l emotional activity which
swept over California. After what must have been a most usual
intellectual cycle of, first, helplessness, then conventional
cataloguing, some rationalizing, some moralizing, and an extensive
feeling of shallowness and inferiority, I called the job done.
"By accident, somewhat later, I was loaned two books of Freud, and I
felt after the reading, that I had found a scientific approach which
might lead to the discovery of important fundamentals for a study of
unrest and violence. Under this stimulation, I read, during a year and a
half, general psychology, physiology and anthropology, eugenics, all the
special material I could find on Mendelism, works on mental hygiene,
feeblemindedness, insanity, evolution of morals and character, and
finally found a resting-place in a field which seems to be best
designated as Abnormal and Behavioristic Psychology. My quest throughout
this experience seemed to be pretty steadily a search for those
irreducible fundamentals which I could use in getting a technically
decent opinion on that riot. In grand phrases, I was searching for the
Scientific Standard of Value to be used in analyzing Human Behavior.
"Economics (which officially holds the analysis of labor-problems) has
been allowed to devote itself almost entirely to the production of
goods, and to neglect entirely the consumption of goods and human
organic welfare. The lip-homage given by orthodox economics to the field
of consumption seems to be inspired merely by the feeling that disaster
might overcome production if workers were starved or business men
discouraged. . . . So, while official economic science tinkers at its
transient institutions which flourish in one decade and pass out in the
next, abnormal and behavioristic psychology, physiology, psychiatry, are
building in their laboratories, by induction from human specimens of
modern economic life, a standard of human values and an elucidation of
behavior fundamentals which alone we must use in our legislative or
personal modification of modern civilization. It does not seem an
overstatement to say that orthodox economics has cleanly overlooked two
of the most important generalizations about human life which can be
phrased, and those are,--
"That human life is dynamic, that change, movement, evolution, are its
basic characteristics.
"That self-expression, and therefore freedom of choice and movement, are
prerequisites to a satisfying human sta
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