concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and
discovering new answers and expanding one's knowledge into an ever-growing sum.''^2
It must be stressed that this policy constitutes evidence of maturity only when it is practiced in all areas of a
person's life and not exclusively in the area of his professional work. There are men who are brilliant at
conceptualizing and thinking in principles when their focus is on higher mathematics or some distant galaxy or
some business activity—but who become helplessly insecure, concrete-bound children, blind to abstractions and
principles, seeing nothing but the immediate moment, when their focus is on, say, current politics or a problem in
their personal life. Maturity is evidenced by the ability to think in principles about oneself.
All other aspects of psychological maturity are derivatives and consequences of developing one's conceptual
faculty. The most important of these aspects are the following:
- A man who deals with the facts of reality on the conceptual level of consciousness has accepted the
responsibility of a human manner of existence—which entails his acceptance of responsibility for his own life and
actions.
A child cannot accept such responsibility; he is still in the process of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary
for independence. But an adult who expects others to take care of him—and /or who habitually cries, when the
consequences of his actions catch up with him, "I couldn't help it!"—is a case of self-arrested development, a
person who has defaulted on the process of human maturation.
- The acceptance of responsibility for one's own life requires a policy of planning and acting long-range, so that
one's actions are integrated to one another and one's present to one's future. A child, in large measure, "lives for the
moment." A healthy adult plans and acts in terms of a lifespan.
This policy entails a corollary: the willingness to defer immediate pleasure or rewards, when and if necessary, and
to tolerate unavoidable frustration.
An infant's typical reaction to frustration is crying. If a child learns that he cannot go to the circus on the day he had
expected to, he may, understandably, feel crushed; next week, to him, seems