falstaffs of the greatest dramatist; the thousand and one fictitious and yet real figures of literature.
The temperament studies by the psychologists and philosophers have been too broad and too classical to be of practical value.
Sanguine and choleric temperament, the bilious, the nervous and the phlegmatic, the quick and the slow, all these are broad divisions, and no man really exemplifies them. What I propose to do is less ambitious, but perhaps more practical. I shall take a few of the qualities with which the previous pages have concerned themselves and show how they work out in individuals mainly sketched from life.
It will seem that perhaps a disproportionate number are pathological, but I wish to insist that there is no sharp line between the "normal" and "pathological" in character. In fact, normality is an abstract conception, an ideal never reached or seen, and each of us only approaches that ideal in greater or lesser degree. Moreover, certain deviations from the normal are useful, as the assemblage of qualities that make the genius or the reformer of certain types. Others are not useful, or at least not useful in the environment and age in which the deviated person finds himself. Undoubtedly the abnormal have helped found religions, for one who "hears" God and "sees" him as do many of the insane, if intelligent and eloquent at the same time, easily convinces others; but if such a person occurs in a group with well-established belief and resistant to the new, the insane hospital soon lodges the new apostle.
I shall not attempt to consider all the varied shades of harmony and disharmony, the extraordinary variety of types. There are as many varieties of persons as there are people, and the mathematical possibilities exceed computation. Those depicted are some of the outstanding types, in whom qualities and combinations of qualities can easily be seen at work.
