STATISTICS ABOUT IDEALS

Southland Times, Issue 18824, 18 May 1920, Page 7

STATISTICS ABOUT IDEALS

WHOM DO YOU ADMIRE MOST?

AMERICAN DOCTOR’S EXPERIMENT.

Hr. A. A. Brill, of New York, the famj ous aLeuist, has for ten years been in I the habit of asking his patients at the ; first interview, "What personage from his- : tory or legend do you admire most, or whom would you consider your ideal?” He has collected answers also from friends, acquaintances, college students and school children, and he gives in the Medical Record uri interesting resume of the. answers; "In nutnng the* question,” he writes, "I : assumed that the person we admire most, I wlio is our ideal, expresses in his life our j conscious and unconscious strivings. That | is to say, we admire this personage so much , because we would wish to be Lite him and ■ are always endeavouring to emulate his mode of leact.on to tho world. "It will perhaps be surprising to hear that over 9b per cent, of my male answers confined themselves to only live historical persons. Of 586 male adults, 31)0 answered "Napoleon," IUI answered "Lincoln,” 38 answered "Caesar,” L’ti answered "Washington,” 1G answered "Frederick the Great,” and the rest, U, had various other ideals. Perhaps the most significant part is that over H) per cent, had Napoleon as their ideal, and that ot the 586 men only two answered "Jesus. : And, considering that SO of 586 gave Caesar, Washington and Frederick the Great as the persons whom they admired most, and that Lincoln, who among American-h-oni men stood next to Napoleon although not a soldier, was not a weakling | in any sense, one can readily see what the average intelligent person’s ideals arc. He evidently admires most a man of action who can put in operation those impuLscs winch he himselt would wish to live through but uares not or cannot do so. ■‘This also demonstrates that we are not as ideal ui our unconscious strivings as some make tus believe, that the good book is correct in asserting, ‘For the imagination of the human heart is evil from the beginning.' Only two Christians out of over 60 per cent, of Christians took Jesus as their ideal. One was a physician who had given up the practice of medicine and lived on a ranch, and the other was u literary gentleman, who lived on h;s income. These answers also explain why things primitive fascinate us, why plays dealing with crime are popular and why most of the newts items in our daily press are not exactly about the cardinal virtues in men. "‘I asked a teacher to explain to the children the meaning of a hero and give them examples. A few days later every boy was asked who was the greatest hero, and the answer was invariably, ‘Father.’ "1 regret to say that I have not been able to tabulate and report the answers given by women. The remarkable thing about their answers is that very few women gave females as their ideals—they invariably mentioned male names. Lincoln and Washington seemed to stand highest. This clearly shows that the ideal of a woman is a man and recalls Nietzsche’s pithy remark: ‘A man says I will, a woman says he will.’ ”