PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

influences not easily separated. [Footnote: For an interesting sketch
of the more noteworthy early attempts to explain character, see the
chapter called "The Antecedents of the Study of Character and
Temperament," in Joseph Jastrow's _The Psychology of Conviction_.]
The analysis in its fundamentals is perhaps still as doubtful as it
was in the fifth century B. C. when Hippocrates formulated the
doctrine of the humors, distinguished the sanguine, the
melancholic, the choleric, and the phlegmatic dispositions, and
ascribed them to the blood, the black bile, the yellow bile, and the
phlegm. The latest theories, such as one finds them in Cannon,
[Footnote: _Bodily Changes in Pleasure, Pain and Anger_.] Adler,
[Footnote: _The Neurotic Constitution_.] Kempf, [Footnote: _The
Autonomic Functions and the Personality; Psychopathology. Cf_. also
Louis Berman: _The Glands Regulating Personality_.] appear to
follow much the same scent, from the outward behavior and the inner
consciousness to the physiology of the body. But in spite of an
immensely improved technique, no one would be likely to claim that
there are settled conclusions which enable us to set apart nature from
nurture, and abstract the native character from the acquired. It is
only in what Joseph Jastrow has called the slums of psychology that
the explanation of character is regarded as a fixed system to be
applied by phrenologists, palmists, fortune-tellers, mind-readers, and
a few political professors. There you will still find it asserted that
"the Chinese are fond of colors, and have their eyebrows much vaulted"
while "the heads of the Calmucks are depressed from above, but very
large laterally, about the organ which gives the inclination to
acquire; and this nation's propensity to steal, etc., is admitted."
[Footnote: _Jastrow, op. cit._, p. 156.]
The modern psychologists are disposed to regard the outward behavior
of an adult as an equation between a number of variables, such as the
resistance of the environment, repressed cravings of several
maturities, and the manifest personality. [Footnote: Formulated by
Kempf, _Psychopathology_, p. 74, as follows:
Manifest wishes }
over }
Later Repressed Wishes }
Over } opposed by the resistance of the
Adolescent Repressed Wishes } environment=Behavior
Over }
Preadolescent Repressed Wishes }
] They permit us to suppose, though I have not seen the notion
formulated, that the repression or control of cravings is fixed not in
relation to the whole person all the time, but more or less in respect
to his various selves. There are things he will not do as a patriot
that he will do when he is not thinking of himself as a patriot. No
doubt there are impulses, more or less incipient in childhood, that