The degree of economic inequality is not the same in all countries. In England, for example, inequality is greater, even among employees of the state, than in France. The highest government servants in England are paid forty or fifty times as much as the lowest. In France, the head of the department receives only about twenty times as much as the typist. Strangely enough, the degree of economic inequality would seem to be greater in Soviet Russia than in many capitalist countries. Max Eastman cites figures which show that, whereas the managing director of an American mining firm receives about forty times as much as one of his miners, the corresponding person in Russia may be earning up to eighty times the wage of the lowest-paid worker.
What is the degree of economic inequality that should be allowed to exist in any community? Clearly, there can be no universally valid answer, at any rate in existing circumstances. In a society where the minimum wage is very small, it may be necessary to fix the rate of inequality at a higher level than in one where the majority of people are earning something more nearly approaching the optimum income. This may seem unjust and (since poor and rich inhabit different worlds) inexpedient. And, in effect, it is unjust and inexpedient. But the inexpediency of reducing all incomes to a level far below the optimum is probably greater than the inexpediency of keeping a few incomes at or above the optimum level. No society can make progress unless at least some of its members are in receipt of an income sufficient to ensure their fullest development. This means that, where minimum wages are low, as they are in even the richest of contemporary communities, it may be necessary to allow the best-paid individuals to draw an income twenty or even thirty times as great as that of the worst-paid. If ever it becomes possible to distribute the optimum income to all, the inequality rate may be greatly reduced. There is no reason, in such a society, why the highest incomes should be more than two or three times as great as the lowest.
The economic is not the only kind of inequality. There is also the more formidable, the less remediable inequality which exists between individuals of different psychological types. ‘The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.’ The universes of two individuals may be profoundly dissimilar, even though they may be in receipt of equal incomes. Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington. Nature as well as nurture has set great gulfs between us. Some of these gulfs are unbridged and seemingly unbridgeable; across them there is no communication. For example, I simply cannot imagine what it feels like to be a genius at chess, a great mathematician, a composer, who does his thinking in terms of melodies and progressions of harmonies. Some people are so clear-sighted that they can see the moons of Jupiter without a telescope; in some the sense of smell is so keen that, after a little training, they can enumerate all the constituent elements in a perfume composed of fifteen to twenty separate substances; some people can detect minute variations of pitch, to which the majority of ears are deaf.
Many attempts have been made to produce a scientific classification of human types in terms of their physical and psychological characteristics. For example, there was the Hippocratic classification of men according to the predominance of one or other of the four humours; this theory dominated European medicine for upwards of two thousand years. Meanwhile the astrologers and palmists were using fivefold classification in terms of planetary types. We still speak of sanguine or mercurial temperaments, describe people as jovial, phlegmatic, melancholic, saturnine. Aristotle wrote a treatise on physiognomy in which he attempted a classification of individuals in terms of the supposed characteristics of the animals they resembled. This pseudo-zoological classification of human beings kept cropping up in physiognomical literature until the time of Lavater.
In recent years we have had a number of new classifications. Stockard, in his Physical Basis of Personality, uses a twofold classification in terms of ‘linear’ and ‘lateral’ types of human beings. Kretschmer uses a threefold classification. So does Dr. William Sheldon, whose classification in terms of somatotonic, viscerotonic and cerebrotonic I shall use in the present chapter. It seems probable that, with the latest work in this field, we may be approaching a genuinely scientific description of human types. Meanwhile, let us not forget that many of the old systems of classification, though employing strange terms and an erroneous explanatory hypothesis, were based firmly upon the facts of observation and personal experience.
It is worth remarking that there have been fashions in temperaments just as there have been fashions in clothes and medicine, theology and the female figure. For example, the men of the eighteenth century admired above all the phlegmatic temperament—the temperament of the man who is naturally cautious, thoughtful, not easily moved. Voltaire gave place to Rousseau; admiration for a certain sagacious coolness, to the cult of sentimentality for sentimentality’s sake. Phlegm lost its old prestige and the sanguine temperament—hot passion and wet tears—rose to a position of fashionable pre-eminence, from which it was driven a generation later by the Byronic temperament, which is a mixture of sanguine and melancholy, a strange hybrid of inconsistencies, warm and moist allied with cold and dry. Meanwhile, at the Gothic height of the Romantic Movement, the Philosophic Radicals were doing their best to revive the prestige of phlegm; and a little later it was the choleric temperament, the temperament of the pushful, energetic man of business, that came into fashion. With muscular Christianity even religion becomes choleric and (in Sheldon’s phrase) somatotonic.
In view of the fact that membership of one or other of the psycho-physiological species is hereditary and inalienable, the habit of exalting one temperament at the expense of all the rest is manifestly silly. All the temperaments exist and something can be made of each of them. People have a right to be phlegmatic, just as they have a right to be plump. In our intolerant ignorance we demand that all shall conform to a fashionable ideal and be, say, melancholy or thin. There are times (such is our folly) when we demand that they shall have psychological characteristics which are to a great extent inconsistent with the physiological peculiarities that are in fashion at the moment. Thus, until a year or two since, we insisted that women should be simultaneously good mixers and as thin as rakes. But the born good-mixer is a person of lateral type, plump and well covered. Fashion in this case demanded the conjunction of incompatibles.
All the systems of classification are agreed that no individual belongs exclusively to one type; to some extent all men and women are of mixed type. But the amount of mixing may be small or great. Where it is small, the individual approximates to the pure type and is separated by a great gulf of psychological incommensurability from those in whom the characteristics of some other type predominate. Thus, it is all but impossible for the melancholy man to enter the universe inhabited by the choleric. The person who, if he went mad, would be a manic-depressive, cannot comprehend the potential victim of schizophrenia. The rotund and jolly ‘lateral’ type is worlds apart from the unexpansive, inward-turning ‘linear.’ The ‘viscerotonic’ man simply can’t imagine why the ‘cerebrotonic’ shouldn’t be a ‘good mixer,’ like himself. The one ‘has a warm heart’; his ‘reins move,’ his ‘bowels yearn.’ The other is ‘a highbrow’ and ‘has no guts.’ (Rich treasures of physiological psychology lie buried in the language of the Old Testament and even in schoolboys’ slang!)
At this point an example from my own personal experience may not be out of place. My own nature, as it happens, is on the whole phlegmatic, and, in consequence, I have the greatest difficulty in entering into the experiences of those whose emotions are easily and violently aroused. Before such works of art as Werther, for example, or Women in Love, or the Prophetic Books of William Blake I stand admiring, but bewildered. I don’t know why people should be shaken by such tempests of emotion on provocations, to my mind, so slight. Reading through the Prophetic Books not long ago, I noticed that certain words, such as ‘howling,’ ‘cloud,’ ‘storm,’ ‘shriek’ occurred with extraordinary frequency.
My curiosity was aroused; I made a pencil mark in the margin every time one of these words occurred. Adding up the score at the end of a morning’s reading, I found that the average worked out to something like two howls and a tempest to every page of verse. The Prophetic Books are, of course, symbolical descriptions of psychological states. What must have been the mentality of a man for whom thunder, lightning, clouds and screams seemed the most appropriate figure of speech for describing his ordinary thoughts and
