Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 351
I am not proposing to unravel the tangle — only to indicate it, coiled all over the ground on which we try to advance. In fact, it begins to look as if a “rainy day” were one of the best things in nature, and the more sudden the shower the better. Come on, loosen up and spend something! Have a cigarette.
So it seems that the bottom is out of the saving theory. That particular pillar is undermined and falling over. You may for the moment help yourself by saving money, but you’re a poor pup in the social sense if you do. Go and buy a velvet suit and order a quart of extra dry.
Saving money! And there again the moment you say “money,” off goes another explosion and up into the air a whole new mass of charred fragments. Scarcely a sentence is left intact of the old monetary theory that seemed as solid as bedrock. There it lay, the basis of our economic life and international trade — the doctrine of sound money. It seemed as if half the economic evils of the past had come about for lack of the knowledge and practice of it. Every student read in his economic scriptures of the evil of the Continental Dollar, the madness of the French Assignat and of how the Greenback was fought, slain and redeemed, as the dragon was fought by St. George.
Where is all this theory now? Nothing left, after the war explosion that blew it up, nothing except fierce, hot blasts of contrary opinion rushing into the vacuum. Monetary theory, or at least monetary practice, denounces solid, sound money, and calls for money at least as bad as and if possible worse than that of other nations. “If you devalue your pound, remember we’ll devalue our dollar. You can’t work that stuff on us!” To cling to sound money would be to become a Christian all alone in the arena.
Of all these doctrines I am not attacking one. Of all these problems I am not solving any. I am only drawing attention to the hopeless muddle in which economic thought and practice has involved itself. It has become a mass of contradiction. Every nation is calling in one breath for freer trade and economic nationalism, for a sound currency as debased as possible, for rigid economy with plenty of spending — in other words, calling out, “High!” “Low!” “Up!” “Down!” “Begin!” “Stop!” — till all is a mere babel of voices.
Perhaps the best index of what has happened to the science of economics is what has happened to the teaching of it in our colleges. The colleges have a system for meeting such difficulties.
When opinion gets confused — living opinion — the colleges can always fall back on the opinion of the dead. If living men can’t think, let’s have a catalogue of all that dead men ever thought, and the students can learn that. In fact, economics can be all dosed up with history, as doctors dose a patient with iron. And statistics. If we don’t understand the industrial world, at least let us have statistics. The continental area of the United States is 3,026,789 square miles and the number of spindles in Lowell, Mass., is 201,608 (or is it?) That’s the stuff. Make a four-year course and give a degree in it — a D.F.
And with that, of course, goes the familiar therapeutics of putting in “qualifications,” what is called the “relative” view — that a thing is partly so and partly isn’t so. Any book of what is called “general economics,” after indicating the continental area of the United States and the number of spindles in Lowell, Mass., proceeds to a series of propositions as to why wages partly rise and partly don’t, why prices may fall, or perhaps leap up, proving that black is in a sense white, except that where it is white it is partly black. This course is called Economics 1. From it you get to first base.
And, most of all, if we can’t understand it, let’s at least see that outsiders don’t. Let us dress economics up in esoteric language, give it a jargon of its own, and break away from plain terms like labour and profit and money and poverty. Let’s talk of “categories” and “increments” and “margins” and “series.” Let’s call our appetite for breakfast our consumer’s marginal demand. That will fool them. And if I buy one cigar but won’t buy two, call that my submarginal saturation point for nicotine.
Above all, let us call in the help of the psychologist. He’s the fellow with the technique. Turn him onto the theory of value, and grandfather Adam Smith won’t know his own offspring.
Accordingly, the theorist of today, following in the tracks of the dead scholasticism, the lost Babylonian and the Egyptian dozing in the dust of the pyramids, runs his economics to finer and finer distinctions that have lost all meaning for everyday life. He can no longer talk of our wants; he must have marginal wants, degrees of wants, increments of satisfaction, curves of desire meeting in an equilibrium. The difference as between plain language and this jargon is as between digestion and a stomach-ache. To the college economist a boy standing in front of a pastry shop represents a submarginal increment of satisfaction. Give him ten cents and he comes out with a consumer’s surplus in him. You can see it sticking out.
If anyone thinks this argument overdone, this language strained, let him open with me the latest of the books on pure economic theory, the books that have such titles as the Theory of Value, of Capital, of Investment, anything like that. It would be invidious to name them singly since this is an attack not on a man but on a method.
Here before me on my desk is one of the latest, a book that will be pronounced by the reviewers as one of the really “big” things — an “outstanding contribution,” that’s the phrase. The ordinary person can no more read it than he can read Chinese. Here is a sample of how this outstanding contribution stands out:
The slope of the curve passing through any point p has indeed a very definite and important meaning. It is the amount of y which is needed by the individual in order to compensate him for the loss of a small unit of x. Now the gain in utility got by gaining such an amount of y equals amount of y gained multiplied by marginal utility of y; the loss in utility got from losing the corresponding amount of x equals amount of x lost multiplied by marginal utility of y (so long as the quantities are small). Therefore, since the gain equals the loss, the slope of the curve
am’t of y gained marg’l utility of x
== —— —— —— —— — == —— —— —— —— ——
am’t of x lost marg’l utility of y
The author naïvely adds:
“Have we any further information about the shapes of the curves?”
No, I hope not.
I was once the guest of that merry institution, the Savage Club of London. Among the mock stunts of the evening was a speech supposedly in Chinese with an interpreter to explain it. After the bogus Chinese guest had spoken about half a dozen sentences, the chairman politely interrupted, and asked of the interpreter, “Now, what has Mr. Woo-hoo said?” “Nothing, so far,” said the interpreter.
The same is true of the quotation. It only means that when you have enough, you don’t want any more.
A thousand chapters have been written similar to that sample. Take enough of that mystification and muddle, combine it with the continental area of the United States, buttress it up on the side with the history of dead opinion and dress it, as the chefs say, with sliced history and green geography, and out of it you can make a doctor’s degree in economics. I have one myself.
CHAPTER VII. PSYCHOLOGY THE BLACK ART OF THE COLLEGE
THE BLACK ART in all ages — Hypnotism enters college — Psychology’s department store — Deep Thought counter — Minds tested free — Psychology and school education — Child expression by ink-throwing — The Psychology of Salesmanship looks the Prospect in the eye — Intellectual test for Willie Worm as a calliper
Among the arts in every age there is one that is the Black Art — mysterious, fearsome, a thing to dread. The Black Art comes and goes — now this, now that. Savages have their Black Arts of incantations, Voodoo rites and medicine men. Earlier Christianity had its attendant devils, its witches and its sorcerers. Along the edges of the light that it gave the world was a dark cloud of superstition, fear, exorcism, persecution, terror. The early learning had its astrologer, in a cone-shaped cap and a gown figured with the Zodiac, pointing with his finger at horoscopes and disasters. But time turned him into a professor of astronomical physics, quite harmless. Beside him was the alchemist, working with crucibles, to transform lead to gold, and seeking the Elixir of Life. He was an awesome being, but has faded long since into a high school chemistry teacher, not so much concerned with how to live forever, as with how to live next winter. As Christianity dropped its devils and its daily miracles and its exorcisms, it faded, for college purposes, into “comparative religion,” a first-year subject, popular as a snap. Students elect religion as cheerfully as they did in Scotland three hundred years ago. And it never fails them.
But a Black Art there has to be. Somewhere plain truth must fade to mystery; somewhere life must meet its border line; somewhere mind and matter present their irreconcilable contrast. Where one art abandons this shuddering mystery, another takes it up. One can see the Black Arts of the past and present moving and changing like the belts of light and shadow in an electric sign. Some day physics, that began in the sunlight of the new solar system as the very embodiment of clarity and fact and measured space and ponderated matter, may be the Black Art. For with the breaking of the atom, the disappearance of solidity, the change of matter into force, the old mystery is all back again and ready for a new astrologer.
But at the present hour and in the colleges all around us psychology has turned into the Black Art.
Now when I was at college, fifty years ago, psychology was an entirely innocuous subject. It was taught by a venerable professor in a long black gown — all senior professors at that date had to be venerable — and he taught it as he had imported it in the wood straight from Scotland thirty years or so before. I didn’t take the subject myself but those of us outside of it understood that it dealt with such things as the “association of ideas” and whether mind was just a form of matter or matter merely a form of mind and how the mind “worked.” It seemed quite harmless. It ranked along with ethnology, and the brand-new subject, just imported to Canada, political economy, as things by which students could take honours without having had a long previous training, like the five days a week in Greek for four years that made us “honour matriculants” in classics, able to translate four or five lines of Homer without stopping. It never seemed then that the lean kine of psychology and economics would one day eat up the fat, and pick the dead bones of Greek.
But there existed then, outside of college, in the dark, a mysterious and evil thing called “hypnotism.” This wasn’t taught. It was practised by “professors,” far from venerable, and exhibited at ten cents a seat in third-rate public halls. The “professor” invited members of the audience to step up on the platform and be “hypnotized” and put through various antics. The audience didn’t know whether it was jest or earnest, all faked up, or all real, or partly both. Certainly the exhibitions always contrived to have a certain amount of buffoonery like the “comic relief” of our ten-twenty-thirty theatre.
I went one night with four or five fellow students to such an exhibition. The “professor” appeared on a stage, with a row of empty chairs, and a background of ropes and pulleys and apparatus grimly mediaeval. He invited members of the audience to step up. I asked my fellow students if they would step up with me. All but one refused. They had a wholesome contempt for hypnotism and a secret fear of it. Curley Wood, who went on the platform with me, was a nervous-looking youth who lived on cigarettes.
We were given two end seats, and various other “subjects” came clumping up onto the platform. The “professor” then announced that he would look into the eyes of each subject and decide whether he was hypnotizable. He began with me as end-man. He stooped forward and looked fixedly in my eyes. I didn’t like it. I was sorry I had come up. I wanted to get out of it. Then I remembered that in the Middle Ages the devil couldn’t reach you if you kept reciting the pater noster in Latin. I didn’t know that but I started reciting to myself the 47th proposition of Euclid, about the square on the hypotenuse. That beat the “professor.” “You can step down,” he said. I did, with a great gladness.
He looked at Curley’s eyes and Curley turned as pale as his own cigarettes. “You can stay,” said the “professor.” He kept a few others. To judge by the absurd things he presently made them do — too absurd for likelihood — I should imagine they were hand-picked. But Curley Wood wasn’t; there was no collusion in his case. Yet the “professor” seemed able to take a mortgage on his will power. “Tell the audience your name,” he said. “Curley Wood,” answered my fellow student quite clearly. “Now try to tell it to them again and you can’t,” said the “professor” with a Rosicrucian gesture. Curley couldn’t. Vox faucibus haesit.
“Now I’ll throw a rope round you and drag you to this side of the stage. Resist if you like, but you’ll have to come.” ... All that and more, till at last he let Curley go and a tom-fool comic effect replaced him. I said nothing to Curley that night. Later he said, “He had me rattled.” He never gave any further explanation.
That kind of thing was outside of college. With it there went séances, and colloquies with the dead (such as there have been since Adam died) and attempts at thought transference, with doses of Madame Blavatsky and theosophy. A new occult world was growing up like weeds among the tombstones of dead superstitions. Naturam expellas furco, tamen usque recurrit.
Then came the Psychical Research Society and the attempt to reduce the occult world to scientific experiment and demonstration. And with that opened new fields of medicine, mind-cure, therapeutics, as old as mind itself but breaking to new life in our own century. Physiology, now better equipped with magnetism and electricity, moved on from Galvani’s dead frog with the salt on its leg to delicate experiments that called aloud for new theories of mind and matter. This new medical physiology reached out its hand, and psychology took it, and the dusty old professor in the long gown turned into Psyche the Soul.
In other words psychology from being nothing in the curriculum but a humble branch of metaphysics, itself a subdivision of philosophy at large, expanded till it became a whole department, with all kinds of affiliations and extensions, and broke outside the bounds of college to invade life in the open.
Psychology has overrun the curriculum by the sheer audacity of its onslaught. It has expanded in all directions at once. It has taken over the dream of the metaphysician and the micrometer of the physiologist. It’s an art and it’s a science. It’s a theory and it’s a practice. It’s an experiment and a dogma. It is business. It is religion. It has become a regular academic department store with a Deep Thought Counter, Practical Experiments in the basement and Minds Tested Free near the front door.
In the college which I know best, and, I am sure, in many others, if a benefactor leaves money for a scholarship “in liberal arts,” psychology says: “Let me in on that. I’m an art. I’m the biggest dream you ever saw. I’m all thought.” If it’s for science, psychology says: “Take me in on this. I’m science straight out; look at this testing machine. Stick your brain under it.” And if it is a medical gift: “Count me in. Therapeutics is my second name.” If it’s for theology, psychology slips on a white surplice and points to its courses on the psychology of religion.
Audacity wins. The other subjects stood meekly by and watched psychology take over their fields. To physiology it said: “You take the knife and do the work and I’ll make the talk.” To economics: “Give me anything your students don’t understand about value and demand and I’ll fix it so that they don’t need to understand it.” And to the college at large: “Hand me over the students and I’ll test their brains. That’s all you need.” ... And it hinted behind its hand, “I can test the professors, too, if you like,” and in a lower voice, “What about the President?”
Having conquered the college, psychology turned to business, set up courses in the Psychology of Business Relations, and gave lectures at luncheon clubs on the Psychology of Advertising. It frightened the business world into submission by threatening it with a course on the Analytical Measurement of Human Personality, a thing no business man would want done to himself, though he might like to have it worked on his employees. It let the business man know that it had its eye on him by announcing courses on the Observation of Social Behaviour, and it tempted his alliance by hinting at a course on leadership. The business man capitulated, had his employees measured on the Analytical Plan, and young women applicants tested by the Orthogenic Method instead of by being taken out to lunch.
Then psychology turned to administration and began testing soldiers by asking them to multiply three by three and watching their “reaction” to it. It has invented for us a world of “reactions” and “complexes” and “fixations” and “inhibitions.” It has its eye now on the criminal law, for which it aspires to be the star witness, replacing the finger-print expert and the toxicologist and the chemical-solution man by the psychiatrist holding the scales of life and death on whether murder was done as a “fun-impulse” or as part of an “inferiority complex.”
How much does this whole pretentious claim amount to, and what room is there for psychology in sound education? In my opinion, very little. Put back all that is mere common sense; restore to medicine what is medicine; leave business to business men, and psychology will be back again with nothing but its original mystery and its black gown.
Psychology “butts in” on our educational system at the very start. It begins to reduce the world, even of little children, to a maze of “complexes” and “suggestions,” “fixations” and “behaviours.” Plain right and wrong, common sense, goodness and badness get mixed up in a world that has a terrifying aspect of dark forces working through the individual and not of him. The psychology school child is possessed of new devils, which are working through him to expression. It is not he who threw the ink at the teacher; it was a complex that had got inside him. The teacher is not faced with a case of discipline but with a “behaviour problem.” She must wipe off the ink and think it out.
