Chapter IV: Mental Characteristics of the Gregarious Animal (4)

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.

* * * * *

The doctrine of the biological necessity of war may, then, be regarded as open to strong suspicion on theoretical grounds of being contrary to the evolutionary tendency already plainly marked out for the human species. The fact that the nation in which its truth was most generally accepted has been led—and undoubtedly to some extent by it—into a war which can scarcely fail to prove disastrous suggests that in the practical field it is equally fallacious. It may well, therefore, be removed to the lumber-room of speculation and stored among the other pseudo-scientific dogmas of political “biologists”—the facile doctrines of degeneracy, the pragmatic lecturings on national characteristics, on Teutons and Celts, on Latins and Slavs, on pure races and mixed races, and all the other ethnological conceits with which the ignorant have gulled the innocent so long.

IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL HABIT IN MAN.

The study of man as a gregarious animal has not been pursued with the thoroughness and objectivity it deserves and must receive if it is to yield its full value in illuminating his status and in the management of society. The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gregariousness is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance, but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activities. We have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as imperative and just as {133} characteristically social as those of any other gregarious animal. A further argument that he is to-day as actively and essentially a social animal as ever is furnished by the fact that he suffers from the disadvantages of such an animal to a more marked degree perhaps than any other. In physical matters he owes to his gregariousness and its uncontrolled tendency to the formation of crowded communities with enclosed dwellings, the seriousness of many of his worst diseases, such as tuberculosis, typhus, and plague; there is no evidence that these diseases effect anything but an absolutely indiscriminate destruction, killing the strong and the weakly, the socially useful and the socially useless, with equal readiness, so that they cannot be regarded as even of the least selective value to man. The only other animal which is well known to suffer seriously from disease as a direct consequence of its social habit is the honey bee—as has been demonstrated by recent epidemics of exterminating severity.

In mental affairs, as I have tried to show, man owes to the social habit his inveterate resistiveness to new ideas, his submission to tradition and precedent, and the very serious fact that governing power in his communities tends to pass into the hands of what I have called the stable-minded—a class the members of which are characteristically insensitive to experience, closed to the entry of new ideas, and obsessed with the satisfactoriness of things as they are. At the time when this corollary of gregariousness was first pointed out—some ten years ago—it was noted as a serious flaw in the stability of civilization. The suggestion was made that as long as the great expert tasks of government necessarily gravitated into the hands of a class which characteristically lacked the greater developments of mental capacity and efficiency, the course of {134} civilization must continue to be at the mercy of accident and disaster. The present European war—doubtless in the actual state of affairs a remedy no less necessary because of its dreadfulness—is an example on the greatest possible scale of the kind of price the race has to pay for the way in which minds and temperaments are selected by its society.

When we see the great and serious drawbacks which gregariousness has entailed on man, it cannot but be supposed that that course of evolution has been imposed upon him by a real and deep-seated peculiarity of his nature—a fatal inheritance which it is impossible for him to repudiate.

* * * * *

When we inquire why it is that the manifestations of gregariousness in man are so ambiguous that their biological significance has been to a great extent overlooked, the answer seems to be furnished by that capacity for various reaction which is the result of his general mental development, and which has tended almost equally to obscure his other instinctive activities. It may be repeated once more that in a creature such as the bee the narrow mental capacity of the individual limits reaction to a few and relatively simple courses, so that the dominance of instinct in the species can to the attentive observer never be long in doubt. In man the equal dominance of instinct is obscured by the kaleidoscopic variety of the reactions by which it is more or less effectually satisfied.

While to a superficial examination of society the evidences of man’s gregarious inheritance are ambiguous and trivial, to the closer scrutiny of the biologist it soon becomes obvious that in society as constituted to-day the advantageous mechanisms rendered available by that inheritance are not being made use of to anything approaching their full possibilities. To such an extent is this the case {135} that the situation of man as a species even is probably a good deal more precarious than has usually been supposed by those who have come to be in charge of its destinies. The species is irrevocably committed to a certain evolutionary path by the inheritance of instinct it possesses. This course brings with it inevitable and serious disadvantages as well as enormously greater potential advantages. As long as the spirit of the race is content to be submissive to the former and indifferent to the discovery and development of the latter, it can scarcely have a bare certainty of survival and much less of progressive enlargement of its powers.

* * * * *

In the society of the bee two leading characteristics are evident—an elaborate and exact specialization of the individual, and a perfect absorption of the interests of the individual in those of the hive; these qualities seem to be the source of the unique energy and power of the whole unit and of the remarkable superiority of intelligence it possesses over the individual member. It is a commonplace of human affairs that combined action is almost invariably less intelligent than individual action, a fact which shows how very little the members of the species are yet capable of combination and co-ordination and how far inferior—on account, no doubt, of his greater mental capacity—man is in this respect to the bee.

This combination of specialization and moral homogeneity should be evident in human society if it is taking advantage of its biological resources. Both are, in fact, rather conspicuously absent.

There is abundant specialization of a sort; but it is inexact, lax, wasteful of energy, and often quite useless through being on the one hand superfluous or on the other incomplete. We have large numbers of experts in the various branches of science {136} and the arts, but we insist upon their adding to the practice of their specialisms the difficult task of earning their living in an open competitive market. The result is that we tend to get at the summit of our professions only those rare geniuses who combine real specialist capacity with the arts of the bagman. An enormous proportion of our experts have to earn their living by teaching—an exhausting and exacting art for which they are not at all necessarily qualified, and one which demands a great amount of time for the earning of a very exiguous pittance.

The teaching of our best schools, a task so important that it should be entrusted to none but those highly qualified by nature and instruction in the art, is almost entirely in the hands of athletes and grammarians of dead languages. We choose as our governors amateurs of whom we demand fluency, invincible prejudice, and a resolute blindness to dissentient opinion. In commerce we allow ourselves to be overrun by a multitude of small and mostly inefficient traders struggling to make a living by the supply of goods from the narrow and ageing stocks which are all they can afford to keep. We allow the supply of our foodstuffs to be largely in the hands of those who cannot afford to be clean, and submit out of mere indifference to being fed on meat, bread, vegetables which have been for an indefinite period at the mercy of dirty middlemen, the dust and mud and flies of the street, and the light-hearted thumbing errand-boy. We allow a large proportion of our skilled workers to waste skill and energy on the manufacture of things which are neither useful nor beautiful, on elaborate specialist valeting, cooking, gardening for those who are their inferiors in social activity and value.

The moral homogeneity so plainly visible in the {137} society of the bee is replaced in man by a segregation into classes which tends always to obscure the unity of the nation and often is directly antagonistic to it. The readiness with which such segregation occurs seems to be due to the invincible strength of the gregarious impulse in the individual man and to the immense size and strength of the modern major unit of the species. It would appear that in order that a given unit should develop the highest degree of homogeneity within itself it must be subject to direct pressure from without. A great abundance of food supply and consequent relaxed external pressure may in the bee lead to indiscriminate swarming, while in man the size and security of the modern State lead to a relaxation of the closer grades of national unity—in the absence of deliberate encouragement of it or of the stimulus of war. The need of the individual for homogeneity is none the less present, and the result is segregation into classes which form, as it were, minor herds in which homogeneity is maintained by the external pressure of competition, of political or religious differences and so forth. Naturally enough such segregations have come to correspond in a rough way with the various types of imperfect specialization which exist. This tendency is clearly of unfavourable effect on national unity, since it tends to obscure the national value of specialization and to give it a merely local and class significance. Segregation in itself is always dangerous in that it provides the individual with a substitute for the true major unit—the nation—and in times when there is an urgent need for national homogeneity may prove to be a hostile force.

It has been characteristic of the governing classes to acquiesce in the fullest developments of segregation and even to defend them by force and to fail to realize in times of emergency that national {138} homogeneity must always be a partial and weakly passion as long as segregation actively persists.

* * * * *

Class segregation has thus come to be regarded as a necessary and inevitable part of the structure of society. Telling as it does much more in the favour of certain classes than others, it has come to be defended by a whole series of legal and moral principles invented for the purpose, and by arguments that to objective examination are no more than rationalized prejudice. The maintenance of the social system—that is, of the segregation of power and prestige, of ease and leisure, and the corresponding segregations of labour, privation, and poverty—depends upon an enormously elaborate system of rationalization, tradition, and morals, and upon almost innumerable indirect mechanisms ranging from the drugging of society with alcohol to the distortion of religious principle in the interests of the established order. To the biologist the whole immensely intricate system is a means for combating the slow, almost imperceptible, pressure of Nature in the direction of a true national homogeneity. That this must be attained if human progress is to continue is, and has long been, obvious. The further fact that it can be attained only by a radical change in the whole human attitude towards society is but barely emerging from obscurity.

The fact that even the immense external stimulus of a great war now fails to overcome the embattled forces of social segregation, and can bring about only a very partial kind of national homogeneity in a society where segregation is deeply ingrained, seems to show that simple gregariousness has run its course in man and has been defeated of its full maturity by the disruptive power of man’s capacity for varied reaction. No state of equilibrium can be reached in a gregarious society short of complete {139} homogeneity, so that, failing the emergence of some new resource of Nature, it might be suspected that man, as a species, has already begun to decline from his meridian. Such a new principle is the conscious direction of society by man, the refusal by him to submit indefinitely to the dissipation of his energies and the disappointment of his ideals in inco-ordination and confusion. Thus would appear a function for that individual mental capacity of man which has so far, when limited to local and personal ends, tended but to increase the social confusion.

A step of evolution such as this would have consequences as momentous as the first appearance of the multicellular or of the gregarious animal. Man, conscious as a species of his true status and destiny, realizing the direction of the path to which he is irrevocably committed by Nature, with a moral code based on the unshakable natural foundation of altruism, could begin to draw on those stores of power which will be opened to him by a true combination, and the rendering available in co-ordinated action of the maximal energy of each individual.

GREGARIOUS SPECIES AT WAR.