WHAT IS HUMAN MIND ?

Taranaki Daily News, 17 September 1934, Page 8

WHAT IS HUMAN MIND ?

IS IT MEIRELY BORROWED?

TRAITS IN THE PROFESSIONS. LORD MACMILLAN'S LECTURE. “Virtue! a fig!” quoth lago, “ ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.” But, on the other hand, is it not equally true (asks the Sydney Morning Herald) that a man’s mind is moulded by his environment and his whole outlook and character influenced profoundly by the daily practice of a particular profession? Thus the professional man might reply to the hereditarian lago, again in Shakespearean phrase: My nature is subdued, to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. This indeed is one point of view expressed by Lord Macmillan, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, in .is Maudsley lecture on “The Professional Mind” delivered to the Medico-Psychological Association, and published in the British Medical Journal.

DOES THE JOB MAKE THE MAN?

Lord Macmillan maintains that, whatever the individual differences among the members of a profession, there are always common elements showed by all belonging to it. “Their habits are controlled, their thoughts canalised, their prejudices formed, by the profession they practise.” It is a pretty point, capable of considerable argument, and interesting to both the psychologist and the professional man. Certainly, individuals will retain their idiosyncrasies, and personality is too powerful and vital a thing to be regulated and determined entirely by the type of. vocation practised. But the constant dripping of professional habits will also wear away the individualist stone, and it is inevitable that the prolonged repetition of. acts, the daily association with certain, particular problems, the imitation induced by moving in a certain social group, the requirements of a professional etiquette, all these will tend to. modify a man’s nature. His mind and character in a hundred ways, often unconscious, will be affected, and his reflexes conditioned, until many of his reactions are largely automatic.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER SEGREGATE.

The professions, as Lord Macmillan points out, tend to share certain characteristics. . “From, the earliest times,” he says, .“the practitioners of a particular art have shown a tendency to draw away from the rest, of the community and to constitute themselves a separate class with their own ceremonial rites and shibboleths.” To-day the lines of demarcation are less rigidly drawn, and hence the professional, types are not as distinctive as. in a primitive, community. But the particular rites and shibboleths still persist, .together with a tendency to preserve them intact as .much and as long as possible. Thus the professional mind in general tends to be conservative. The medical profession, of course, has been proverbially hostile to new discoveries and novel methods, as instanced recently in the life of Sir Robert Jones and his struggle to establish orthopaedics. But the. legal profession is also inveterately conservative, prone to depend on longaccepted principles, and precedents. As for the practitioners of the other learned profession, the Church, they perhaps resist change more strongly than the, doctors and lawyers. And each profession tends to be selfish in putting the interests of the craft before those of the community. On the other hand, there is a natural sense of brotherhood within the craft, a fellowship arising from common. interests. And if the professional mind clings to its prerogatives, it also honours its traditions, setting up high standards of conduct, jealous of the integrity of its “high calling.” ALAS, NO “BELOVED” LAWYERS! If we consider the professions individually, we find certain mental phenomena appearing as typical of each one. The lawyer’s has never been a popular profession, profiting as it does by people’s misfortunes and crimes, and the popular attitude was expressed by Dr. Johnson vzhen he said, “I cannot exactly tell you, sir, who he is, and I would be loth to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.” Lord Macmillan, however, points out that “the great bulk of the legal work of the country is administrative and non-contentious, requiring no perverse intellectual subtlety, but just the ordinary workaday virtues of industry and honesty.” Yet he admits that the profession engenders the habit of judging by words, formulas, and logic rather than by the facts alone. The legal mind is prone to be over-subtle, formal, even pedantic, yet sharp and critical. Although the Law Lord does not mention it. it is probable, too, that, from the nature of his experience, the lawyer tends to be a little sceptical and cynical in regard to human nature. The medical mind is not so strongly intellectual, because qualities of emotion, imagination, and personality generally count for so much in therapeutics. His wide experience makes the doctor humane, and Lord Macmillan pays the profession a generous tribute when he says, “It is perhaps in the medical man that the professional mind finds its finest sphere. At any rate, I envy the physician the epithet which is peculiarly his own, the epithet ‘beloved.’ I have never heard of a beloved barrister or a beloved solicitor.”