The same principle applies with equal force to man. Whether he is alone or in company, a hermit philosopher or a mere unit of a mob, his responses will bear the same stamp of being regulated by the existence and influence of his fellows.
The foregoing considerations, elementary and incomplete as they are, suggest that there is a strong prima facie case for rejecting the common conceptions that man is among animals the least endowed with an inheritance of instinct, and that civilization has produced in him profound modifications in his primitive instinctive impulses. If the conception which I have put forward be correct, namely, that man is not at all less subject to instinctive impulsions than any other animal but disguises the fact from the observer and from himself by the multiplicity of the lines of response his mental capacity enables him to take, it should follow that his conduct is much less truly variable and much more open to generalization than has generally been supposed. Should this be possible, it would enable the biologist to study the actual affairs of mankind in a really practical way, to analyse the tendencies of social development, to discover how deeply or superficially they were based in the necessity of things, and above all, to foretell their course. Thus might be founded a true science of politics which would be of direct service to the statesman.
Many attempts have been made to apply biological principles to the interpretation of history and the guidance of statecraft, especially since the popularization of the principles associated with the name of Darwin. Such attempts have generally been undertaken less in the spirit of the scientific {100} investigator than in that of the politician; the point of departure has been a political conviction and not a biological truth; and as might be expected, when there has been any conflict between political conviction and biological truth it is the latter that has had to give way. Work of this kind has brought the method into deserved contempt by its crudity, its obvious subservience to prejudice, and its pretentious gestures of the doctrinaire. England has not been without her examples of these scientific politicians and historians, but they cannot be said to have flourished here as they have in the more scholastic air of Germany. The names of several such are now notorious in this country and their works are sufficiently familiar for it to be obvious that their claims to scientific value do not admit of discussion. It is not necessary to consider their conclusions, they are condemned by their manner; and however interesting their political vociferation may be to fellow-patriots, it plainly has no meaning whatsoever as science. In face of the spectacle presented by these leather-lunged doctrinaires, it needs some little hardihood to maintain that it is possible profitably to apply biological principle to the consideration of human affairs; nevertheless, that is an essential thesis of this essay.
In attempting to illuminate the records of history by the principles of biology, an essential difficulty is the difference of scale in time upon which these two departments of knowledge work. Historical events are confined within a few thousands of years, the biological record covers many millions; it is scarcely to be expected, therefore, that even a gross movement on the cramped historical scale will be capable of detection in the vast gulf of time the biological series represents. A minor difficulty is the fact that the data of history come to us through a dense and reduplicated veil of human {101} interpretation, whereas the biological facts are comparatively free from this kind of obscuration. The former obstacle is undoubtedly serious. It is to be remarked, however, that there is strong reason to suppose that the process of organic evolution has not been and is not always infinitely slow and gradual. It is more than suspected that, perhaps as the result of slowly accumulated tendency or perhaps as the result of a sudden variation of structure or capacity, there have been periods of rapid change which might have been perceptible to direct observation. The infinitely long road still tending upwards comes to where it branches and meets another path, tending perhaps downwards or even upwards at a different slope. May not the meeting or branching form, as it were, a node in the infinite line, a resting place for the eye, a point in the vast extension capable of recognition by a finite mind and of expression in terms of human affairs? It is the belief of the writer that the human race stands at such a nodal point to-day.
THE BIOLOGY OF GREGARIOUSNESS.
In order to set forth the evidence on which is based the conclusion that the present juncture of affairs is not merely, as it very obviously is, a meeting-place of epochs in the historical series, but also marks a stage in the biological series which will prove to have been a moment of destiny in the evolution of the human species, it will be necessary to inquire somewhat closely into the biological meaning of the social habit in animals. In an earlier essay certain speculations in the same subject were indulged, and a certain amount of repetition will be necessary. The point of view then taken up, however, was different from that from which I shall now attempt to review the facts. Then the main {102} interest lay in an examination of the meaning of gregariousness for the individual mind, and although reasons enough were found for uneasiness at the course of events, and at the instability of civilization which any radical examination displayed, the inquiry was not pursued under any immediate imminence of disaster to the social fabric as it must be now. Naturally, therefore, at the present time certain aspects of the subject which before were of no special relevance become of great importance and demand close examination.
In a general view of the social habit in animals certain outstanding facts are readily to be observed. It is of wide distribution and sporadic occurrence, it varies much in the completeness of its development, and there seems to be an inverse relation between its completeness and the brain power of the animal concerned.
From the wideness of its distribution the social habit may be supposed to represent a forward step in complexity which comes about readily. It has the appearance of being upon a path which species have a natural tendency to follow, a line of evolution which is perhaps rendered possible by constantly occurring small variations common to all animals and taken advantage of only under certain circumstances of pressure or increase. It seems not to depend on any sudden large variation of type, and such is not necessary to account for it. It differs from many other modifications which we know animal life to have undergone in being immediately useful to the species from its very beginning and in its least perfect forms. Once started, however imperfectly, the new habit will have a natural tendency to progress towards fuller forms of sociality by reason of special selective forces which it inevitably sets going. The fact that it is valuable to the species in which it develops even in its most larval forms, {103} combined with its tendency to progress, no doubt accounts for the wonderful series of all degrees of gregariousness which the field of natural history presents.
I have pointed out elsewhere that the fundamental biological meaning of gregariousness is that it allows of an indefinite enlargement of the unit upon which the undifferentiated influence of natural selection is allowed to act, so that the individual merged in the larger unit is shielded from the immediate effects of natural selection and is exposed directly only to the special form of selection which obtains within the new unit.
There seems little doubt that this sheltering of the individual allows him to vary and to undergo modifications with a freedom which would have been dangerous to him as an isolated being, but is safe under the new conditions and valuable to the new unit of which he now is a part.
In essence the significance of the passage from the solitary to the gregarious seems to be closely similar to that of the passage from the unicellular to the multicellular organism—an enlargement of the unit exposed to natural selection, a shielding of the individual cell from that pressure, an endowment of it with freedom to vary and specialize in safety.
Nature has thus made two great experiments of the same type, and if one be reasonably careful to avoid arguing from analogy, it is possible to use one case to illuminate the other by furnishing hints as to what mechanisms may be looked for and in what directions inquiry may profitably be pursued.
The sporadic occurrence of gregariousness at widely separated points of the animal field—in man and sheep, in ant and elephant—inclines one to suppose that multicellularity must have arisen also at multiple points, and that the metazoa did not arise from the protozoa by a single line of descent. It {104} suggests also that there is some inherent property in mobile living organisms that makes combination of individuals into larger units a more or less inevitable course of development under certain circumstances and without any gross variation being necessary to initiate it. The complex evolution which multicellularity made possible, and perhaps enforced, can scarcely fail to make one wonder whether the gregarious animal has not entered upon a path which must of necessity lead to increasing complexity and co-ordination, to a more and more stringent intensity of integration or to extinction.
The varying degrees to which the social habit has developed among different animals provide a very interesting branch of study. The class of insects is remarkable in furnishing an almost inexhaustible variety of stages to which the instinct is developed. Of these that reached by the humble bee, with its small, weak families, is a familiar example of a low grade; that of the wasp, with its colonies large and strong, but unable to survive the winter, is another of more developed type; while that of the honey bee represents a very high grade of development in which the instinct seems to have completed its cycle and yielded to the hive the maximum advantages of which it is capable. In the honey bee, then, the social instinct may be said to be complete.
It is necessary to examine somewhat closely into what is denoted by the completeness or otherwise of the social habit in a given species.
To return for a moment to the case of the change from the unicellular to the multicellular, it is obvious that in the new unit, to get the full advantage of the change there must be specialization involving both loss and gain to the individual cell; one loses power of digestion and gains a special sensitiveness to stimulation, another loses locomotion {105} to gain digestion, and so forth in innumerable series as the new unit becomes more complex. Inherent, however, in the new mechanism is the need for co-ordination if the advantages of specialization are to be obtained. The necessity of a nervous system—if progress is to be maintained—early becomes obvious, and it is equally clear that the primary function of the nervous system is to facilitate co-ordination. Thus it would seem that the individual cell incorporated in a larger unit must possess a capacity for specialization, the ability to originate new methods of activity, and a capacity for response—that is, the ability to limit itself to action co-ordinated suitably to the interests of the new unit rather than to those that would have been its own if it had been a free unit in itself. Specialization and co-ordination will be the two necessary conditions for success of the larger unit, and advance in complexity will be possible as long only as these two are unexhausted. Neither, of course, will be of avail without the other. The richest specialization will be of no good if it cannot be controlled to the uses of the whole organism, and the most perfect control of the individual cells will be incapable of ensuring progress if it has no material of original variation to work on.
The analogy is helpful in the consideration of the mechanisms brought into play by the social habit. The community of the honey bee bears a close resemblance to the body of a complex animal. The capacity for actual structural specialization of the individuals in the interests of the hive has been remarkable and has gone far, while at the same time co-ordination has been stringently enforced, so that each individual is actually absorbed into the community, expends all its activities therein, and when excluded from it is almost as helpless as a part of the naked flesh of an animal {106} detached from its body. The hive may, in fact, without any very undue stretch of fantasy, be described as an animal of which all the individual cells have retained the power of locomotion. When one watches the flight of a swarm of bees its unanimity and directness very easily produce the illusion that one is witnessing the migration of a single animal usually sedentary but at times capable of undertaking journeys with a formidable and successful energy. This new animal differs from the other animals of the metazoa which it has outdistanced in the race of evolution, not merely in its immense power, energy, and flexibility, but also in the almost startling fact that it has recovered the gift of immortality which seemed to have been lost with its protozoal ancestors.
The extent to which the hive makes use of the powers of its individuals is the measure of the completeness with which the social habit is developed in it. The worker bee has practically no activities which are not directly devoted to the hive, and yet she goes about her ceaseless tasks in a way that never fails to impress the observer with its exuberant energy and even its appearance of joyfulness. It is thought that the average worker bee works herself to death in about two months. That is a fact which can scarcely fail to arouse, even in the least imaginative, at any rate a moment of profound contemplation.
If we could suppose her to be conscious in the human sense, we must imagine the bee to be possessed by an enthusiasm for the hive more intense than a mother’s devotion to her son, without personal ambitions, or doubts or fears, and if we are to judge by the imperfect experience man has yet had of the same lofty passion, we must think of her consciousness, insignificant spark as it is, as a little fire ablaze with altruistic feeling. Doubtless, such {107} an attribution of emotion to the bee is a quite unjustified fallacy of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, it is not altogether valueless as a hint of what social unity might effect in an animal of larger mental life. There can be little doubt that the perfection to which the communal life of the bee has attained is dependent on the very smallness of the mental development of which the individuals are capable. Their capacity to assimilate experience is necessarily from their structure, and is known by experience to be, small and their path is marked out so plainly by actual physical modifications that the almost miraculous absorption of the worker in the hive is after all perhaps natural enough. If she were able to assimilate general experience on a larger scale, to react freely and appropriately to stimuli external to the hive, there can be little doubt that the community would show a less concentrated efficiency than it does to-day. The standing miracle of the bee—her sensitiveness to the voice of the hive and her capacity to communicate with her fellows—would undoubtedly be less marvellously perfect if she were not at the same time deaf to all other voices.
When we come to consider animals in which the anatomist can recognize a brain and the psychologist an individual mind, the types of gregariousness we meet with are found to have lost the magnificent intensity of the bee. This decline in intensity seems to be due to the greatly increased variety of reaction of which the individual is capable. The gregarious mammalia are most of them relatively intelligent, they are capable of assimilating experience to a certain extent and have a definite capacity for individual existence. In them the social habit shows comparatively little tendency to a gradual intensification, but is a more static condition. Doubtless, there are other conditions {108} which also limit it. For example, the slowness of multiplication and fixity of structure in the mammalia obviously deprive them of the possibility of undergoing a continuous social integration as the insects have. Be this as it may, we find in them the social habit but little or scarcely at all expressed in physical specialization but shown as a deeply ingrained mental character which profoundly influences their habits and their modes of reaction to bodily and external impressions. Among the mammalia other than man and possibly apes and monkeys, gregariousness is found in two broadly distinguishable types according to the function it subserves. It may be either protective as in the sheep, the deer, the ox, and the horse, or aggressive as in the wolf and allied animals. In both forms it will involve certain common types of capacity, while the distinguishing characteristic of each will be a special kind of reaction to certain stimuli. It is important to understand that these peculiarities are possessed by each individual of the larger unit, and will be displayed by him in a characteristic way whether he is in the company of his fellows or not. It is not necessary to repeat here in any detail the characters of the gregarious mammal. They have been dealt with in an earlier essay, but it is desirable to emphasize here certain features of exceptional importance and some which were but little discussed before.
The quite fundamental characteristic of the social mammal, as of the bee, is sensitiveness to the voice of his fellows. He must have the capacity to react fatally and without hesitation to an impression coming to him from the herd, and he must react in a totally different way to impressions coming to him from without. In the presence of danger his first motion must be, not to fly or to attack as the case may be, but to notify the herd. This characteristic is beautifully demonstrated in the low {109} growl a dog will give at the approach of a stranger. This is obviously in no way part of the dog’s programme of attack upon his enemy—when his object is intimidation he bursts into barking—but his first duty is to put the pack on its guard. Similarly the start of the sheep is a notification and precedes any motion of flight.
In order that the individual shall be sensitive in a special degree to the voice of the herd, he must have developed in him an infallible capacity for recognizing his fellow-members. In the lower mammalia this seems almost exclusively a function of the sense of smell, as is natural enough since that sense is as a general rule highly developed in them. The domestic dog shows admirably the importance of the function of recognition in his species. Comparatively few recognize even their masters at any distance by sight or sound, while obviously with their fellows they are practically dependent on smell. The extent to which the ceremonial of recognition has developed in the dog is, of course, very familiar to every one. It shows unmistakable evidence of the rudiments of social organization, and is not the less illuminating to the student of human society for having a bodily orientation and technique which at first sight obscures its resemblance to similar, and it is supposed more dignified, mechanisms in man.
Specialization fitting the animal for social life is obviously in certain directions restrictive; that is, it denies him certain capacities and immunities which the solitary animal possesses; equally obviously is it in certain directions expansive and does it confer qualities on the social which the solitary does not possess. Among qualities of restrictive specialization are inability to live satisfactorily apart from the herd or some substitute for it, the liability to loneliness, a dependence on leadership, custom, and tradition, a {110} credulity towards the dogmas of the herd and an unbelief towards external experience, a standard of conduct no longer determined by personal needs but influenced by a power outside the ego—a conscience, in fact, and a sense of sin—a weakness of personal initiative and a distrust of its promptings. Expansive specialization, on the other hand, gives the gregarious animal the sense of power and security in the herd, the capacity to respond to the call of the herd with a maximum output of energy and endurance, a deep-seated mental satisfaction in unity with the herd, and a solution in it of personal doubts and fears.
All these characters can be traced in an animal such as the dog. The mere statement of them, necessarily in mental terms, involves the liability to a certain inexactitude if it is not recognized that no hypothesis as to the consciousness of the dog is assumed but that the description in mental terms is given because of its convenient brevity. An objective description of the actual conduct on which such summarized statements are founded would be impossibly voluminous.
The advantage the new unit obtains by aggressive gregariousness is chiefly its immense accession of strength as a hunting and fighting organism. Protective gregariousness confers on the flock or herd advantages perhaps less obvious but certainly not less important. A very valuable gain is the increased efficiency of vigilance which is possible. Such efficiency depends on the available number of actual watchers and the exquisite sensitiveness of the herd and all its members to the signals of such sentries. No one can have watched a herd of sheep for long without being impressed with the delicacy with which a supposed danger is detected, transmitted throughout the herd, and met {111} by an appropriate movement. Another advantage enjoyed by the new unit is a practical solution of the difficulties incident upon the emotion of fear. Fear is essentially an enfeebling passion, yet in the sheep and such animals it is necessarily developed to a high degree in the interests of safety. The danger of this specialization is neutralized by the implication of so large a part of the individual’s personality in the herd and outside of himself. Alarm becomes a passion, as it were, of the herd rather than of the individual, and the appropriate response by the individual is to an impulse received from the herd and not directly from the actual object of alarm. It seems to be in this way that the paralysing emotion of fear is held back from the individual, while its effect can reach him only as the active and formidable passion of panic. The gregarious herbivora are in fact timid but not fearful animals. All the various mechanisms in which the social habit shows itself apparently have as their general function a maximal sensitiveness to danger of the herd as a whole, combined with maintaining with as little interruption as possible an atmosphere of calm within the herd, so that the individual members can occupy themselves in the serious business of grazing. It must be doubted whether a truly herbivorous animal of a solitary habit could ever flourish when we remember how incessant must be his industry in feeding if he is to be properly nourished, and how much such an occupation will be interfered with by the constant alarms he must be subject to if he is to escape the attacks of carnivorous enemies. The evidence suggests that protective gregariousness is a more elaborate manifestation of the social habit than the aggressive form. It is clear that the security of the higher herbivora, such as the ox and especially the horse and their allies, is considerable in relation to the carnivora. One may {112} permissibly perhaps indulge the speculation that in the absence of man the horse possibly might have developed a greater complexity of organization than it has actually been able to attain; that the facts should seem to contain this hint is a curious testimony to the wonderful constructive imagination of Swift.
Setting aside such guesses and confining ourselves to the facts, we may say in summary that we find the infrahuman mammalia to present two distinctly separable strains of the social habit. Both are of great value to the species in which they appear, and both are associated with certain fundamentally similar types of reactive capacity which give a general resemblance of character to all gregarious animals. Of the two forms the protective is perhaps capable of absorbing more fully the personality of the individual than is the aggressive, but both seem to have reached the limit of their intensification at a grade far lower than that which has been attained in the insects.
CHARACTERS OF THE GREGARIOUS ANIMAL DISPLAYED BY MAN.
When we come to consider man we find ourselves faced at once by some of the most interesting problems in the biology of the social habit. It is probably not necessary now to labour the proof of the fact that man is a gregarious animal in literal fact, that he is as essentially gregarious as the bee and the ant, the sheep, the ox, and the horse. The tissue of characteristically gregarious reactions which his conduct presents furnishes incontestable proof of this thesis, which is thus an indispensable clue to an inquiry into the intricate problems of human society.
It is desirable perhaps to enumerate in a summary {113} way the more obvious gregarious characters which man displays.
1. He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental. This intolerance is the cause of the mental fixity and intellectual incuriousness which, to a remarkable degree for an animal with so capacious a brain, he constantly displays. As is well known, the resistance to a new idea is always primarily a matter of prejudice, the development of intellectual objections, just or otherwise, being a secondary process in spite of the common delusion to the contrary. This intimate dependence on the herd is traceable not merely in matters physical and intellectual, but also betrays itself in the deepest recesses of personality as a sense of incompleteness which compels the individual to reach out towards some larger existence than his own, some encompassing being in whom his perplexities may find a solution and his longings peace. Physical loneliness and intellectual isolation are effectually solaced by the nearness and agreement of the herd. The deeper personal necessities cannot be met—at any rate, in such society as has so far been evolved—by so superficial a union; the capacity for intercommunication is still too feebly developed to bring the individual into complete and soul-satisfying harmony with his fellows, to convey from one to another
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped.
Religious feeling is therefore a character inherent in the very structure of the human mind, and is the expression of a need which must be recognized by the biologist as neither superficial nor transitory. It must be admitted that some philosophers and {114} men of science have at times denied to the religious impulses of man their true dignity and importance. Impelled perhaps by a desire to close the circle of a materialistic conception of the universe, they have tended to belittle the significance of such phenomena as they were unable to reconcile with their principles and bring within the iron circle of their doctrine. To deal with religion in this way has not only been an outrage upon true scientific method, but has always led to a strong reaction in general opinion against any radical inquiry by science into the deeper problems of man’s nature and status. A large and energetic reaction of this kind prevails to-day. There can be little doubt that it was precipitated, if not provoked, by attempts to force a harsh and dogmatic materialism into the status of a general philosophy. As long as such a system is compelled to ignore, to depreciate, or to deny the reality of such manifestly important phenomena as the altruistic emotions, the religious needs and feelings, the experiences of awe and wonder and beauty, the illumination of the mystic, the rapture of the prophet, the unconquerable endurance of the martyr, so long must it fail in its claims to universality. It is therefore necessary to lay down with the strongest emphasis the proposition that the religious needs and feelings of man are a direct and necessary manifestation of the inheritance of instinct with which he is born, and therefore deserve consideration as respectful and observation as minute as any other biological phenomenon.
2. He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and can as easily take these away. {115} It can make him acquiese in his own punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is in this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man. That a creature of strong appetites and luxurious desires should come to tolerate uncomplainingly his empty belly, his chattering teeth, his naked limbs, and his hard bed is miracle enough. What are we to say of a force which, when he is told by the full-fed and well-warmed that his state is the more blessed can make him answer, “How beautiful! How true!” In the face of so effectual a negation, not merely of experience and common sense but also of actual hunger and privation, it is not possible to set any limits to the power of the herd over the individual.
3. He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and the passions of the herd in his panics. These activities are by no means limited to the outbursts of actual crowds, but are to be seen equally clearly in the hue and cry of newspapers and public after some notorious criminal or scapegoat, and in the success of scaremongering by the same agencies.
4. He is remarkably susceptible to leadership. This quality in man may very naturally be thought to have a basis essentially rational rather than instinctive if its manifestations are not regarded with a special effort to attain an objective attitude. How thoroughly reasonable it appears that a body of men seeking a common object should put themselves under the guidance of some strong and expert {116} personality who can point out the path most profitably to be pursued, who can hearten his followers and bring all their various powers into a harmonious pursuit of the common object. The rational basis of the relation is, however, seen to be at any rate open to discussion when we consider the qualities in a leader upon which his authority so often rests, for there can be little doubt that their appeal is more generally to instinct than to reason. In ordinary politics it must be admitted that the gift of public speaking is of more decisive value than anything else. If a man is fluent, dextrous, and ready on the platform, he possesses the one indispensable requisite for statesmanship; if in addition he has the gift of moving deeply the emotions of his hearers, his capacity for guiding the infinite complexities of national life becomes undeniable. Experience has shown that no exceptional degree of any other capacity is necessary to make a successful leader. There need be no specially arduous training, no great weight of knowledge either of affairs or the human heart, no receptiveness to new ideas, no outlook into reality. Indeed, the mere absence of such seems to be an advantage; for originality is apt to appear to the people as flightiness, scepticism as feebleness, caution as doubt of the great political principles that may happen at the moment to be immutable. The successful shepherd thinks like his sheep, and can lead his flock only if he keeps no more than the shortest distance in advance. He must remain, in fact, recognizable as one of the flock, magnified no doubt, louder, coarser, above all with more urgent wants and ways of expression than the common sheep, but in essence to their feeling of the same flesh with them. In the human herd the necessity of the leader bearing unmistakable marks of identification is equally essential. Variations from the normal standard in intellectual matters are tolerated {117} if they are not very conspicuous, for man has never yet taken reason very seriously, and can still look upon intellectuality as not more than a peccadillo if it is not paraded conspicuously; variations from the moral standard are, however, of a much greater significance as marks of identification, and when they become obvious, can at once change a great and successful leader into a stranger and an outcast, however little they may seem to be relevant to the adequate execution of his public work. If a leader’s marks of identity with the herd are of the right kind, the more they are paraded the better. We like to see photographs of him nursing his little grand-daughter, we like to know that he plays golf badly, and rides the bicycle like our common selves, we enjoy hearing of “pretty incidents” in which he has given the blind crossing-sweeper a penny or begged a glass of water at a wayside cottage—and there are excellent biological reasons for our gratification.
In times of war leadership is not less obviously based on instinct, though naturally, since the herd is exposed to a special series of stresses, manifestations of it are also somewhat special. A people at war feels the need of direction much more intensely than a people at peace, and as always they want some one who appeals to their instinctive feeling of being directed, comparatively regardless of whether he is able in fact to direct. This instinctive feeling inclines them to the choice of a man who presents at any rate the appearance and manners of authority and power rather than to one who possesses the substance of capacity but is denied the shadow. They have their conventional pictures of the desired type—the strong, silent, relentless, the bold, outspoken, hard, and energetic—but at all costs he must be a “man,” a “leader who can lead,” a shepherd, in fact, who, by his gesticulations and {118} his shouts, leaves his flock in no doubt as to his presence and his activity. It is touching to remember how often a people in pursuit of this ideal has obtained and accepted in response to its prayers nothing but melodramatic bombast, impatience, rashness, and foolish, boasting truculence; and to remember how often a great statesman in his country’s need has had to contend not merely with her foreign enemies, but with those at home whose vociferous malignity has declared his magnanimous composure to be sluggishness, his cautious scepticism to be feebleness, and his unostentatious resolution to be stupidity.
5. His relations with his fellows are dependent upon the recognition of him as a member of the herd. It is important to the success of a gregarious species that individuals should be able to move freely within the large unit while strangers are excluded. Mechanisms to secure such personal recognition are therefore a characteristic feature of the social habit. The primitive olfactory greeting common to so many of the lower animals was doubtless rendered impossible for man by his comparative loss of the sense of smell long before it ceased to accord with his pretensions, yet in a thriving active species the function of recognition was as necessary as ever. Recognition by vision could be of only limited value, and it seems probable that speech very early became the accepted medium. Possibly the necessity to distinguish friend from foe was one of the conditions which favoured the development of articulate speech. Be this as it may, speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition. As is usual with instinctive activities in man, the actual state of affairs is concealed by a deposit of rationalized explanation which is apt to discourage merely superficial inquiry. The function of conversation is, it is to be supposed, ordinarily regarded {119} as being the exchange of ideas and information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the two speakers, and are known to be so by each. The process, however, is none the less satisfactory for this; indeed, it seems even to derive its satisfactoriness therefrom. The interchange of the conventional lead and return is obviously very far from being tedious or meaningless to the interlocutors. They can, however, have derived nothing from it but the confirmation to one another of their sympathy and of the class or classes to which they belong.
Conversations of greeting are naturally particularly rich in the exchange of purely ceremonial remarks, ostensibly based on some subject like the weather, in which there must necessarily be an absolute community of knowledge. It is possible, however, for a long conversation to be made up entirely of similar elements, and to contain no trace of any conveyance of new ideas; such intercourse is probably that which on the whole is most satisfactory to the “normal” man and leaves him more comfortably stimulated than would originality or brilliance, or any other manifestation of the strange and therefore of the disreputable.
Conversation between persons unknown to one another is also—when satisfactory—apt to be rich in the ritual of recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack {120} and must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar manœuvres of the dog, and to be thankful that Nature has provided us with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code.
It may appear that we have been dealing here with a far-fetched and laboured analogy, and making much of a comparison of trivialities merely for the sake of compromising, if that could be done, human pretensions to reason. To show that the marvel of human communion began, perhaps, as a very humble function, and yet retains traces of its origin, is in no way to minimize the value or dignity of the more fully developed power. The capacity for free intercommunication between individuals of the species has meant so much in the evolution of man, and will certainly come in the future to mean so incalculably more, that it cannot be regarded as anything less than a master element in the shaping of his destiny.
SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE SOCIAL HABIT IN MAN.
It is apparent after very little consideration that the extent of man’s individual mental development is a factor which has produced many novel characters in his manifestations of the social habit, and has even concealed to a great extent the profound influence this instinct has in regulating his conduct, his thought, and his society.
Large mental capacity in the individual, as we have already seen, has the effect of providing a wide freedom of response to instinctive impulses, so that, while the individual is no less impelled by instinct than a more primitive type, the manifestations of these impulses in his conduct are very varied, and his conduct loses the appearance of a {121} narrow concentration on its instinctive object. It needs only to pursue this reasoning to a further stage to reach the conclusion that mental capacity, while in no way limiting the impulsive power of instinct, may, by providing an infinite number of channels into which the impulse is free to flow, actually prevent the impulse from attaining the goal of its normal object. In the ascetic the sex instinct is defeated, in the martyr that of self-preservation, not because these instincts have been abolished, but because the activity of the mind has found new channels for them to flow in. As might be expected, the much more labile herd instinct has been still more subject to this deflection and dissipation without its potential impulsive strength being in any way impaired. It is this process which has enabled primitive psychology so largely to ignore the fact that man still is, as much as ever, endowed with a heritage of instinct and incessantly subject to its influence. Man’s mental capacity, again, has enabled him as a species to flourish enormously, and thereby to increase to a prodigious extent the size of the unit in which the individual is merged. The nation, if the term be used to describe every organization under a completely independent, supreme government, must be regarded as the smallest unit on which natural selection now unrestrictedly acts. Between such units there is free competition, and the ultimate regulator of these relations is physical force. This statement needs the qualification that the delimitation between two given units may be much sharper than that between two others, so that in the first case the resort to force is likely to occur readily, while in the second case it will be brought about only by the very ultimate necessity. The tendency to the enlargement of the social unit has been going on with certain temporary relapses throughout human history. {122} Though repeatedly checked by the instability of the larger units, it has always resumed its activity, so that it should probably be regarded as a fundamental biological drift the existence of which is a factor which must always be taken into account in dealing with the structure of human society.
The gregarious mind shows certain characteristics which throw some light on this phenomenon of the progressively enlarging unit. The gregarious animal is different from the solitary in the capacity to become conscious in a special way of the existence of other creatures. This specific consciousness of his fellows carries with it a characteristic element of communion with them. The individual knows another individual of the same herd as a partaker in an entity of which he himself is a part, so that the second individual is in some way and to a certain extent identical with himself and part of his own personality. He is able to feel with the other and share his pleasures and sufferings as if they were an attenuated form of his own personal experiences. The degree to which this assimilation of the interests of another person is carried depends, in a general way, on the extent of the intercommunication between the two. In human society a man’s interest in his fellows is distributed about him concentrically according to a compound of various relations they bear to him which we may call in a broad way their nearness. The centrifugal fading of interest is seen when we compare the man’s feeling towards one near to him with his feeling towards one farther off. He will be disposed, other things being equal, to sympathize with a relative as against a fellow-townsman, with a fellow-townsman as against a mere inhabitant of the same county, with the latter as against the rest of the country, with an Englishman as against a European, with a European as against an Asiatic, and so on until a limit is reached beyond {123} which all human interest is lost. The distribution of interest is of course never purely geographical, but is modified by, for example, trade and professional sympathy, and by special cases of intercommunication which bring topographically distant individuals into a closer grade of feeling than their mere situation would demand. The essential principle, however, is that the degree of sympathy with a given individual varies directly with the amount of intercommunication with him. The capacity to assimilate the interests of another individual with one’s own, to allow him, as it were, to partake in one’s own personality, is what is called altruism, and might equally well perhaps be called expansive egoism. It is a characteristic of the gregarious animal, and is a perfectly normal and necessary development in him of his instinctive inheritance.
Altruism is a quality the understanding of which has been much obscured by its being regarded from the purely human point of view. Judged from this standpoint, it has been apt to appear as a breach in the supposedly “immutable” laws of “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as a virtue breathed into man from some extra-human source, or as a weakness which must be stamped out of any race which is to be strong, expanding, and masterful. To the biologist these views are equally false, superfluous, and romantic. He is aware that altruism occurs only in a medium specifically protected from the unqualified influence of natural selection, that it is the direct outcome of instinct, and that it is a source of strength because it is a source of union.
In recent times, freedom of travel, and the development of the resources rendered available by education, have increased the general mass of intercommunication to an enormous extent. Side by side with this, altruism has come more and more into recognition as a supreme moral law. There is {124} already a strong tendency to accept selfishness as a test of sin, and consideration for others as a test of virtue, and this has influenced even those who by public profession are compelled to maintain that right and wrong are to be defined only in terms of an arbitrary extra-natural code.
Throughout the incalculable ages of man’s existence as a social animal, Nature has been hinting to him in less and less ambiguous terms that altruism must become the ultimate sanction of his moral code. Her whispers have never gained more than grudging and reluctant notice from the common man, and from those intensified forms of the common man, his pastors and masters. Only to the alert senses of moral genius has the message been at all intelligible, and when it has been interpreted to the people it has always been received with obloquy and derision, with persecution and martyrdom. Thus, as so often happens in human society, has one manifestation of herd instinct been met and opposed by another.
As intercommunication tends constantly to widen the field of action of altruism, a point is reached when the individual becomes capable of some kind of sympathy, however attenuated, with beings outside the limits of the biological unit within which the primitive function of altruism lies. This extension is perhaps possible only in man. In a creature like the bee the rigidly limited mental capacity of the individual and the closely organized society of the hive combine to make the boundary of the hive correspond closely with the uttermost limit of the field over which altruism is active. The bee, capable of great sympathy and understanding in regard to her fellow-members of the hive, is utterly callous and without understanding in regard to any creature of external origin and existence. Man, however, with his infinitely greater capacity for assimilating {125} experience, has not been able to maintain the rigid limitation of sympathy to the unit, the boundaries of which tend to acquire a certain indefiniteness not seen in any of the lower gregarious types.
Hence tends to appear a sense of international justice, a vague feeling of being responsibly concerned in all human affairs and by a natural consequence the ideas and impulses denoted under the term “pacifism.”
One of the most natural and obvious consequences of war is a hardening of the boundaries of the social unit and a retraction of the vague feelings towards international sympathy which are a characteristic product of peace and intercommunication. Thus it comes about that pacifism and internationalism are in great disgrace at the present time; they are regarded as the vapourings of cranky windbags who have inevitably been punctured at the first touch of the sword; they are, our political philosophers tell us, but products of the miasm of sentimental fallacy which tends to be bred in the relaxing atmosphere of peace. Perhaps no general expressions have been more common since the beginning of the war, in the mouths of those who have undertaken our instruction in the meaning of events, than the propositions that pacifism is now finally exploded and shown always to have been nonsense, that war is and always will be an inevitable necessity in human affairs as man is what is called a fighting animal, and that not only is the abolition of war an impossibility, but should the abolition of it unhappily prove to be possible after all and be accomplished, the result could only be degeneration and disaster.
Biological considerations would seem to suggest that these generalizations contain a large element of inexactitude. The doctrine of pacifism is {126} a perfectly natural development, and ultimately inevitable in an animal having an unlimited appetite for experience and an indestructible inheritance of social instinct. Like all moral discoveries made in the haphazard, one-sided way which the lack of co-ordination in human society forces upon its moral pioneers, it has necessarily an appearance of crankiness, of sentimentality, of an inaptitude for the grasp of reality. This is normal and does not in the least affect the value of the truth it contains. Legal and religious torture were doubtless first attacked by cranks; slavery was abolished by them. Advocacy by such types does not therefore constitute an argument of any weight against their doctrines, which can adequately be judged only by some purely objective standard. Judged by such a standard, pacifism, as we have seen, appears to be a natural development, and is directed towards a goal which unless man’s nature undergoes a radical change will probably be attained. That its attainment has so far been foreseen only by a class of men possessing more than the usual impracticability of the minor prophet is hardly to be considered a relevant fact.
It is impossible to leave this subject without some comment on the famous doctrine that war is a biological necessity. Even if one knew nothing of those who have enunciated this proposition, its character would enable one to suspect it of being the utterance of a soldier rather than a biologist. There is about it a confidence that the vital effects of war are simple and easy to define and a cheerful contempt for the considerable biological difficulties of the subject that remind one of the bracing military atmosphere, in which a word of command is the supreme fact, rather than that of the laboratory, {127} where facts are the masters of all. It may be supposed that even in the country of its birth the doctrine seemed more transcendently true in times of peace amid a proud and brilliant regime than it does now after more than twelve months of war. The whole conception is of a type to arouse interest in its psychological origin rather than in a serious discussion of its merits. It arose in a military State abounding in prosperity and progress of very recent growth, and based upon three short wars which had come closely one after another and formed an ascending series of brilliant success. In such circumstances even grosser assumptions might very well flourish and some such doctrine was a perfectly natural product. The situation of the warrior-biologist was in some way that of the orthodox expounder of ethics or political economy—his conclusions were ready-made for him; all he had to do was to find the “reasons” for them. War and war only had produced the best and greatest and strongest State—indeed, the only State worthy of the name; therefore war is the great creative and sustaining force of States, or the universe is a mere meaningless jumble of accidents. If only wars would always conform to the original Prussian pattern, as they did in the golden age from 1864 to 1870—the unready adversary, the few pleasantly strenuous weeks or months, the thumping indemnity! That is the sort of biological necessity one can understand. But twelve months of agonizing, indecisive effort in Poland and Russia and France, might have made the syllogism a little less perfect, the new law of Nature not quite so absolute.
These matters, however, are quite apart from the practical question whether war is a necessity to maintain the efficiency and energy of nations and to prevent them sinking into sloth and degeneracy. The {128} problem may be stated in another form. When we take a comprehensive survey of the natural history of man—using that term to include the whole of his capacities, activities, and needs, physical, intellectual, moral—do we find that war is the indispensable instrument whereby his survival and progress as a species are maintained? We are assuming in this statement that progress or increased elaboration is to continue to be a necessary tendency in his course by which his fate, through the action of inherited needs, powers, and weaknesses, and of external pressure is irrevocably conditioned. The assumption, though commonly made, is by no means obviously true. Some of the evidence justifying it will be dealt with later; it will not be necessary here to do more than note that we are for the moment treating the doctrine of human progress as a postulate.
Man is unique among gregarious animals in the size of the major unit upon which natural selection and its supposedly chief instrument, war, is open to act unchecked. There is no other animal in which the size of the unit, however laxly held together, has reached anything even remotely approaching the inclusion of one-fifth or one-quarter of the whole species. It is plain that a mortal contest between two units of such a monstrous size introduces an altogether new mechanism into the hypothetical “struggle for existence” on which the conception of the biological necessity of war is founded. It is clear that that doctrine, if it is to claim validity, must contemplate at any rate the possibility of a war of extremity, even of something like extermination, which shall implicate perhaps a third of the whole human race. There is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished as the result of a racial impoverishment so extreme, even if it were accompanied by a closely specific {129} selection instead of a mere indiscriminate destruction. Progress is undoubtedly dependent mainly on the material that is available for selection being rich and varied. Any great reduction in the amount and variety of what is to be regarded as the raw material of elaboration necessarily must have as an infallible effect, the arrest of progress. It may be objected, however, that anything approaching extermination could obviously not be possible in a war between such immense units as those of modern man. Nevertheless, the object of each of the two adversaries would be to impose its will on the other, and to destroy in it all that was especially individual, all the types of activity and capacity which were the most characteristic in its civilization and therefore the cause of hostility. The effect of success in such an endeavour would be an enormous impoverishment of the variety of the race and a corresponding effect on progress.
To this line of speculation it may perhaps further be objected that the question is not of the necessity of war to the race as a whole, but to the individual nation or major unit. The argument has been used that when a nation is obviously the repository of all the highest gifts and tendencies of civilization, the race must in the end benefit, if this nation, by force if necessary, imposes its will and its principles on as much of the world as it can. To the biologist the weakness of this proposition—apart from the plain impossibility of a nation attaining an objective estimate of the value of its own civilization—is that it embodies a course of action which tends to the spread of uniformity and to limit that variety of material which is the fundamental quality essential for progress. In certain cases of very gross discrepancy between the value of two civilizations, it is quite possible that the destruction of the simpler by the more elaborate does not result in any great {130} loss to the race through the suppression of valuable varieties. Even this admission is, however, open to debate, and it may well be doubted whether in some ways the wholesale extermination of “inferior” races has not denied to the species the perpetuation of lines of variation which might have been of great value.
It seems remarkable that among gregarious animals other than man direct conflict between major units such as can lead to the suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon. They are, it may be supposed, too busily engaged in maintaining themselves against external enemies to have any opportunities for fighting within the species. Man’s complete conquest of the grosser enemies of his race has allowed him leisure for turning his restless pugnacity—a quality no longer fully occupied upon his non-human environment—against his own species. When the major units of humanity were small the results of such conflict were not perhaps very serious to the race as a whole, except in prolonging the twilight stages of civilization. It can scarcely be questioned that the organization of a people for war tends to encourage unduly a type of individual who is abnormally insensitive to doubt, to curiosity, and to the development of original thought. With the enlargement of the unit and the accompanying increase in knowledge and resources, war becomes much more seriously expensive to the race. In the present war the immense size of the units engaged and their comparative equality in power have furnished a complete reductio ad absurdum of the proposition that war in itself is a good thing even for the individual nation. It would seem, then, that in the original proposition the word “war” must be qualified to mean a war against a smaller and notably weaker adversary. The German Empire was founded on such wars. {131} The conception of the biological necessity of war may fairly be expected to demonstrate its validity in the fate of that Empire if such a demonstration is ever to be possible. Every condition for a crucial experiment was present: a brilliant inauguration in the very atmosphere of military triumph, a conscious realization of the value of the martial spirit, a determination to keep the warrior ideal conspicuously foremost with a people singularly able and willing to accept it. If this is the way in which an ultimate world-power is to be founded and maintained, no single necessary factor is lacking. And yet after a few years, in what should be the very first youth of an Empire, we find it engaged against a combination of Powers of fabulous strength, which, by a miracle of diplomacy no one else could have accomplished, it has united against itself. It is an irrelevance to assert that this combination is the result of malice, envy, treachery, barbarism; such terms are by hypothesis not admissible. If the system of Empire-building is not proof against those very elementary enemies, any further examination of it is of course purely academic. To withstand those is just what the Empire is there for; if it falls a victim to them, it fails in its first and simplest function and displays a radical defect in its structure. To the objectivist practice is the only test in human affairs, and he will not allow his attention to be distracted from what did happen by the most perfectly logical demonstration of what ought to have happened. It is the business of an Empire not to encounter overwhelming enemies. Declaring itself to be the most perfect example of its kind and the foreordained heir of the world will remain no more than a pleasant—and dangerous—indulgence, and will not prevent it showing by its fate that the fruits of perfection and the promise of permanence are not demonstrated in the wholesale {132} manufacture of enemies and in the combination of them into an alliance of unparalleled strength.