Psychological principles / by James Ward.

  • James Ward
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychological principles / by James Ward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    488/504 page 468
    The more single and resolute his purpose, the more ‘ inward ’ the self that he seeks to realise, the greater his progress may be. Yet, such progress, though a psychological advance, might quite well be a moral decline. Even Kant allowed that “ a man of bad character (like Sulla), though he excites our horror by the tyranny of his settled maxims is still an object of our admiration as compared with a good-natured man of no character at all1.” But good or bad, he is more of a person, has psychologically more character the more he shews of singleness of aim, the less easily he swerves from this, and the wider and more coherent it is. Crises in the development of such personality are the rule rather than the exception, especially when a complete transvaluation of all things divides the old life from the new. Psychologically it could hardly be otherwise, for the profounder the change the more central it must be. “ Whatsoever turns the soul inward on itself tends to concentrate its forces and fit it for greater and stronger flights,” Burke has somewhere said. This is a fact admitted on all hands2. What is familiarly known in religious experience as conversion or ‘ second birth ’ is the most striking instance of it3. This ‘ change of heart ’ is often deceptive and has only ‘a temperamental origin4’; but sometimes, at any rate, it is genuine ; and, in the case of those whom James calls ‘religious geniuses,’ is so impressive as to compel universal reverence. Such 1 Anthropologies loc. cit. Cf. W. M. Urban, Valuations its Nature and Laws, 1909, p. -287, Bosanquet, Individuality and Value, 1912, p. 345. 2 Even by Schopenhauer (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 70) who reconciled it with his fundamental doctrine only by the help of Oriental metaphysics. 3 What is true of it is true in a lesser degree of other crises and we might there¬ fore pass them over without special notice. But it may be well to take an instance of such a crisis in what has been called ‘ the bad self.5 The readiest that offers—though many better in fact or fiction might doubtless be found—is that of the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Unable, owing to his personal deformities and forbidding appearance, to take a leading part in the frivolous court life of the early years of his brother’s reign, he ends his soliloquy in the first scene of the play with the resolve: And therefore—since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fine well-spoken days,— I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. So indeed he proved. “ I am a villain ” are almost his last words the night before his death on Bosworth Field. * 4 Cf. W. James, Variety of Religious Experiences 1902, pp. 236 ff.
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