SOURCE: "Jane Addams on Human Nature," in Ideas in Cultural Perspective, edited by Philip P. Wiener and Aaron Noland, Rutgers University Press, 1962, pp. 468-81.

[In the following essay, which was originally presented as the first William I. Hull Lecture at Swarthmore College on 16 October 1960, Curti discusses Addams's views on the self and the place of the individual in society.]

It is somewhat curious that in tributes to Jane Addams (1860-1935) occasioned by her centennial year, no serious consideration has been given to her place in American intellectual history. One finds merited praise of her personality and of her contributions to the woman's movement, to social welfare, and to international peace. Her understanding and appreciation of the immigrants in our midst and what she did to help them become Americans without losing a feeling for their Old World heritage have been rightly recalled. But the ideas she held, their relation to her time and her life, have not apparently seemed worthy of analysis and evaluation.

Three main considerations go a long way toward explaining this. Jane Addams did not in any of her writings systematically set forth her social ideas in a way to please the scholars nowadays who set great store on what is called intellectual sophistication. Her ideas, in her books and essays, are subordinated to the larger social and human purposes and activities to which her life was dedicated. The pages abound with straightforward, unpretentious but often moving and penetrating reports of interviews with well known public figures and of participation in meetings of social workers and advocates of peace. Her writings are chiefly concerned with her everyday experiences over forty odd years at Hull House.

A second reason for the neglect of Jane Addams' thought may be that in her own day a public image was developed in some quarters which did her scant justice. She was widely appreciated, but certain critics, influenced by the stereotype of the sentimental do-gooder which was common among intellectuals, were close to condescension in their judgments of her. Agnes Repplier, for example, wrote of her "ruthless sentimentality." Theodore Roosevelt once dubbed her "poor bleeding Jane" and "a progressive mouse." Such judgments no doubt have lingered and confirmed many in accepting a stereotype—a Jane Addams whose easy optimism blinded her to the depth of the "tragic view of life" so popular now in many intellectual circles.

The neglect of her ideas may also be related to a present discouragement over the uses women have made of the vote, to which she attached so much importance, and, even more likely, to the contemporary strength of nationalism and of the forces in the world that make the abolition of war seem at best remote.

It is not my purpose to try to elevate Jane Addams into a major figure in our intellectual life. But on re-reading her ten books¹ it seems clear that if justice has been done her heart and her social vision, it has not been done her mind. Her ideas illuminate in sensitive and often keen ways major movements of thought in her time. Nor can the significance of her life be understood unless thoughtful attention is given to the rôle that ideas played in that life. Further, at its best, the writing in which her ideas are expressed rises to a level of literary distinction.

The thought of Jane Addams might be considered in any of a number of ways. I have chosen to use a central theme as a key to her ideas and feelings—her conception of human nature. The term itself occurs frequently in her writings. It was not common in her time to give the term an explicit, formal definition, and she herself did not do so. But it is clear that she did not limit it to the native equipment of men. For her, human nature encompassed the experiences and potentialities of the growing organism, in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and old age. She appreciated the dynamic factors in motivation and saw in the universal desire of individuals to be recognized and appreciated as unique persons, and the consequence of society's failure to make such recognition, the key to much behavior. She recognized the nature and rôle of sex in the life of the individual, but she also saw its relation to civilization. In her view of human nature, play and recreation are basic needs which brook denial only at heavy cost. Fighting is of course a part of human nature, but so is cooperation. Above all, her image of man emphasized the idea that the differences separating social classes and distinguishing immigrants and Negroes from old stock Americans, are far less important than the capacities, impulses, and motives they share in common.

In Twenty Years at Hull House the author noted that in 1889, when she went to live on Halstead Street, she was without any preconceived social theories and economic views. These, she added, were developed out of her experiences in Chicago. True, but the foundations for these theories and views rested on already formulated conceptions of human nature which, as she herself recognized, began to take shape in early childhood. Such recognition was natural enough, for by 1910, when the book was published, social workers as well as parents and educators were familiar with the great importance G. Stanley Hall had long been attaching to childhood experiences. And so it was natural for Miss Addams to begin her autobiography by referring to the theory that "our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be traced back to that 'No man's land' where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development."

These reminiscences reveal some of the basic conceptions of human nature later to be more or less explicitly formulated in writing and richly implemented in living. One finds repeated reference, for example, to the presumably innate tendency of children to seek in ceremonial expression a sense of identification with man's primitive life and kinship with the past, perhaps a compensation for the child's slowness to understand the real world about him, and certainly an instrument toward that end. This conviction, made intellectually respectable by early XIXth-century German philosophers and in Jane Addams' young womanhood by G. Stanley Hall (the recapitulation theory), was to figure in the importance she attached to the esthetic impulse and to children's play. The theory that in play children satisfy an innate need to live over the experience of the race seemed to her both reasonable and realistic. Adolescent behavior, which some thought stemmed from original sin, she looked upon as a natural expression of an instinct too old and too powerful to be easily recognized and wisely controlled. She noted also that children love to carry on, either actually or in play, activities proper to older people. This trait she thought of as also grounded in the need to repeat racial experience, and as expressing itself regardless of precept or inculcation. "The old man," as she put it, "clogs our earliest years."

Another early formed foundation stone for her image of man was the conviction that the basis of childhood's timidity, never altogether outworn, stems from "a sense of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and elemental forces." It is at least in part because of this fear and loneliness, she thought, that the child, and the adult which he becomes, needs affection and companionship. Jane Addams realized, of course, long before she wrote the autobiography, that in her own case this feeling of being unsheltered was accentuated by the fact that she had been deprived of her mother by death in her third year and by the further fact that a physical deformity both isolated her and gave her a sense of inadequacy and inferiority. But she was sure that all children share in greater or less degree this sense of fear and loneliness and that its major antidote is understanding and love. Also in her case the sense of timidity and loneliness was compensated for by the close and affectionate father-daughter relationship. The father's way of assuring her of his acceptance of her cemented the bond more tightly. It is hard, she reflected, to account fully for a child's adoring affection for a parent, "so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the affairs of the imagination."

It came to be clear to Jane Addams, as it is so patently clear to us, that her father greatly influenced her ideas about the nature of mankind. A substantial miller imbued with the democracy of the Illinois frontier and of his hero Mazzini, John Addams' views of human nature reflected his abolitionism, his great admiration of Lincoln, and his commitment to Hicksite Quakerism. His complete lack of racial prejudice and his firm conviction that the similarities of men far outweigh the differences, were an indelible influence in the forming of the daughter's view of human nature. So too was his belief in the essential equality of men and women. These beliefs were reinforced by his Quaker heritage and the essentially classless society of this Illinois farm community. When his young daughter was troubled about the doctrine of fore-ordination, and asked her father to explain it to her, he replied that probably neither she nor he had the kind of minds capable of understanding the doctrine. In other words, as Jane Addams later recalled the conversation, some minds are capable and fond of dealing with abstractions while others are at home with concrete facts and immediate problems: this simple typology explained much that she later observed at Hull House in heated discussions over socialism and anarchism. Her father continued by adding that it made little difference whether one was the sort to understand such doctrines as predestination as long as he did not pretend to understand what he didn't. "You must always be honest with yourself inside, no matter what happens." This idea, so basic in Quaker tradition, stuck with the girl. The discussion ended with the suggestion that there may be areas of unfathomed complexity, incapable at least at the present stage of man's rational development, of being fully comprehended. In Jane Addams' view of human nature there was a large place for the contemplation of life's mysteries.

The instruction and associations of Rockford Seminary did not greatly alter these foundations for a conception of human nature. Jane Addams, like her fellow-students, read textbooks on mental philosophy, but the static and sterile approach in most treatises of this kind at best stimulated discussions outside class on such questions as the freedom of the will. The reading of Emerson strengthened her sense that human nature includes both rational and intuitive capacities. But as she was introduced to new ranges of feminism, she felt dissatisfied with the old belief in the ascendancy of intuition in the feminine mind. Under the influence of the positivism which she discovered, she concluded that women ought to study intensively at least one branch of natural science to make the faculties clear and more acute. Following graduation from Rockford, she tried studying medicine in Philadelphia but found she had little taste or aptitude for the sciences and dropped the course.

During the Rockford years and the brief Philadelphia experiment, Miss Addams' awareness of death and sorrow took on, especially through her study of Plato, a universal dimension: human existence had always been an unceasing flow and ebb of justice and oppression, of life and death. She heard about Darwinism and accepted it. The acceptance and interpretations she gave to evolution became a fresh and vastly important component in her image of man.

Like so many young women college graduates of the time, Jane Addams went to Europe in search of further culture. The four years she spent abroad were shadowed by long and painful illnesses and a depressing sense of failure. Thus her years of further education were not altogether roseate. But she continued to learn. Experiences in the great art galleries and study of man's early artistic expressions in the pyramids and in the catacombs sharpened her vague feeling that the esthetic component is basic in man's nature. But this was not all, for she interested herself further in the positivism which she had discovered in her reading at Rockford.

When she saw that for all their enthusiasm about human brotherhood, the positivists did little or nothing to implement the idea, she sought light elsewhere. This she found in her growing awareness of the human wretchedness in the great urban slums and in the programs of the British social settlement pioneers. Increasingly she felt that many college women in their zest for learning and in their search for individual culture departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and great grandmothers. The rewards of the search for individual knowledge and culture paled as she became more deeply convinced of the far greater importance of learning from life itself. Education and artistic effort, she decided, were futile when considered apart from the ultimate test of the conduct it inspired, when there was no relationship between these and the human need of the poor and the suffering. Thus without benefit of William James and John Dewey, who only later reenforced her views of human nature, she became, as her friend Dr. Alice Hamilton said, something of a pragmatist, determined to test ideas and values about life in the actual laboratory of life. But the pragmatism that later provided support for an enlarged view of human nature did not lead to a rejection of presuppositions more or less unconsciously acquired and interwoven with Christian humanism and Christian mystery.

Closely related to pragmatism and more important in her own intellectual growth had been the doctrine of evolution. No one of the other late XIXth- and early XXth-century movements of thought—the so-called new psychology of the experimental laboratory, or Freudianism, or Marxism—to all of which she responded, exerted so far-reaching an influence on Jane Addams' view of the nature of man as did the teachings of Darwin and his disciple Kropotkin, who spent some time at Hull House in 1901.

For Jane Addams, the evolutionary view of human nature postulated certain primordial types of behavior and potential types of behavior. On many occasions she referred to these, in the fashion of those days, as instincts. Man shared some of these with other animals. But in the process of evolution, of survival through adaptation, he came to have impulses that set him apart from other animals in somewhat the way that the human hand enabled him to claw his way to a civilization denied his less well equipped fellow creatures.

Her view of the inherited basic equipment of man emphasized the special importance of the extremely early appearance in man's long struggle upwards, of the tribal feeding of the young. This human instinct sprang out of or was at least closely related to man's innate gregariousness and to the ability first of mothers and then of males to see in the hunger of any young symbolical relationship to the hunger of their own offspring. Our very organism, Jane Addams wrote, holds memories and glimpses of "that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing," she continued, "so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment, as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness, as a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut oneself away from the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born and to use but half our faculties." This desire for action to fulfil social obligation was so deep-seated a heritage that to deny its expression, she thought, was more fatal to well-being than anything save disease, indigence, and a sense of guilt.

Here we have the corner stone of all that Jane Addams did in sharing her life with less fortunate neighbors, in encouraging measures designed to prevent the young and the old from being exploited, and in mobilizing in war-time food for helpless hungry mouths wherever they might be. For marvelous though human nature was in its adaptability, it had never "quite fitted its back to the moral strain involved in the knowledge that fellow creatures are starving."

The reading of Kropotkin and others led to the belief that this human instinct or trait appeared perhaps a million years or more before man developed a proclivity to kill masses of his own kind. This method of settling differences, many anthropologists held, had become common among human beings a mere twenty thousand years ago. It was used by only one other species, ants, which like human beings, were property holders. Thus Jane Addams might respectably hold, and she did, that the earlier instinct, with its implications of human solidarity, could under proper conditions exert an even stronger pull over behavior than competing forces, less deeply seated. In other words, man's primordial concern for group feeding of the young and the sense of responsibility for helping those in need which was related to it, might check and control the more recently acquired habit of mass killing of one's own kind. In the growth of international institutions and the evidences that love of man was crossing provincial and national boundaries, she saw hope for an emerging pacifism that in time would make war as obsolete as slavery had become. In sum, her reading convinced her that war, like slavery, was a relatively recent man-made institution. The argument that pacifism could never triumph because of man's inborn and unchangeable pugnacity, was no more valid, she thought, than the pre-Civil War argument of Southerners that slavery could never be abolished because it is ingrained in human nature itself.

In an address at the Boston Peace Congress of 1904, Miss Addams began to spell out the implications of this position, a position more positive in character than the non-resistance ideas of her hero, Tolstoy. In that address she anticipated William James' "Moral Equivalents of War" in suggesting that the subhuman and dark forces which so easily destroy the life of mankind might be diverted into organized attacks on social maladjustments, on poverty, disease, and misfortune, on one hand, and into the closely related "nurture of human life" on the other. It might in particular be diverted from destructive outburst into war by taking heed from the successful example of the immigrants of diverse and even hostile traditions who had learned to live as friends in America's cities. This view was developed in her book Newer Ideals of Peace, published in 1907. In the poorer quarters of our cosmopolitan cities she found multitudes of immigrants surrendering habits of hate and of aggression cherished for centuries, and customs that could be traced to habits of primitive man. She not only saw that they surrendered these habits, she also witnessed innumerable and sustained examples of the pity and kindness based on an equally ancient, or even more ancient, instinct: the instinct of pity and kindness toward those in the group whose need was even greater than that of the others. "In seeking companionship in the new world the immigrants are reduced to the fundamental equalities and universal necessities of life itself. They develop power of association which comes from daily contact with those who are unlike each other in all save the universal characteristics of man." To put it in other words, the pressures of a cosmopolitan neighborhood seemed to be the simple and inevitable foundations for an international order in some-what the same way that the foundations of tribal and national morality had already been laid.

This hope suffered a blow during the first world war when an emotional crisis showed that many immigrants had not in living together actually shed the heritage of Old World hatreds. But the outbreak of the war brought to the fore another belief also rooted in her conception of human nature. Jane Addams found a great many soldiers in hospitals in the several belligerent countries who expressed the wish that women everywhere would use their influence to end the struggle. She knew, of course, that women as well as men in all the fighting countries Were supporting the war. Yet she reflected that, just as an artist in an artillery corps commanded to fire on a beautiful cathedral would be "deterred by a compunction unknown to the man who had never given himself to creating beauty and did not know the intimate cost of it, so women, who have brought men into the world and nurtured them until they reach the age of fighting, must experience a peculiar revulsion when they see them destroyed, irrespective of the country in which these may have been born."

Such intimations received confirmation at the meeting of women from several countries at The Hague in 1915. Here it was said again and again that appeals against war and for a peaceful organization of the world had been made too largely a matter of reason and a sense of justice. If reason is only part of the human endowment, then emotion and the deepest racial impulses must be recognized, modified, utilized. These deep racial impulses admittedly include the hatred of the man who differs from the crowd: but this would be softened by understanding and education. Also involved are those primitive human urgings to foster life and to protect the helpless of which women were the earliest custodians. Involved too are the gregarious instincts shared with the animals themselves—instincts which women as noncombatants might now best keep alive. Such were some of the supports in her concept of human nature on which Jane Addams now leaned.

When her own country entered the war in 1917 she kept faith with the instrumentalist conviction that the processes or methods by which goals are approached or achieved, are more important than acceptance of so-called practical means that are in fact incompatible with the ends. She had always felt that temperament and habit—also important ingredients in human nature—kept her in the middle of the road. Now circumstances drove her to the extreme left of what had been the peace movement. She faced the opprobrium of society and the loneliness of standing out against mass judgment, wondering at times if such deviation as hers might not be only arrogance. But she fell back on the lesson her Quaker father had taught her: that what was most important was always to be honest with oneself inside, no matter what happened, that the ability to hold out against friends and society in a time of crisis depends "upon the categorical belief that a man's primary allegiance is to his own vision of the truth and that he is under an obligation to affirm it."

She also found comfort in reminding herself of the universality of sorrow and death and in pondering—she knew it was at the risk of rationalization—on what seemed to be one of the lessons of the evolutionary view of human nature. If the deviant pacifist invited the deeply rooted biological hatred meted out to one who by non-conforming threatened the security of the group, there was after all another side of the evolutionary coin. All forms of growth begin with a variation from the mass. Might not the individual or group that differed from the mass be initiating moral changes and growth in human behavior and affairs? Might not he who was damned as a crank or pitied as a freak in times of stern crisis actually be leading in the growth of a new moral sense for his society? In view of the complexity and mystery of life's purposes, who could say? And finally, the difficulties of being a pacifist in war time were made a bit more bearable by keeping in mind what seemed another lesson from evolution: that the virtues of patriotism and the martial traits remained only as vestiges after they had actually become a deterrent to future social progress.

In other ways, too, the evolutionary view deeply influenced without moulding Jane Addams' ideas about human nature. This view also influenced, in an unknown measure, her own conduct. During the first years on Halstead Street nothing was more pitifully clear to her than "the fact that pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment." The Socialists, more than any other group, seemed to realize this, and seemed also to be making an earnest effort to relieve that heavy pressure. She would have been glad to have the comradeship of that "gallant company" had the Socialists not so firmly insisted that fellowship depended on identity of creed. In making this comment she was for the moment probably overlooking a Socialist emphasis on class conflict: for though she recognized the existence of such a conflict, she was not convinced that it was inevitable.

And so, unable to find comfort in a definite ideology which "explained" social chaos and pointed to logical bettering of physical conditions, Jane Addams went at the matter differently. Without bitterness or self-righteousness she tried to help labor and management learn the lesson of cooperation. She tried to educate public opinion and legislators to an appreciation of the fact that there is a definite relation between physical conditions and human behavior: that long and exhausting hours of labor at deadening tasks are likely to be followed by a quest for lurid and exciting pleasures. Moreover, the power to overcome such temptation reaches its limit almost automatically with that of physical resistance. "The struggle for existence," she wrote in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), "which is so much harsher among people near the edge of pauperism, sometimes leaves ugly marks on character." Society had begun to apply this evolutionary principle to the bringing up of children. It had finally come to expect certain traits and behavior under certain conditions, to adapt methods and matter to the child's growing and changing needs. But society was slow to apply this principle to human affairs in general. In our attitudes toward the poor, the alcoholic, the prostitute, the outcast, she wrote, we think much more of what a man or woman ought to be than of what he is or what he might become under different and better conditions.

Here is an important factor in Jane Addams' approach to social work. She sensed the limitations in what the scientific charity groups and case workers had come to look on as the only true kind of helpfulness but what all too often seemed to those to be aided, ruthless imposition of conventions and standards that were incomprehensible. Pity might seem capricious and harmful to the new type of social case worker, but she should not forget that a theory of social conduct is a poor substitute for tenderness of heart which need not be blind to the complexity of the situation.

The deeply human interest in and appreciation of all sorts of people, including those in trouble, led Jane Addams to an early appreciation of the rôle of sex in deviant behavior and tragedy. It is noteworthy that a girl reared in the Victorian period was able to speak as frankly as she did and to recognize sex as "the most basic and primordial instinct of human beings." It is remarkable that she so early saw in the sex instinct a source of creativity in the arts and that she recognized its close association with play, which she also thought to be an inherent need in humankind. Basic and all important as the sex instinct was, it had always, from the beginnings of the race itself, been in some way controlled in the expression it took. But, in her view, our modern industrial city as it was in the 1890's not only failed to provide sensible, humane, and necessary forms of regulation of the instinct but invited its commercial degradation and exploitation and encouraged its expression in delinquent behavior and in enduring human tragedy.

More specifically, the American city with its anonymity, its uprooted families, its ill-adjusted immigrants, its commercial exploitation of the labor of girls and boys and young men and women in grim shops and factories in an almost never-ending workday, provided no opportunities for the development of comradeship and recreation save in gaudy and sensation-evoking saloons, dance halls and similar money-making establishments. Loneliness was the fate of innumerable girls who struggled against poverty and who had no decent opportunities for making friendships. "It is strange," wrote Miss Addams in 1911, "that we are so slow to learn that no one can safely live without companionship and affection, that the individual who tries the hazardous experiment of going without at least one of them is prone to be swamped by a black mood from within. It is as if we had to build little islands of affection in the vast sea of impersonal forces lest we be overwhelmed by them." Boys, to be sure, found companionship in gangs. But deprived of opportunities for natural expression of adolescent revolt in healthy recreation, the gang was at best an antisocial institution leading naturally to delinquency and a life of defeat, alcoholism, violence, and crime.

One might suppose in view of the innumerable examples of the rôle of sex in leading to ruthless exploitation one the one hand and to grim tragedy on the other, that Jane Addams would have accepted the Calvinist theory, with which she was familiar, of the innate depravity of man kind. On the contrary, with her faith in the pliability of human nature she held that just as our society brings out unfortunate behavior, so it is also capable of evoking wholesome relationships, social idealism, and artistic creativity if society assumes responsibility in a great area of human drive and experience, sex, which it had ignored, or condemned, or permitted to be degraded. She quoted General Bingham, Police Commissioner of New York, to the effect that there is "not enough depravity in human nature" to keep alive the very large business of commercial prostitution. "The immorality of women and the brutishness of men have to be persuaded, coaxed, and constantly stimulated in order to keep the social evil in its present state of business prosperity."

Jane Addams, like other Americans imbued with the teachings of pragmatism, did not draw any separating line between theory and practice. If, as she insisted, the regulation of this great primitive instinct had a long history and if that regulation had evolved with civilization, indeed, with the race itself, it was important to recognize the fact that its regulation now needed to be better adapted to the conditions of urban and industrial life.

Understanding the nature of sex was the first step in developing a better regulation of it. The cooperation of parents and schools might do much to bring about a more healthy understanding of and attitude toward sex. Sane education could be furthered not only through classes in biology and hygiene. It could also be encouraged through the study of literature and history which provide rich examples of the ill-effects of mere suppression or mere indulgence, and which also give abundant illustration of the ennobling expression of sex in altruism. Also important in her view was the expression of the creative aspects of the sex instinct in music and art—which the ancient Greeks had so well understood. "In failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination," she wrote, "we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the most precious implements for ministering to life's highest need." It is, to be sure, no easy thing to substitute the love of beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses. But "the whole history of civilization," as she kept reminding her generation, "has been one long effort to substitute psychic impulsion for the driving force of blind appetite." Jane Addams took pains again and again to make clear that this was quite different from the mere parental and social imposition of repression.

Understanding the nature and potential relationships between sex, altruism, and esthetic creativity was, however, not enough. What was also needed was community provision for the expression of the sex impulse in wholesome companionship, in social idealism put into practice, and in the provision by society of adequate means for the expression and development of the play instinct. For this too was so basic and inherent a constituent of human nature that it could neither be safely repressed nor, in modern urban life, left to chance. The thwarting of all these basic instincts, the failure of contemporary society to provide proper channels for their expression, explained, Jane Addams insisted, much of the tragedy that stemmed from leaving the sex instinct isolated from intelligent direction and manifestation. It is worth noting in passing that she came to these views without benefit of Freud, at least as far as we know. When, in the 1920's, she first spoke of him in her writings, it was less to find support for her thesis than to regret the popular interpretation which focused attention on the driving need for direct and overt sex expression.

But understanding and sublimation of the sex instinct are not in her view enough. Society, she insisted, must put an end to certain conditions that tempted boys and girls into degrading expressions of the sex impulse. It can not do this merely by sanctioning benevolent welfare capitalism, such as that exemplified in the paternalism at Pullman. For like a modern King Lear, George Pullman could not understand that his regimentation of the workers presum-ably in their own interest led to "a revolt of human nature" against the denial of their own participation in what affected every detail of their lives. State intervention against long hours, poor pay, and the grueling monotony of tending machines in factory and sweatshop was a more positive need. The trade unions were working in this direction and early found in Jane Addams a strong supporter. But the community, she said, must also provide an environment in which, after an exhausting workday, youth and older workers might find the right sort of companionship and release from nervous tensions. Only by this means and through adequate pay would the toilers be freed from the temptation and necessity of finding pleasure in saloons and dubious dance halls.

Society can, in short, Miss Addams believed, reestablish under modern conditions the ancient tie between the sex impulse and artistic creativity and wholesome relaxation from the nervous tension of modern industrial labor. And it can also provide the means by which the social idealism of adolescence can find constructive outlet in helping others. Hull House pioneered in all this; but Jane Addams was sufficiently realistic to appreciate the need of a broader institutionally and socially supported program, and to work toward that end. In brief, people need not be allowed to fall into esthetic and social insensibility and into an indulgence of basic instincts that is unsatisfying, wasteful, and often tragic.

How much of the analysis of human nature which Jane Addams so unpretentiously made seems valid in the light of experience and present-day knowledge? One must report that some of her concepts are no longer entertained by competent psychologists. The theory that children in their growth recapitulate racial experiences, for example, now has few adherents. Nor would psychologists describe as instincts some of the motives and behavior she regarded as inborn and unlearned. But in her day psychologists did accept the instinct theory, and in following them she was au courant. She was on more solid ground in early emphasizing the importance of childhood experiences and of sex well before even psychologists had generally recognized it. It is true that she was too optimistic in thinking that degrading forms of expression of the sex impulse would disappear if bitter poverty were eliminated and adequate recreation made available. Our society has gone far toward achieving these ends, yet the degrading forms of expression seem to be as much of a problem as ever. But it is hard to measure the effects of changing conditions, and a great deal can of course be said for her conviction that the sex impulse can be modified and channeled into varied and often elevating expressions.

Miss Addams was also a pioneer in America in appreciating and using constructively the now well established fact that the great modes of adjustment in life, whether considered individually or socially, develop through influences of which each participant is often unconscious as he struggles to adapt himself to continuing and changing conditions. And though motivation research, unknown in her day, has made substantial progress, her discussion of motivation was unusually perceptive and is still largely acceptable. Her explanation of the deviant behavior of youth as a blundering effort to find adventure and self-expression in a society which provides few opportunities for either, is still central in the most informed approaches to the problems of delinquency. A case can also be made for her thesis that the talents and experiences of women in bearing children, in nurturing life, and in housekeeping and homemaking have been important factors in what they have done with the vote and through organization in helping to raise standards of community welfare.

It is perhaps in Miss Addams' discussion of the relation of war to human nature that the limitations of her analysis and her program are most apparent. One need not minimize the contributions of women in the continuing struggle against war. But her ideas about the potential rôle of women in this struggle, which she associated with a strongly ingrained compassion and reverence for life, would probably seem to her, were she alive today, to have been overstressed. The fact that immigrants in the United States seem quickly to forget ancient hatreds and learn to live together in peace, has been cited by various writers here and abroad. But Miss Addams' expectation that this demonstration would have an effect on international cooperation does not appear to have been realized. It also seems clear that she overstressed as a factor for peace what she regarded as the primordial appearance in the race of group responsibility for feeding infants and children regardless of parentage. The fact that loyalty to the nation and mass killing appeared historically late has not thus far rendered these patterns of behavior subordinate to the compassionate traits in human nature which she thought to be much older and therefore stronger in pull.

On the other hand, social scientists generally endorse Miss Addams's early arrived at insistence that the things that make men alike are more important than the things that differentiate them. If this is the case, then it may be that in our trials and errors and in our efforts to adjust our behavior to the world community we now recognize as a fact, we have not yet found adequate means for institutionalizing the implications of the fact that men share common characteristics regardless of culture. Also relevant to the discussion is the general agreement of psychologists and other social scientists that man's action or behavior is largely explained in terms of his social relationships.

Perhaps we have not yet sufficiently tested Jane Addams' conviction that there will be no peace until the world community is no longer divided into the repressed, dimly conscious that they have no adequate outlet for normal life, and the repressing, the self-righteous and the cautious who hold fast to their own. Perhaps we have not yet tested sufficiently her overarching conviction that if life is often mean, unprofitable and tragic, if it is at other times feeble and broken, it is because we have not yet learned the lesson, and acted on it, that these evidences of what some call the tragic flaw in human nature, result not from man's essential and unchangeable limitations, but rather follow from our failure to understand ourselves and others.

NOTES

¹ All of Jane Addams' books were published by the Macmillan Company: Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930), The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (1932), and My Friend Julia Lathrop (1935); Jane Addams, A Centennial Reader, edited by Emily Cooper Johnson, 1960. The Jane Addams papers are in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.