No one can doubt that true dangers are near wherever
the dancing habit is prominent. The dance is a bodily
movement which aims at no practical purpose and is
thus not bound by outer necessities. , It is simply self-
expression: and this gives to the dancing impulse the
liberty which easily becomes licentiousness. Two men-
tal conditions help in that direction; the mere move-
ment as such produces increased excitement, and the
excitement reenforces the movement, and so the dance
has in itself the tendency to become quicker and wilder
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SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
and more and more unrestrained. When gay Vienna
began its waltzing craze in the last century, it waltzed
to the charming melodies of Lanner in a rhythm which
did not demand more than about one hundred and
sixty movements in a minute; but soon came Johann
Strauss the father, and the average waltzing rhythm
was two hundred and thirty a minute, and finally the
king of the waltz, Johann Strauss the younger, and
Vienna danced at the rhythm of three hundred move-
ments. But another mental effect is still more
significant than the impulse to increase rapidity. The
uniformity of the movements, and especially of the re-
volving movement, produces a state of half dizziness
and half numbness with ecstatic elements. We know
the almost hypnotic state of the whirling dervishes and
the raptures in the savage war dances; all this in milder
form is involved in every passionate dance. But noth-
ing is more characteristic of such half-hypnotic states
than that the individual loses control of his will. He
behaves like a drunken man who becomes the slave of
his excitement and of every suggestion from without.
No doubt many seek the dancing excitement as a kind
of substitute for the alcoholic exaltation.
The social injury which must be feared if the social
community indulges in such habits of undisciplined,
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
passionate expression needs no explaining. The mind
is a unit: it cannot be without self-control in one de-
partment and under the desirable self -discipline of the
will in another. A period in which the mad rush of
dancing stirs social life must be unfavourable to the
development of thorough training and earnest en-
deavour. The fate of imperial Rome ought to be the
eternal warning to imperial Manhattan. Italy, like
America, took its art and science from over the sea,
but gave to them abundant wealth. Instead of true
art, it cultivated the virtuosi, and in Rome, which paid
three thousand dancers, the dance was its glory until it
began ingloriously to sink.
Not without inner relation to the inebriety, and yet
distinctly different, is the erotic character of the dance.
Lovemaking is the most central, underlying motive
of all the mimic dances all over the globe. Among
many primitive peoples the dance is a real pantomimic
presentation of the whole story from the first tender
awaking of a sweet desire through the warmer and
warmer courtship to the raptures of sensual delight.
Civilized society has more or less covered the naked
passion, but from the graceful play of the minuet to
the graceless movements of the turkey trot the sensual,
not to say the sexual, element can easily be recognized
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SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
by the sociologist. Here again cause and effect move
in a circle. Love excitement expresses itself in dance,
and the dance heightens the love excitement. This
erotic appeal to the senses is the chief reason why the
church has generally taken a hostile attitude. For a
long while the dance was denounced as irreligious and
sinful on account of Salome's blasphemous dancing.
Certainly the rigid guardians of morality always look
askance on the contact of the sexes in the ballroom.
To be sure, the standards are relative. What appeared
to one period the climax of immorality may be con-
sidered quite natural and harmless in another. In
earlier centuries it was quite usual in the best society
for the young man to invite the girl to a dance by a kiss,
and in some times it was the polite thing for the gentle-
man after the dance to sit in the lap of the girl. The
shifting of opinion comes to most striking expression,
if we compare our present day acquiescence to the waltz
with the moral indignation of our great-grandmothers.
No accusers of the tango to-day can find more heated
words against this Argentine importation than the
conservatives of a hundred years ago chose in their
hatred of the waltz. Good society had confined its
dancing to those forms of contact in which only the
hands touched each other, leaving to the peasants the
[2791
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
crude, rustic forms, and now suddenly every mother has
to see her daughter clasped about the waist by any
strange man. Even the dancing masters cried out
against the intruder and claimed that it was illogical
for a man to be allowed to press a girl to his bosom at the
sound of music, while no one would dare to do it be-
tween the dances.
Thus the immorality of our most recent dances may
be hardly worse than the dancing surprises of earlier
fashions, but who will doubt that these sensual ele-
ments of the new social gayeties are to-day especially
dangerous? The whole American atmosphere is filled
with erotic thought to a degree which has been un-
known throughout the history of the republic. The
newspapers are filled with intra- and extra-matrimonial
scandals, the playhouses commercialize the sexual
instinct in lurid melodramas, sex problems are the
centre of public discussion, all the old barriers which
the traditional policy of silence had erected are being
broken down, the whole nation is gossiping about
erotics. In such inflammable surroundings where the
sparks of the dance are recklessly kindled, the danger is
imminent. If a nation focuses its attention on sen-
suality, its virile energy must naturally suffer. There
is a well-known antagonism between sex and sport.
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SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
Perhaps the very best which may be said about sport
is that it keeps boyhood away from the swamps of
sexuality. The dance keeps boyhood away from the
mratial field of athletics.
The dance has still another psychological effect which
must not be disregarded from a social point of view. It
awakes to an unusual degree the impulse to imitation.
The seeing of rhythmic movements starts similar motor
impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well known
that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe
suffered from dancing epidemics. They started from
pathological cases of St. Vitus' dance and released in
the excitable crowds cramplike impulses to imitative
movements. But we hear the same story of instinctive
imitations on occasions of less tragic character. It is re-
ported that in the eighteenth century papal Rome was
indignant over the passionate Spanish fandango. It was
decided solemnly to put this wild dance under the ban.
The lights of the church were assembled for the formal
judgment, when it was proposed to call a pair of Span-
ish dancers in order that every one of the priests might
form his own idea of the unholy dance. But history
tells that the effect was an unexpected one. After a
short time of fandango demonstration the high clerics
began involuntarily to imitate the movements, and
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
the more passionately the Spaniards indulged in their
native whirl, the more the whole court was transformed
into one great dancing party. Even the Italian tar-
antella probably began as a disease with nervous danc-
ing movements, and then spread over the land through
mere imitation which led to an ecstatic turning around
and around. Whoever studies the adventures of Ameri-
can dancing during the last season from New York to
San Francisco must be impressed by this contagious
character of our dancing habits. But this means that
the movement carries in itself the energy to spread
farther and farther, and to fill the daily life with in-
creased longing for the ragtime. We are already ac-
customed to the dance at the afternoon tea; how long
will it take before we are threatened by the dance at
the breakfast coffee?
We have spoken of three mental effects: the license,
the eroticism, and the imitativeness which are stirred
up by the dancing movements. But in the perspec-
tive of history we ought not to overlook another signif-
icant trait: the overemphasis on dancing has usually
characterized a period of political reaction, of indif-
ference to public life, of social stagnation and careless-
ness. When the volcanoes were rumbling, the masses
were always dancing. At all times when tyrants.
[2821
SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
wanted to divert the attention of the crowd, they
gave the dances to their people. A nation which
dances cannot think, but lives from hour to hour.
The less political maturity, the more happiness does a
national community show in its dancing pleasures.
The Spaniards and the Polish, the Hungarians and the
Bohemians, have always been the great dancers the
Gypsies dance. There is no fear that the New Yorkers
will suddenly stop reading their newspapers and voting
at the primaries; they will not become Spaniards. But
an element of this psychological effect of carelessness
and recklessness and stagnation may influence them
after all, and may shade the papers which they read,
and even the primaries at which they do vote.
Yet how onesided would it be, if we gave attention
only to the dangers which the dance may bring to a
nation's mind. The credit account of the social dance
is certainly not insignificant, and perhaps momentous
just for the Americans of to-day. The dance is a
wonderful discharge of stirred up energy; its rhyth-
mic form relieves the tension of the motor apparatus
and produces a feeling of personal comfort. The
power to do this is a valuable asset, when so much
emotional poverty is around us. The dance makes
life smooth in the midst of hardship and drudgery.
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
For the dancer the cup is always overflowing, even
though it may be small. There is an element of relaxa-
tion and of joyfulness in the rhythm of the music and
the twinkling of the feet, which comes as a blessing into
the dulness and monotony of life. The overworked
factory girl does not seek rest for her muscles after the
day of labour, but craves to go on contrasting them in
the rhythmic movements of the dance. So it has
been at all times. The hardest worked part of the com-
munity has usually been the most devoted to the
gayety of popular dances. The refined society has in
many periods of civilization declined to indulge in
dancing, because it was too widely spread among the
lowest working classes in towns and in the country.
The dance through thousands of years has been the
bearer of harmless happiness : who would refuse a wel-
come to such a benefactor? And with the joyfulness
comes the sociability. The dance brings people near
together. It is unfair to claim that the dance is ar-
istocratic, because it presupposes leisure and luxury.
On the contrary, throughout the history of civilization
the dance has been above all, democratic, and has
reenforced the feeling of good fellowship, of community,
of intimacy, of unity. Like the popular games which
melt all social groups together by a common joyful
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SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
interest, and like humour which breaks all social bar-
riers, the love for dancing removes mutual distrust and
harmonizes the masses.
This social effect has manifold relation to another
aspect of the dance, which is psychologically perhaps
the deepest: the dance is an art, and as such, of deep
aesthetic influence on the whole mental life. Whenever
the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art
is developed to high artificiality. No step and no
movement is left to the chance inspiration of the mo-
ment; everything is prescribed, and to learn the dances
not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the
great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery
of the exact rules appeared one of the most difficult
parts of higher education, and as a real test of the
truly cultivated gentleman and gentlewoman; scholarly
books analysed every detail of the necessary forms, and
the society dances in the castles of the eighteenth cen-
tury were more elaborate than the best prepared ballets
on the stage of to-day. But the popular dances of the
really dancing nations are no less bound by traditions,
and we know that even the dances of the savages are
moving on in strictly inherited forms. Far from the
license of haphazard movements, the self-expression of
the dancer is thus regulated and bound by rules which
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
are taken by him as prescriptions of beauty. To
dance thus means a steady adjustment to artistic re-
quirements; it is an aesthetic education by which the
whole system of human impulses becomes harmonized
and unified. The chance movements are blended into
a beautiful whole, and this reflects on the entire inner
setting. Educators have for a long time been aware
that calisthenics, with its subtly tuned movements of
the body, develops refinement in the interplay of men-
tal life. The personality who understands how to live
in gentle, beautiful motions through that trains his
mind to beauty. In Europe, for instance in Hellerau
near Dresden, they have recently begun to establish
schools for young men and women in which the main,
higher education is to be moulded by the aesthetics of
bodily expression, and the culture of the symbolic
dance.
This aesthetic character of the dance, however, leads
still further. It is not only the training in beautiful
expression; it is the development of an attitude which
is detached from practical effects and from the practi-
cal life of outer success. The dance is an action by
which nothing is produced and nothing in the sur-
roundings changed. It is an oasis in the desert of our
materialistic behaviour. From morning till night we
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SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
are striving to do things, to manufacture something
in the mill of the nation : but he who dances is satisfied
in expressing himself. He becomes detached from the
cares of the hour, he acquires a new habit of disinter-
ested attitude toward life. Who can underestimate the
value of such detachment in our American life? The
Americans have always been eagerly at work, but have
never quite learned to enjoy themselves and to take the
aesthetic attitude which creates the wonders of beauty
and the true harmonies of life. To forget drudgery and
to sink into the rhythms of the dance may bring to
millions that inner completeness which is possible only
when practical and aesthetic attitude are blending in
a personality. The one means restless change; the
other means repose, perfection, eternity. This hard-
working, pioneer nation needs the noisy teachings
of efficiency and scientific management less than the
melodious teaching of song and dance and beauty.
In short, the dance may bring both treacherous perils
and wonderful gifts to our community. It depends
upon us whether we reenforce the dangerous elements
of the dance, or the beneficial ones. It will depend on
ourselves whether the dance will debase the nation,
as it has so often done in the history of civilization,
or whether it will help to lead it to new heights of
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
beauty and harmony, as it has not seldom done before.
Our social conscience must be wide awake; it will not
be a blind fate which will decide when the door of the
future opens whether we shall meet the lady or the
tiger
[288]
NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY
NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY
THE scientific psychologists started on a new road
yesterday. For a long time their chief interest was to
study the laws of the mind. The final goal was a text-
book which would contain a system of laws to which
every human mind is subjected. But in recent times
a change has set in. The trend of much of the best
work nowadays is toward the study of individual dif-
ferences. The insight into individual personalities was
indeed curiously neglected in modern psychology. This
does not mean that the declaration of psychological in-
dependence insisted that all men are born equal, nor
did any psychologist fancy that education or social
surroundings could form all men in equal moulds. But
as scientists they felt no particular interest in the rich-
ness of colours and tints. They intentionally neglected
the question of how men differ, because they were ab-
sorbed by the study of the underlying laws which must
hold for every one. It is hardly surprising that the
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it was a
kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the
psychology of olden times. Speculations about the
soul had served for centuries. Metaphysics had reigned
and the observation of the real facts of life and
experience had been disregarded. When the new time
came in which the psychologists were fascinated by the
spirit of scientific method and exact study of actual
facts, the safest way was for them to imitate the well-
tested and triumphant procedures of natural science.
The physicist and the chemist seek the laws of the
physical universe, and the psychologist tried to act
like them, to study the elements from which the psy-
chical universe is composed and to find the laws which
control them. But while it was wise to make the first
forward march in this one direction, the psychologist
finally had to acknowledge that a no less important
interest must push him on an opposite way. The hu-
man mind is not important to us only as a type. Every
social aim reminds us that we must understand the
individual personality. If we deal with children in the
classroom or with criminals in the courtroom, with cus-
tomers in the market or with patients in the hospital,
we need not only to know what is true of every human
being; we must above all discover how the particular
[292]
NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY
individual is disposed and composed, or what is char-
acteristic of special groups, nations, races, sexes, and
ages. It is clear that new methods were needed to
approach these younger problems of scientific psy-
chology, but the scientists have eagerly turned with
concerted efforts toward this unexplored region and
have devoted the methods of test experiments, of sta-
tistics, and of laboratory measurements to the examina-
tion of such differences between various individuals and
groups.
But in all these new efforts the psychologist meets a
certain public resistance, or at least a certain disregard,
which he is not accustomed to find in his routine en-
deavours. As long as he was simply studying the laws
of the mind, he enjoyed the approval of the wider pub-
lic. His work was appreciated as is that of the biolo-
gist and the chemist. But when it becomes his aim to
discover mental features of the individual, and to fore-
see what he can expect from the social groups of
men, every layman tells him condescendingly that it is
a superfluous task, as instinct and intuition and the
naive psychology of the street will be more successful
than any measurements with chronoscopes and kymo-
graphs. Do we not know how the skilful politician or
the efficient manager looks through the mind of a man
[293]
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
at the first glance? The life insurance agent has hardly
entered the door before he knows how this particular
mind must be handled. Every commercial traveller
knows more than any psychologist can tell him, and
even the waiter in the restaurant foresees when the
guest sits down how large a tip he can expect from him.
In itself it would hardly be convincing to claim that
scientific efforts to bring a process down to exact prin-
ciples are unnecessary because the process can be per-
formed by instinct. We all can walk without needing
a knowledge of the muscles which are used, and can
find nourishment without knowing the physiology of
nutrition. Yet the physiologist has not only brought
to light the principles according to which we actually
eat, but he has been able to make significant suggestions
for improved diet, and in not a few cases his knowledge
can render services which no instinctive appetite could
replace. The psychological study of human traits, too,
may not only find out the principles underlying the
ordinary knowledge of men, but may discover means
for an insight which goes as far beyond the instinctive
understanding of man as the scientific diet prescribed
by a physician goes beyond the fancies of a cook. The
manager may believe that he can recognize at the first
glance for which kind of work the labourer is fit: and
[294]
NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY
yet the psychological analysis with the methods of
exact experiments may easily demonstrate that his
judgment is entirely mistaken. Moreover, although
such practical psychologists of the street or of the office
may develop a certain art of recognizing particular
features in the individual, they cannot formulate the
laws and cannot lay down those permanent relations
from which others may learn.
Yet even this claim of the psychological scholar seems
idle pride. Had the world really to wait for his exact
statistics and his formulae of correlation of mental
traits in order to get general statements and definite
descriptions of the human types and of the mental
diversities? Are not the writings of the wise men of all
times full of such psychological observations? Has not
the consciousness of the nations expressed itself in an
abundance of sayings and songs, of proverbs and philo-
sophic words, which contains this naive psychological
insight into the characters and temperaments of the
human mind? We may go back thousands of years
to the contemplations of oriental wisdom, we may read
the poets of classic antiquity, or Shakespeare, or Goethe,
we may study what the great religious leaders and
statesmen, the historians and the jurists, have said
about man and his behaviour; and we find an over-
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
abundance of wonderful sayings with which no text-
books of psychology can be compared.
This is all true. And yet, is it not perhaps all en-
tirely false? Can this nai've psychology of the ages, to
which the impressionism and the wisdom of the finest
minds have so amply contributed, really make super-
fluous the scientific efforts for the psychology of groups
and correlations and individual traits? It seems al-
most surprising that this overwhelmingly rich harvest
of prescientific psychology has never been examined
from the standpoint of scientific psychology, and that
no one has sifted the wheat from the chaff. The very
best would be not only to gather such material, but to
combine the sayings of the naive psychologists in a
rounded system of psychology. In all ages they surely
must have been among the best observers of mankind,
as even what is not connected with the name of an
individual author, but is found in proverbs or in the
folk-epics of the nations, must have originated in the
minds of individual leaders. My aim here is more
modest: I have made my little pilgrimage through lit-
erature to find out in a tentative fashion whether the
supply of psychology, outside of science, is really so
rich and valuable as is usually believed. What I wish
to offer, therefore, is only a first collection of psycho-
[296]
NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY
logical statements, which the prescientific psychologists
have proclaimed, and surely will go on proclaiming, and
ought to go on proclaiming, as they do it so beautifully,
where we scientists have nothing but tiresome formulae.
Let us begin at the beginning. There has never been
a nation whose contemplation was richer in wisdom,
whose view of man was subtler and more suggestive,
than those of old India. The sayings of its philosophers
and poets and thinkers have often been gathered in large
volumes of aphorisms. How many of these fine-cut
remarks about man contain real psychology? The
largest collection which I could discover is that of
Boehtlinck, who translated seventy-five hundred In-
dian sayings into German. Not a few of them refer to
things of the outer world, but by far the largest part of
them speaks of man and of man's feeling and doing.
But here in India came my first disappointment, a dis-
appointment which repeated itself in every corner of the
globe. After carefully going through those thousands
of general remarks, I could not find more than a hun-