MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE AND NATURE’S PLACE IN MAN
As the nineteenth century draws away into the past and it is possible to get a comprehensive view of the intellectual legacies it has left to its successor, certain of its ideas stand out from the general mass by reason of the greatness of their scale and scope. Ideas of the first order of magnitude are from their very greatness capable of full appreciation only in a comparatively distant view. However much they have been admired and studied by contemporary thought, it is with the passage of time only that all their proportions come gradually into focus. The readjustments of thought as to what used to be called man’s place in nature, which were so characteristic a work of the latter half of the nineteenth century, embodied an idea of this imperial type which, fruitful as it has proved, has even now yielded far less than its full harvest of truth.
The conception of man as an animal, at first entertained only in a narrow zoological sense, has gradually extended in significance, and is now beginning to be understood as a guiding principle in the study of all the activities of the individual and the species. In the early days such a conception was regarded by non-scientific thought as degrading to man, and as denying to him the possibility of moral progress {67} and the reality of his higher æsthetic and emotional capabilities; at the same time, men of science found themselves compelled, however unwillingly, to deny that the moral activities of man could be made consistent with his status as an animal. It may still be remembered how even the evolutionary enthusiasm of Huxley was baffled by the incompatibility he found to subsist between what he called the ethical and the cosmical processes, and how he stood bewildered by the sight of moral beauty blossoming incorrigibly amidst the cruelty, lust, and bloodshed of the world.
The passage of time has tended more and more to clear up these lingering confusions of an anthropocentric biology, and thought is gradually gaining courage to explore, not merely the body of man but his mind and his moral capacities, in the knowledge that these are not meaningless intrusions into an otherwise orderly world, but are partakers in him and his history just as are his vermiform appendix and his stomach, and are elements in the complex structure of the universe as respectably established there, and as racy of that soil as the oldest saurian or the newest gas.
Man is thus not merely, as it were, rescued from the inhuman loneliness which he had been taught was his destiny and persuaded was his pride, but he is relieved from perplexities and temptations which had so long proved obstacles to his finding himself and setting out valiantly on an upward path. Cut off from his history and regarded as an exile into a lower world, he can scarcely fail to be appalled and crushed by the discrepancy between his lofty pretensions and his lowly acts. If he but recognize that he himself and his virtues and aspirations are integral strands in the fabric of life, he will learn that the great tissue of reality loses none of its splendour by the fact that near by where the pattern {68} glows with his courage and his pride it burns with the radiance of the tiger, and over against his intellect and his genius it mocks in the grotesques of the ape.
The development of an objective attitude towards the status of man has had, perhaps, its most significant effect in the influence it has exercised upon the study of the human mind.
The desire to understand the modes of action of the mind, and to formulate about them generalizations which shall be of practical value, has led to inquiries being pursued along three distinct paths. These several methods may be conveniently distinguished as the primitive, the human, and the comparative.
What I have called the primitive method of psychological inquiry is also the obvious and natural one. It takes man as it finds him, accepts his mind for what it professes to be, and examines into its processes by introspection of a direct and simple kind. It is necessarily subject to the conditions that the object of study is also the medium through which the observations are made, and that there is no objective standard by which the accuracy of transmission through this medium can be estimated and corrected. In the result the materials collected are subjected to a very special and very stringent kind of censorship. If an observation is acceptable and satisfactory to the mind itself, it is reported as true; if it contains material which is unwelcome to the mind, it is reported as false; and in both cases the failure is in no sense due to any conscious dishonesty in the observing mind, but is a fallacy necessarily inherent in the method. A fairly characteristic product of inquiries of this type is the conception, which seems so obvious to common sense, that introspection does give access to all mental processes, so that a conscious motive must be discoverable for all the acts of the subject. Experience {69} with more objective methods has shown that when no motive is found for a given act or no motive consistent with the mind’s pretensions as to itself, there will always be a risk of a presentable one being extemporized.
Psychology of this primitive type—the naïve psychology of common sense—is always necessarily tainted with what may be called in a special sense anthropomorphism; it tells us, that is to say, not what man is but what he thinks and feels himself to be. Judged by its fruits in enabling us to foretell or to influence conduct, it is worthless. It has been studied for thousands of years and infinite ingenuities have been expended on it, and yet at its best it can only tell us how the average man thinks his mind works—a body of information not sensibly superior in reality to the instructions of a constitutional monarch addressed to an unruly parliament. It has distracted thought with innumerable falsifications, but in all its secular cultivation has produced no body of generalizations of value in the practical conduct of life.
COMMENTS ON AN OBJECTIVE SYSTEM OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
I
Until comparatively recent years the fact that what was called psychology did not even pretend to be of any practical value in affairs was tolerated by its professors and regarded as more or less in the nature of things. The science, therefore, outside a small class of specialists was in very dismal reputation. It had come to comprise two divergent schools, one which busied itself with the apparatus of the experimental physiologist and frankly studied the physiology of the nervous system, the other {70} which occupied itself with the faded abstractions of logic and metaphysics, while both agreed in ignoring the study of the mind. This comparative sterility may in a broad way be traced back to the one fundamental defect from which the science suffered—the absence of an objective standard by which the value of mental observations could be estimated. Failing such a standard, any given mental phenomenon might be as much a product of the observing mind as of the mind observed, or the varying degrees in which both of these factors contributed might be inextricably mixed. Of late years the much-needed objective standard has been sought and to some extent found in two directions. What I have called “human” psychology has found it in the study of diseases of the mind. In states of disease mental processes and mechanisms which had eluded observation in the normal appear in an exaggerated form which renders recognition less difficult. The enlightenment coming from the understanding of such pathological material has made it possible to argue back to the less obtrusive or more effectively concealed phenomena of the normal and more or less to exclude the fallacies of the observing mind, and, at any rate in part, to dissipate the obscurity which for so long had successfully hidden the actual mental phenomena themselves.
The most remarkable attack upon the problems of psychology which has been made from the purely human standpoint is that in which the rich genius of Sigmund Freud was and still is the pioneer. The school which his work has founded was concerned at first wholly with the study of abnormal mental states, and came into notice as a branch of medicine finding the verification of its principles in the success it laid claim to in the treatment of certain mental diseases. It now regards itself as possessing a body {71} of doctrine of general applicability to mental phenomena, normal or abnormal. These principles are the product of laborious and minute inquiries into the working of the mind, rendered possible by the use of a characteristic method known as psycho-analysis. This method, which constitutes a definite and elaborate technique of investigation, is looked upon by those who practise it as the sole means by which access can be obtained to the veritable phenomena of the mind, and as rendering possible a truly objective view of the facts. It is no part of my purpose to examine the validity of psycho-analysis as a scientific method. It is enough to notice that the exponents of it completely repudiate the teachings of what I have called “common-sense” psychology, that they maintain that objectivity in the collection and collation of psychical facts is in no way to be obtained by the light of nature but demands very special methods and precautions, and that their claims to the possession of a truly objective method appear to be open to verification or disproof by actual experiment in the treatment of disease. Whatever value, then, psycho-analysis may ultimately prove to possess in solving the peculiar difficulties of psychological research, the evolution of it marks a very definite advance in principle and shows that it is the product of a mind determined by whatever effort to get to close quarters with the facts.
The body of doctrine enunciated by Freud concerns us more directly than the peculiarities of his method. Some very general and summary account may therefore be attempted as illustrating the characteristics of this vigorous, aggressive, and essentially “human” school of research.
The Freudian psychology regards the mind of the adult as the outcome of a process of development the stages of which are within limits, orderly {72} and inevitable. The trend of this development in each individual is determined by forces which are capable of precise definition, and the final product of it is capable of yielding to expert examination clear evidence of the particular way in which these forces have acted and interacted during the developmental process. The mind of the adult, then, is like the body in bearing traces which betray to the skilled observer the events of its developmental history. Inconspicuous and apparently insignificant structures and peculiarities in the one no less than in the other prove to have had a meaning and a function in the past, however little significance their final form may seem to possess, and thus the psychologist is able to reconstruct the history of a given subject’s mind, although the most important stages of its development are hidden from direct observation as effectively as is the prenatal growth of the body.
It seems to be a fundamental conception of the Freudian system that the development of the mind is accompanied and conditioned by mental conflict. The infant is regarded as being impelled by instinctive impulses which at first are solely egoistic. From the earliest moments of its contact with the world resistance to the full indulgence of these impulses is encountered. With the growth and intensification of such impulses, the resistance from external interference—the beginnings of social pressure—becomes more formidable, until at a quite unexpectedly early age a veritable condition of mental conflict is established—egoistic impulses fatally pressing for indulgence regardless of their acceptability to the environment, while environmental influences bear equally heavily against any indulgence unwelcome to surrounding standards of discipline, taste, or morality.
Of the two parties in this conflict—the instinctive {73} impulse and the repressive force—the first, according to Freud, is wholly the product of the sex instinct. This instinct is conceived of as being much more active and potent in the infant and child than had been suspected by any previous investigator. The normal sexual interest and activity as manifested in the adult are developed out of the sexual impulse of the child by a regular series of modifications, which appear to be regarded as due partly to a process of natural development and partly to the influence of external repressive forces. In the infant the instinct is egocentric and the object of its interest is the individual’s own body; with the increase of the mental field consequent on enlarging experience the instinctive activity is externalized, and its object of interest changes so that the child acquires a specific inclination towards other individuals without distinction of sex; finally, as a last stage of development the instinctive inclination is localized to members of the opposite sex. This series of transformations is regarded as normal by Freud, and as essential to the appearance of the “normal” adult type. The evolution of this series is sensitive to interference by outside influences, and any disturbance of it either by way of anticipation or delay will have profound effects upon the ultimate character and temperament of the subject. The psychical energy of an instinct so important as that of sex is very great, and is not dissipated by the forces of repression brought to bear upon it, but transformed into activities ostensibly quite different and directed into channels having no obvious connection with their source. It is a fundamental characteristic of the mind to be able to accept these substitutes for the actual indulgence of the instinct, and to enjoy a symbolical gratification in manifestations which have no overt sexual significance. When development proceeds normally the {74} surplus energy of the sex instinct finds an outlet in activities of social value—æsthetic, poetic, altruistic; when development is interfered with the outflow of energy is apt to result in definite disease of the mind or in peculiarities of character scarcely to be distinguished therefrom.
Thus the mind of the adult, according to Freud, in addition to activities which are conscious and fully accessible to the subject, carries on activities and holds memories which are unconscious and totally inaccessible to the subject by any ordinary method of introspection. Between these two fields there is a barrier sedulously guarded by certain repressive forces. The unconscious is the realm of all the experiences, memories, impulses, and inclinations which during the subject’s life have been condemned by the standards of the conscious, have proved incompatible with it and have therefore been outlawed from it. This banishment in no way deprives these excluded mental processes of their energy, and they constantly influence the feelings and behaviour of the subject. So strict, however, is the guard between them and the conscious that they are never allowed to pass the barrier between one sphere and the other except in disguised and fantastically distorted forms by which their true meaning is closely concealed. It has been perhaps Freud’s most remarkable thesis that dreams are manifestations of this emergence of desires and memories from the unconscious into the conscious field. During sleep the repressing force which guards the frontier between conscious and unconscious is weakened. Even then, however, such ideas as emerge into the conscious can do so only in a worked up and distorted form, so that their significance can be disengaged from the grotesque jumble of the actual dream only by a minute inquiry according to a difficult and highly technical method. {75} By this method, however, is to be obtained a deep insight into the otherwise irrecoverable emotional history of the individual, the structure of his temperament, and, if he is mentally abnormal, the meaning of his symptoms.
II
The foregoing enumeration of the chief doctrines of the Freudian psychology is intended to be no more than a mere outline to serve as a basis for certain comments which seem to be relevant to the general argument of this essay. The point of view from which this slight sketch is made, that of an interested but detached observer, is naturally somewhat different from that of the actual authorities themselves. Here it is desired to get the broadest possible view in the most general terms, and as we have no concern with immediate problems of practical therapeutics—which remain at least the chief preoccupation of writers of the psycho-analytic school—an effort has been made to avoid the use of the rich and rather forbidding technical vocabulary in which the writings of the school abound. It may well be that this generalized method of description has yielded an ill-proportioned or distorted picture. The subject has proved to be so much at the mercy of prejudice that the least impassioned spectator, however completely he may believe himself to be free from advocacy or detraction, is far from being able to claim immunity from these influences.
Keeping constantly in mind this general caution, which is at least as necessary in the field of criticism as in that of mere description, we may pass on to make certain comments on the psychology of Freud which are relevant to the general argument being followed out here. {76}
A discussion in any way detailed of this immense subject is very obviously impossible here, but it is desirable to say a few words as to the general validity of Freud’s chief thesis. However much one may be impressed by his power as a psychologist and his almost fierce resolution to get at the actual facts of mental processes, one can scarcely fail to experience in reading Freud’s works that there is a certain harshness in his grasp of facts and even a trace of narrowness in his outlook which tend to repel the least resistant mind and make one feel that his guidance in many matters—perhaps chiefly of detail—is open to suspicion. He seems to have an inclination for the enumeration of absolute rules, a confidence in his hypotheses which might be called superb if that were not in science a term of reproach, and a tendency to state his least acceptable propositions with the heaviest emphasis as if to force belief upon an unwilling and shrinking mind were an especial gratification. All these traits of manner—at the worst mere foibles of a distinguished and successful investigator—appear to exercise some considerable effect on the acceptance his writings meet with, and are perhaps indications in which direction, if he is open to fallacy, such might be looked for.
Nevertheless with regard to the main propositions of his system there can be little doubt that their general validity will be increasingly accepted. Among such propositions must be put the conception of the significance of mental conflict, the importance of the emotional experiences of infancy and childhood in the determination of character and the causing of mental disease, and his conception of the general structure of the mind as comprising conscious and unconscious fields.
The comments which I shall venture to make upon the work of Freud will be such as are suggested {77} by the biological point of view of which this essay is intended to be an exposition. The standard of interest upon which they are based will therefore necessarily differ to some extent from that which is usually adopted in writings of the psycho-analytic school.
To the biologist perhaps the most striking characteristic of the work of this school is its complete acceptance of what one may call the human point of view. It seems to be satisfied that no useful contribution to psychology is to be obtained outside the limits of human feeling and behaviour, and to feel no impatience to expand its inquiries into a still larger field. It is not that the school has failed to show an extremely vigorous movement of expansion. Beginning as a mere province of medicine, and while its foothold there was still far from general recognition, it invaded the regions of general psychology, of æsthetics, ethnology, the study of folklore and myth, and indeed of all matters in which it could find its essential material—the records of human feeling and conduct. Beyond the human species it has shown remarkably little of this aggressive spirit, and it seems to feel no need of bringing its principles into relation with what little is known of the mental activities of the non-human animals.
The absence of any strong pressure in the direction of establishing a correlation of all mental phenomena, whether human or not, is not a matter of merely theoretical interest. The actual practical success to be obtained to-day in such an attempt might possibly be insignificant and yet of great value in moulding the whole attitude of mind of the investigator towards matters lying wholly within the sphere of human psychology. However much one may be impressed by the greatness of the edifice which Freud has built up and by the soundness of {78} his architecture, one can scarcely fail, on coming into it from the bracing atmosphere of the biological sciences, to be oppressed by the odour of humanity with which it is pervaded. One finds everywhere a tendency to the acceptance of human standards and even sometimes of human pretensions which cannot fail to produce a certain uneasiness as to the validity, if not of his doctrines, at any rate of the forms in which they are expounded. The quality I am trying to describe is extremely difficult to express in concrete terms without exaggeration or distortion. To those who have approached Freud’s work solely by the path of medicine the idea that it can give any one the feeling of a certain conventionality of standard and outlook and of a certain over-estimation of the objectivity of man’s moral values will seem perhaps merely absurd. That this is an impression which I have not been able altogether to escape I record with a good deal of hesitation and diffidence and without any wish to lay stress upon it.
Psycho-analytic psychology has grown up under conditions which may very well have encouraged the persistence of the human point of view. Originally its whole activity was concentrated upon the investigation and treatment of disease. Many of its early disciples were those who had received proof of its value in their own persons, those, that is to say, who had been sufferers from their very susceptibility to the influence of human standards. The objective standard of validity by which the system was judged was necessarily that of the physician, namely the capacity to restore the abnormal mind to the “normal.” Normal in this sense is of course no more than a statistical expression implying the condition of the average man. It could scarcely fail, however, to acquire the significance of “healthy.” If once the statistically {79} normal mind is accepted as being synonymous with the psychologically healthy mind (that is, the mind in which the full capacities are available for use), a standard is set up which has a most fallacious appearance of objectivity. The statistically normal mind can be regarded only as a mind which has responded in the usual way to the moulding and deforming influence of its environment—that is, to human standards of discipline, taste, and morality. If it is to be looked upon as typically healthy also, the current human standards of whose influence it is a product must necessarily be accepted as qualified to call forth the best in the developing mind they mould. Writers of the psycho-analytic school seem in general to make some such assumption as this.
III
The conception of mental conflict is the central feature of the Freudian system. Of its importance and validity there can be no doubt. In a general way the idea is familiar and even commonplace, but Freud had developed it and shown how deeply the principle penetrates the structure and development of the mind from the earliest period and to an extent quite unsuspected by earlier psychologists.
From an early period of life the child finds the gratification of its instinctive impulses checked or even prevented by the pressure of its environment. Conflict is thus set up between the two forces of instinctive pressure within and social pressure from without. Instinctive impulses which thus come into conflict with the repressing force are not destroyed but are deflected from their natural outlet, are repressed within the mind and ultimately prevented from rising into the conscious field at all except in disguised or symbolic forms. To the adult his childhood seems to have been altogether free from {80} any kind of sexual activity or interest, not because, as is generally supposed, such has never existed, but because it proved incapable of persisting in the conscious field and was suppressed into the unconscious with the increase of the social repressing forces. Similarly impulses experienced in adult life which are for the same reason incompatible with conscious recognition do not become conscious, but live their life in the unconscious, though they may exercise the profoundest influence on the happiness and health of the subject.
The work of Freud has been concentrated chiefly upon the one party in these conflicts—the instinctive impulse of which the only considerable one according to him is the sexual. To the other party—the repressing forces—he has given very much less attention, and in them has found apparently much less interest. By most writers of his school also they seem to be taken very much as a matter of course.
When we consider, however, what they can accomplish—how they can take the immensely powerful instinct of sex and mould and deform its prodigious mental energy—it is clear that the repressing forces are no less important than the antagonist with which they contend.
It is desirable, perhaps, to discuss a little more closely the nature of mental conflict, and especially first to define the precise meaning of the conception.
It may readily be granted that the young child’s mind is wholly egocentric, though the proposition is not without a certain element of assumption which it is not wise altogether to ignore. He experiences certain desires and impulses which he assumes with the blandest unconsciousness of any other desires but his own are there to be gratified. The failure to gratify such an impulse may come about in several ways, not all of which are equally significant in {81} establishing mental conflict. The gratification may be physically impossible. Here there is no basis for internal conflict. The resistance is wholly external; the whole child still desires its pleasure and its whole resources, mental and physical, are directed to gain the object. Mere failure may be painful and may lead to an outburst of rage which possibly even discharges some of the mental energy of the wish, but the situation psychically is simple and the incident tends of itself to go no farther.
The gratification may prove to be physically painful in itself. This seems to promise certain elements of mental conflict in balancing the pleasure of the gratification against the remembered pain it involves. We are assuming that the pain is the immediate consequence of the act, as when, for example, a child makes the immemorial scientific discovery that fire burns fingers. Such a direct experience without the interposition of a second person or the pointing of a moral does not in fact involve any real mental conflict. The source of the pain is external, its only emotional quality is that of its simple unpleasantness, and this cannot, as it were, enter into the child’s mind and divide it against itself.
True conflict, the conflict which moulds and deforms, must be actually within the mind—must be endopsychic to use a term invented by Freud, though not used by him in this exact application. In order that a desire may set up conflict it must be thwarted, not by a plain impossibility or by a mere physical pain, but by another impulse within the mind antagonizing it. It seems clear that the counter-impulse to be strong enough to contend with an impulse having in it the energy of the sex instinct must itself derive its force from some potent instinctive mechanism. We cannot suppose that the immense power of the sex impulse can be {82} controlled, moulded, and directed by any influence except such as have access to the stores of psychical energy which the instinctive activities alone possess.
We are thus led to the proposition that the essence of mental conflict is the antagonism of two impulses which both have instinct behind them, and are both, as it were, intimate constituents in the personality of the subject. Thus only can the mind become, in the worn but still infinitely appropriate metaphor, a house divided against itself. The counter-impulses to the developing sexual interest and activity of the child are, as we have seen, the result of social pressure—that is to say, the result of the influence of the human environment. This influence is manifested, not merely in direct precept, in warning, in punishment, in expressions of disapproval or disgust, but in the whole system of secrecy, of significant silences, of suppressions, of nods and winks and surreptitious signallings, of sudden causeless snubs and patently lame explanations amid which such sexual interest as the child possesses has to find a modus vivendi and an intelligible meaning.
Whence does this environmental pressure obtain the power which enables it to exercise in the child’s mind the regal functions of instinct? Clearly it can do so only if the mind possesses a specific sensitiveness to external opinion and the capacity to confer on its precepts the sanction of instinctive force. In the two earlier essays of this book I attempted to show that the essential specific characteristic of the mind of the gregarious animal is this very capacity to confer upon herd opinion the psychical energy of instinct. It is this sensitiveness, then, which lays the child’s mind open to the influence of his environment and endows for him the mental attitude of that environment with all the sanction of instinct. Thus do the repressing forces {83} become actually constituent in the child’s personality, and as much a part of his being as the egoistic desires with which they are now able to contend on equal terms.
The specific sensitiveness of the gregarious mind seems, then, to be a necessary condition for the establishment of true mental conflict, and a character which must be taken into account if we are to develop a complete theory of the evolution of the individual mind.
Assuming the validity of the proposition that there are two primary factors in the development of the mind in each individual—the egoistic impulses of the child and his specific sensitiveness to environing influences—it may well be asked why it is that the product, the “normal” adult mind, is so uniform in its characters. It is true that this uniformity may very easily be exaggerated, for in a very considerable number of cases gross “abnormalities” are the result of the process of development, but, as I pointed out in an earlier essay, the result on the whole is to produce two broadly distinguishable types of mind—the unstable and the stable—the latter on account of its numerical superiority being also dignified as normal. A considerable uniformity in the final products must therefore be accepted. If, however, environmental influences are an essential factor in the production of this result, there seems no little difficulty in accounting for the uniformity seeing that environments vary so much from class to class, nation to nation, and race to race. Where, we may ask, is the constant in the environmental factors which the uniformity of the outcome leads us to expect? Assuming with Freud that of the egoistic impulses of the child, the sexual alone seriously counts in the formation of character, can it be shown that the influences which surround the child are uniform {84} in their general direction against this? At first sight it would seem certainly not. Even in the same country the variations in taste, reticence, modesty, and morality towards matters of sex interest vary greatly from class to class, and presumably are accompanied by corresponding variations in the type of influence exercised by the environment of the child.
Adequately to deal with this difficulty would involve examining in detail the actual mental attitude of the adult towards the young, especially in regard to matters directly or indirectly touching upon interests of sex. The subject is a difficult one, and if we limit ourselves to the purely human standpoint, ugly and depressing. The biologist, however, need not confine himself to so cramped an outlook, and by means of collecting his observations over a much larger field is able to some extent to escape the distorting effects of natural human prejudice. Viewed in a broad way, it is neither surprising nor portentous that there should naturally exist a strong and persistent jealousy between the adult and the young. Indeed, many of the superficial consequences of this fact are mere commonplaces. Throughout most of the lower animals the relation is obvious and frankly manifested. Indeed, it may be regarded as a more or less inevitable consequence of any form of social life among animals. As such, therefore, it may be expected to appear in some form or other in the human mind. The manifestations of it, however, will by no means necessarily take easily recognizable forms. The social pressure to which the mind is subject will tend to exclude such a feeling from at any rate full consciousness, and such manifestations as are allowed it will be in disguised and distorted forms.
It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that some dim and unrealized offshoot of such a jealousy {85} between adult and young is responsible for the unanimity with which man combines to suppress and delay the development of any evidence of sexual interest by the young. The intensity of the dislike which is felt for admitting the young to share any part of the knowledge of the adult about the physiology of sex is well illustrated by the difficulty parents feel in communicating to their children some of the elementary facts which they may feel very strongly it is their duty to impart. A parent may find himself under these circumstances trying to quiet his conscience with all sorts of excuses and subterfuges while he postpones making the explanations which duty and affection urge upon him as necessary for the health and happiness of his child. An unwillingness so strong and irrational as this must have its root in subconscious processes charged with strong feeling.
The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste. Amongst primitive savages the principle has not acquired the altruistic signification which civilized man has given it, but operates as a definite exclusion to be overcome only by solemn ceremonies of initiation and at the price of submission to painful and sometimes mutilating rites.
The constancy of attitude of the adult towards the young, which is thus seen to be so general, evidently gives to the environmental influences which surround the child a fundamental uniformity, and as we have seen, the theory of the development of the individual mind demands that such a uniformity of environmental influence should be shown to be in action.
This is no place to follow out the practical consequences of the fact that every adult necessarily {86} possesses a primary bias in his attitude towards the young, and a bias which is connected with instinctive impulses of great mental energy. However much this tendency is overlaid by moral principles, by altruism, by natural affection, as long as its true nature is unrecognized and excluded from full consciousness its influence upon conduct must be excessive and full of dangerous possibilities. To it must ultimately be traced the scarcely veiled distrust and dislike with which comparative youth is always apt to be met where matters of importance are concerned. The attitude of the adult and elderly towards the enthusiasms of youth is stereotyped in a way which can scarcely fail to strike the psychologist as remarkable and illuminating in its commonplaceness. The youthful revolutionary, who after all is no more essentially absurd than the elderly conservative, is commonly told by the latter that he too at the same age felt the same aspirations, burnt with the same zeal, and yearned with the same hope until he learnt wisdom with experience—“as you will have, my boy, by the time you are my age.” To the psychologist the kindly contempt of such pronouncements cannot conceal the pathetic jealousy of declining power. Herd instinct, inevitably siding with the majority and the ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history, proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and enterprise and in favour of age and caution, the immemorial wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumblings of senile decay.
Any comprehensive survey of modern civilized life cannot fail to yield abundant instances of the disproportionate influence in the conduct of affairs which has been acquired by mere age. When we remember how little in actual practice man proves himself capable of the use of reason, how very little {87} he actually does profit by experience though the phrase is always in his mouth, it must be obvious that there is some strong psychological reason for the predominance of age, something which must be determinative in its favour quite apart from its merits and capacity when competing with youth. The “monstrous regiment” of old men—and to the biologist it is almost as “monstrous” as the regiment of Mary Stuart was to poor indignant Knox—extends into every branch of man’s activity. We prefer old judges, old lawyers, old politicians, old doctors, old generals, and when their functions involve any immediacy of cause and effect and are not merely concerned with abstractions, we contentedly pay the price which the inelasticity of these ripe minds is sometimes apt to incur.
IV
If the propositions already laid down prove to be sound, we must regard the personality of the adult as the resultant of three groups of forces to which the mind from infancy onwards is subject; first the egoistic instincts of the individual pressing for gratification and possessing the intense mental energy characteristic of instinctive processes, secondly the specific sensitiveness to environmental influences which the mind as that of a gregarious animal necessarily possesses, a quality capable of endowing outside influences with the energy of instinct and, thirdly the environmental influences which act upon the growing mind and are also essentially determined in their intensity and uniformity by instinctive mechanisms.
The work of Freud has been directed mainly to the elucidation of the processes included in the first group—that is to say, to the study of the primarily egoistic impulses and the modifications {88} they develop under restraint. He has worked out, in fact, a veritable embryology of the mind.
The embryology of the body is to those who have had no biological training far from being a gratifying subject of contemplation. The stages through which the body passes before reaching its familiar form have a superficial aspect of ugly and repulsive caricature with which only a knowledge of the great compressed pageant of nature they represent can reconcile the mind. The stages through which, according to the doctrines of Freud, the developing mind passes are not less repulsive when judged from the purely human point of view than are the phases of the body, which betray its cousinship with the fish and the frog, the lemur and the ape. The works of Nature give no support to the social convention that to be truly respectable one must always have been respectable. All her most elaborate creations have “risen in the world” and are descended in the direct line from creatures of the mud and dust. It is characteristic of her method to work with the humblest materials and to patch and compromise at every step. Any given structure of her making is thus not by any means necessarily the best that could conceivably be contrived, but a workable modification of something else, always more or less conditioned in its functioning by the limitations of the thing from which it was made.
To the biologist, therefore, the fact that Freud’s investigations of the development of the mind have shown it passing through stages anything but gratifying to self-esteem will not be either surprising or a ground for disbelief. That Freud’s conclusions are decidedly unpalatable when judged by a narrowly human standard is very obvious to any one who is at all familiar with the kind of criticism they have received. It must be acknowledged, moreover, that his methods of exposition have not always tended {89} to disguise the nauseousness of the dose he attempts to administer. Such matters, however, lie altogether apart from the question whether his conclusions are or are not just, though it is perhaps justifiable to say that had these conclusions been immediately acceptable, the fact would be presumptive evidence that they were either not new or were false.
The work of Freud embodies the most determined, thorough, and scientific attempt which has been made to penetrate the mysteries of the mind by the direct human method of approach, making use of introspection—guided and guarded, it is true, by an elaborate technique—as its essential instrument. To have shaped so awkward and fallacious an instrument into an apparatus for which accuracy and fruitfulness can be claimed is in itself a notable triumph of psychological skill.
The doctrines of Freud seem to be regarded by his school as covering all the activities of the mind and making a complete, though of course not necessarily exhaustive, survey of the whole field. I have already pointed out directions in which it appears to me that inquiries by other methods than those of the psycho-analytic school can be pursued with success. Regarded in a broad way, the Freudian body of doctrine which I have already ventured to describe as essentially an embryology of the mind gives one the impression of being mainly descriptive and systematic rather than dynamic, if one may with due caution use such words. It is able to tell us how such and such a state of affairs has arisen, what is its true significance, and to describe in minute detail the factors into which it can be analysed. When the question of acting upon the mind is raised its resources seem less striking. In this direction its chief activities have been in the treatment of abnormal mental states, and these are dealt with by a laborious process of analysis {90} in which the subject’s whole mental development is retraced, and the numerous significant experiences which have become excluded from the conscious field are brought back into it.
When the unconscious processes which underlie the symptoms have been assimilated to the conscious life of the patient, the symptoms necessarily disappear, and the patient’s mind gains or regains the “normal” condition. However precious such a cure may be to the patient, and however interesting to the physician, its value to the species has to be judged in relation to the value of the “normal” to which the patient has been restored—that is, in relation to the question as to whether any move, however small, in the direction of an enlargement of the human mind has been made. Until some clearer evidence has been furnished of a capacity for development in this direction the Freudian system should, perhaps, be regarded as more notably a psychology of knowledge than a psychology of power.
It is interesting to notice that in discussing the mechanism of psycho-analysis in liberating the “abnormal” patient from his symptoms, Freud repeatedly lays stress on the fact that the efficient factor in the process is not the actual introduction of the suppressed experiences into the conscious field, but the overcoming of the resistances to such an endeavour. I have attempted to show that these resistances or counter-impulses are of environmental origin, and owe their strength to the specific sensitiveness of the gregarious mind. Resistances of similar type and identical origin are responsible for the formation of the so-called normal type of mind. It is a principal thesis of an earlier essay in this book that this normal type is far from being psychologically healthy, is far from rendering available the full capacity of the mind for foresight and {91} progress, and being in exclusive command of directing power in the world, is a danger to civilization. An investigation of the resistant forces that are encountered by the developing mind is clearly, then, a matter of the utmost importance. They are now allowed to come into being haphazard, and while they undoubtedly contain elements of social value and necessary restraints, they are the products, not of a courageous recognition of facts but of fears, prejudices, and repressed instinctive impulses, and are consolidated by ignorance, indolence, and tribal custom.
The interest of the psycho-analytic school has been turned remarkably little into this field. The speculation may be hazarded that in this direction it might find the sources of a directer power over the human mind, and at least some attenuation of that atmosphere of the consulting-room and the mad-house which does so much to detract from its pretensions to be a psychological system of universal validity.
SOME PRINCIPLES OF A BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY.
The third method by which it has been attempted to attack the problems of psychology is that which I have called the comparative. Its characteristic note is a distrust of that attitude towards phenomena which I have called the human point of view. Man’s description and interpretation of his own mental experience being so liable to distortion by prejudice, by self-esteem, by his views as to his own nature and powers, as well as so incomplete by reason of his incapacity to reach by ordinary introspection the deeper strata of his mind, it becomes necessary to make action as far as possible the subject of observation rather than speech, and to regard it as a touchstone of motive more important than the actor’s own views. The principle {92} may be exemplified in a simple and concrete form. If a given piece of human behaviour bears the closest resemblance to behaviour which is characteristic of the ape, the sheep, or the wolf, the biologist in attempting to arrive at the actual cause will ascribe an importance to this resemblance at least no less than that he will give to any explanation of the action as rational and deliberate which may be furnished by the actor or by his own intelligence.
A second principle of the method will be by a study of the whole range of animal life, and especially of forms whose conduct presents obvious resemblances to that of man, to discover what instinctive impulses may be expected to operate in him.
A third principle will be to search for criteria, whereby instinctive impulses or their derivatives arising in the mind can be distinguished from rational motives, or at any rate motives in which the instinctive factor is minimal. Thus will be furnished for the method the objective standard for the judgment of mental observations which is the one indispensable requirement in all psychological inquiries.
When it is known what types of instinctive mechanisms are to be expected, and under what aspects they will appear in the mind, it is possible to press inquiry into many of the obscurer regions of human behaviour and thought, and to arrive at conclusions which, while they are in harmony with the general body of biological science, have the additional value of being immediately useful in the conduct of affairs.
At the very outset of such researches we are met by an objection which illustrates how different the biological conception of the mind is from that current amongst those whose training has been {93} literary and philosophic. The objection I am thinking of is that of the ordinary intellectualist view of man. According to this we must regard him as essentially a rational creature, subject, it is true, to certain feeble relics of instinctive impulsion, but able to control such without any great expense of will power, irrational at times in an amiable and rather “nice” way, but fundamentally always independent, responsible, and captain of his soul. Most holders of this opinion will of course admit that in a distant and vague enough past man must have been much more definitely an instinctive being, but they regard attempts to trace in modern man any considerable residue of instinctive activities as a tissue of fallacious and superficial analogies, based upon a shallow materialism and an ignorance of the great principles of philosophy or a crudeness which cannot assimilate them.
This objection is an expression of the very characteristic way in which mankind over-estimates the practical functioning of reason in his mind and the influence of civilization on his development. In an earlier essay I have tried to show to how great an extent the average educated man is willing to pronounce decided judgments, all of which he believes himself to have arrived at by the exercise of pure reason, upon the innumerable complex questions of the day. Almost all of them concern highly technical matters upon none of which has he the slightest qualification to pronounce. This characteristic, always obvious enough, has naturally during the war shown the exaggeration so apt to occur in all non-rational processes at a time of general stress. It is not necessary to catalogue the various public functions in regard to which the common citizen finds himself in these days moved to advise and exhort. They are numerous, and for the most part highly technical. Generally the {94} more technical a given matter is, the more vehement and dogmatic is the counsel of the utterly uninstructed counsellor. Even when the questions involved are not especially such as can be dealt with only by the expert, the fact that the essential data are withheld from the public by the authorities renders all this amateur statecraft and generalship more than usually ridiculous. Nevertheless, those who find the materials insufficient for dogmatism and feel compelled to a suspense of judgment are apt to fall under suspicion of the crime of failing to “realize” the seriousness of the war. When it is remembered that the duty of the civilian is in no way concerned with these matters of high technique, while he has very important functions to carry out in maintaining the nation’s strength if he could be brought to take an interest in them, it seems scarcely possible to argue that such conduct is that of a very highly rational being. In reality the objective examination of man’s behaviour, if attention is directed to the facts and not to what the actors think of them, yields at once in every field example after example of similar irrational features.
When the influence of civilization is looked upon as having rendered man’s instincts of altogether secondary importance in modern life, it is plain that such a conclusion involves a misconception of the nature of instinct. This well-worn term has come to have so vague a connotation that some definition of it is necessary. The word “instinct” is used here to denote inherited modes of reaction to bodily need or external stimulus. It is difficult to draw a sharp distinction between instinct and mere reflex action, and an attempt to do so with exact precision is of no particular value. In general we may say that the reactions which should be classed under the head of instinct are delayed (that is, not necessarily carried out with fatal promptitude {95} immediately upon the stimulus), complex (that is, consist of acts rather than mere movements), and may be accompanied by quite elaborate mental processes. In a broad way also it may be said that the mental accompaniments of an instinctive process are for the most part matters of feeling. During the growth of the need or stimulus there will be a desire or inclination which may be quite intense, and yet not definitely focused on any object that is consciously realized; the act itself will be distinguished to the actor by its rightness, obviousness, necessity, or inevitableness, and the sequel of the act will be satisfaction. This mere hint of the psychical manifestations of instinctive activity leaves quite out of account the complex effects which may ensue when two instinctive impulses that have come to be antagonistic reach the mind at the same time. The actual amount of mental activity which accompanies an instinctive process is very variable; it may be quite small, and then the subject of it is reduced to a mere automaton, possessed, as we say, by an ungovernable passion such as panic, lust, or rage; it may be quite large, and sometimes the subject, deceived by his own rationalizations and suppressions, may suppose himself to be a fully rational being in undisputed possession of free will and the mastery of his fate at the very moment when he is showing himself to be a mere puppet dancing to the strings which Nature, unimpressed by his valiant airs, relentlessly and impassively pulls.
The extent of the psychical accompaniments of instinctive activity in civilized man should not, therefore, be allowed to obscure the fact that the instincts are tendencies deeply ingrained in the very structure of his being. They are as necessarily inherited, as much a part of himself, and as essential a condition for the survival of himself and his race, as are the vital organs of his body. {96} Their persistence in him is established and enforced by the effects of millions of years of selection, so that it can scarcely be supposed that a few thousand years of civilized life which have been accompanied by no steady selection against any single instinct can have had any effect whatever in weakening them. The common expression that such an effect has been produced is doubtless due to the great development in civilized man of the mental accompaniments of instinctive processes. These mental phenomena surround the naked reality of the impulse with a cloud of rationalized comment and illusory explanation. The capacity which man possesses for free and rational thought in matters untainted by instinctive inclination is of course indubitable, but he has not realized that there is no obvious mental character attached to propositions having an instinctive basis which should expose them to suspicion. As a matter of fact, it is just those fundamental propositions which owe their origin to instinct which appear to the subject the most obvious, the most axiomatic, and the least liable to doubt by any one but an eccentric or a madman.
It has been customary with certain authors—perhaps especially such as have interested themselves in sociological subjects—to ascribe quite a large number of man’s activities to separate instincts. Very little consideration of most of these propositions shows that they are based upon too lax a definition or a want of analysis, for most of the activities referred to special instincts prove to be derivatives of the great primal instincts which are common to or very widely distributed over the animal kingdom. Man and a very large number of all animals inherit the capacity to respond to physical need or emergency according to the demands which we classify, as the three primary instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and {97} reproduction. If a series of animals of increasing brain power be examined, it will be found that a growth of intelligence, while it does nothing to enfeeble the instinctive impulse, modifies the appearances of it by increasing the number of modes of reaction it may use. Intelligence, that is to say, leaves its possessor no less impelled by instinct than his simpler ancestor, but endows him with the capacity to respond in a larger variety of ways. The response is now no longer directly and narrowly confined to a single path, but may follow a number of indirect and intricate ways; there is no reason, however, to suppose that the impulse is any the weaker for that. To mistake indirectness of response for enfeeblement of impulse is a fundamental error to which all inquiry into the psychology of instinct is liable.
To man his big brain has given a maximal power of various response which enables him to indulge his instinctive impulses in indirect and symbolic activities to a greater extent than any other animal. It is for this reason that the instincts of man are not always obvious in his conduct and have come to be regarded by some as practically no more than vestigial. Indirect modes of response may indeed become so involved as to assume the appearance of the negation of the very instincts of which they are the expression. Thus it comes to be no paradox to say that monks and nuns, ascetics and martyrs, prove the strength of the great primary instincts their existence seems to deny.
Man and a certain number of other species widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom show, in addition to the instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, specialized inherited modes of response to the needs, not directly of the individual but of the herd to which he belongs. These responses, which are perfectly well marked and characteristic, are those of the herd instinct. It is {98} important to grasp clearly the relation of this instinct to the individual. It must be understood that each separate member of a gregarious species inherits characters deeply rooted in his being which effectually differentiate him from any non-gregarious animal. These characters are such that in presence of certain stimuli they will ensure his responding in a specialized way which will be quite different from the response of a solitary animal. The response when examined will be found not necessarily to favour the survival of the individual as such, but to favour his survival as a member of a herd. A very simple example will make this plain. The dog and the cat are our two most familiar examples of the social and the solitary animal respectively. Their different attitudes towards feeding must have been observed by all. The cat takes her food leisurely, without great appearance of appetite and in small amounts at a time; the dog is voracious and will eat hurriedly as much as he can get, growling anxiously if he is approached. In doing so he is expressing a deeply ingrained characteristic. His attitude towards food was built up when he hunted in packs and to get a share of the common kill had to snatch what came in his way and gulp it down before it could be taken from him. In slang which has a sound biological basis we say he “wolfs” his food. When in domestication his food supply is no longer limited in the primitive way, his instinctive tendency persists; he is typically greedy and will kill himself by overeating if he is allowed to. Here we have a perfect instance of an instinctive response being disadvantageous to the survival of the individual as such, and favouring his survival only as a member of a herd. This example, trivial as it may seem, is worthy of close study. It shows that the individual of the gregarious species, as an individual and in {99} isolation, possesses indelible marks of character which effectually distinguish him from all solitary animals.