Chapter IV: Mental Characteristics of the Gregarious Animal (5)

The occurrence of war between nations renders obvious certain manifestations of the social instinct which are apt to escape notice at other times. So marked is this that a certain faint interest in the biology of gregariousness has been aroused during the present war, and has led to some speculation but no very radical examination of the facts or explanation of their meaning. Expression, of course, has been found for the usual view that primitive instincts normally vestigial or dormant are aroused into activity by the stress of war, and that there is a process of rejuvenation of “lower” instincts at the expense of “higher.” All such views, apart {140} from their theoretical unsoundness, are uninteresting because they are of no practical value.

It will be convenient to mention some of the more obvious psychological phenomena of a state of war before dealing with the underlying instinctive processes which produce them.

The war that began in August 1914 was of a kind peculiarly suitable to produce the most marked and typical psychological effects. It had long been foreseen as no more than a mere possibility of immense disaster—of disaster so outrageous that by that very fact it had come to be regarded with a passionate incredulity. It had loomed before the people, at any rate of England, as an event almost equivalent to the ultimate overthrow of all things. It had been led up to by years of doubt and anxiety, sometimes rising to apprehension, sometimes lapsing into unbelief, and culminating in an agonized period of suspense, while the avalanche tottered and muttered on its base before the final and still incredible catastrophe. Such were the circumstances which no doubt led to the actual outbreak producing a remarkable series of typical psychological reactions.

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The first feeling of the ordinary citizen was fear—an immense, vague, aching anxiety, perhaps typically vague and unfocused, but naturally tending soon to localize itself in channels customary to the individual and leading to fears for his future, his food supply, his family, his trade, and so forth. Side by side with fear there was a heightening of the normal intolerance of isolation. Loneliness became an urgently unpleasant feeling, and the individual experienced an intense and active desire for the company and even physical contact of his fellows. In such company he was aware of a great accession of confidence, courage, and moral power. It was possible for an observant person to trace the actual {141} influence of his circumstances upon his judgment, and to notice that isolation tended to depress his confidence while company fortified it. The necessity for companionship was strong enough to break down the distinctions of class, and dissipate the reserve between strangers which is to some extent a concomitant mechanism. The change in the customary frigid atmosphere of the railway train, the omnibus, and all such meeting-places was a most interesting experience to the psychologist, and he could scarcely fail to be struck by its obvious biological meaning. Perhaps the most striking of all these early phenomena was the strength and vitality of rumour, probably because it afforded by far the most startling evidence that some other and stronger force than reason was at work in the formation of opinion. It was, of course, in no sense an unusual fact that non-rational opinion should be so widespread; the new feature was that such opinion should be able to spread so rapidly and become established so firmly altogether regardless of the limits within which a given opinion tends to remain localized in times of peace. Non-rational opinion under normal conditions is as a rule limited in its extent by a very strict kind of segregation; the successful rumours of the early periods of the war invaded all classes and showed a capacity to overcome prejudice, education, or scepticism. The observer, clearly conscious as he might be of the mechanisms at work, found himself irresistibly drawn to the acceptance of the more popular beliefs; and even the most convinced believer in the normal prevalence of non-rational belief could scarcely have exaggerated the actual state of affairs. Closely allied with this accessibility to rumour was the readiness with which suspicions of treachery and active hostility grew and flourished about any one of even foreign appearance or origin. It is not intended to {142} attempt to discuss the origin and meaning of the various types of fable which have been epidemic in opinion; the fact we are concerned with here is their immense vitality and power of growth.

We may now turn to some consideration of the psychological significance of these phenomena of a state of war.

The characteristic feature of a really dangerous national struggle for existence is the intensity of the stimulus it applies to the social instinct. It is not that it arouses “dormant” or decayed instincts, but simply that it applies maximal stimulation to instinctive mechanisms which are more or less constantly in action in normal times. In most of his reactions as a gregarious animal in times of peace, man is acting as a member of one or another class upon which the stimulus acts. War acts upon him as a member of the greater herd, the nation, or, in other words, the true major unit. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the cardinal mental characteristic of the gregarious animal is his sensitiveness to his fellow-members of the herd. Without them his personality is, so to say, incomplete; only in relation to them can he attain satisfaction and personal stability. Corresponding with his dependence on them is his openness towards them, his specific accessibility to stimuli coming from the herd.

A threat directed towards the whole herd is the intensest stimulus to these potentialities, and the individual reacts towards it in the most vigorous way.[O] The first response is a thrill of alarm which {143} passes through the herd from one member to another with magic rapidity. It puts him on the alert, sets him looking for guidance, prepares him to receive commands, but above all draws him to the herd in the first instinctive concentration against the enemy. In the presence of this stimulus even such partial and temporary isolation as was possible without it becomes intolerable. The physical presence of the herd, the actual contact and recognition of its members, becomes indispensable. This is no mere functionless desire, for re-embodiment in the herd at once fortifies courage and fills the individual with moral power, enthusiasm, and fortitude. The meaning that mere physical contact with his fellows still has for man is conclusively shown in the use that has been made of attacks in close formation in the German armies. It is perfectly clear that a densely crowded formation has psychological advantages in the face of danger, which enable quite ordinary beings to perform what are in fact prodigies of valour. Even undisciplined civil mobs have, on occasion, proved wonderfully valorous, though their absence of unity often causes their enterprise to alternate with panic. A disciplined mob—if one may use that word merely as a physical expression, without any derogatory meaning—has been shown in this war on innumerable occasions to be capable of facing dangers the facing of which by isolated individuals would be feats of fabulous bravery. {144}

[O] War in itself is by no means necessarily a maximal stimulus
to herd instinct if it does not involve a definite threat to the
whole herd. This fact is well shown in the course of the South
African War of 1899–1901. This war was not and was not regarded
as capable of becoming a direct threat to the life of the nation.
There was consequently no marked moral concentration of the
people, no massive energizing of the Government by a homogeneous
nation, and therefore the conduct of the war was in general
languid, timid, and pessimistic. The morale of the people was as
a whole bad; there was an exaggerated hunger for good news, and
an excessive satisfaction in it; an exaggerated pessimism was
excited by bad news, and public fortitude was shaken by casualties
which we should now regard as insignificant. Correspondingly the
activity and vitality of rumour were enormously less than they
have been in the present war. The weaker stimulus is betrayed
throughout the whole series of events by the weakness of all the
characteristic gregarious responses.

The psychological significance of the enormous activity of rumour in this war is fairly plain. That rumours spread readily and are tenacious of life is evidence of the sensitiveness to herd opinion which is so characteristic of the social instinct. The gravity of a threat to the herd is shown by nothing better than by the activity of rumour. The strong stimulus to herd instinct produces the characteristic response in the individual of a maximal sensitiveness to his fellows—to their presence or absence, their alarms and braveries, and in no less degree to their opinions. With the establishment of this state of mind the spread and survival of rumours become inevitable, and will vary directly with the seriousness of the external danger. Into the actual genesis of the individual rumours and the meaning of their tendency to take a stereotyped form we cannot enter here.

The potency of rumour in bearing down rational scepticism displays unmistakably the importance of the instinctive processes on which it rests. It is also one of the many evidences that homogeneity within the herd is a deeply rooted necessity for gregarious animals and is elaborately provided for by characteristics of the gregarious mind.

The establishment of homogeneity in the herd is the basis of morale. From homogeneity proceed moral power, enthusiasm, courage, endurance, enterprise, and all the virtues of the warrior. The peace of mind, happiness, and energy of the soldier come from his feeling himself to be a member in a body solidly united for a single purpose. The impulse towards unity that was so pronounced and universal at the beginning of the war was, then, a true and sound instinctive movement of defence. It was prepared to sacrifice all social distinctions and local prejudices if it could liberate by doing so Nature’s inexhaustible stores of moral power for the defence {145} of the herd. Naturally enough its significance was misunderstood, and a great deal of its beneficent magic was wasted by the good intentions which man is so touchingly ready to accept as a substitute for knowledge. Even the functional value of unity was, and still is, for the most part ignored. We are told to weariness that the great objection to disunion is that it encourages the enemy. According to this view, apparent disunion is as serious as real; whereas it must be perfectly obvious that anything which leads our enemy to under-estimate our strength, as does the belief that we are disunited when we are not, is of much more service to us than is neutralized by any more or less visionary disservice we do ourselves by fortifying his morale. The morale of a nation at war proceeds from within itself, and the mere pharisaism and conceit that come from the contemplation of another’s misfortunes are of no moral value. Modern civilians in general are much too self-conscious to conduct the grave tragedy of war with the high, preoccupied composure it demands. They are apt to think too much of what sort of a figure they are making before the world, to waste energy in superfluous explanations of themselves, in flustered and voluble attempts to make friends with bystanders, in posing to the enemy, and imagining they can seriously influence him by grimaces and gesticulations. As a matter of fact, it must be confessed that if such manœuvres could be conducted with a deliberate and purposeful levity which few would now have the fortitude to employ, there would be a certain satisfaction to be obtained in this particular war by the knowledge of our adversary conscientiously, perhaps a little heavily, and with immense resources of learning “investigating our psychology” upon materials of a wholly fantastic kind. Such a design, however, is very far from being the intention of {146} our interpreters to the world, and as long as they cannot keep the earnest and hysterical note out of their exposition it were much better for us that they were totally dumb.

To the psychologist it is plain that the seriousness of disunion is the discouragement to ourselves it necessarily involves. In this lies its single and its immense importance. Every note of disunion is a loss of moral power of incalculable influence; every evidence of union is an equally incalculable gain of moral power. Both halves of this statement deserve consideration, but the latter is incomparably the more important. If disunion were the more potent influence, a great deal might be done for national morale by the forcible control of opinion and expression. That, however, could yield nothing positive, and we must rely upon voluntary unity as the only source of all the higher developments of moral power.

It was towards this object that we dimly groped when we felt in the early weeks of the war the impulses of friendliness, tolerance, and goodwill towards our fellow-citizens, and the readiness to sacrifice what privileges the social system had endowed us with in order to enjoy the power which a perfect homogeneity of the herd would have given us.

A very small amount of conscious, authoritative direction at that time, a very little actual sacrifice of privilege at that psychological moment, a series of small, carefully selected concessions none of which need have been actually subversive of prescriptive right, a slight relaxation in the vast inhumanity of the social machine would have given the needed readjustment out of which a true national homogeneity would necessarily have grown.

The psychological moment was allowed to pass, and the country was spared the shock of seeing its {147} moral strength, which should of course be left to luck, fortified by the hand of science. The history of England during the first fourteen months of the war was thus left to pursue its characteristically English course. The social system of class segregation soon repented of its momentary softness and resumed its customary rigidity. More than that, it decided that, far from the war being a special occasion which should penetrate with a transforming influence the whole of society from top to bottom, as the common people were at first inclined to think, the proper pose before the enemy was to be that it made no difference at all. We were to continue imperturbably with the conduct of our business, and to awe the Continent with a supreme exhibition of British phlegm. The national consciousness of the working-man was to be stimulated by his continuing to supply us with our dividends, and ours by continuing to receive them. It is not necessary to pursue the history of this new substitute for unity. It is open to doubt whether our enemies were greatly appalled by the spectacle, or more so than our friends; it is certain that the stimulant supplied to the working-man proved to be inadequate and had to be supplemented by others. . . .

The problem of the function of the common citizen in war was of course left unsolved. It was accepted that if a man were unfit for service and not a skilled worker, he himself was a mere dead weight, and his intense longing for direct service, of however humble a kind, a by-product of which the State could make no use.

That the working classes have to a certain extent failed to develop a complete sense of national unity is obvious enough. It is contended here that what would have been easy in the early days of the war and actually inexpensive to prescriptive right, has steadily become more and more costly to effect {148} and less and less efficiently done. We are already faced with the possibility of having to make profound changes in the social system to convince the working-man effectually that his interests and ours in this war are one.

That a very large class of common citizens, incapable of direct military work, has been left morally derelict during all these agonizing months of war has probably not been any less serious a fact, although the recognition of it has not been forced unavoidably on public notice. It must surely be clear that in a nation engaged in an urgent struggle for existence, the presence of a large class who are as sensitive as any to the call of the herd, and yet cannot respond in any active way, contains very grave possibilities. The only response to that relentless calling that can give peace is in service; if that be denied, restlessness, uneasiness, and anxiety must necessarily follow. To such a mental state are very easily added impatience, discontent, exaggerated fears, pessimism, and irritability. It must be remembered that large numbers of such individuals were persons of importance in peace time and retain a great deal of their prestige under the social system we have decided to maintain, although in war time they are obviously without function. This group of idle and flustered parasites has formed a nucleus from which have proceeded some of the many outbursts of disunion which have done so much to prevent this country from developing her resources with smoothness and continuity. It is not suggested that these eruptions of discontent are due to any kind of disloyalty; they are the result of defective morale, and bear all the evidences of coming from persons whose instinctive response to the call of the herd has been frustrated and who, therefore, lack the strength and composure of those whose souls are uplifted by a satisfactory {149} instinctive activity. Moral instability has been characteristic of all the phenomena of disunion we are now considering, such as recrudescences of political animus, attacks on individual members of the Government, outbursts of spy mania, campaigns of incitement against aliens and of blustering about reprisals. Similar though less conspicuous manifestations are the delighted circulation of rumours, the wild scandalmongering, the eager dissemination of pessimistic inventions which are the pleasure of the smaller amongst these moral waifs. Of all the evidences of defective morale, however, undoubtedly the most general has yet to be mentioned, and that is the proffering of technical advice and exhortation. If we are to judge by what we read, there are few more urgent temptations than this, and yet it is easy to see that there are few enterprises which demand a more complete abrogation of reason. It is almost always the case that the subject of advice is one upon which all detailed knowledge is withheld by the authorities. This restriction of materials, however, seems generally to be regarded by the volunteer critic as giving him greater scope and freedom rather than as a reason for silence or even modesty.

It is interesting to notice in this connection what those who have the ear of the public have conceived to be their duty towards the nation and to try to estimate its value from the point of view of morale. It is clear that they have in general very rightly understood that one of their prime functions should be to keep the Government working in the interests of the nation to the fullest stretch of its energy and resources. Criticism is another function, and advice and instruction a third which have also been regarded as important.

The third of these activities is, no doubt, that which has been most abused and is least important. {150} It tends on the one hand to get involved in technical military matters and consequent absurdity, and on the other hand, in civil matters, to fall back into the bad old ways of politics. Criticism is obviously a perfectly legitimate function, and one of value as long as it keeps to the field of civil questions, and can free itself of the moral failure of being acrimonious in tone. In a government machine engaged upon the largest of tasks there will always be enough injustice and inhumanity, fraud and foolishness to keep temperate critics beneficially employed.

It is in the matter of stimulating the energy and resolution of the Government that the psychologist might perhaps differ to some extent from the popular guides of opinion. In getting work out of a living organism it is necessary to determine what is the most efficient stimulus. One can make a man’s muscles contract by stimulating them with an electric battery, but one can never get so energetic a contraction with however strong a current as can be got by the natural stimulus sent out from the man’s brain. Rising to a more complex level, we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily. The best way to get our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the man’s soul. It is plain, therefore, that the best way to extract the maximum amount of work from members of a Government—and it is to yield this, at whatever cost to themselves, that they are there—is not by the use of threats and objurgations, by talk of impeachment or dismissal, or by hints of a day of reckoning after the war, but by keeping their souls full of a burning passion of service. Such a supply of mental energy can issue only from a {151} truly homogeneous herd, and it is therefore to the production of such a homogeneity of feeling that we come once more as the one unmistakable responsibility of the civilian.

We have seen reason to believe that there was a comparatively favourable opportunity of establishing such a national unity in the early phases of the war, and that the attainment of the same result at this late period is likely to be less easy and more costly of disturbance to the social structure.

The simplest basis of unity is equality, and this has been an important factor in the unity which in the past has produced the classically successful manifestations of moral and military power, as for example in the cases of Puritan England and Revolutionary France. Such equality as obtained in these cases was doubtless chiefly moral rather than material, and it can scarcely be questioned that equality of consideration and of fundamental moral estimation is a far more efficient factor than would be equality of material possessions. The fact that it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence as a man with thirty thousand a year, is merely evidence that the imagination of the former is somewhat restricted by his type of education, and that we habitually attach an absurd moral significance to material advantages. It seems certain that it would still be possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.

A serious and practical attempt to secure a true moral unity of the nation would render necessary a general understanding that the state to be striven for was something different, not only in degree but also in quality, from anything which has yet {152} been regarded as satisfactory. A mere intellectual unanimity in the need for prosecuting the war with all vigour, we may be said actually to possess, but its moral value is not very great. A state of mind directed more to the nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good soldier absorbed in his regiment has little inclination to concern himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration, at all times showing serious inconsistencies with functional value, and in war doing so more than ever, are denials of the essential propositions of perfect citizenship, not, curiously enough, through their arbitrary distribution of wealth, comfort, and leisure, but through their persistent, assured, and even unconscious assumption that there exists a graduation of moral values equally real and, to men of inferior station, equally arbitrary. To a gregarious species at war the only tolerable claim to any kind of superiority must be based on leadership. Any other affectation of superiority, whether it be based on prescriptive right, on tradition, on custom, on wealth, on birth, or on mere age, arrogance, or fussiness, and not on real functional value to the State, is, however much a matter of course it may seem, however blandly it may be asserted or picturesquely displayed, an obstacle to true national unity.

Psychological considerations thus appear to indicate a very plain duty for a large class of civilians who have complained of and suffered patriotically {153} from the fact that the Government has found nothing for them to do. Let all those of superior and assured station make it a point of honour and duty to abrogate the privileges of consideration and prestige with which they are arbitrarily endowed. Let them persuade the common man that they also are, in the face of national necessity, common men. The searching test of war has shown that a proportion of the population, serious enough in mere numbers, but doubly serious in view of its power and influence, has led an existence which may fairly be described as in some degree parasitic. That is to say, what they have drawn from the common stock in wealth and prestige has been immensely larger than what they have contributed of useful activity in return. Now, in time of war, they have still less to give proportionally to what they have received. Their deplorably good bargain was in no way of their making; no one has the slightest right to attack their honour or good faith; they are as patriotically minded as any class, and have contributed their fighting men to the Army as generously as the day labourer and the tradesman. It is therefore not altogether impossible that they might come to understand the immense opportunity that is given them by fate to promote a true, deep, and irresistibly potent national unity.

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A further contribution to the establishment of a national unity of this truly Utopian degree might come from a changed attitude of mind towards his fellows in the individual. There would have to be an increased kindliness, generosity, patience, and tolerance in all his relations with others, a deliberate attempt to conquer prejudice, irritability, impatience, and self-assertiveness, a deliberate encouragement of cheerfulness, composure, and fortitude. All these would be tasks for the individual {154} to carry out for himself alone; there would be no campaign-making, no direct exhortation, no appeals. Towards the Army and the Navy the central fact of each man’s attitude would be the question, “Am I worth dying for?” and his strongest effort would be the attempt to make himself so.

That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard more often during the war as a text of the Church. There is little doubt that very many men whose feeling towards the Church is in no way disrespectful or hostile are conscious of a certain uneasiness in hearing her vigorously defending the prosecution of the war and demonstrating its righteousness. They feel, in spite of however conclusive demonstrations to the contrary, that there is a deep-seated inconsistency between war for whatever object and the Sermon on the Mount, and they cannot but remember, when they are told that this is a holy war, that that also the Germans say. They perhaps feel that the justification of the war is, after all, a matter for politicians and statesmen, and that the Church would be more appropriately employed in making it as far as she can a vehicle of good, rather than trying to justify superfluously its existence. A people already awed by the self-sacrifice of its armies may be supposed to be capable of profiting by the exhortations of a Church whose cardinal doctrine is concerned with the responsibility that attaches to those for whose sake life has voluntarily been given up. One cannot imagine an institution more perfectly qualified by its faith and its power to bring home to this people the solemnity of the sanction under which they lie to make themselves worthy of the price that is still being unreservedly paid. If it were consciously the determination of every citizen to make himself worth dying for, who can doubt that a national unity of the sublimest kind would be within reach? {155}

Of all the influences which tend to rob the citizen of the sense of his birthright, perhaps one of the strongest, and yet the most subtle, is that of officialism. It seems inevitable that the enormously complex public services which are necessary in the modern State should set up a barrier between the private citizen and the official, whereby the true relation between them is obscured. The official loses his grasp of the fact that the mechanism of the State is established in the interests of the citizen; the citizen comes to regard the State as a hostile institution, against which he has to defend himself, although it was made for his defence. It is a crime for him to cheat the State in the matter of tax-paying, it is no crime for the State to defraud him in excessive charges. Considered in the light of the fundamental relation of citizen and State, it seems incredible that in a democratic country it is possible for flourishing establishments to exist the sole business of which is to save the private individual from being defrauded by the tax-gathering bureaucracy. This is but a single and rather extreme example of the far-stretching segregation effected by the official machine. The slighter kinds of aloofness, of inhuman etiquette, of legalism and senseless dignity, of indifference to the individual, of devotion to formulæ and routine are no less powerful agents in depriving the common man of the sense of intimate reality in his citizenship which might be so valuable a source of national unity. If the official machine through its utmost parts were animated by an even moderately human spirit and used as a means of binding together the people, instead of as an engine of moral disruption, it might be of incalculable value in the strengthening of morale. {156}

ENGLAND AGAINST GERMANY—GERMANY.

In an earlier part of this book the statement was made that the present juncture in human affairs probably forms one of those rare nodes of circumstance in which the making of an epoch in history corresponds with a perceptible change in the secular progress of biological evolution. It remains to attempt some justification of this opinion.

England and Germany face one another as perhaps the two most typical antagonists of the war. It may seem but a partial way of examining events if we limit our consideration to them. Nevertheless, it is in this duel that the material we are concerned with is chiefly to be found, and it may be added Germany herself has abundantly distinguished this country as her typical foe—an instinctive judgment not without value.

By the end of September 1914 it had become reasonably clear that the war would be one of endurance, and the comparatively equal though fluctuating strength of the two groups of adversaries has since shown that in such endurance the main factor will be the moral factor rather than the material. An examination of the moral strength of the two arch-enemies will therefore have the interest of life and death behind it, as well as such as may belong to the thesis which stands at the head of this chapter.

Germany affords a profoundly interesting study for the biological psychologist, and it is very important that we should not allow what clearness of representation we can get into our picture of her mind to be clouded by the heated atmosphere of national feeling in which our work must be done. As I have said elsewhere, it is merely to encourage fallacy to allow oneself to believe that one is without prejudices. The most one can do is to recognize {157} what prejudices are likely to exist and liberally to allow for them.

If I were to say that at the present moment I can induce myself to believe that it will ever be possible for Europe to contain a strong Germany of the current type and remain habitable by free peoples, the apparent absence of national bias in the statement would be a mere affectation, and by no means an evidence of freedom from prejudice. I am much more likely to get into reasonable relations with the truth if I admit to myself, quite frankly, my innermost conviction that the destruction of the German Empire is an indispensable preliminary to the making of a civilization tolerable by rational beings. Having recognized the existence of that belief as a necessary obstacle to complete freedom of thought, it may be possible to allow for it and to counteract what aberrations of judgment it may be likely to produce.

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In making an attempt to estimate the relative moral resources of England and Germany at the present time it is necessary to consider them as biological entities or major units of the human species in the sense of that term we have already repeatedly used. We shall have to examine the evolutionary tendencies which each of these units has shown, and if possible to decide how far they have followed the lines of development which psychological theory indicates to be those of healthy and progressive development for a gregarious animal.

I have already tried to show that the acquirement of the social habit by man—though in fact there is reason to believe that the social habit preceded and made possible his distinctively human characters—has committed him to an evolutionary process which is far from being completed yet, but which {158} nevertheless must be carried out to its consummation if he is to escape increasingly severe disadvantages inherent in that biological type. In other words, the gregarious habit in an animal of large individual mental capacity is capable of becoming, and indeed must become a handicap rather than a bounty unless the society of the species undergoes a continuously progressive co-ordination which will enable it to attract and absorb the energy and activities of its individual members. We have seen that in a species such as man, owing to the freedom from the direct action of natural selection within the major unit, the individual’s capacity for varied reaction to his environment has undergone an enormous development, while at the same time the capacity for intercommunication—upon which the co-ordination of the major unit into a potent and frictionless mechanism depends—has lagged far behind. The term “intercommunication” is here used in the very widest sense to indicate the ties that bind the individual to his fellows and them to him. It is not a very satisfactory word; but as might be expected in attempting to express a series of functions so complex and so unfamiliar to generalization, it is not easy to find an exact expression ready made. Another phrase applicable to a slightly different aspect of the same function is “herd accessibility,” which has the advantage of suggesting by its first constituent the limitation, primitively at any rate, an essential part of the capacities it is desired to denote. The conception of herd accessibility includes the specific sensitiveness of the individual to the existence, presence, thought, and feelings of his fellow-members of the major unit; the power he possesses of reacting in an altruistic and social mode to stimuli which would necessarily evoke a merely egoistic response from a non-social animal—that is to say, the power to deflect and modify egoistic {159} impulses into a social form without emotional loss or dissatisfaction; the capacity to derive from the impulses of the herd a moral power in excess of any similar energy he may be able to develop from purely egoistic sources.

Intercommunication, the development of which of course depends upon herd-accessibility, enables the herd to act as a single creature whose power is greatly in excess of the sum of the powers of its individual members.

Intercommunication in the biological sense has, however, never been systematically cultivated by man, but has been allowed to develop haphazard and subject to all the hostile influences which must infest a society in which unregulated competition and selection are allowed to prevail. The extravagance of human life and labour, the indifference to suffering, the harshness and the infinite class segregation of human society are the result. The use of what I have called conscious direction is apparently the only means whereby this chaos can be converted into organized structure.

Outside the gregarious unit, the forms of organic life at any given time seem to be to some considerable extent determined by the fact that the pressure of environmental conditions and of competition tends to eliminate selectively the types which are comparatively unsuited to the conditions in which they find themselves. However much or little this process of natural selection has decided the course which the general evolutionary process has taken, there can be no doubt that it is a condition of animal life, and has an active influence. The suggestion may be hazarded that under circumstances natural selection tends rather to restrict variation instead of encouraging it as it has sometimes been supposed to do. When the external pressure is very severe it might be supposed that anything like free variation {160} would be a serious disadvantage to a species, and if it persisted might result in actual extermination. It is conceivable, therefore, that natural selection is capable of favouring stable and non-progressive types at the expense of the variable and possibly “progressive,” if such a term can be applied to species advancing towards extinction. Such a possible fixative action of natural selection is suggested by the fact that the appearance of mechanisms whereby the individual is protected from the direct action of natural selection seems to have led to an outburst of variation. In the multicellular animal the individual cells passing from under the direct pressure of natural selection become variable, and so capable of a very great specialization. In the gregarious unit the same thing happens, the individual member gaining freedom to vary and to become specialized without the risk that would have accompanied such an endowment in the solitary state.

Within the gregarious unit, then, natural selection in the strict sense is in abeyance, and the consequent freedom has allowed of a rich variety among the individual members. This variety provides the material from which an elaborate and satisfactory society might be constructed if there were any constant and discriminating influence acting upon it. Unfortunately, the forces at work in human society to-day are not of this kind, but are irregular in direction and fluctuating in strength, so that the material richness which would have been so valuable, had it been subject to a systematic and co-ordinate selection, has merely contributed to the confusion of the product. The actual mechanism by which society, while it has grown in strength and complexity, has also grown in confusion and disorder, is that peculiarity of the gregarious mind which automatically brings into the monopoly of power the mental type which I have called the {161} stable and common opinion calls normal. This type supplies our most trusted politicians and officials, our bishops and headmasters, our successful lawyers and doctors, and all their trusty deputies, assistants, retainers, and faithful servants. Mental stability is their leading characteristic, they “know where they stand” as we say, they have a confidence in the reality of their aims and their position, an inaccessibility to new and strange phenomena, a belief in the established and customary, a capacity for ignoring what they regard as the unpleasant, the undesirable, and the improper, and a conviction that on the whole a sound moral order is perceptible in the universe and manifested in the progress of civilization. Such characteristics are not in the least inconsistent with the highest intellectual capacity, great energy and perseverance as well as kindliness, generosity, and patience, but they are in no way redeemed in social value by them.

In the year 1915 it is, unfortunately, in no way necessary to enumerate evidences of the confusion, the cruelty, the waste, and the weaknesses with which human society, under the guidance of minds of this type, has been brought to abound. Civilization through all its secular development under their rule has never acquired an organic unity of structure; its defects have received no rational treatment, but have been concealed, ignored, and denied; instead of being drastically rebuilt, it has been kept presentable by patches and buttresses, by paint, and putty, and whitewash. The building was already insecure, and now the storm has burst upon it, threatens incontinently to collapse.

The fact that European civilization, approaching what appeared to be the very meridian of its strength, could culminate in a disaster so frightful as the present war is proof that its development was radically unsound. This is by no means to say that {162} the war could have been avoided by those immediately concerned. That is almost certainly not the case. The war was the consequence of inherent defects in the evolution of civilized life; it was the consequence of human progress being left to chance, and to the interaction of the heterogeneous influences which necessarily arise within a gregarious unit whose individual members have a large power of varied reaction. In such an atmosphere minds essentially resistive alone can flourish and attain to power, and they are by their very qualities incapable of grasping the necessities of government or translating them into action.

The method of leaving the development of society to the confused welter of forces which prevail within it is now at last reduced to absurdity by the unmistakable teaching of events, and the conscious direction of man’s destiny is plainly indicated by Nature as the only mechanism by which the social life of so complex an animal can be guaranteed against disaster and brought to yield its full possibilities.

A gregarious unit informed by conscious direction represents a biological mechanism of a wholly new type, a stage of advance in the evolutionary process capable of consolidating the supremacy of man and carrying to its full extent the development of his social instincts.

Such a directing intelligence or group of intelligences would take into account before all things the biological character of man, would understand that his condition is necessarily progressive along the lines of his natural endowments or downward to destruction. It would abandon the static view of society as something merely to be maintained, and adopt a more dynamic conception of statesmanship as something active, progressive, and experimental, reaching out towards new powers for human activity and new conquests for the human will. {163} It would discover what natural inclinations in man must be indulged, and would make them respectable, what inclinations in him must be controlled for the advantage of the species, and make them insignificant. It would cultivate intercommunication and altruism on the one hand, and bravery, boldness, pride, and enterprise on the other. It would develop national unity to a communion of interest and sympathy far closer than anything yet dreamed of as possible, and by doing so would endow the national unit with a self-control, fortitude, and moral power which would make it so obviously unconquerable that war would cease to be a possibility. To a people magnanimous, self-possessed, and open-eyed, unanimous in sentiment and aware of its strength, the conquest of fellow-nations would present its full futility. They would need for the acceptable exercise of their powers some more difficult, more daring, and newer task, something that stretches the human will and the human intellect to the limit of their capacity; the mere occupation and re-occupation of the stale and blood-drenched earth would be to them barbarians’ work; time and space would be their quarry, destiny and the human soul the lands they would invade; they would sail their ships into the gulfs of the ether and lay tribute upon the sun and stars.

* * * * *

It is one of the features of the present crisis that gives to it its biological significance, that one of the antagonists—Germany—has discovered the necessity and value of conscious direction of the social unit. This is in itself an epoch-making event. Like many other human discoveries of similar importance, it has been incomplete, and it has not been accompanied by the corresponding knowledge of man and his natural history which alone could have given it full fertility and permanent value. {164}

It seems to have been in no way a revelation of genius, and, indeed, the absence of any great profundity and scope of speculation is rather remarkable in the minds of the numerous German political philosophers. The idea would appear rather to have been developed out of the circumstances of the country, and to have been almost a habit before it became a conception. At any rate, its appearance was greatly favoured by the political conditions and history of the region in which it arose. If this had not been the case, it is scarcely conceivable that the principle could have been accepted so readily by the people, and in a form which was not without its asperities and its hardships for them, or that it could have been discovered without the necessary biological corollaries which are indispensable to the successful application of it.

Germany in some ways resembles a son who has been educated at home, and has taken up the responsibilities of the adult, and become bound by them without ever tasting the free intercourse of the school and university. She has never tasted the heady liquor of political liberty, she has had no revolution, and the blood of no political martyrs calls to her disturbingly from the ground. To such innocent and premature gravity the reasonable claims of what, after all, had to her the appearance of no more than an anxiously paternal Government could not fail to appeal.

Explain it how we may, there can be no doubt that to the German peoples the theoretical aspects of life have long had a very special appeal. Generalizations about national characteristics are notoriously fallacious, but it seems that with a certain reserve one may fairly say that there is a definite contrast in this particular between the Germans and, let us say, the English.

To minds of a theoretical bias the appeal of a {165} closely regulative type of Government, with all the advantages of organization which it possesses, must be very strong, and there is reason to believe that this fact has had influence in reconciling the people to the imposition upon it of the will of the Government.

Between a docile and intelligent people and a strong, autocratic, and intelligent Government the possibilities of conscious national direction could scarcely fail to become increasingly obvious and to be increasingly developed. A further and enormously potent factor in the progress of the idea was an immense accession of national feeling, derived from three almost bewilderingly successful wars, accomplished at surprisingly small cost, and culminating in a grandiose and no less successful scheme of unification. Before rulers and people an imperial destiny of unlimited scope, and allowing of unbounded dreams, now inevitably opened itself up. Alone, amongst the peoples of Europe, Germany saw herself a nation with a career. No longer disunited and denationalized, she had come into her inheritance. The circumstances of her rebirth were so splendid, the moral exaltation of her new unity was so great that she could scarcely but suppose that her state was the beginning of a career of further and unimagined glories and triumphs. There were not lacking enthusiastic and prophetic voices to tell her she was right.

The decade that followed the foundation of the Empire was, perhaps, more pregnant with destiny than that which preceded it, for it saw the final determination of the path which Germany was to follow. She had made the immense stride in the biological scale of submitting herself to conscious direction; would she also follow the path which alone leads to a perfect concentration of national life and a permanent moral stability? {166}

To a nation with a purpose and a consciously realized destiny some principle of national unity is indispensable. Some strand of feeling which all can share, and in sharing which all can come into communion with one another, will be the framework on which is built up the structure of national energy and effort.

The reactions in which the social instinct manifests itself are not all equally developed in the different social species. It is true that there is a certain group of characteristics common to all social animals; but it is also found that in one example there is a special development of one aspect of the instinct, while another example will show a characteristic development of a different aspect. Taking a broad survey of all gregarious types, we are able to distinguish three fairly distinct trends of evolution. We have the aggressive gregariousness of the wolf and dog, the protective gregariousness of the sheep and the ox, and, differing from both these, we have the more complex social structure of the bee and the ant, which we may call socialized gregariousness. The last-named is characterized by the complete absorption of the individual in the major unit, and the fact that the function of the social habit seems no longer to be the simple one of mere attack or defence, but rather the establishment of a State which shall be, as a matter of course, strong in defence and attack, but a great deal more than this as well. The hive is no mere herd or pack, but an elaborate mechanism for making use by co-ordinate and unified action of the utmost powers of the individual members. It is something which appears to be a complete substitute for individual existence, and as we have already said, seems like a new creature rather than a congeries united for some comparatively few and simple purposes. The hive and the ant’s nest stand to the flock and the {167} pack as the fully organized multicellular animal stands to the primitive zooglœa which is its forerunner. The wolf is united for attack, the sheep is united for defence, but the bee is united for all the activities and feelings of its life.

Socialized gregariousness is the goal of man’s development. A transcendental union with his fellows is the destiny of the human individual, and it is the attainment of this towards which the constantly growing altruism of man is directed. Poets and prophets have, at times, dimly seen this inevitable trend of Nature, biology detects unmistakable evidence of it, and explains the slowness of advance, which has been the despair of those others, by the variety and power of man’s mind, and consoles us for the delay these qualities still cause by the knowledge that they are guarantees of the exactitude and completeness that the ultimate union will attain.

When a nation takes to itself the idea of conscious direction, as by a fortunate combination of circumstances Germany has been induced to do, it is plain that some choice of a principle of national unity will be its first and most important task. It is plain, also, from the considerations we have just laid down, that such a principle of national unity must necessarily be a manifestation of the social instinct, and that the choice is necessarily limited to one of three types of social habit which alone Nature has fitted gregarious animals to follow. No nation has ever made a conscious choice amongst these three types, but circumstances have led to the adoption of one or another of them often enough for history to furnish many suggestive instances.