Living Mind: An Inquiry into the Psychological and Logical Foundation of Human Understanding

Hartley Burr Alexander, Late of the University of Nebraska and Scripps College

Mind and Intelligence

(A) The Mind's House

HUMAN NATURE Every man who is born into a human society enters not only into an abode set after a certain manner for his material sustenance but also into a house of thought within whose characteristic structure his mind is to be nourished and his life fashioned. He is born heir to a set of traditions which define for him a native culture, and he is foredestined to a kind of life which is to be his share in the realization of that culture, so that his years participate in its history. Physically he is introduced into a determined longitude and latitude of Earth's surface, into zone and clime, with all the limitations which are imposed and only the permissions which are granted by soil and sky and seasonal year, by food-resource and power-resource, by bounty or parsimony of natural gift. Historically, he is a citizen of his particular hour, a man of his unduplicatable generation, appearing on the scale of time wherever may be his allotted position. And these two, Space and Time, marking the stage and the entrance-exit of his life, constitute his dramatic fates in the impersonal and material sense in which Nature is their form. But beyond these he has also his human and personal ordinations, those which gave him his character as a man enacting a humanly intelligible role, placing him definably within the sequence of man-custom and man-bethought events, and so actualizing within his vital hours some moment of Human Nature. In the world men are not only staged and timed, they are also given characters.