Aldous Huxley Lecture: What a Piece Of Work is a Man

Tonight Mr. Huxley gives the second of his public lectures as kind of a visiting professor in the humanities department of the Institute for the past week in his introductory lecture. Mr. Hucks the subject was ancient views of human nature this evening he will speak to you on the contemporary picture. Mr. Huxley for us ladies and gentleman. I want this this evening to pass from the ancient art of home in the Old Testament and the Indians to some of the view. Naturally I can't. Discuss them all which are current know about human beings about this piece of work which is a man. Well the interesting thing is that the ego remains very much what it was in Homer's day. It is

this conscious fairly rational creature which uses words which is analytical which pursues its own self-interest. It is the person in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson the person with a conscience and a variable bank balance. But all round this go around this person with a variable bank balance. There are a whole number of not the surrounded and to a great extent controlled manipulated by this whole series of not as well as we saw in the ancient world. These are not classified under such names as the few masts and free and the midriff the heart of this power in the chest. In the Old

Testament we have such phrases as the again the heart the remains the bowels. And on top of the physical and psychophysical entities there where in all of the ancient conceptions these supernatural creatures which made in rushes and which that affected the life of the Eagle there were actual possessions by name and by name day Mons. And there were also we get in the Old Testament too. We get Samson being possessed by the Spirit of God and being able to perform these prodigies of strings in the battle. And we also have these kind of impersonal forces which are yet directed by supernatural powers from the outside which which calls in regard to the Negative Forces which lead us

to disaster. And many of us the. Positive forces which enable us to perform actions which normally in our normal state would be almost impossible for us. Well today we have course of. We still have the body with us which we classify and talk about in a rather different way in which I will speak about towards the end of the lecture. But in regard to the to the men US and the arty and these supernatural positions we observe the same phenomena but of course we speak about them in a different way. We speak about them in terms of an active dynamic unconscious. Well it's remarkable how recent this idea is we now take it completely for granted. But actually it is an idea. Which William James DTT exactly did William James attributed the beginning of the new

psychology with its stress upon the dynamic unconscious to the publication of a paper in 1886. But if W. H Myers MYERS It was a profound and I regard him as one of the business students and describers of the unconscious mind. Naturally he has been his fame has been completely eclipsed by that of Freud who in a sense I think was less complete as we can generalize and say that whereas Myers was chiefly concerned with the positive side of the unconscious with the unconscious as giving us men ups the sex sessions of strength and power and insight from Lloyd who was a physician dealing with sick people. Well I was mainly preoccupied with the negative side. Myers was concerned with men arse and Freud was concerned with.

Freud says of his own theory of the unconscious in his words. We obtain our Siri is the unconscious from our serious repression. His idea was a viewer this is I needn't go into it in any detail because it's perfectly familiar with the discreditable desires and drives. Push down out of consciousness because we don't want to confront the effect that we have such drives and desires which are variance with the cultural pattern of us and they are pushed. They remain alive and cause a great deal of trouble. Underneath the surface expressed themselves in these symbolic and roundabout ways and altogether behave very much as the positioning diamonds of the of Homeric times. It's interesting in this context to find that our colloquial language still preserves

many of the ideas which we inherit from America days. For example when we do something particularly stupid or delinquent we say I don't know what possessed me what can have come over me. We say He can't have been himself when he did that. All these are very interesting is showing how strong this ancient idea of being possessed by somebody else and how strongly it persists. And of course subjectively the activities of the of the negative unconscious definitely feel like a position. Then of course along with the discreditable drives which we repress we also repress painful memories of traumatic experiences but also pushed out of sight and also create a great deal of trouble in the basement of the mind

of Freud so to speak is talking all the time about the basement downstairs with the rats and the bear black beetles where. NYers is largely concerned with the floors above the ground floor where the ego lives. And he would agree I would think with that with the mystical point of view that the top most floor of these upper levels has no roof to it and is open to the sky which we will go into that later. Well over and above the negative unconscious due to repression there is of course a large negative unconscious and also positive unconscious due to. Early conditioning conditioning of course is something which everybody undergoes in the course of childhood and is completely necessary to adapt to a growing

social environment but of course it can also be extremely dangerous and produce very bad results. Pavel off in his classical studies of dogs showed that conditioning is particularly easy when the resistance has been lowered by disease or by fear or indeed by any emotion that at these times it's particularly simple to install a behavior pattern which is then very difficult to get rid of. We become in these states of low resistance. We become what the poet describes as well acts to receive and marble to retain these in these. Behavior patterns can be pushed into us at this time with extraordinary falls and incidentally during the

Second World War the theory of conditioning under stress and during moments of resistance was used in the treatment of what used to be called shell shock and I was called Battle Fatigue. It was the they used this as the as the explanatory principle for these processes which they called narco hypnosis which were very successful in getting rid of these conditionings installed under. Distressing conditions. Actually when one looks at the what happens when people who have had a behavior pattern. Bed kind installed a condition of lowered resistance. They are reacting to the world here and

now as though they were suffering from some kind of laboring under some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion which had been given to them in the past. The conditioning in this moment of traumatic experience ECT is a kind of post hypnotic suggestion which makes them do all kinds of things which are totally irrelevant to the facts of the of the present moment. I mean this is after all one of the possible definitions of neurosis that it is a behavior which is not relevant to the present but is relevant to one of these posted not-X gestures induced by conditioning in a state of lowered resistance or interests to the response to one of these. Repressed desires which is still festering in the lower

levels of the mind. Now Freud has enormous merits and I think also a very great weakness is the enormous made it was of course to stress the immense importance of the unconscious mind to point out that it was a dynamic seeing that it was continually active that it continuously influenced the life of the ego largely in Freud's fuel for evil because Freud was as I say a physician and concerned with sick people and he paid very little attention to the positive side of the unconscious. This was his greatest made it and his weakness to say first of all that he paid very little attention to the positive side of the unconscious and he also paid very little attention to the physical side the bodily side of the personality of these I think are his two main weakness isn't it.

I shall discuss the body decide later on and now let us get on to the to the positive unconscious to the to the men else. The exhibitions of power which we receive from this that this body mind is under. One turned up a stories of. And now here again let's look at the colloquial creases that we use in regard to the positive unconscious. One of the interesting things is that we are. Curiously humble about good ideas colloquially we really really claim a good idea as being originated by our sales by the way. We say for example a wonderful idea has just occurred to me. It suddenly flashed into my head. We say the violinist played as though he were inspired. Always this idea that there is

something which is not the familiar the ego light which provides the good idea. It may be actually that I never have a good idea of the good ideas simply come to me from somewhere else. And this is certainly a very common experience of things simply emerging from the blue into our consciousness and the source of course is this this huge area of the book. Of the positive unconscious mind which in many respects. Is more accomplished than the greater has greater insight. In many respects I think than the than the positive in the ordinary conscious ego. Now the ordinary process I

suppose of thought goes something like this. We take in material from the external world the natural world and the social consciously. This material is then stored away in the memory and is worked upon. But this does not use in the unconscious mind. And when we have good ideas this seems to be. The transmission into the contrails Mat and all of the results of this unconscious working under in the basement or anyhow in some areas. The manner in which we are not normally in touch with it it sort of comes up to us. And we get the good idea and then the function of the conscious mind is to verify the idea to check it to see if it is

actually a good idea. It's as good as it feels. And if it seems to be coherent and are consonant with what we know already and then after that we can work out the relationship between the new good idea with the other information and the other ideas which we have. This is I say seems to be roughly the. Modus operandi of this of this. Conscious and unconscious process. In relation to the science I suppose the best account of the workings of the unconscious intuition to be found in the writings of only placarded and more recently who described the mathematical intuitions these up brushes of. Knowledge and insight which come out of the unconscious I mean generally the process is that the mathematician

tries to wrestles with the problem and cannot succeed in solving it leaves it alone and then suddenly in a moment of distraction or of reverie the answer will come into his head. Well sometimes the answer is correct and sometimes it's not. But it is the business of the critical conscious mind to examine this answer. And in the cases when it's correct to see what the logical steps are between this conclusion which the conscious mind has arrived at in its subterranean state and the premises from which the whole thing starts. It is interesting to remark that in his recently published book Professor Bruno and his book The process of education devotes a chapter to the possibility of actually training the intuition training children to retain and to sharpen their powers of intuitive thought. He says there probably is

still a great deal of research to be done in this field. But he's very strongly of opinion that this should be taught to children the children should not have this power of guessing sometimes correctly sometimes incorrectly but above all that they shouldn't have this repressed by the process of analytical education and that they should be encouraged and trained to do that. They're into it in a not exactly systematic but because it isn't systematic but to do it you know as a regular seeing to be to be open to this idea of intuition. No. We close now from the positive unconscious in the sphere. Of science to the closely related operations of the positive unconscious in the spheres of art. Here of course the whole idea. Of poetic

inspiration has been around for centuries for millenia. It's interesting for example to find that in several of the Indo-European languages the word for poet and SIA is the same we have been let in. We have the Irish and we have some of it I think that is the word in Icelandic always meaning the same thing that the poet is the seer. And we have in home appraises for example of the minstrel sings out of the gods and we have this this whole idea of inspiration running right through into modern times and it's interesting to find what numbers of great poets have said about the subject for example of the songs made me not the songs and Lamartine it is not you who think it is ideas that think for me and Miss freedom you see.

But one doesn't work quite a distance it is as if some stranger whispering in one's ear and then surely has a curious metaphor he says the mind in creation is like a fading code which some invisible influence like an even innocent wind awakens to transitory brilliance. In relation to these remarks it's worth pointing out that the famous summing up of philosophy by Descartes Cogito ergo sum I think therefore I was him indeed by the German Romantic philosopher told Ghost whom I am thought therefore I am not I think but I thought. Therefore I am and then he is really I think a great deal about those ideas that the ego naturally retains its immense importance as a critical faculty within the

total mind body. But a great many of its best ideas come to it from somewhere else. And obviously I think one of the major problems of education is to keep open this. Door into the other world where where these ideas come from help the young person to remain open and aware. Of these kind of intuitions. Coming from a deeper level. This is all this allows us I think to make a. Reasonable definition of what is genius genius man of genius I suppose is one who has a particularly active positive

unconscious and a particularly good one and one which is furnishes him with a great many novel insights and brilliant new ideas at the same time. He must have obviously a very good and efficient conscious critical mass which can take the ideas which come to him in this way by a kind of automatism and examine them and see if they are really good works them out and fit them in to build them up into structures either scientific or philosophical or artistic which shall be satisfactory it is this I would say is the. The definition of a man of genius that he is both inspiration and perspiration I mean there has to be the thing coming in and the tremendous hard work being done also. Of course one thing which we must never forget is that somehow some of the upper

rushes from the unconscious world in many cases they are not of the first quality they may be extremely poor in quality. In this case we have somebody talking about the arts who is working. It might be said in the mood of genius but not with the consequences of genius he is what he does. Feels like being a genius. But objectively it looks like something nonsensical. And this unfortunately happens quite frequently. There are tragic tragic cases of this I mean one of the classical tragic cases is a case of poor Benjamin Robert Haden who felt himself to be one of the greatest geniuses in painting that has ever lived. But his pictures are infective plausible although he was an extremely intelligent man and oddly enough we get another very curious case of this in a man much more intelligent even than Hedon which is the

Voltaire. Volterra prided himself on being a writer of tragedies and he wrote one of his tragedies cattle traded in RAW and Alexandra ends in one week and he wrote to a friend proposed this feat of saying nobody who has not experienced terrific inspiration from possibly believe this to be true. But I have experienced this inspiration and here is the tragedy. The only trouble is the tragedy is completely unreadable. So that. We see that we can ahead all of the functioning of us without to see the results of it. In this case the up brushes resemble very much the the automatic writing which we find in a number of mediums and here again if you look at the output of mediums most of it is a

kind of inspirational twaddle. Occasionally there are messages which look as if they had some kind of ridiculous quality to them. Still more occasionally the utterances of very profound kind of mystical wisdom and still use yet more occasion. Quite considerable works of art produced in this automatic way that I'm thinking of the very very strange case which has been frequently quoted and analyzed the case of patients worse this this historical novel which was produced a quite a and littered lead in the Middle West who wrote in this archaic English style which never really departing from the spirit in the vocabulary of the century in which he was writing a book which is not a very good book which is quite an interesting book and it remains one of the

real puzzles of the work of the positive unconscious where on earth did this thing come from. She of course of therm that it came from the spirit of some good person who is speaking through her. But you didn't this may or may not be true. But anyhow if there was something in her mind capable of spinning extremely good yarn and bringing it out also. I mean still more remarkable of. Maintaining this kind of historical archaic for cabinet over quite consistently over hundreds of pages. In relation to the storytelling faculty. Well to quote the case of Robert Louis Stevenson which is one of the most remarkable cases of an excellent author. Who relied almost entirely on the unconscious mind for his material.

He tells us in across the plains that all his stories came to him in dreams or in river from something not himself. He called this part of him the Brownies the brownies in my present me with this material and all I have to do is to work it up into literary form. One of the lecture which actually gave in relation to. Visionary experience actually have more to say about this video storytelling faculty which seems to be at the back of every magazine but which in certain minds is developed as I say to an extraordinary pitch. And here again this is I think a most fantastic phenomenon that that this power of invention a fictional invention of grama Tacey Sion should most of us are aware of it of course only during dreams or in delirium. But

there are certain people to whom this storytelling faculty provides an endless wealth of material either for their amusement or if they happen to be capable writers for the purpose of thought of turning out action or drama. Now before we leave this subject I would like to mention one of the oddest phenomena. Produced by the unconscious mind the phenomenon of what is called the calculating boy. These are decent children a really I mean entirely inexplicably you get these children who. Have these amazing capacities for doing arithmetical calculations in the head with extraordinary rapidity and with perfect accuracy. I want to read an anecdotal I'm very fond of about one of these calculating votes it was

called Benjamin Black Ice who lived early in the 19th century and this is a story which is father wrote down about him. He used to go for father like going for a walk before breakfast always into the little bin who was then six years old. Went for a walk with him one day and as they walked along then said Park. At what hour was I born and said and then he said and what is the time now. The time my body 752 been worked along for a few hundred yards in silence. Then stated the number of seconds he had to leave. His father took notice and went home took out a pencil and paper made a very elaborate calculations about 20 minutes and came out triumphantly and said Your answer is out by a hundred seventy two thousand eight hundred seconds whereupon been said but

you have forgotten the two leap years of 18 20 and 18 pretty. Complete collapse of the apocalypse. Will. Then blight grew up to be quite capable a mathematician and. I mean it is a very interesting thing son. There are two pieces of calculating boys who grew up to be men of genius one is unfair and the other is Gauss. One or two others have grown up to be remarkable mathematicians have lost their calculating faculty but have grown up to be and have been quite intelligent even when about the average. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that quite a number of them have been far below the average in intelligence. The most extraordinary case of them was a German in the middle 19th century called does it.

She was really completely half witted he was unable to the day of his death to understand the first book of Euclid. But he had this unbelievable capacity for doing so and all his life for about 40 years he was paid a small pension by the Prussian government to find the factors of numbers between seven millions and millions which he did with the greatest of ease. I do think presents one of the strangest mysteries anywhere on earth does this fantastic capacity come from. It seems it seems really quite inexplicable that some people should have built into their brains this enormous this

enormous power of arithmetical calculation which they don't they don't know how they do it in many cases many of them have been asked How do you do it. Some of them have some ideas of how they do it but some of them simply don't know what they just say I get I get the answer. There is some kind of not sitting down in the basement which performs these calculations and presents the result to their conscious self and the conscious self may as I say be a complete idiot to do it. We just have to. Hold up our hands with complete incomprehension. So much for the negative and the positive unconscious Now let us consider what may be regarded as the deepest of all levels of the unconscious namely the body. After all we all go about with the body and

it profoundly influences personal life and we know remarkably little about most of its functioning. For example I give the order. I want to raise my arm where this is a very simple order and the duty goes up. But how on earth does it go up. We had no idea we can give this general order but there is some kind of physiological intelligence within the body which mobilizes the resources of the body to carry this out. And are we now and this is being analyzed and we see that this process is of immense complexity that has to be coordination of the nerves and muscles and below the level of massive molar level that is of course the the cellular level and the subset level. There's an enormous

organization of electrical impulses and chemical exchanges and changes going on. None of which none of which do we as personal conscious egos have the slightest awareness. And nor does it as far as we know does any part of. Unconscious with which we ever come into contact. I really don't have the slightest awareness of this or that this this kind of physiological intelligence works within us in ways which of which we are perfectly ignorant of tedium. Philosophers of the Middle Ages in the earlier new science they used to call this this physiological intelligence which runs the body used to call it by the name of the two aspects of the soul the vegetative the and the sensitive or animals. These are quite useful terms.

We mustn't of course take them too seriously. They are merely useful as the names of processes but by no means the names of functional entities I will sometimes use the word digital If so as a kind of shortcut for. Describing certain things which happen within the body. And really the interesting thing is that these kind of earth. Physiological intelligence has two aspects. There is what may be called the biological intelligence to sort of generalize specific intelligence which runs our heartbeat target gestation which heals wounds when we hurt ourselves which mobilizes the resources the body against disease and so on.

And there is also a kind of ad hoc physiological intelligence which mobilizes resources of the body to perform specific actions. Some of these actions appear to have no kind of evolutionary precedent and some of them even seem to have no kind of utility. Very strange. Cure your example of what the physiological intelligence of a quite literally animal can do provided by the parrot. When it imitates something that is try to analyze what happens when a parrot imitates a human voice seeing something. Presumably the parrot consciously hears the human voice repeating this phrase whatever it may be. And after hearing it some time is evidently penetrates into its mind such as it has and then

something inside the palate gets to work and proceeds to organize a noise making apparatus which in the bird is really really different from the human noise separators Malawi's making operators we have our tongue teeth soft palate. They have a ton of quite different shape to have a beak. They have no soft palate. No teeth. And yet the imitation that a parrot can give is sometimes so good that talks will be deceived by the by the bird calling out until you think it's their master's voice. And even occasionally I think human beings can even be deceived by the parrots words and think this is another human being speaking. Well this is really most extraordinary when you try to seem to analyze this I mean what you see is there is something in the palette some kind of physiological intelligence performing an ad hoc Act which has no

evolutionary precedent and new biological value as far as one can see it all performing it in a way. Inconceivably more difficult than anything that the conscious parent can do. The user a part of the palettes mind is this unconscious physiological intelligence is infinitely brighter than the ferret's conscious mind. Now in human beings certain analogies to this I mean for example the again question of imitation the very tiny infant will imitate the smiles of somebody who bends over the crib and smiles again here is something within the infant which arranges the most elaborate display of muscles to produce a play of muscles to produce this smiling.

And we have and we have examples which are did it it is strange I mean some of you may have read of a curious book which came out or I suppose about five or six years ago by a German psychologist called Harry Gale who spent some time in Japan and who. Who studied the art of archery. There's a special art of Xen archery in Japan and he's book is called Zen and the art of archery. And this is a particularly interesting book because one sees that the whole technique. Of this art consists precisely in the ego getting out of it the way that when the ego interferes. It just messes everything up. I mean actually make a small digression here. It's quite obvious that the what may be

called the physiological intelligence of the body is almost infallible so long as it's not interfered with by the ego or by the personal unconscious the moment some kind of personal anxiety or subconscious anxiety or some other subconscious distressing emotion comes into play then we're liable to get psychosomatic disorders. Is that all that the ego can do in relation to the these physiological intelligences used to mess them up to prevent them functioning properly. Well if you're in this curious Art of archery what is taught is simply a kind of. The organized passivity of stepping aside of the personal self and permitting this physiological intelligence to do a specific ad hoc Act which is firing the bow and the bow is

inspired with the most incredible accuracy and I'm very goal describes this whole process and extremely interesting as showing that like the parrot we have something within us which is in a certain sense much more intelligent than we are. It's again one of these extremely mysterious things that we should carry around with us this this kind of extravagantly well developed intelligence which it can do not merely the daily miracles of keeping the body balanced and functioning but also these strange ad hoc feats which as I say don't seem to have any kind of evolutionary precedent in which it just performs because it's able to perform them. Well now let's briefly consider another aspect of of the

body. Now there's word here of course the body is a very and satisfactory word because in point of fact there are actually on this planet at the moment I forget about 2.9 billion bodies. And the interesting thing about human bodies is that they're sufficiently alike to one another for them all to be recognized as human but they are also sufficiently unlike one another. But each other and be recognized as belonging to a unique individual. In general I think biologists tell us that variability tends to increase in species according to their position in the evolutionary hierarchy that the higher you go up the evolutionary ladder the greater the degree of variability in the highest degree of variability in any species is found in man. There is

this enormous. An enormous failure of beauty between individuals and this of course is extraordinarily embarrassing for the people who want to develop a satisfactory science of man because after all science says we in the ordinary natural sciences is in the words of a meta Madison the great French philosopher of science and science is the reduction of diversity to unity the the finding of a kind of generalized idea which covers the behavior of all the members of a class. But we think human beings know the difference is just as important as the resemblance. So there are two really satisfactory. The science of man will require not only the development of general laws of behavior but also some way of talking about individual differences between individuals between the

special differences between individuals and the way in which these general laws of behavior are applied in specific cases. Plenty of recent work exists which shows that which stresses the importance of these differences. I was thinking of the remarkable work done at the University of Texas by Professor Roger Williams whose book biochemical individuality points out the biochemical level we are even more different than we are from one another in the shape of our faces and bodies that these profound differences in his other books he's pointed out a striking anatomical differences in the structure of different organs in the structure of the nervous system and so on which indicate quite clearly that this immense faery ability

exists in human beings and that it is no wonder that we think there is so much misunderstanding between people in the world. I mean the fact that we are so very unlike one another. Accounts of course for the extraordinary difficulties we have in getting right and wrong with one another and also I think is one of the good reasons why we should be tolerant and have some kind of democratic form of government which permits a certain degree of free choice. I mean if everybody were like some dictator at the top could perfectly legitimately dictate what was good for all of us because what was good for him would be good for everybody else. But as we are profoundly different from one another then some kind of regime in which there is a certain freedom of choice is clearly more biologically sensible than a dictatorship I think this is a is an important fact

to remember. Now we come from the from the. Biochemical dissimilarities to the morphological differences. And here I would recommend you to examine an extraordinary book which came out well three or four years ago. W.H. children's Atlas of men. And this is a volume of several thousand photographs showing the entire spectrum of human variability Sheldon has worked on a kind of system that can alter the differences between men and this. This sets forth the evidence of his theories and we see here this extraordinary display of different types of creatures I mean it's almost unbelievable that people as different from one another as the people of these three polar extremes of possible variability as incredible as they should belong to the same species incidentally.

I'm sorry to say that when I looked at this book one is struck by the curious ugliness of the human species. I look forward with part of it to the publication of its companion volume which will be the Atlas of women. I think. It will probably be a book of such an extraordinarily anti aphrodesiac Nature that. Will. Never be put into the hands of a young man. Let it be again as I say that this in the most clear and pictorial form indicates the extraordinary range of variability between individuals. Now quite an interesting point here I would like to make very briefly is that if you look back over periods of history you can see that certain types of PCP and temperament

which undoubtedly to some extent this condition for example I mean no novelist in his senses would put the character of Falstaff into the body of Cassius character Pickwick into the body of your heap. There is a certain relationship between the U.S. can the temperament. And as I say that I think in every period of history there is there one or two types of fizzy can temperament which are fashionable and which seem to be particularly useful in that period and those who happen to be born not belonging to that type of physique and temperament find themselves very unhappy. There's a poem by William Blake where he says oh why was i born with a different face. Why was I not born like the rest of my race. When I look people stare when I speak then I am silent and passive and lose every friend.

And this is it. Certainly this is the state of things which many people have suffered from I mean the who find themselves physically and temperamentally in a world which approves of other types of fizzy can temperament and they happen to have. Again it's another very good reason for tolerance and for freedom of choice. In this context I would like briefly to touch on something which I think is of great interest in regard to his he can temperament that is to say the traditional rendering in the Christian part of the figure of Jesus. Now this is really curious. We shall find here that there is on the whole there is a fairly standardized traditional figure. In no case as far as I know I don't think there is any example.

Of Jesus having being represented as raw and uncomfortable like the Chinese god of luck. And there is no case I think either of his having been represented as a kind of bustling rolie polie figure like Santa Claus. Almost always he is. He is represented as I am using Sheldon's classification is that two three five. That is to say somebody. Somebody with almost the lowest amount of sort of soft round about the middle amount of muscularity and dry and rather high in linearity and slenderness insensitivity. And this is a very great artists have represented the figure of Jesus as powerful in muscled for example in the famous picture in Sunset Park in Italy of the resurrection of

Jesus is actually more powerful more athletic than the Roman soldiers around the tomb and in many paintings by Rubens he is represented as very powerful the muscles. And this generally we find offensive again. And if bleak when he'd seen a picture by Rubens where he said I always thought Christ was a carpenter and not of Brewer's servant to my good. And again this shows how profoundly we are aware of this importance of the bodily release. Temperament into behavior in the in the world now. Yeah I had much more time than I would like video briefly to speak about this immemorial controversy which has been

going on for many many centuries between the proponents of the opponents of nature opponents of the rigidity and the proponents of environment. So this is I say has been going on in different forms in enormous time and we get it. Originally in the in a theological form in to get the problem of predestination or of will of works. Matthew Pryor. Wrote a very amusing two couplets which sums up the whole problem of predestination goes like this could destroy us long before he thinks he'll escape the terrors of the future. Resist or not embrace OB Trudi to heaven and if Acacius grace and this of course the extreme Augustine Ians would say no that they couldn't escape this

to Jesus Judas on one side and Paul on the other were predestined to their different fates and there was this great controversy in the fifth century between St. Augustine and collegiates plagiarists was obviously an early British behavior just because you came from Britain is religious is offensive name for Morgan. GUSTIN maintained that man was born hopelessly depraved religious men like J.B. Watson that he was completely blank. He had born without tendencies towards good or evil but the sin of Adam affected only Adam and that every child was as innocent as Adam had been born with us and that even an unbaptized child would go to heaven whereas Gaston insisted the to hell was paved

with good intentions but was then baptized infants. Within. In later centuries the argument between nature and nurture shifts it's grown and we find in the 18th century for example a revival of pure luck where man is born as a target. We still further goes further in in the middle of the century asserting that people with all abilities are due to education and environment and that you could take any shepherd boy from the mountains of the civilians and turn him into an Isaac Newton which I am afraid is rather optimistic to say the least of it. Then you get to the end of the century mark with his doctrine that acquired characteristics were inherited and then you get a sharp reaction in the

19th century with Darwin and Mendel and the later insisting on the importance of radiator effects. Recent times you have had another swing back. Towards the police position with the early writings of Watson who. Did a fertile ground one time that he could see absolutely no evidence for. Musical or mathematical ability being inherited and the gain that it did any trial could be turned into anything by suitable conditioning and we have had of course for a time in Russia there was the revival of Lamarckism and Lysenko who insisted that you could manipulate plants in such a way that you could change course required characteristics to be inherited. Well it seems

pretty obvious that neither of these extreme views is correct as that obviously it seems to me that the nature and nurture synergy always act together and that it's perfectly ridiculous to to stress one at the expense of the other. And indeed if you analyze the use of it. The realities of the case you find that if you are a believer in the existence of hereditary factors and their importance then ipso facto you must be a social reformer because it is only a good environment that the good he related to really factors can find their full expression in a bad environment. The good will either be repressed completely or masked or

distorted in some way so that every good Eugene used in every believing here it is I say it should be a social reformer and the converse of it seems to me that every good social reformer should certainly take into account the affects of hereditary differences in order to make environmental training of the effective. And with this I will close this lecture slow down a little bit. Too long I'm afraid. Needless to say I'd only touched on very few of the endless factors which which modern research has revealed about human beings but I hope I touched upon some of them which are more significance than others and I trust that you will find these is a modern view. There you have what I mean is this sketch of the modern fuel

useful to you in your thinking about individual behavior and about the march of events in the world. Thank you. Police. Next week the third lecture entitled The individual in relation to history. The programme was produced by WGBH in Boston for the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the N A B Radio Network.