And yet Man in general,--Man as man and therefore as mind--the concept of Man--normal and ideal man--the complete and adequate Idea of man--is the true terminus of the psychological process; and whatever be the difficulties in the way, it is the only proper goal of the science. Only it has to be built up, constructed, evolved, developed,--and not assumed as a datum of popular imagination. We want a concept, concrete and real, of Man and of Mind, which shall give its proper place to each of the elements that, in the several examples open to detailed observation, are presented with unfair or exaggerated prominence. The savage and the child are not to be left out as free from contributing to form the ideal: virtues here are not more important than vices, and are certainly not likely to be so informing: even the insane and the idiot show us what human intelligence is and requires: and the animals are also within the sweep of psychology. Man is not its theatre to the exclusion of woman; if it records the results of introspection of the Me, it will find vast and copious quarries in the various modes in which an individual identifies himself with others as We. And even the social and civilised man gets his designation, as usual, _a potiori_. He is more civilised and social than others: perhaps rather more civilised than not. But always, in some measure, he is at the same time unsocial or anti-social, and uncivilised. Each unit in the society of civilisation has to the outside observer--and sometimes even to his own self-detached and impartial survey--a certain oddity or fixity, a gleam of irrationality, which shows him to fall short of complete sanity or limpid and mobile intelligence. He has not wholly put off the savage,--least of all, says the cynic, in his relations with the other sex. He carries with him even to the grave some grains of the recklessness and petulance of childhood. And rarely, if ever, can it be said of him that he has completely let the ape and tiger die.
But that is only one way of looking at the matter--and one which, perhaps, is more becoming to the pathologist and the cynic, than to the psychologist. Each of these stages of psychical development, even if that development be obviously describable as degeneration, has something which, duly adjusted, has its place and function in the theory of the normally-complete human mind. The animal, the savage, and the child,--each has its part there. It is a mutilated, one-sided and superficial advance in socialisation which cuts off the civilised creature from the natural stem of his ancestry, from the large freedom, the immense _insouciance_, the childlikeness of his first estate. There is something, again, wanting in the man who utterly lacks the individualising realism and tenderness of the woman, as in the woman who can show no comprehension of view or bravery of enterprise. Even pathological states of mind are not mere anomalies and mere degenerations. Nature perhaps knows no proper degenerations, but only by-ways and intricacies in the course of development. Still less is the vast enormity or irregularity of genius to be ignored. It is all--to the philosophic mind--a question of degree and proportion,--though often the proportion seems to exceed the scale of our customary denominators. If an element is latent or quiescent (in arrest), that is no index to its absolute amount: "we know not what's resisted." Let us by all means keep proudly to our happy mediocrity of faculty, and step clear of insanity or idiotcy on one hand, and from genius or heroism on the other. But the careful observer will notwithstanding note how delicately graded and how intricately combined are the steps which connect extremes so terribly disparate. It is only vulgar ignorance which turns away in hostility or contempt from the imbecile and the deranged, and only a worse than vulgar sciolism which sees in genius and the hero nothing but an aberration from its much-prized average. Criminalistic anthropology, or the psychology of the criminal, may have indulged in much frantic exaggeration as to the doom which nature and heredity have pronounced over the fruit of the womb even before it entered the shores of light: yet they have at least served to discredit the free and easy assumption of the abstract averagist, and shown how little the penalties of an unbending law meet the requirements of social well-being.