INSTINCTS OF THE HERD IN PEACE AND WAR

BY

W. TROTTER

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

• February, 1916 First Published
• March, 1917 Second Impression
• July, 1917 Third Impression
• November, 1919 Second Edition
• March, 1920 Fifth Impression
• February, 1921 Sixth Impression

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

The first two essays in this book were written some ten years ago and published in the Sociological Review in 1908 and 1909. They had formed a single paper, but it was found necessary to publish in two instalments at an interval of six months, and to cut down to a considerable extent the total bulk.

It was lately suggested to me that as the numbers of the review in which the two essays appeared were out of print, the fact that the subject concerned was not without some current interest might justify a republication. It was not possible to do this without trying to embody such fruits as there might be of ten years’ further speculation and some attempt to apply to present affairs the principles which had been sketched out.

The new comment very soon surpassed by far in bulk the original text, and constitutes, in fact, all but a comparatively few pages of this book. This rather minute record is made here not because it has any interest of its own, but especially to point out that I have been engaged in trying to apply to the affairs of to-day principles which had taken shape ten years ago. I point this out not in order {6} to claim any gift of foresight in having suggested so long ago reasons for regarding the stability of civilization as unsuspectedly slight, but because it is notorious that the atmosphere of a great war is unfavourable to free speculation. If the principles upon which my argument is based had been evolved during the present times, the reader would have had special reason to suspect their validity, however plausible they might seem in the refracting air of national emergency.

The general purpose of this book is to suggest that the science of psychology is not the mass of dreary and indefinite generalities of which it sometimes perhaps seems to be made up; to suggest that, especially when studied in relation to other branches of biology, it is capable of becoming a guide in the actual affairs of life and of giving an understanding of the human mind such as may enable us in a practical and useful way to foretell some of the course of human behaviour. The present state of public affairs gives an excellent chance for testing the truth of this suggestion, and adds to the interest of the experiment the strong incentive of an urgent national peril.

If this war is becoming, as it obviously is, daily more and more completely a contest of moral forces, some really deep understanding of the nature and sources of national morale must be at least as important a source of strength as the technical knowledge of the military engineer and the maker of cannon. One is apt to suppose that the chief function of a sound morale is the maintenance of {7} a high courage and resolution through the ups and downs of warfare. In a nation whose actual independence and existence are threatened from without such qualities may be taken for granted and may be present when the general moral forces are seriously disordered. A satisfactory morale gives something much more difficult to attain. It gives smoothness of working, energy and enterprise to the whole national machine, while from the individual it ensures the maximal outflow of effort with a minimal interference from such egoistic passions as anxiety, impatience, and discontent. A practical psychology would define these functions and indicate means by which they are to be called into activity.

The more we consider the conduct of government in warfare the clearer does it become that every act of authority produces effects in two distinct fields—that of its primary function as directed more or less immediately against the enemy, and that of its secondary action upon the morale of the nation. The first of these two constituents possesses the uncertainty of all military enterprises, and its success or failure cannot be foretold; the influence of the second constituent is susceptible of definition and foresight and need never be wholly ambiguous to any but the ignorant or the indifferent.

The relative importance of the military and the moral factors in any act or enterprise varies much, but it may be asserted that while the moral factor may sometimes be enormously the more important, it is never wholly absent. This constant and admittedly significant factor in all acts of {8} government is usually awarded an attention so thoroughly inexpert and perfunctory, as to justify the feeling that the customary belief in its importance is no more than a conventional expression.

The method I have used is frankly speculative, and I make no apology for it because the facts are open to the observation of all and available for confirmation or disproof. I have tried to point out a way; I have tried not to exhort or persuade to the use of it—these are matters outside my province. November, 1915.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

A few errors in the text of the First Edition have been corrected, and a sentence which had caused misunderstanding has been omitted. No other change has been made. A Postscript has been added in order to point out some of the directions in which the psychological inquiry made during the war gave a practical foresight that was confirmed by the course of events, and in order to examine the remarkable situation in which society now finds itself.

In the Preface to the First Edition I ventured to suggest that some effective knowledge of the mind might be of value to a nation at war; I take this opportunity of suggesting that such knowledge might be not less useful to a tired nation seeking peace. At the same time it should perhaps be added that this book is concerned wholly with the examination of principles, is professedly speculative in methods and conclusions, and is quite without pretensions to advise upon the conduct of affairs. August, 1919.

• CONTENTS

  • 5 PREFACE
  • 8 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
  • HERD INSTINCT AND ITS BEAR­ING ON THE PSY­CHOL­O­GY OF CIV­I­LIZED MAN
    • 11 INTRODUCTION
    • 15 PSYCHOLOGICAL AS­PECTS OF IN­STINCT
    • 18 BIOLOGICAL SIG­NIF­I­CANCE OF GRE­GAR­I­OUS­NESS
    • 23 MENTAL CHAR­AC­TER­IS­TICS OF THE GRE­GAR­I­OUS AN­I­MAL
  • SOCIOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE PSY­CHOL­O­GY OF HERD IN­STINCT
    • 60 GRE­GAR­IOUS­NESS AND THE FU­TURE OF MAN
  • SPECULATIONS UPON THE HU­MAN MIND IN 1915
    • 66 MAN’S PLACE IN NA­TURE AND NA­TURE’S PLACE IN MAN
    • 69 COMMENTS ON AN OB­JEC­TIVE SYS­TEM OF HU­MAN PSY­CHOL­O­GY
    • 91 SOME PRINCIPLES OF A BI­O­LOG­I­CAL PSY­CHOL­O­GY
    • 101 THE BIOLOGY OF GRE­GAR­IOUS­NESS
    • 112 CHARACTERS OF THE GRE­GAR­I­OUS AN­I­MAL DIS­PLAYED BY MAN
    • 120 SOME PECULIAR­I­TIES OF THE SO­CIAL HA­BIT IN MAN
    • 132 IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SO­CIAL HA­BIT IN MAN
    • 139 GREGARIOUS SPE­CIES AT WAR
    • 156 ENGLAND AGAINST GER­MANY—GER­MANY
    • 201 ENGLAND AGAINST GER­MANY—EN­GLAND
  • POSTSCRIPT OF 1919
    • 214 PREJUDICE IN TIME OF WAR
    • 224 PSYCHOLOGICAL AN­TI­CI­PA­TIONS
    • 235 AFTER THE WAR
    • 241 THE INSTABILITY OF CIV­I­LI­ZA­TION
    • 251 SOME CHARACTERS OF A RA­TION­AL STATE­CRAFT
  • 261 INDEX

INSTINCTS OF THE HERD IN PEACE AND WAR

HERD INSTINCT AND ITS BEARING ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CIVILIZED MAN

I. INTRODUCTION

Few subjects have led to discussion so animated and prolonged as has the definition of the science of sociology. It is therefore necessary, as it is hoped that this essay may be capable of sociological applications, that the writer should define the sense in which he uses the term. By calling it a science is, of course, denoted the view that sociology is a body of knowledge derived from experience of its material and co-ordinated so that it shall be useful in forecasting and, if possible, directing the future behaviour of that material. This material is man in society of associated man.

Sociology, therefore, is obviously but another name for psychology, in the widest sense, for, that is to say, a psychology which can include all the phenomena of the mind without the exception even of the most complex, and is essentially practical in a fuller sense than any orthodox psychology which has yet appeared.

Sociology has, of course, often been described as social psychology and has been regarded as differing from ordinary psychology in being {12} concerned with those forms of mental activity which man displays in his social relations, the assumption being made that society brings to light a special series of mental aptitudes with which ordinary psychology, dealing as it does essentially with the individual, is not mainly concerned. It may be stated at once that it is a principal thesis of this essay that this attitude is a fallacious one, and has been responsible for the comparative sterility of the psychological method in sociology. The two fields—the social and the individual—are regarded here as absolutely continuous; all human psychology, it is contended, must be the psychology of associated man, since man as a solitary animal is unknown to us, and every individual must present the characteristic reactions of the social animal if such exist. The only difference between the two branches of the science lies in the fact that ordinary psychology makes no claim to be practical in the sense of conferring useful foresight; whereas sociology does profess to deal with the complex, unsimplified problems of ordinary life, ordinary life being, by a biological necessity, social life. If, therefore, sociology is to be defined as psychology, it would be better to call it practical or applied psychology than social psychology.

The first effect of the complete acceptance of this point of view is to render very obvious the difficulty and immensity of the task of sociology; indeed, the possibility of such a science is sometimes denied. For example, at an early meeting of the Sociological Society, Professor Karl Pearson expressed the opinion that the birth of the science of sociology must await the obstetrical genius of some one man of the calibre of Darwin or Pasteur. At a later meeting Mr. H. G. Wells went farther, and maintained that as a science sociology not only does not but cannot exist. {13}

Such scepticism appears in general to be based upon the idea that a practical psychology in the sense already defined is impossible. According to some this is because the human will introduces into conduct an element necessarily incommensurable, which will always render the behaviour of man subject to the occurrence of true variety and therefore beyond the reach of scientific generalization; according to another and a more deterministic school, human conduct, while not theoretically liable to true variety in the philosophic sense or to the intrusion of the will as a first cause, is in fact so complex that no reduction of it to a complete system of gen­er­al­i­za­tions will be possible until science in general has made very great progress beyond its present position. Both views lead in practice to attitudes of equal pessimism towards sociology.

The observable complexity of human conduct is, undoubtedly, very great and discouraging. The problem of generalizing from it presents, however, one important peculiarity, which is not very evident at first sight. It is that as observers we are constantly pursued by man’s own account of his behaviour; that of a given act our observation is always more or less mixed with a knowledge, derived from our own feelings, of how it seems to the author of the act, and it is much more difficult than is often supposed to disentangle and allow for the influence of this factor. Each of us has the strongest conviction that his conduct and beliefs are fundamentally individual and reasonable and in essence independent of external causation, and each is ready to furnish a series of explanations of his conduct consistent with these principles. These explanations, moreover, are the ones which will occur spontaneously to the observer watching the conduct of his fellows.

It is suggested here that the sense of the {14} unimaginable complexity and variability of human affairs is derived less than is generally supposed from direct observation and more from this second factor of introspectual interpretation which may be called a kind of an­thro­po­mor­phism. A reaction against this in human psychology is no less necessary therefore than was in comparative psychology the similar movements the extremer developments of which are associated with the names of Bethe, Beer, Uexküll and Nuel. It is contended that it is this an­thro­po­mor­phism in the general attitude of psychologists which, by disguising the observable uniformities of human conduct, has rendered so slow the establishment of a really practical psychology. Little as the subject has been studied from the point of view of a thorough-going objectivism, yet even now certain gen­er­al­i­za­tions summarising some of the ranges of human belief and conduct might already be formulated. Such an inquiry, however, is not the purpose of this essay, and these considerations have been advanced, in the first place, to suggest that theory indicates that the problem of sociology is not so hopelessly difficult as it at first appears, and secondly, as a justification for an examination of certain aspects of human conduct by the deductive method. The writer would contend that while that method is admittedly dangerous when used as a substitute for a kind of investigation in which deductive processes are reduced to a minimum, yet it has its special field of usefulness in cases where the significance of previously accumulated facts has been misinterpreted, or where the exacter methods have proved unavailing through the investigator having been without indications of precisely what facts were likely to be the most fruitful subject for measurement. This essay, then, will be an attempt to obtain by a deductive consideration of conduct some guidance for the application of those methods of {15} measurement and co-ordination of facts upon which all true science is based.

A very little consideration of the problem of conduct makes it plain that it is in the region of feeling, using the term in its broadest sense, that the key is to be sought. Feeling has relations to instinct as obvious and fundamental as are the analogies between intellectual processes and reflex action; it is with the consideration of instinct, therefore, that this paper must now be occupied.

II. PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF INSTINCT.

Many years ago, in a famous chapter of his Text Book of Psychology, William James analysed and established with a quite final delicacy and precision the way in which instinct appears to introspection. He showed that the impulse of an instinct reveals itself as an axiomatically obvious proposition, as something which is so clearly “sense” that any idea of discussing its basis is foolish or wicked.1

1 Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool. The connexion between the savoury sensation and the act it awakens is for him absolute and selbst­ver­ständ­lich, an “a priori synthesis” of the most perfect sort needing no proof but its own evidence. . . . To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved” (W. James, “Principles of Psychology” vol. ii. p. 386).

When we recognize that decisions due to instinct come into the mind in a form so characteristic and easily identifiable we are encouraged at once to ask {16} whether all decisions having this form must be looked upon as essentially of instinctive origin. Inquiry, however, reveals the fact that the bulk of opinion based upon assumptions having these introspectual characters is so vast that any answer but a negative one would seem totally incompatible with current conceptions of the nature of human thought.2

2 This introspectual quality of the “a priori synthesis of the most perfect sort” is found, for example, in the assumptions upon which is based the bulk of opinion in matters of Church and State, the family, justice, probity, honour, purity, crime, and so forth. Yet clearly we cannot say that there is a specific instinct concerned with each of these subjects, for that, to say the least, would be to postulate an unimaginable multiplicity of instincts, for the most part wholly without any conceivable biological usefulness. For example, there are considerable difficulties in imagining an instinct for making people Wesleyans or Roman Catholics, or an instinct for making people regard British family life as the highest product of civilization, yet there can be no question that these positions are based upon assumptions having all the characters described by James as belonging to the impulses of instinct.

Many attempts have been made to explain the behaviour of man as dictated by instinct. He is, in fact, moved by the promptings of such obvious instincts as self-preservation, nutrition, and sex enough to render the enterprise hopeful and its early spoils enticing. So much can so easily be generalized under these three impulses that the temptation to declare that all human behaviour could be resumed under them was irresistible. These early triumphs of materialism soon, however, began to be troubled by doubt. Man, in spite of his obvious duty to the contrary, would continue so often not to preserve himself, not to nourish himself and to prove resistant to the blandishments of sex, that the attempt to squeeze his behaviour into these three categories began to involve an increasingly obvious and finally intolerable amount of pushing and pulling, as well as so much pretence that he was altogether “in,” {17} when, quite plainly, so large a part of him remained “out,” that the enterprise had to be given up, and it was once more discovered that man escaped and must always escape any complete generalization by science.

A more obvious inference would have been that there was some other instinct which had not been taken into account, some impulse, perhaps, which would have no very evident object as regarded the individual, but would chiefly appear as modifying the other instincts and leading to new combinations in which the primitive instinctive impulse was unrecognizable as such. A mechanism such as this very evidently would produce a series of actions in which uniformity might be very difficult to recognize by direct observation, but in which it would be very obvious if the characters of this unknown “x” were available.

Now, it is a striking fact that amongst animals there are some whose conduct can be generalized very readily in the categories of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, while there are others whose conduct cannot be thus summarized. The behaviour of the tiger and the cat is simple, and easily comprehensible, presenting no unassimilable anomalies, whereas that of the dog, with his conscience, his humour, his terror of loneliness, his capacity for devotion to a brutal master, or that of the bee, with her selfless devotion to the hive, furnishes phenomena which no sophistry can assimilate without the aid of a fourth instinct. But little examination will show that the animals whose conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive instinctive categories are gregarious. If then it can be shown that gre­gar­i­ous­ness is of a biological significance approaching in importance that of the other instincts, we may expect to find in it the source of these anomalies of conduct, and if we can also show {18} that man is gregarious, we may look to it for the definition of the unknown “x” which might account for the complexity of human behaviour.

III. BIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GREGARIOUSNESS.

The animal kingdom presents two relatively sudden and very striking advances in complexity and in the size of the unit upon which natural selection acts unmodified. These advances consist in the aggregation of units which were previously independent and exposed to the full normal action of natural selection, and the two instances are, of course, the passage from the unicellular to the multicellular, and from the solitary to the social.

It is obvious that in the multicellular organism individual cells lose some of the capacities of the unicellular—reproductive capacity is regulated and limited, nutrition is no longer possible in the old simple way and response to stimuli comes only in certain channels. In return for these sacrifices we may say, metaphorically, that the action of natural selection is withdrawn from within the commune. Unfitness of a given cell or group of cells can be eliminated only through its effect upon the whole organism. The latter is less sensitive to the vagaries of a single cell than is the organism of which the single cell is the whole. It would seem, therefore, that there is now allowed a greater range of variability for the individual cells, and perhaps, therefore, an increased richness of the material to be selected from. Variations, moreover, which were not immediately favourable would now have a chance of surviving.

Looked at in this way, multi­cel­lu­lar­ity presents itself as an escape from the rigour of natural selection, which for the unicellular organism had narrowed {19} competition to so desperate a struggle that any variation outside the straitest limits was fatal, for even though it might be favourable in one respect, it would, in so small a kingdom, involve a loss in another. The only way, therefore, for further advantageous elaboration to occur was by the enlargement of the competing unit. Various species of multicellular organisms might in time be supposed in turn to reach the limit of their powers. Competition would be at its maximum, smaller and smaller variations would be capable of producing serious results. In the species where these conditions prevail an enlargement of the unit is imminent if progress is to occur. It is no longer possible by increases of physical complexity and the apparently inevitable sequence is the appearance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness. The necessity and inevitableness of the change are shown by its scattered development in very widely separated regions (for example, in insects and in mammals) just as, we may suspect, multi­cel­lu­lar­ity appeared.

Gregariousness seems frequently to be regarded as a somewhat superficial character, scarcely deserving, as it were, the name of an instinct, advantageous it is true, but not of fundamental importance or likely to be deeply ingrained in the inheritance of the species. This attitude may be due to the fact that among mammals at any rate the appearance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness has not been accompanied by any very gross physical changes which are obviously associated with it.3

3 Among gregarious insects there are of course physical changes arising out of and closely dependent on the social organization.

To whatever it may be due, this method of regarding the social habit is, in the opinion of the present writer, not justified by the facts, and prevents the attainment of conclusions of considerable fruitfulness.

A study of bees and ants shows at once how {20} fundamental the importance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness may become. The individual in such communities is completely incapable, often physically, of existing apart from the community, and this fact at once gives rise to the suspicion that even in communities less closely knit than those of the ant and the bee, the individual may in fact be more dependent on communal life than appears at first sight.

Another very striking piece of general evidence of the significance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness as no mere late acquirement is the remarkable coincidence of its occurrence with that of exceptional grades of intelligence or the possibility of very complex reactions to environment. It can scarcely be regarded as an unmeaning accident that the dog, the horse, the ape, the elephant, and man are all social animals. The instances of the bee and the ant are perhaps the most amazing. Here the advantages of gre­gar­i­ous­ness seem actually to outweigh the most prodigious differences of structure, and we find a condition which is often thought of as a mere habit, capable of enabling the insect nervous system to compete in the complexity of its power of adaptation with that of the higher vertebrates.

If it be granted that gre­gar­i­ous­ness is a phenomenon of profound biological significance and one likely therefore to be responsible for an important group of instinctive impulses, the next step in our argument is the discussion of the question as to whether man is to be regarded as gregarious in the full sense of the word, whether, that is to say, the social habit may be expected to furnish him with a mass of instinctive impulse as mysteriously potent as the impulses of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex. Can we look to the social instinct for an explanation of some of the “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort needing no proof but their own evidence,” which are not explained by the three {21} primitive categories of instinct, and remain stumbling-blocks in the way of generalizing the conduct of man?

The conception of man as a gregarious animal is, of course, extremely familiar; one frequently meets with it in the writings of psychologists and sociologists, and it has obtained a respectable currency with the lay public. It has, indeed, become so hackneyed that it is the first duty of a writer who maintains the thesis that its significance is not even yet fully understood, to show that the popular conception of it has been far from exhaustive. As used hitherto the idea seems to have had a certain vagueness which greatly impaired its practical value. It furnished an interesting analogy for some of the behaviour of man, or was enunciated as a half serious illustration by a writer who felt himself to be in an exceptionally sardonic vein, but it was not at all widely looked upon as a definite fact of biology which must have consequences as precise and a significance as ascertainable as the secretion of the gastric juice or the refracting apparatus of the eye. One of the most familiar attitudes was that which regarded the social instinct as a late development. The family was looked upon as the primitive unit; from it developed the tribe, and by the spread of family feeling to the tribe the social instinct arose. It is interesting that the psychological attack upon this position has been anticipated by sociologists and anthropologists, and that it is already being recognized that an undifferentiated horde rather than the family must be regarded as the primitive basis of human society.

The most important consequence of this vague way of regarding the social habit of man has been that no exhaustive investigation of its psychological corollaries has been carried out. When we see the enormous effect in determining conduct that the gregarious inheritance has in the bee, the ant, the {22} horse, or the dog, it is quite plain that if the gre­gar­i­ous­ness of man had been seriously regarded as a definite fact a great amount of work would have been done in determining precisely what reactive tendencies it had marked out in man’s mind. Unfortunately, the amount of precise work of this kind has been very small.

From the biological standpoint the probability of gre­gar­i­ous­ness being a primitive and fundamental quality in man seems to be considerable. As already pointed out, like the other great enlargement of the biological unit, but in a much more easily recognizable degree, it would appear to have the effect of enlarging the advantages of variation. Varieties not immediately favourable, varieties departing widely from the standard, varieties even unfavourable to the individual may be supposed to be given by it a chance of survival. Now the course of the development of man seems to present many features incompatible with its having proceeded amongst isolated individuals exposed to the unmodified action of natural selection. Changes so serious as the assumption of the upright posture, the reduction in the jaw and its musculature, the reduction in the acuity of smell and hearing, demand, if the species is to survive, either a delicacy of adjustment with the compensatingly developing intelligence so minute as to be almost inconceivable, or the existence of some kind of protective enclosure, however imperfect, in which the varying individuals were sheltered from the direct influence of natural selection. The existence of such a mechanism would compensate losses of physical strength in the individual by the greatly increased strength of the larger unit, of the unit, that is to say, upon which natural selection still acts unmodified.

A realization, therefore, of this function of gre­gar­i­ous­ness relieves us from the necessity of {23} supposing that the double variations of diminishing physical and increasing mental capacity always occurred pari passu. The case for the primitiveness of the social habit would seem to be still further strengthened by a consideration of such widely aberrant developments as speech and the æsthetic activities, but a discussion of them here would involve an unnecessary indulgence of biological speculation.

IV. MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GREGARIOUS ANIMAL.

(a) Current Views in Sociology and Psychology.

If we now assume that gre­gar­i­ous­ness may be regarded as a fundamental quality of man, it remains to discuss the effects we may expect it to have produced upon the structure of his mind. It would be well, however, first, to attempt to form some idea of how far investigation has already gone in this direction. It is of course clear that no complete review of all that has been said concerning a conception so familiar can be attempted here, and, even if it were possible, it would not be a profitable enterprise, as the great bulk of writers have not seen in the idea anything to justify a fundamental examination of it. What will be done here, therefore, will be to mention a few representative writers who have dealt with the subject, and to give in a summary way the characteristic features of their exposition.

As far as I am aware, the first person to point out any of the less obvious biological significance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness was Professor Karl Pearson.4 {24}

4 Many references to the subject will be found in his published works, for example in “The Grammar of Science,” in “National Life from the Standpoint of Science,” and in “The Chances of Death.” In the collection of Essays last named the essay entitled “Socialism and Natural Selection” deals most fully with the subject.

He called attention to the enlargement of the selective unit effected by the appearance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, and to the fact that therefore within the group the action of natural selection becomes modified. This conception had, as is well known, escaped the insight of Haeckel, of Spencer, and of Huxley, and Pearson showed into what confusions in their treatment of the problems of society these three had been led by the oversight.5 For example may be mentioned the famous antithesis of the “cosmical” and the “ethical” processes expounded in Huxley’s Romanes Lecture. It was quite definitely indicated by Pearson that the so-called ethical process, the appearance, that is to say, of altruism, is to be regarded as a directly instinctive product of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, and as natural, therefore, as any other instinct.

These very clear and valuable conceptions do not seem, however, to have received from biologists the attention they deserved, and as far as I am aware their author has not continued further the examination of the structure of the gregarious mind, which would undoubtedly have yielded in his hands further conclusions of equal value.

We may next examine the attitude of a modern sociologist. I have chosen for this purpose the work of an American sociologist, Lester Ward, and propose briefly to indicate his position as it may be gathered from his book entitled “Pure Sociology.”6 {25}

5 “Socialism and Natural Selection” in “The Chances of Death.”

6 Lester F. Ward, “Pure Sociology: a Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society.” New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903. I do not venture to decide whether this work may be regarded as representative of orthodox sociology, if there be such a thing; I have made the choice because of the author’s capacity for fresh and ingenious speculation and his obviously wide knowledge of sociological literature.

The task of summarizing the views of any sociologist seems to me to be rendered difficult by a certain vagueness in outline of the positions laid down, a certain tendency for a description of fact to run into an analogy, and an analogy to fade into an illustration. It would be discourteous to doubt that these tendencies are necessary to the fruitful treatment of the material of sociology, but, as they are very prominent in connection with the subject of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, it is necessary to say that one is fully conscious of the difficulties they give rise to, and feels that they may have led one into unintentional mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

With this proviso it may be stated that the writings of Ward produce the feeling that he regards gre­gar­i­ous­ness as furnishing but few precise and primitive char­ac­ter­is­tics of the human mind. The mechanisms through which group “instinct” acts would seem to be to him largely rational processes, and group instinct itself is regarded as a relatively late development more or less closely associated with a rational knowledge that it “pays.” For example, he says: “For want of a better name, I have characterized this social instinct, or instinct of race safety, as religion, but not without clearly perceiving that it constitutes the primordial undifferentiated plasm out of which have subsequently developed all the more important human institutions. This . . . if it be not an instinct, is at least the human homologue of animal instinct, and served the same purpose after the instincts had chiefly disappeared, and when the egotistic reason would otherwise have rapidly carried the race to destruction in its mad pursuit of pleasure for its own sake.”7

7 “Pure Sociology,” p. 134. Italics not in original. Passages of a similar tendency will be found on pp. 200 and 556.

That gre­gar­i­ous­ness has to be considered amongst {26} the factors shaping the tendencies of the human mind has long been recognized by the more empirical psychologists. In the main, however, it has been regarded as a quality perceptible only in the char­ac­ter­is­tics of actual crowds—that is to say, assemblies of persons being and acting in association. This conception has served to evoke a certain amount of valuable work in the observation of the behaviour of crowds.8

Owing, however, to the failure to investigate as the more essential question the effects of gre­gar­i­ous­ness in the mind of the normal individual man, the theoretical side of crowd psychology has remained incomplete and relatively sterile.

There is, however, one exception, in the case of the work of Boris Sidis. In a book entitled “The Psychology of Suggestion”9 he has described certain psychical qualities as necessarily associated with the social habit in the individual as in the crowd. His position, therefore, demands some discussion. The fundamental element in it is the conception of the normal existence in the mind of a subconscious self. This subconscious or subwaking self is regarded as embodying the “lower” and more obviously brutal qualities of man. It is irrational, imitative, credulous, cowardly, cruel, and lacks all individuality, will, and self-control.10 This personality takes the place of the normal personality during hypnosis and when the individual is one of an active crowd, as, for example, in riots, panics, lynchings, revivals, and so forth. {27}

8 For example, the little book of Gustave Le Bon—“Psychologie des Foules,” Paris: Felix Alcan—in which are formulated many gen­er­al­i­za­tions.

9 “The Psychology of Suggestion: a Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society,” by Boris Sidis, with an Introduction by Prof. Wm. James. New York. 1903.

10 “Psychology of Suggestion,” p. 295.

Of the two personalities—the subconscious and the normal—the former alone is suggestible; the successful operation of suggestion implies the recurrence, however transient, of a disaggregation of personality, and the emergence of the subwaking self as the controlling mind (pp. 89 and 90). It is this suggestibility of the subwaking self which enables man to be a social animal. “Suggestibility is the cement of the herd, the very soul of the primitive social group. . . . Man is a social animal, no doubt, but he is social because he is suggestible. Suggestibility, however, requires disaggregation of consciousness, hence society presupposes a cleavage of the mind. Society and mental epidemics are intimately related; for the social gregarious self is the suggestible subconscious self” (p. 310).

Judged from our present standpoint, the most valuable feature of Sidis’s book is that it calls attention to the undoubtedly intimate relation between gre­gar­i­ous­ness and suggestibility. The mechanism, however, by which he supposes suggestibility to come into action is more open to criticism. The conception of a permanent subconscious self is one to which it is doubtful whether the evidence compels assent.11 The essential difference, however, which Sidis’s views present from those to be developed below, lies in his regarding suggestibility as being something which is liable to intrude upon the normal mind as the result of a disaggregation of consciousness, instead of as a necessary quality of every normal mind, continually present, and an inalienable accompaniment of human thought. A careful reading of his book gives a very clear impression that he looks upon suggestibility as a {28} disreputable and disastrous legacy of the brute and the savage, undesirable in civilized life, opposed to the satisfactory development of the normal individuality, and certainly in no way associated at its origin with a quality so valuable as altruism. Moreover, one gets the impression that he regards suggestibility as being manifested chiefly, if not solely, in crowds, in panics, revivals, and in conditions generally in which the element of close association is well marked.

11 In this connexion the “Symposium on the Subconscious” in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. ii. Nos. 1 and 2, is of much interest. The discussion is contributed to by Münsterberg, Ribot Jastrow, Pierre Janet, and Morton Prince.

(b) Deductive Considerations

The functions of the gregarious habit in a species may broadly be defined as offensive or defensive, or both. Whichever of these modes it has assumed in the animal under consideration, it will be correlated with effects which will be divisible into two classes—the general char­ac­ter­is­tics of the social animal, and the special char­ac­ter­is­tics of the form of social habit possessed by the given animal. The dog and the sheep illustrate well the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the two simple forms of gre­gar­i­ous­ness—offensive and defensive.

1. Special Characteristics of the Gregarious Animal.

These need not be dealt with here, as they are the qualities which for the most part have been treated of by psychologists in such work as has been done on the corollaries of gre­gar­i­ous­ness in man. This is because they are qualities which are most evident in man’s behaviour when he acts in crowds, and are then evident as something temporarily superadded to the possibilities of the isolated individual. Hence it has come about that they have been taken for the most part as constituting the whole of man’s gregarious inheritance, while the possibility that that inheritance might have {29} equally important consequences for the individual has been relatively neglected.

2. General Characteristics of the Gregarious Animal.

The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity. It is clear that the great advantage of the social habit is to enable large numbers to act as one, whereby in the case of the hunting gregarious animal strength in pursuit and attack is at once increased to beyond that of the creatures preyed upon,12 and in protective socialism the sensitiveness of the new unit to alarms is greatly in excess of that of the individual member of the flock.

12 The wolf pack forms an organism, it is interesting to note, stronger than the lion or the tiger; capable of compensating for the loss of members; inexhaustible in pursuit, and therefore capable by sheer strength of hunting down without wile or artifice the fleetest animals; capable finally of consuming all the food it kills, and thus possessing another considerable advantage over the large solitary carnivora in not tending uselessly to exhaust its food supply. The advantages of the social habit in carnivora is well shown by the survival of wolves in civilized countries even to-day.

To secure these advantages of homogeneity, it is evident that the members of the herd must possess sensitiveness to the behaviour of their fellows. The individual isolated will be of no meaning, the individual as part of the herd will be capable of transmitting the most potent impulses. Each member of the flock tending to follow its neighbour and in turn to be followed, each is in some sense capable of leadership; but no lead will be followed that departs widely from normal behaviour. A lead will be followed only from its resemblance to the normal. If the leader go so far ahead as definitely to cease to be in the herd, he will necessarily be ignored.

The original in conduct, that is to say resistiveness to the voice of the herd, will be suppressed {30} by natural selection; the wolf which does not follow the impulses of the herd will be starved; the sheep which does not respond to the flock will be eaten.

Again, not only will the individual be responsive to impulses coming from the herd, but he will treat the herd as his normal environment. The impulse to be in and always to remain with the herd will have the strongest instinctive weight. Anything which tends to separate him from his fellows, as soon as it becomes perceptible as such, will be strongly resisted.

So far, we have regarded the gregarious animal objectively. We have seen that he behaves as if the herd were the only environment in which he can live, that he is especially sensitive to impulses coming from the herd, and quite differently affected by the behaviour of animals not in the herd. Let us now try to estimate the mental aspects of these impulses. Suppose a species in possession of precisely the instinctive endowments which we have been considering, to be also self-conscious, and let us ask what will be the forms under which these phenomena will present themselves in its mind. In the first place, it is quite evident that impulses derived from herd feeling will enter the mind with the value of instincts—they will present themselves as “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort needing no proof but their own evidence.” They will not, however, it is important to remember, necessarily always give this quality to the same specific acts, but will show this great distinguishing characteristic that they may give to any opinion whatever the characters of instinctive belief, making it into an “a priori synthesis”; so that we shall expect to find acts which it would be absurd to look upon as the results of specific instincts carried out with all the enthusiasm of instinct, and displaying {31} all the marks of instinctive behaviour. The failure to recognize this appearance of herd impulse as a tendency, as a power which can confer instinctive sanctions on any part of the field of belief or action, has prevented the social habit of man from attracting as much of the attention of psychologists as it might profitably have done.

In interpreting into mental terms the consequences of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, we may conveniently begin with the simplest. The conscious individual will feel an unanalysable primary sense of comfort in the actual presence of his fellows, and a similar sense of discomfort in their absence. It will be obvious truth to him that it is not good for the man to be alone. Loneliness will be a real terror, insurmountable by reason.

Again, certain conditions will become secondarily associated with presence with, or absence from, the herd. For example, take the sensations of heat and cold. The latter is prevented in gregarious animals by close crowding, and experienced in the reverse condition; hence it comes to be connected in the mind with separation, and so acquires altogether unreasonable associations of harmfulness. Similarly, the sensation of warmth is associated with feelings of the secure and salutary. It has taken medicine many thousands of years to begin to doubt the validity of the popular conception of the harmfulness of cold; yet to the psychologist such a doubt is immediately obvious.13

13 Any one who has watched the behaviour of the dog and the cat towards warmth and cold cannot have failed to notice the effect of the gregarious habit on the former. The cat displays a moderate liking for warmth, but also a decided indifference to cold, and will quietly sit in the snow in a way which would be impossible to the dog.

Slightly more complex manifestations of the same tendency to homogeneity are seen in the desire for identification with the herd in matters of opinion. {32} Here we find the biological explanation of the ineradicable impulse mankind has always displayed towards segregation into classes. Each one of us in his opinions and his conduct, in matters of dress, amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain the support of a class, of a herd within the herd. The most eccentric in opinion or conduct is, we may be sure, supported by the agreement of a class, the smallness of which accounts for his apparent eccentricity, and the preciousness of which accounts for his fortitude in defying general opinion. Again, anything which tends to emphasize difference from the herd is unpleasant. In the individual mind there will be an unanalysable dislike of the novel in action or thought. It will be “wrong,” “wicked,” “foolish,” “undesirable,” or as we say “bad form,” according to varying circumstances which we can already to some extent define.

Manifestations relatively more simple are shown in the dislike of being conspicuous, in shyness and in stage fright. It is, however, sensitiveness to the behaviour of the herd which has the most important effects upon the structure of the mind of the gregarious animal. This sensitiveness is closely associated with the suggestibility of the gregarious animal, and therefore with that of man. The effect of it will clearly be to make acceptable those suggestions which come from the herd, and those only. It is of especial importance to note that this suggestibility is not general, and that it is only herd suggestions which are rendered acceptable by the action of instinct. Man is, for example, notoriously insensitive to the suggestions of experience. The history of what is rather grandiosely called human progress everywhere illustrates this. If we look back upon the development of some such thing as the steam-engine, we cannot fail to be struck by the extreme obviousness of each advance, and how {33} obstinately it was refused assimilation until the machine almost invented itself.

Again, of two suggestions, that which the more perfectly embodies the voice of the herd is the more acceptable. The chances an affirmation has of being accepted could therefore be most satisfactorily expressed in terms of the bulk of the herd by which it is backed.

It follows from the foregoing that anything which dissociates a suggestion from the herd will tend to ensure such a suggestion being rejected. For example, an imperious command from an individual known to be without authority is necessarily disregarded, whereas the same person making the same suggestion in an indirect way so as to link it up with the voice of the herd will meet with success.

It is unfortunate that in discussing these facts it has been necessary to use the word “suggestibility,” which has so thorough an implication of the abnormal. If the biological explanation of suggestibility here set forth be accepted, the latter must necessarily be a normal quality of the human mind. To believe must be an ineradicable natural bias of man, or in other words an affirmation, positive or negative, is more readily accepted than rejected, unless its source is definitely dissociated from the herd. Man is not, therefore, suggestible by fits and starts, not merely in panics and in mobs, under hypnosis, and so forth, but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances. The capricious way in which man reacts to different suggestions has been attributed to variations in his suggestibility. This in the opinion of the present writer is an incorrect interpretation of the facts which are more satisfactorily explained by regarding the variations as due to the differing extent to which suggestions are identified with the voice of the herd.

Man’s resistiveness to certain suggestions, and {34} especially to experience, as is seen so well in his attitude to the new, becomes therefore but another evidence of his suggestibility, since the new has always to encounter the opposition of herd tradition.

The apparent diminution in direct suggestibility with advancing years, such as was demonstrated in children by Binet, is in the case of the adult familiar to all, and is there usually regarded as evidence of a gradually advancing organic change in the brain. It can be regarded, at least plausibly, as being due to the fact that increase of years must bring an increase in the accumulations of herd suggestion, and so tend progressively to fix opinion.

In the early days of the human race, the appearance of the faculty of speech must have led to an immediate increase in the extent to which the decrees of the herd could be promulgated, and the field to which they applied. Now the desire for certitude is one of profound depth in the human mind, and possibly a necessary property of any mind, and it is very plausible to suppose that it led in these early days to the whole field of life being covered by pronouncements backed by the instinctive sanction of the herd. The life of the individual would be completely surrounded by sanctions of the most tremendous kind. He would know what he might and might not do, and what would happen if he disobeyed. It would be immaterial if experience confirmed these beliefs or not, because it would have incomparably less weight than the voice of the herd. Such a period is the only trace perceptible by the biologist of the Golden Age fabled by the poet, when things happened as they ought, and hard facts had not begun to vex the soul of man. In some such condition we still find the Central Australian native. His whole life, to its minutest detail, is ordained for him by the voice of the herd, and he must not, under the most dreadful {35} sanctions, step outside its elaborate order. It does not matter to him that an infringement of the code under his very eyes is not followed by judgment, for with tribal suggestion so compactly organized, such cases are in fact no difficulty, and do not trouble his belief, just as in more civilized countries apparent instances of malignity in the reigning deity are not found to be inconsistent with his benevolence.

Such must everywhere have been primitive human conditions, and upon them reason intrudes as an alien and hostile power, disturbing the perfection of life, and causing an unending series of conflicts.

Experience, as is shown by the whole history of man, is met by resistance because it invariably encounters decisions based upon instinctive belief, and nowhere is this fact more clearly to be seen than in the way in which the progress of science has been made.

In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, then sociology—but always the new field was grudged to the new method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of science. Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief, because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.

Direct observation of man reveals at once the fact that a very considerable proportion of his beliefs are non-rational to a degree which is immediately obvious without any special examination, and with {36} no special resources other than common knowledge. If we examine the mental furniture of the average man, we shall find it made up of a vast number of judgments of a very precise kind upon subjects of very great variety, complexity, and difficulty. He will have fairly settled views upon the origin and nature of the universe, and upon what he will probably call its meaning; he will have conclusions as to what is to happen to him at death and after, as to what is and what should be the basis of conduct. He will know how the country should be governed, and why it is going to the dogs, why this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He will have strong views upon military and naval strategy, the principles of taxation, the use of alcohol and vaccination, the treatment of influenza, the prevention of hydrophobia, upon municipal trading, the teaching of Greek, upon what is permissible in art, satisfactory in literature, and hopeful in science.

The bulk of such opinions must necessarily be without rational basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by the expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have any opinion upon them at all. The rational method adequately used would have told him that on the great majority of these questions there could be for him but one attitude—that of suspended judgment.

In view of the considerations that have been discussed above, this wholesale acceptance of non-rational belief must be looked upon as normal. The mechanism by which it is effected demands some examination, since it cannot be denied that the facts conflict noticeably with popularly current views as to the part taken by reason in the formation of opinion.

It is clear at the outset that these beliefs are invariably regarded by the holder as rational, and {37} defended as such, while the position of one who holds contrary views is held to be obviously unreasonable. The religious man accuses the atheist of being shallow and irrational, and is met by a similar reply; to the Conservative, the amazing thing about the Liberal is his incapacity to see reason and accept the only possible solution of public problems. Examination reveals the fact that the differences are not due to the commission of the mere mechanical fallacies of logic, since these are easily avoided, even by the politician, and since there is no reason to suppose that one party in such controversies is less logical than the other. The difference is due rather to the fundamental assumptions of the antagonists being hostile, and these assumptions are derived from herd suggestion; to the Liberal, certain basal conceptions have acquired the quality of instinctive truth, have become “a priori syntheses,” because of the accumulated suggestions to which he has been exposed, and a similar explanation applies to the atheist, the Christian, and the Conservative. Each, it is important to remember, finds in consequence the rationality of his position flawless, and is quite incapable of detecting in it the fallacies which are obvious to his opponent, to whom that particular series of assumptions has not been rendered acceptable by herd suggestion.

To continue further the analysis of non-rational opinion, it should be observed that the mind rarely leaves uncriticized the assumptions which are forced on it by herd suggestion, the tendency being for it to find more or less elaborately rationalized justifications of them. This is in accordance with the enormously exaggerated weight which is always ascribed to reason in the formation of opinion and conduct, as is very well seen, for example, in the explanation of the existence of altruism as being due to man seeing that it “pays.” {38}

It is of cardinal importance to recognize that in this process of the rationalization of instinctive belief, it is the belief which is the primary thing, while the explanation, although masquerading as the cause of the belief, as the chain of rational evidence on which the belief is founded, is entirely secondary, and but for the belief would never have been thought of. Such rationalizations are often, in the case of intelligent people, of extreme ingenuity, and may be very misleading unless the true instinctive basis of the given opinion or action is thoroughly understood.

This mechanism enables the English lady, who, to escape the stigma of having normal feet, subjects them to a formidable degree of lateral compression, to be aware of no logical inconsequence when she subscribes to missions to teach the Chinese lady how absurd it is to compress her feet longitudinally; it enables the European lady who wears rings in her ears to smile at the barbarism of the coloured lady who wears her rings in her nose; it enables the Englishman who is amused by the African chieftain’s regard for the top hat as an essential piece of the furniture of state to ignore the identity of his own behaviour when he goes to church beneath the same tremendous ensign.

The objectivist finds himself compelled to regard these and similar correspondences between the behaviour of civilized and barbarous man as no mere interesting coincidences, but as phenomena actually and in the grossest way identical, but such an attitude is possible only when the mechanism is understood by which rationalization of these customs is effected.

The process of rationalization which has just been illustrated by some of its simpler varieties is best seen on the largest scale, and in the most elaborate form, in the pseudosciences of political economy and ethics. Both of these are occupied in deriving {39} from eternal principles justifications for masses of non-rational belief which are assumed to be permanent merely because they exist. Hence the notorious acrobatic feats of both in the face of any considerable variation in herd belief.

It would seem that the obstacles to rational thought which have been pointed out in the foregoing discussion have received much less attention than should have been directed towards them. To maintain an attitude of mind which could be called scientific in any complete sense, it is of cardinal importance to recognize that belief of affirmations sanctioned by the herd is a normal mechanism of the human mind, and goes on however much such affirmations may be opposed by evidence, that reason cannot enforce belief against herd suggestion, and finally that totally false opinions may appear to the holder of them to possess all the characters of rationally verifiable truth, and may be justified by secondary processes of rationalization which it may be impossible directly to combat by argument.

It should be noticed, however, that verifiable truths may acquire the potency of herd suggestion, so that the suggestibility of man does not necessarily or always act against the advancement of knowledge. For example, to the student of biology the principles of Darwinism may acquire the force of herd suggestion through being held by the class which he most respects, is most in contact with and the class which has therefore acquired suggestionizing power with him. Propositions consistent with these principles will now necessarily be more acceptable to him, whatever the evidence by which they are supported, than they would be to one who had not been exposed to the same influences. The opinion, in fact, may be hazarded that the acceptance of any proposition is invariably the resultant of suggestive influences, whether the {40} proposition be true or false, and that the balance of suggestion is usually on the side of the false, because, education being what it is, the scientific method—the method, that is to say, of experience—has so little chance of acquiring suggestionizing force.

Thus far sensitiveness to the herd has been discussed in relation to its effect upon intellectual processes. Equally important effects are traceable in feeling.

It is obvious that when free communication is possible by speech, the expressed approval or disapproval of the herd will acquire the qualities of identity or dissociation from the herd respectively. To know that he is doing what would arouse the disapproval of the herd will bring to the individual the same profound sense of discomfort which would accompany actual physical separation, while to know that he is doing what the herd would approve will give him the sense of rightness, of gusto, and of stimulus which would accompany physical presence in the herd and response to its mandates. In both cases it is clear that no actual expression by the herd is necessary to arouse the appropriate feelings, which would come from within and have, in fact, the qualities which are recognized in the dictates of conscience. Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal. A dog and a cat caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that punishment is coming; but the dog, moreover, knows that he has done wrong, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him, while the cat’s sole impulse is to escape. The rational recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally clear to the gregarious and to the solitary animal, but it is the former only who understands {41} that he has committed a crime, who has, in fact, the sense of sin. That this is the origin of what we call conscience is confirmed by the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the latter which are accessible to observation. Any detailed examination of the phenomena of conscience would lead too far to be admissible here. Two facts, however, should be noticed. First, the judgments of conscience vary in different circles, and are dependent on local environments; secondly, they are not advantageous to the species to the slightest degree beyond the dicta of the morals current in the circle in which they originate. These facts—stated here in an extremely summary way—demonstrate that conscience is an indirect result of the gregarious instinct, and is in no sense derived from a special instinct forcing men to consider the good of the race rather than individual desires. 1908

SOCIOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HERD INSTINCT

It was shown in the previous essay that the gregarious mental character is evident in man’s behaviour, not only in crowds and other circumstances of actual association, but also in his behaviour as an individual, however isolated. The conclusions were arrived at that man’s suggestibility is not the abnormal casual phenomenon it is often supposed to be, but a normal instinct present in every individual, and that the apparent inconstancy of its action is due to the common failure to recognize the extent of the field over which suggestion acts; that the only medium in which man’s mind can function satisfactorily is the herd, which therefore is not only the source of his opinions, his credulities, his disbeliefs, and his weaknesses, but of his altruism, his charity, his enthusiasms, and his power.

The subject of the psychological effects of herd instinct is so wide that the discussion of it in the former essay covered only a comparatively small part of the field, and that in a very cursory way. Such as it was, however, it cannot be further amplified here, where an attempt will rather be made to sketch some of the practical corollaries of such gen­er­al­i­za­tions as were laid down there.

In the first place, it must be stated with emphasis that deductive speculation of this sort finds its principal value in opening up new possibilities for {43} the application of a more exact method. Science is measurement, but the deductive method may indicate those things which can be most profitably measured.

When the overwhelming importance of the suggestibility of man is recognized our first effort should be to obtain exact numerical expressions of it. This is not the place to attempt any exposition of the directions in which experiment should proceed; but it may be stated that what we want to know is, how much suggestion can do in the way of inducing belief, and it may be guessed that we shall ultimately be able to express the force of suggestion in terms of the number of undifferentiated units of the herd it represents. In the work that has already been done, chiefly by Binet and by Sidis, the suggestive force experimented with was relatively feeble, and the effects consequently were rendered liable to great disturbance from the spontaneous action of other forces of suggestion already in the mind. Sidis, for example, found that his subjects often yielded to his suggestions out of “politeness”; this source of difficulty was obviously due to his use of pure individual suggestion, a variety which theory shows to be weak or even directly resisted.

The next feature of practical interest is connected with the hypothesis, which we attempted in the former article to demonstrate, that irrational belief forms a large bulk of the furniture of the mind, and is indis­tin­guish­able by the subject from rational verifiable knowledge. It is obviously of cardinal importance to be able to effect this distinction, for it is the failure to do so which, while it is not the cause of the slowness of advance in knowledge, is the mechanism by which this delay is brought about. Is there, then, we may ask, any discoverable touchstone by which non-rational opinion may be distinguished from rational? Non-rational judgments, being the product of suggestion, will have {44} the quality of instinctive opinion, or, as we may call it, of belief in the strict sense. The essence of this quality is obviousness; the truth held in this way is one of James’s “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort”; to question it is to the believer to carry scepticism to an insane degree, and will be met by contempt, disapproval, or condemnation, according to the nature of the belief in question. When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.

Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore, we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favourable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may both show by their attitude that the belief is held {45} instinctively and non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.

A third practical corollary of a recognition of the true gre­gar­i­ous­ness of man is the very obvious one that it is not by any means necessary that suggestion should always act on the side of unreason. The despair of the reformer has always been the irrationality of man, and latterly some have come to regard the future as hopeless until we can breed a rational species. Now, the trouble is not irrationality, not a definite preference for unreason, but suggestibility—that is, a capacity for accepting reason or unreason if it comes from the proper source.

This quality we have seen to be a direct consequence of the social habit, of a single definite instinct, that of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, the same instinct which makes social life at all possible and altruism a reality.

It does not seem to have been fully understood that if you attack suggestibility by selection—and that is what you do if you breed for rationality—you are attacking gre­gar­i­ous­ness, for there is at present no adequate evidence that the gregarious instinct is other than a simple character and one which cannot be split up by the breeder. If, then, such an effort in breeding were successful, we should exchange the manageable unreason of man for the inhuman rationality of the tiger.

The solution would seem rather to lie in seeing to it that suggestion always acts on the side of reason; if rationality were once to become really respectable, if we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul disease, then the dangers of man’s suggestibility would be turned into advantages. We {46} have seen that suggestion already has begun to act on the side of reason in some small part of the life of the student of science, and it is possible that a highly sanguine prophetic imagination might detect here a germ of future changes.

Again, a fourth corollary of gre­gar­i­ous­ness in man is the fact expounded many years ago by Pearson that human altruism is a natural instinctive product. The obvious dependence of the evolution of altruism upon increase in knowledge and inter-communication has led to its being regarded as a late and a conscious development—as something in the nature of a judgment by the individual that it pays him to be unselfish. This is an interesting rationalization of the facts because in the sense in which “pay” is meant it is so obviously false. Altruism does not at present, and cannot, pay the individual in anything but feeling, as theory declares it must. It is clear, of course, that as long as altruism is regarded as in the nature of a judgment, the fact is overlooked that necessarily its only reward can be in feeling. Man is altruistic because he must be, not because reason recommends it, for herd suggestion opposes any advance in altruism, and when it can the herd executes the altruist, not of course as such but as an innovator. This is a remarkable instance of the protean character of the gregarious instinct and the complexity it introduces into human affairs, for we see one instinct producing manifestations directly hostile to each other—prompting to ever advancing developments of altruism, while it necessarily leads to any new product of advance being attacked. It shows, moreover, as will be pointed out again later, that a gregarious species rapidly developing a complex society can be saved from inextricable confusion only by the appearance of reason and the application of it to life. {47}

When we remember the fearful repressing force which society has always exercised on new forms of altruism and how constantly the dungeon, the scaffold, and the cross have been the reward of the altruist, we are able to get some conception of the force of the instinctive impulse which has triumphantly defied these terrors, and to appreciate in some slight degree how irresistible an enthusiasm it might become if it were encouraged by the unanimous voice of the herd.

In conclusion we have to deal with one more consequence of the social habit in man, a consequence the discussion of which involves some speculation of a necessarily quite tentative kind.

If we look in a broad, general way at the four instincts which bulk largely in man’s life, namely, those of self-preservation, nutrition, sex, and the herd, we shall see at once that there is a striking difference between the mode of action of the first three and that of the last. The first three, which we may, for convenience and without prejudice, call the primitive instincts, have in common the characteristic of attaining their maximal activities only over short periods and in special sets of circumstances, and of being fundamentally pleasant to yield to. They do not remain in action concurrently, but when the circumstances are appropriate for the yielding to one, the others automatically fall into the background, and the governing impulse is absolute master. Thus these instincts cannot be supposed at all frequently to conflict amongst themselves, and the animal possessing them alone, however highly developed his consciousness might be, would lead a life emotionally quite simple, for at any given moment he would necessarily be doing what he most wanted to do. We may, therefore, imagine him to be endowed with the feelings of free-will and reality to a superb degree, wholly unperplexed by doubt and wholly secure in his unity of purpose. {48}

The appearance of the fourth instinct, however, introduces a profound change, for this instinct has the characteristic that it exercises a controlling power upon the individual from without. In the case of the solitary animal yielding to instinct the act itself is pleasant, and the whole creature, as it were body and soul, pours itself out in one smooth concurrence of reaction. With the social animal controlled by herd instinct it is not the actual deed which is instinctively done, but the order to do it which is instinctively obeyed. The deed, being ordained from without, may actually be unpleasant, and so be resisted from the individual side and yet be forced instinctively into execution. The instinctive act seems to have been too much associated in current thought with the idea of yielding to an impulse irresistibly pleasant to the body, yet it is very obvious that herd instinct at once introduces a mechanism by which the sanctions of instinct are conferred upon acts by no means necessarily acceptable to the body or mind. This, of course, involves an enormous increase of the range through which instinct can be made use of. Its appearance marks the beginning of the multifarious activities of man and of his stupendous success as a species; but a spectator watching the process at its outset, had he been interested in the destiny of the race, might have felt a pang of apprehension when he realized how momentous was the divorce which had been accomplished between instinct and individual desire. Instinctive acts are still done because they are based on “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort,” but they are no longer necessarily pleasant. Duty has first appeared in the world, and with it the age-long conflict which is described in the memorable words of Paul: “I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members {49} warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”

Into the features and consequences of this conflict it is now necessary for us to probe a little farther.

The element of conflict in the normal life of all inhabitants of a civilized state is so familiar that no formal demonstration of its existence is necessary. In childhood the process has begun. The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight. And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold upon this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares to be the certainty of future bliss. To the child, of course, experience has but little suggestive force, and he is easily consoled by the perfunctory rationalizations offered him as explanations by his elders. Yet who of us is there who cannot remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, the obscure and elusive sense of something being wrong, which is left by these and similar conflicts?

When the world begins to open out before us and experience to flow in with rapidly increasing volume, the state of affairs necessarily becomes more obvious. The mental unrest which we, with a certain cynicism, regard as normal to adolescence is evidence of the heavy handicap we lay upon the developing mind in forcing it to attempt to assimilate with {50} experience the dicta of herd suggestion. Moreover, let us remember, to the adolescent experience is no longer the shadowy and easily manipulable series of dreams which it usually is to the child. It has become touched with the warmth and reality of instinctive feeling. The primitive instincts are now fully developed and finding themselves balked at every turn by herd suggestion; indeed, even products of the latter are in conflict among themselves. Not only sex, self-preservation, and nutrition are at war with the pronouncements of the herd, but altruism, the ideal of rationality, the desire for power, the yearning for protection, and other feelings which have acquired instinctive force from group suggestion.

The sufferings entailed by this condition are commonplace knowledge, and there is scarcely a novelist who has not dealt with them. It is around matters of sex and of religion that the conflict is most severe, and while it is no part of our purpose to make any detailed survey of the condition, it may be of interest to point out some of the more obvious significances of this localization.

Religion has always been to man an intensely serious matter, and when we realize its biological significance we can see that this is due to a deeply ingrained need of his mind. The individual of a gregarious species can never be truly independent and self-sufficient. Natural selection has ensured that as an individual he must have an abiding sense of incompleteness, which, as thought develops in complexity, will come to be more and more abstractly expressed. This is the psychological germ which expresses itself in the religious feelings, in the desire for completion, for mystical union, for incorporation with the infinite, which are all provided for in Christianity and in all the successful sub-varieties of Christianity which modern times have {51} seen develop. This need seems with the increasing complexity of society to become more and more imperious, or rather to be satisfiable only by more and more elaborately rationalized expressions. The following is a representative passage from a recent very popular book of mystical religion: “The great central fact in human life, in your life and in mine, is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow.” It is very interestingly shown here to what lengths of rationalization may be forced the consequences of that yearning in us which is identical with the mechanism that binds the wolf to the pack, the sheep to the flock, and to the dog makes the company of his master like walking with God in the cool of the evening.

Did an opportunity offer, it would be interesting to inquire into the relation of the same instinctive impulse to the genesis of philosophy. Such an attempt would, however, involve too great a digression from the argument of this essay.

That sex should be a chief field for the conflicts we are discussing is comprehensible not only from the immense strength of the impulse and the fact that it is a mode of man’s activity which herd suggestion has always tried to regulate, but also because there is reason to believe that the sex impulse becomes secondarily associated with another instinctive feeling of great strength, namely, altruism. We have seen already that altruism is largely antagonized by herd tradition, and it is plausible to suppose that the overwhelming rush of this feeling which is usually associated with sex feelings is not altogether sexual in quality, but secondarily associated therewith as being the only outlet through which it is allowed by the herd to indulge manifestations of really passionate intensity. {52} If this were so it would clearly be of great practical importance should the rational method ever come to be applied to the solution of the problems for the sociologist and statesman which surround the relations of the sexes.

The conflicts which we are discussing are of course by no means limited to the periods of childhood and adolescence, but are frequently carried over into adult life. To understand how the apparent calm of normal adult life is attained, it is necessary to consider the effects upon the mind of these processes of contention.

Let us consider the case of a person caught in one of those dilemmas which society presents so abundantly to its members—a man seized with a passion for some individual forbidden to him by the herd, or a man whose eyes have been opened to the vision of the cruelty which everywhere lies close below the surface of life, and yet has deeply ingrained in him the doctrine of the herd that things, on the whole, are fundamentally right, that the universe is congruous with his moral feelings, that the seeming cruelty is mercy and the apparent indifference long-suffering. Now, what are the possible developments in such a tormented soul?

The conflict may end through the subsidence of either antagonist. Years, other instincts, or grosser passions may moderate the intensity of ungratified love or take away the sharpness from the sight of in­com­pre­hen­sible pain.

Again, scepticism may detect the nature of the herd suggestion and deprive it of its compelling force.

Thirdly, the problem may be shirked by the easy mechanism of rationalization. The man may take his forbidden pleasure and endow a chapel, persuading himself that his is a special case, that at any rate he is not as bad as X, or Y, or Z, who {53} committed such and such enormities, that after all there is Divine mercy, and he never beat his wife, and was always regular with his subscriptions to missions and the hospitals. Or, if his difficulty is the ethical one, he will come to see how right the herd view really is; that it is a very narrow mind which cannot see the intrinsic excellence of suffering; that the sheep and cattle we breed for eating, the calf we bleed to death that its meat may be white, the one baby out of four we kill in the first year of life, that cancer, consumption, and insanity and the growing river of blood which bathes the feet of advancing mankind, all have their part in the Increasing Purpose which is leading the race ever upwards and onwards to a Divine consummation of joy. Thus the conflict ceases, and the man is content to watch the blood and the Purpose go on increasing together and to put on flesh unperplexed by the shallow and querulous scruples of his youth.

Of these three solutions that of scepticism is unquestionably the least common, though the impression that this is not the case is created by the frequency of apparent scepticism, which, in fact, merely masks the continuation of conflict in the deeper strata of the mind. A man the subject of such submerged conflict, though he may appear to others, and, of course, to himself, to have reached a secure and uncontested basis of stability, may, after a period of apparently frictionless mental life, betray by unmistakable evidence the fact that conflict has continued disastrously below the surface.

The solutions by indifference and by rationalization or by a mixture of these two processes are characteristic of the great class of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State. In {54} them herd suggestion shows its capacity to triumph over experience, to delay the evolution of altruism, and to obscure the existence and falsify the results of the contest between personal and social desires. That it is able to do so has the advantage of establishing existing society with great firmness, but it has also the consequence of entrusting the conduct of the State and the attitude of it towards life to a class which their very stability shows to possess a certain relative incapacity to take experience seriously, a certain relative insensibility to the value of feeling and to suffering, and a decided preference for herd tradition over all other sources of conduct.

Early in history the bulk of mankind must have been of this type, because experience, being still relatively simple, would have but little suggestive force, and would therefore readily be suppressed by herd suggestion. There would be little or no mental conflict, and such as there was would be readily stilled by comparatively simple rationalizations. The average man would then be happy, active, and possessed of an inexhaustible fund of motive and energy, capable of intense patriotism and even of self-immolation for the herd. The nation consequently, in an appropriate environment, would be an expanding one and rendered ruthless and formidable by an intense, unshakable conviction of its divine mission. Its blindness towards the new in experience would keep its patriots narrow and fierce, its priests bigoted and bloodthirsty, its rulers arrogant, reactionary, and over-confident. Should chance ordain that there arose no great environmental change rendering necessary great modifications, such a nation would have a brilliant career of conquest as has been so often demonstrated by history.

Amongst the first-class Powers to-day the mentally stable are still the directing class, and their {55} characteristic tone is discernible in national attitudes towards experience, in national ideals and religions, and in national morality. It is this possession of the power of directing national opinion by a class which is in essence relatively insensitive towards new combinations of experience; this persistence of a mental type which may have been adequate in the simpler past, into a world where environments are daily becoming more complex—it is this survival, so to say, of the waggoner upon the footplate of the express engine, which has made the modern history of nations a series of such breathless adventures and hairbreadth escapes. To those who are able to view national affairs from an objective standpoint, it is obvious that each of these escapes might very easily have been a disaster, and that sooner or later one of them must be such.

Thus far we have seen that the conflict between herd suggestion and experience is associated with the appearance of the great mental type which is commonly called normal. Whether or not it is in fact to be regarded as such is comparatively unimportant and obviously a question of statistics; what is, however, of an importance impossible to exaggerate is the fact that in this type of mind personal satisfactoriness or adequacy, or, as we may call it, mental comfort, is attained at the cost of an attitude towards experience which greatly affects the value to the species of the activities of minds of this type. This mental stability, then, is to be regarded as, in certain important directions, a loss; and the nature of the loss resides in a limitation of outlook, a relative intolerance of the new in thought, and a consequent narrowing of the range of facts over which satisfactory intellectual activity is possible. We may, therefore, for convenience, refer to this type as the resistive, a name which serves as a reminder of the exceedingly important fact that, {56} however “normal” the type may be, it is one which falls far short of the possibilities of the human mind.

If we now turn to a consideration of the mental char­ac­ter­is­tics of the constituents of society other than those of the resistive type, we shall find a common quality traceable, and another great type capable of broad definition. We must at once, however, guard ourselves against being misled by the name “normal” as applied to the resistant into the supposition that this type is in a numerical majority in society. Intellectually unquestionably of inferior value, there is good reason to suppose that in mere numbers it has already passed its zenith, as may be gathered from the note of panic which what is called the increase of degeneracy is beginning to excite.

Outside the comfortable and possibly diminishing ranks of the “normal,” society is everywhere penetrated by a steadily increasing degree of what we may call in the broadest possible way mental instability. All observers of society, even the most optimistic, are agreed that the prevalence of this mental quality is increasing, while those who are competent to trace its less obtrusive manifestations find it to be very widespread.

When the twenty years just past come to be looked back upon from the distant future, it is probable that their chief claim to interest will be that they saw the birth of the science of abnormal psychology. That science, inconspicuous as has been its development, has already given us a few gen­er­al­i­za­tions of the first importance. Amongst such, perhaps the most valuable is that which has taught us that certain mental and physical manifestations which have usually been regarded as disease in the ordinary sense are due to the effects upon the mind of the failure to assimilate the {57} experience presented to it into a harmonious unitary personality. We have seen that the stable-minded deal with an unsatisfactory piece of experience by rejecting its significance. In certain minds such successful exclusion does not occur, and the unwelcome experience persists as an irritant, so to say, capable neither of assimilation nor rejection. Abnormal psychology discloses the fact that such minds are apt to develop the supposed diseases we have just referred to, and the fact that these and other manifestations of what we have called mental instability are the consequences of mental conflict.

Now, we have already seen that a gregarious animal, unless his society is perfectly organized, must be subject to lasting and fierce conflict between experience and herd suggestion.14 It is natural, therefore, to assume that the manifestations of mental instability are not diseases of the individual in the ordinary sense at all, but inevitable consequences of man’s biological history and exact measures of the stage now reached of his assimilation into the gregarious life. The manifestations of mental instability and disintegration were at first supposed to be of comparatively rare occurrence and limited to certain well-known “diseases,” but they are coming to be recognized over a larger and larger field, and in a great variety of phenomena.

14 The word “experience” is used here in a special sense that perhaps renders necessary a word or two of definition. The experience meant is everything that comes to the individual, not only his experience of events in the external world, but also his experience of the instinctive and often egoistic impulses at work within his own personality. 1915.

Conditions which at first sight give rise to no suspicion of being acquired injuries to the mind, when they are looked at in the light of the facts we have been considering, reveal themselves as being scars inflicted by conflict as certainly as are some {58} forms of insanity. Characteristics which pass as vices, eccentricities, defects of temper, peculiarities of disposition, come when critically examined to be explicable as minor grades of defective mental stability, although, on account of their great frequency, they have been looked upon as normal, or at any rate in the natural order of things.

Few examples could be found to illustrate better such conditions than alcoholism. Almost universally regarded as either, on the one hand, a sin or vice, or on the other hand, as a disease, there can be little doubt that in fact it is essentially a response to a psychological necessity. In the tragic conflict between what he has been taught to desire and what he is allowed to get, man has found in alcohol, as he has found in certain other drugs, a sinister but effective peacemaker, a means of securing, for however short a time, some way out of the prison house of reality back to the Golden Age. There can be equally little doubt that it is but a comparatively small proportion of the victims of conflict who find a solace in alcohol, and the prevalence of alcoholism and the punishments entailed by the use of that dreadful remedy cannot fail to impress upon us how great must be the number of those whose need was just as great, but who were too ignorant, too cowardly, or perhaps too brave to find a release there.

We have seen that mental instability must be regarded as a condition extremely common, and produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other. It remains for us to estimate in some rough way the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the unstable, in order that we may be able to judge of their value or otherwise to the State and the species. Such an estimate must necessarily be exaggerated, over-sharp in its outlines, omitting {59} much, and therefore in many respects false. The most prominent characteristic in which the mentally unstable contrast with the “normal” is what we may vaguely call motive. They tend to be weak in energy, and especially in persistence of energy. Such weakness may translate itself into a vague scepticism as to the value of things in general, or into a definite defect of what is popularly called will power, or into many other forms, but it is always of the same fundamental significance, for it is always the result of the thwarting of the primary impulses to action resident in herd suggestion by the influence of an experience which cannot be disregarded. Such minds cannot be stimulated for long by objects adequate to normal ambition; they are apt to be sceptical in such matters as patriotism, religion, politics, social success, but the scepticism is incomplete, so that they are readily won to new causes, new religions, new quacks, and as readily fall away therefrom.

We saw that the resistive gain in motive what they lose in adaptability; we may add that in a sense the unstable gain in adaptability what they lose in motive. Thus we see society cleft by the instinctive qualities of its members into two great classes, each to a great extent possessing what the other lacks, and each falling below the possibilities of human personality. The effect of the gradual increase of the unstable in society can be seen to a certain extent in history. We can watch it through the careers of the Jews and of the Romans. At first, when the bulk of the citizens were of the stable type, the nation was enterprising, energetic, indomitable, but hard, inelastic, and fanatically convinced of its Divine mission. The inevitable effect of the expansion of experience which followed success was that development of the unstable and sceptical which ultimately allowed the nation, no longer {60} believing in itself or its gods, to become the almost passive prey of more stable peoples.

In regard to the question of the fundamental significance of the two great mental types found in society, a tempting field for speculation at once opens up, and many questions immediately arise for discussion. Is, for example, the stable normal type naturally in some special degree insensitive to experience, and if so, is such a quality inborn or acquired? Again, may the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the members of this class be the result of an experience relatively easily dealt with by rationalization and exclusion? Then again, are the unstable naturally hypersensitive to experience, or have they met with an experience relatively difficult to assimilate? Into the discussion of such questions we shall here make no attempt to enter, but shall limit ourselves to reiterating that these two types divide society between them, that they both must be regarded as seriously defective and as evidence that civilization has not yet provided a medium in which the average human mind can grow undeformed and to its full stature.