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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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by Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge
What is personality? If by the question we mean to ask, What is the nature of personality as a given conscious fact to be analyzed?, we get the answer from psychology. As such a fact personality is found to be, not a cause of consciousness, not something back of it and distinct from it, but is itself a content, an arrangement of element. But if we mean by the question what an individual with such a conduct of life, what is he a factor in society, what is he revealed in the fullness of human experience, we get the answer from history -- to be a person is to use the material and machinery of life in the service of ideals. Let us think of ourselves as masses of sensations if we must; but let us never be so absurd as to forget that such masses of sensations have made human history what it is, and can, if they will, make the history of the future immeasurably more glorious. Let us not quarrel with psychology or the results of science, but let the wonder of it all possess us; that there should appear in the natural history of the world creatures whose lot in life should be constantly to reach beyond themselves in order to live at all, whose whole existence should be a world-transformation and a self-tranformation in the interest of what they would have prevail, who, while they must draw the materials of their work from what they could discover of nature's constitution and their own, must none the less draw life's inspiration and motives, must get the mainspring of the activity and progress, not from what they are, but from what they might be; creatures who, under this necessity and this compulsion, should find no permanent peace until they would commit themselves, freely and wholly, in complete self-surrender, to what their ideals reveal them to be -- let us wonder at it. And we should be wondering, not at some theory of things, but at one of the plainest facts we know. No psychology can destroy that fact, and no metaphysics enhance the wonder of it. It is the truth of experience, and in that truth our personality is disclosed.
Excerpted from Nature and Mind, Selected Essays, by Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge |
Nature and Mind: Selected Essays of Frederick J.E. Woodbridge
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