Chapter IV: Mental Characteristics of the Gregarious Animal (7)

Let us now consider what guidance in the solution of the problem can be got from a consideration of the peculiarities of the social type which the Germans of the present day so characteristically present.

Regarded from this point of view, the war is seen to be directed against a social type which, when endowed with the technical resources of modern civilization, is, and must continue to be, a dangerous anachronism. A people of the aggressive social habit can never be in a state of stable equilibrium with its neighbours. The constitution of its society presents a rigid barrier to smooth and continuous internal integration; its energy, therefore, must be occupied upon essentially, though not always superficially, external objects, and its history will necessarily be made up of alternating periods of aggression and periods of preparation. Such a people has no conception of the benign use of power. It must regard war as an end in itself, as the summit of its national activities, as the recurring apogee {197} of its secular orbit; it must regard peace as a necessary and somewhat irksome preparation for war in which it may savour reminiscently the joys of conquest by dragooning its new territories and drastically imposing upon them its national type. This instinctive insistence upon uniformity makes every conquest by such a people an impoverishment of the human race, and makes the resistance of such aggression an elementary human duty.

In every particular Germany has proved true to her social type, and every detail of her history for the last fifty years betrays the lupine quality of her ideals and her morals.

We have seen that in all gregarious animals the social instinct must follow one of three principal types, each of which will produce a herd having special activities and reactions. The major units of the human species appear limited to a similar number of categories, but it is probable that the perpetuation of a given type in a given herd is not chiefly a matter of heredity in the individual. The individual is gregarious by inheritance; the type according to which his gregarious reactions are manifested is not inherited, but will depend upon the form current in the herd to which he belongs, and handed down in it from generation to generation. Thus it has happened that nations have been able in the course of their history to pass from the aggressive to the socialized type. The change has perhaps been rendered possible by the existence of class segregation of a not too rigid kind, and has doubtless depended upon a progressive intercommunication and the consequently developing altruism. The extremely rigid Prussian social system seems clearly to be associated with the persistence of the aggressive form of society.

In considering the permanent deliverance of Europe from the elements in Germany for which {198} there can be no possible toleration, we therefore have not to deal with characters which must be regarded as inherited in the biological sense. We have to deal rather with a group of reactions which, while owing their unity, coherence, and power to the inherited qualities of the gregarious mind, owe their perpetuation to organized State suggestion, to tradition, and to their past success as a national method.

There can be no doubt that the success of the German Empire has consolidated the hold of the aggressive social type upon its people, and has guarded it from the eroding effects of increasing communication with other peoples and knowledge of the world. As I have already tried to show, the moral power of such peoples is intimately associated with the continuance of aggression and of success. The German Empire has had no experience of failure, and for this reason has been able to maintain its ideals and aspirations untouched by modern influences. It needs no psychological insight to foretell that if the result of this war can be in any way regarded as a success for Germany, she will be thereby confirmed in her present ideals, however great her sufferings may have been, and however complete her exhaustion. It must be remembered that this type of people is capable of interpreting facts in accordance with its prejudices to an almost incredible extent, as we have seen time and again in the course of the war. The proof that the aggressive national type is intolerable in modern Europe, if it can be afforded by force of arms, must therefore be made very plain, or it will have no value as a lesson. Proof of failure adequate to convince a people of the socialized type might be quite inadequate to convince a people of the lupine type in whom, from the nature of the case, mental resistiveness is so much more {199} impenetrable. This is the psychological fact of which the statesmen of Europe will have to be, above all things, aware when questions of peace come seriously to be discussed, for otherwise they will risk the loss of all the blood and treasure which have been expended without any corresponding gain for civilization.

* * * * *

We have been warned that to “humiliate” Germany will merely be to set her upon the preparation of vengeance, and to confirm her belief in the supreme value of military strength. This opinion affects to be based on a knowledge of human nature, but its pretensions are not very well founded. The passion of revenge is habitually over-estimated as a motive—possibly through the influence of the novelists and playwrights to whom it is so useful. When we examine man’s behaviour objectively we find that revenge, however deathless a passion it is vowed to be at emotional moments, is in actual life constantly having to give way to more urgent and more recent needs and feelings. Between nations there is no reason to suppose that it has any more reality as a motive of policy, though it perhaps has slightly more value as a consolatory pose.

It is curious that the naïve over-estimation of the revenge ideal should have been uninfluenced by so obvious an example as the relations of France and Germany. In 1870 the former was “humiliated” with brutal completeness and every element of insult. She talked of revenge, as she could scarcely fail to do, but she soon showed that her grasp on reality was too firm to allow her policy to be moved by that childish passion. Characteristically, it was the victorious aggressor who believed in her longing for revenge, and who at length attacked her again. {200}

A psychological hint of great value may be obtained from our knowledge of those animals whose gregariousness, like that of the Germans, is of the aggressive type. When it is thought necessary to correct a dog by corporal measures, it is found that the best effect is got by what is rather callously called a “sound” thrashing. The animal must be left in no doubt as to who is the master, and his punishment must not be diluted by hesitation, nervousness, or compunction on the part of the punisher. The experience then becomes one from which the dog is capable of learning, and if the sense of mastery conveyed to him is unmistakable, he can assimilate the lesson without reservation or the desire for revenge. However repulsive the idea may be to creatures of the socialized type, no sentimentalism and no pacifist theorizing can conceal the fact that the respect of a dog can be won by violence. If there is any truth in the view I have expressed that the moral reactions of Germany follow the gregarious type which is illustrated by the wolf and the dog, it follows that her respect is to be won by a thorough and drastic beating, and it is just that elementary respect for other nations, of which she is now entirely free, which it is the duty of Europe to teach her. If she is allowed to escape under conditions which in any way can be sophisticated into a victory, or, at any rate, not a defeat, she will continue to hate us as she continued to hate her victim France.

To the politician, devoted as he necessarily is to the exclusively human point of view, it may seem fantastic and scandalous to look for help in international policy to the conduct of dogs. The gulf between the two fields is not perhaps so impassably profound as he would like to think, but, however that may be, the analogy I have drawn is not unsupported by evidence of a more respectable kind. {201} The susceptibility of the individual German to a harsh and even brutally enforced discipline is well known. The common soldier submits to be beaten by his sergeant, and is the better soldier for it; both submit to the bullying of their officer apparently also with profit; the common student is scarcely less completely subject to his professor, and becomes thereby a model of scientific excellence; the common citizen submits to the commands of his superiors, however unreasonably conceived and insultingly conveyed, and becomes a model of disciplined behaviour; finally the head of the State, combining the most drastic methods of the sergeant, the professor, and the official, wins not merely a slavish respect, but a veritable apotheosis.

Germany has shown unmistakably the way to her heart; it is for Europe to take it.

ENGLAND AGAINST GERMANY—ENGLAND.

It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while Germany is the very type of a perfected aggressive herd, England is perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd. Corresponding with this biological difference is the striking difference in their history. Germany has modelled her soul upon the wolf’s, and has rushed through the possibilities of her archetype in fifty feverish years of development; already she is a finished product, her moral ideal is fulfilled and leaves her nothing to strive for except the imposition of it upon the world. England has taken as her model the bee, and still lags infinitely far behind the fulfilment of her ideal. In the unbroken security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely, perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness, pursued her path towards a social integration of an {202} ever closer and deeper kind. She has stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness of her destiny, no will to power. She has had almost no national heroes, and has always been constitutionally frigid to her great men, grudging them the material for their experimentations on her people, indifferent to their expositions of her duty and her imperial destiny, granting them a chance to die for her with no more encouragement than an impatient sigh. She has allowed an empire to be won for her by her restless younger sons, has shown no gratification in their conquests, and so far from thrilling with the exultation of the conqueror, has always at the earliest moment set her new dominions at work upon the problem in which her wholly unromantic absorption has never relaxed. And after a thousand years she seems as far as ever from her goal. Her society is irregular, disorganized, inco-ordinate, split into classes at war with one another, weighted at one end with poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease, weighted at the other end by ignorance, prejudice, and corpulent self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, her patience is no more shaken by what she is lectured upon as failure than was her composure by what she was assured was imperial success. She is no less bound by her fate than is Germany, and must continue her path until she reaches its infinitely remoter goal. Nations may model themselves on her expedients, and found the architecture of their liberty on the tabernacles she has set up by the wayside to rest in for a night—she will continue on her road unconscious of herself or her greatness, absent-mindedly polite to genius, pleasantly tickled by prophets with very loud voices, but apt to go to sleep under {203} sermons, too awkward to boast or bluster, too composed to seem strong, too dull to be flattered, too patient to be flurried, and withal inflexibly practical and indifferent to dreams.

* * * * *

No more perfect illustration of the characteristics of the two nations could be found than their attitude before the war. England the empiric, dimly conscious of trouble, was puzzled, restless, and uneasy in the face of a problem she was threatened with some day having to study; Germany, the theorist, cool, “objective,” conscious of herself, was convinced there was no problem at all.

In studying the mind of England in the spirit of the biological psychologist, it is necessary to keep in mind the society of the bee, just as in studying the German mind it was necessary to keep in mind the society of the wolf.

One of the most striking phenomena which observers of the bee have noticed is the absence of any obvious means of direction or government in the hive. The queen seems to be valued merely for her functions, which are in no way directive. Decisions of policy of the greatest moment appear, as far as we can detect, to arise spontaneously among the workers, and whether the future is to prove them right or wrong, are carried out without protest or disagreement. This capacity for unanimous decisions is obviously connected with the limited mental development of the individual, as is shown by the fact that in man it is very much more feeble. In spite of this, the unanimity of the hive is wonderfully effective and surprisingly successful. Speculators upon the physiology and psychology of bees have been forced—very tentatively of course—to imagine that creatures living in such intensely close communion are able to communicate to one another, and, as it were, to a common stock, such extremely {204} simple conceptions as they can be supposed to entertain, and produce, so to say, a communal mind which comes to have, at any rate in times of crisis, a quasi-independent existence. The conception is difficult to express in concrete terms, and even to grasp in more than an occasional intuitive flash. Whether we are to entertain such a conception or are to reject it, the fact remains that societies of a very closely communal habit are apt to give the appearance of being ruled by a kind of common mind—a veritable spirit of the hive—although no trace of any directive apparatus can be detected.

A close study of England gives the impression of some agency comparable with a “spirit of the hive” being at work within it. The impression is not perhaps to be taken as altogether fantastic, when we remember how her insular station and her long history have forced upon her a physical seclusion and unity resembling, though of course far less complete than, that of the hive. I am of course not unaware that disquisitions upon the national spirit are very familiar to us. These, however, are so loosely conceived, so much concerned with purely conventional personifications of quite imaginary qualities, that I cannot regard them as referring to the phenomenon I am trying to describe.

The conception in my mind is that of an old and isolated people, developing, by the slow mingling and attrition of their ideas, and needs, and impulses, a certain deeply lying unity which becomes a kind of “instinct” for national life, and gives to national policy, without the conscious knowledge of any individual citizen, without the direction of statesmen, and perhaps in spite of them all, a continuity of trend, and even an intelligence, by which events may be influenced in a profoundly important way.

The making of some such assumption, helped as it is by the analogy of the bee, seems to be {205} necessary when we consider at all objectively the history of England and her Empire. She has done so much without any leading, so much in spite of her ostensible leaders, so often a great policy or a successful stroke has been apparently accidental. So much of her work that seemed, while it was doing, to be local and narrow in conception and motive displays at a distance evidences of design on the great scale. Her contests with Philip of Spain, with Louis XIV, with Napoleon, and the foundation of her Colonial Empire, would seem to be the grandiose conceptions of some supreme genius did we not know how they were undertaken and in what spirit pursued.

It appears, then, that England has something with which to retort upon the conscious direction to which Germany owes so much of her strength. Among the number of embattled principles and counter principles which this war has brought into the field, we must include as not the least interesting the duel between conscious national direction on the one side and unconscious national will and knowledge on the other.

It is quite outside my province to touch upon the diplomatic events which led up to the war. They seem to me to be irrelevant to the biological type of analysis we are trying to pursue. There can be no doubt at all that the ordinary consciousness of the vast majority of citizens of this country was intensely averse from the idea of war. Those who were in general bellicose were for the moment decidedly out of influence. Can we suppose, however, that the deep, still spirit of the hive that whispers unrecognized in us all had failed to note that strange, gesticulating object across the North Sea? In its vast, simple memory would come up other objects that had gone on like that. It would remember a mailed fist that had been {206} flourished across the Bay of Biscay three hundred years ago, a little man in shining armour who had strutted threateningly on the other shore of the Channel, and the other little man who had stood there among his armies, and rattled his sabre in the scabbard. It had marked them all down in their time, and it remembered the old vocabulary. It would turn wearily and a little impatiently to this new portent over the North Sea. . . . Wise with the experience of a thousand years, it would know when to strike.

* * * * *

Such deeply buried combined national impulses as we are here glancing at are far removed from the influence of pacifist or jingo. Any attempt to define them must be a matter of guesswork and groping, in which the element of speculation is far in excess of the element of ascertained fact. It seems, however, that, as in the case of the bee, they concern chiefly actual decisions of crucial matters of policy. To put this suggestion in another form, we might say the spirit of the people makes the great wars, but it leaves the statesman to conduct them. It may make, therefore, a decision of incredible profundity, launch the people on the necessary course at the necessary moment, and then leave them to flounder through the difficulties of their journey as best they can. Herein is the contrast it presents with the German resource of conscious direction—superficial, apt to blunder in all the larger, deeper matters of human nature, but constant, alert, and ingenious in making immediate use of every available means and penetrating every department of activity.

During the conduct of war it is only in the simplest, broadest matters that the spirit of the people can bring its wisdom to bear. One of the most striking manifestations of it has, for example, been {207} the way in which it has shown a knowledge that the war would be long and hard. The bad news has been, in general, received without complaint, reproach, or agitation, the good news, such as it has been, with a resolute determination not to exult or rejoice. That so many months of a deadly war have produced no _popular_ expression of exultation or dismay is a substantial evidence of moral power, and not the less impressive for being so plainly the work of the common man himself.

Such manifestations of the spirit of the people are rare, and meet with very little encouragement from those who have access to the public. It is astonishing how absent the gift of interpretation seems to be. A few, a very few, stand out as being able to catch those whispers of immemorial wisdom; many seem to be occupied in confusing them with a harsh and discordant clamour of speech.

* * * * *

If we are correct in our analogy of the bee and the wolf, England has one great moral advantage over Germany, namely, that there is in the structure of her society no inherent obstacle to perfect unity among her people. The utmost unity Germany can compass is that of the aggressive type, which brings with it a harsh, non-altruistic relation among individuals, and can yield its full moral value only during the maintenance of successful attack. England, on the other hand, having followed the socialized type of gregariousness, is free to integrate her society to an indefinite extent. The development of the altruistic relation among her individuals lies in her natural path. Her system of social segregation is not necessarily a rigid one, and if she can bring about an adequate acceleration of the perfectly natural consolidation towards which she is, and has slowly been, tending, she will {208} attain access to a store of moral power literally inexhaustible, and will reach a moral cohesion which no hardship can shake, and an endurance which no power on earth can overcome.

These are no figures of speech, but plain biological fact, capable of immediate practical application and yielding an immediate result. It must be admitted that she has made little progress towards this consummation since the beginning of the war. Leaders, including not only governing politicians but also those who in any way have access to public notice, tend to enjoin a merely conventional unity, which is almost functionless in the promotion of moral strength. It is not much more than an agreement to say we are united; it produces no true unity of spirit and no power in the individual to deny himself the indulgence of his egoistic impulses in action and in speech, and is therefore as irritating as it is useless. It is unfortunate that the education and circumstances of many public men deny them any opportunity of learning the very elementary principles which are necessary for the development of a nation’s moral resources. Occasionally one or another catches an intuitive glimpse of some fragment of the required knowledge, but never enough to enable him to develop any effective influence. For the most part their impulses are as likely to be destructive of the desired effect as favourable to it. In the past England’s wars have always been conducted in an atmosphere of disunion, of acrimony, and of criticism designed to embarrass the Government rather than, as it professes, to strengthen the country. It is a testimony to the moral sturdiness of the people, and to the power and subtlety of the spirit of the hive, that success has been possible in such conditions. When one remembers how England has flourished on domestic discord in {209} critical times, one is tempted to believe that she derives some mysterious power from such a state, and that the abolition of discord might not be for her the advantageous change it appears so evidently to be. Consideration, however, must show that this hypothesis is inadmissible, and that England has won through on these occasions in spite of the handicap discord has put upon her. In the present war, tough and hard as is her moral fibre, she will need every element of her power to avoid the weariness and enfeeblement that will otherwise come upon her before her task is done.

Throughout the months of warfare that have already passed no evidence has become public of any recognition that the moral power of a nation depends upon causes which can be identified, formulated, and controlled. It seems to be unknown that that domination of egoistic impulses by social impulses which we call a satisfactory morale is capable of direct cultivation as such, that by it the resources of the nation are made completely available to the nation’s leaders, that without it every demand upon the citizen is liable to be grudgingly met or altogether repudiated.

We are told by physicians that uninstructed patients are apt to insist upon the relief of their symptoms, and to care nothing for the cure of their diseases, that a man will demand a bottle of medicine to stop the pain of an ulcer in his stomach, but will refuse to allow the examination that would establish the nature of his disease. The statesman embarrassed by the manifestations of an imperfect morale seems to incline to a similar method. When he finds he cannot get soldiers at the necessary rate, he would invent a remedy for that particular symptom. When he has difficulties in getting one or another industrial class to suspend its charters in the interests of the State, he must have a new {210} and special nostrum for that. When he would relax the caution of the capitalist or restrain the wastefulness of the self-indulgent, again other remedies must be found. And so he passes from crisis to crisis, never knowing from moment to moment what trouble will break out next, harassed, it is to be supposed, by the doubt whether his stock of potions and pills will hold out, and how long their very moderate efficiency will continue.

None of these troubles is a disease in itself; all are evidences of an imperfect national morale, and any attempt to deal with them that does not reach their common cause will necessarily therefore be unsatisfactory and impermanent.

The sole basis of a satisfactory morale in a people of the social type that obtains in England is a true national unity, which is therefore the singular and complete remedy for all the civil difficulties incident upon a great and dangerous war.

* * * * *

It is impossible to form any guess whether England will keep to her traditional methods or will depart so far from them as to take a bold and comprehensive view of her present and her growing moral needs. A carefully conceived and daringly carried out organization of a real national unity would have no great difficulty in a country so rich in practical genius; it would make an end once for all of every internal difficulty of the State, and would convert the nation into an engine of war which nothing could resist.

The more probable and the characteristic event will be a mere continuation in the old way. It will exemplify our usual and often admirable enough contempt for theoretical considerations and dreams, our want of interest in knowledge and foresight, our willingness to take any risk rather than endure the horrid pains of thought. {211}

When we remember how costly is our traditional method, how long and painful it makes the way, how doubtful it even makes the goal, it is impossible for the most philosophic to restrain a sigh for the needless suffering it entails, and a thrill of alarm for the dangers it gives our path, the darkness around us and ahead, the unimaginable end.

* * * * *

To the student, the end of the chapter is a chance to turn from the study of detail and allow his mind to range through a larger atmosphere and over a longer sequence. Closing our small chapter, we also may look at large over the great expanse of the biological series in whose illimitable panorama the war that covers our nearer skies with its blood-red cloud is no bigger than a pin point. As we contemplate in imagination the first minute spot of living jelly that crept and hungered in the mud, we can see the interplay of its necessities and its powers already pushing it along the path at the end of which we stand. Inherent in the dot of magic substance that was no longer mere carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and a little phosphorus, was the capacity to combine with its fellows and to profit by the fellowship, however loose. In the slow process of time combination brought freedom which, just like ours, was freedom to vary and, varying, to specialize. So in time great States of cells grew up, their individual citizen cells specialized to the finest pitch, perfect in communion with one another, co-ordinate in all their activities, incorporated with the State.

These new and splendid organizations, by the very fact of giving freedom to the individual cells, had lost it themselves. Still, they retained their capacity for combination, and where the need of {212} freedom was greatest they found it again in a new combination on a bigger scale. Thus again was obtained freedom to vary, to specialize, to react. Over the world fellowships of all grades and almost all types of creatures sprang up. Specialization, communion, co-ordination again appeared on the new plane. It was as if Nature, to protect her children against herself, was trying to crowd as much living matter into one unit as she could. She had failed with her giant lizards, with the mammoth and the mastodon. She would try a new method which should dispense with gross physical aggregations, but should minister to the same needs and afford the same powers. The body should be left free, the mind alone should be incorporated in the new unit. The non-material nexus proved as efficient as the physical one had been. The flock, the herd, the pack, the swarm, new creatures all, flourished and ranged the world. Their power depended on the capacity for intercommunication amongst their members and expanded until the limits of this were reached. As long as intercommunication was limited the full possibilities of the new experiment were concealed, but at length appeared a creature in whom this capacity could develop indefinitely. At once a power of a new magnitude was manifest. Puny as were his individuals, man’s capacity for communication soon made him master of the world. The very quality, however, which gave him success introduced a new complication of his fate. His brain power allowed him to speak and understand and so to communicate and combine more effectively than any other animal; his brain power gave him individuality and egoism, and the possibility of varied reaction which enabled him to obey the voice of instinct after the fashion of his own heart. All combination therefore was irregular, inco-ordinate, and only very slowly progressive. He has even at {213} times wandered into blind paths where the possibility of progressive combination is lost.

Nevertheless the needs and capacities that were at work in the primeval amœba are at work in him. In his very flesh and bones is the impulse towards closer and closer union in larger and larger fellowships. To-day he is fighting his way towards that goal, fighting for the perfect unit which Nature has so long foreshadowed, in which there shall be a complete communion of its members, unobstructed by egoism or hatred, by harshness or arrogance or the wolfish lust for blood. That perfect unit will be a new creature, recognizable as a single entity; to its million-minded power and knowledge no barrier will be insurmountable, no gulf impassable, no task too great.

{214} POSTSCRIPT OF 1919

PREJUDICE IN TIME OF WAR.

With the exception of the two preliminary essays, the foregoing chapters were written in the autumn of 1915. As the chief purpose of the book was to expound the conception that psychology is a science practically useful in actual affairs, it was inevitable that a great deal of the exemplary matter by which it was attempted to illustrate the theoretical discussion should be related to the war of 1914–1918. Rich, however, as this subject was in material with which to illustrate a psychological inquiry, it presented also the great difficulty of being surrounded and permeated by prejudices of the most deeply impassioned kind, prejudices, moreover, in one direction or another from which no inhabitant of one of the belligerent countries could have the least expectation of being free. To yield to the temptation offered by the psychological richness of war themes might thus be to sacrifice the detachment of mind and coolness of judgment without which scientific investigation is impossible. It had to be admitted, in fact, that there were strong grounds for such epistemological pessimism, and it will perhaps be useful in a broad way to define some of these here.

In normal times a modern nation is made up of a society in which no regard is paid to moral unity, and in which therefore common feeling is to {215} a great extent unorganized and inco-ordinate. In such a society the individual citizen cannot derive from the nation as a whole the full satisfaction of the needs special to him as a gregarious animal. The national feeling he experiences when at home among his fellows is too vague and remote to call forth the sense of moral vigour and security that his nature demands. As has already been pointed out[S] the necessary consequence is the segregation of society into innumerable minor groups, each constituting in itself a small herd, and dispensing to its members the moral energy that in a fully organized society would come from the nation as a whole. Of such minor herds some are much more distinct from the common body than others. Some engage a part only of the life of their members, so that the individual citizen may belong to a number of groups and derive such moral energy as he possesses from a variety of sources. Thus in a fully segregated society in time of peace the moral support of the citizen comes from his social class and his immediate circle, his professional associations, his church, his chapel, his trade union and his clubs, rather than directly from the nation in which he is a unit. Indeed, so far from looking to the nation at large for the fulfilment of its natural function of providing “all hope, all sustainment, all reward,” he is apt to regard it as embodied by the tax-gatherer, the policeman, and the bureaucrat, at its best remote and indifferent, at its worst hostile and oppressive.

[S] Pp. 137, 138 _supra_.

The more distinct of these intra-national groups may not only be very fully isolated from the common body, but may be the seat of an actual corporate hostility to it, or rather to the aggregated minor groups which have come officially to represent it. When war breaks upon a society thus constituted {216} the intense stimulation of herd instinct that results tends to break down the moral restrictions set up by segregation, to throw back the individual citizen on to the nation at large for the satisfaction of his moral needs, and to replace class feeling by national feeling. The apprehended danger of the given war is the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with which the war is defended and conducted. If a minor group has already developed a certain hostility to the common body and resists the solvent effect of the outbreak of war, it becomes a potential source of anti-national feeling and of opposition to the national policy. Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility, its character as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness a herd can give. Thus we may say, that in a country at war _every_ citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd instinct characteristic of that state. In the individual who follows in feeling the general body of his fellows, and in him who belongs to a dissentient minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion that our citizen of the majority is no more—if no less—liable to the distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we conclude that in a country at war _all_ opinion is necessarily more or less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to {217} bias is a herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.

It is undoubtedly depressing to have to recognize this universality of prejudice and to have to abandon the opinion sometimes held that the characteristics of herd belief are limited to the judgments of the vulgar. The selectness of a minority in no way guarantees it against the fallacies of the mob. A minority sufficiently unpopular is, in a sense, a mob in which smallness is compensated for by density. The moral vigour and fortitude which unpopular minorities enjoy are evidences of herd instinct in vigorous action; the less admirable liability to prejudice being a part of the same instinctive process is a necessary accompaniment. We may lay it down, then, as fundamental that all opinion among the members of a nation at war is liable to prejudice, and when we remember with what vehemence such opinion is pronounced and with what fortitude it is defended we may regard as at least highly probable that such opinion always actually is prejudiced—rests, that is to say, on instinct rather than reason. Now, it is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war. All of it sharing the common characteristic of war opinion in being prejudiced, some will pronounce more or less clearly that the war is just and necessary, some will pronounce more or less clearly against that view; there will be a division into what we may call pro-national and anti-national currents of opinion, each accompanied respectively by its counterpart of what we may call anti-hostile and pro-hostile opinion. It is a significant fact that the relative development of pro-national and anti-national feeling varies according to the degree in which the given war is apprehended as dangerous. A {218} war apprehended as dangerous produces a more complete solution of the minor herds of society into the common body than does a war not so regarded; in consequence there is a nearer approach to homogeneity, and pro-national opinion is far in excess of anti-national opinion, which, if recognizable, is confined to insignificant minorities. A war regarded as not dangerous produces a less complete solution in the common body, a less degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national opinion, that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War of 1899–1902 was not apprehended as dangerous in this country, and in consequence, though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority, anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority. The war of 1914–1918, regarded from the first as of the greatest gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance, and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The Russo-Japanese War provided an excellent double illustration of these mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national opinion, and made the conduct of the war correspondingly vigorous. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a further point is illustrated. The essential factor in the stimulation of herd instinct by war is not the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it. The Prussians were dangerous enough to France, but were not generally regarded as such by the French, and in consequence national {219} homogeneity did not develop as it did on a later occasion in face of the same menace.

If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly important psychological factor—the apprehended danger to the nation of the war in question—it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which are usually regarded as so important in determining the people’s response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914–1918 each of the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice. The fact that such a sense of rectitude is a universal and inevitable accompaniment of war, and as strong in a predatory and {220} criminal belligerent as in a generally pacific one, gives us a convenient measure of the extent to which prejudice must prevail in warfare.[T]

[T] It is important that it should be quite clear that we have
been speaking here of the reaction of the general body of a nation
to the occurrence of war, and not of the reasons for which a given
war was undertaken. In England and in Germany the feeling of
the people that the late war was just and necessary was equally
intense and equally a direct consequence of the danger to the
herd it represented. It was therefore a non-rational instinctive
response without reference to objective justice in either case.
Had the threat to the herd on either side seemed less grave,
opinion as to the justice of the war would in that country have
been correspondingly more divided. By her calculated truculence
in the years before the war Germany—intending doubtless to
intimidate a decaying people—had made it certain that when the
threat to this country did come it should be apprehended at once
as dangerous to the last degree, and had thus herself organized
the practical unanimity of her chief enemy. All such reactions
upon the outbreak of war are instinctively determined. It is the
burden of the statesman that his decision in a crisis in favour of
war _automatically_ renders impossible _rational_ confirmation by
the people.

We thus arrive at the discouraging conclusion that in a belligerent country all opinion in any way connected with the war is subject to prejudice, either pro-national or anti-national, and is very likely in consequence to be of impaired validity. Must we then conclude further that speculation upon war themes is so liable to distortion that reasoned judgments of any practical value are impossible? Now, it is guidance in just such a difficulty as this that a psychology having any pretensions to be called practical may fairly be expected to yield, and psychology does in fact provide certain broad precautionary principles, which, although by no means infallible guides, do profess to be able to keep within bounds the disturbing effects of prejudice on judgment and so render possible the not wholly unprofitable discussion even of matters the most deeply implicated by war-time passion.

First among such principles is the recognition of the fact that prejudice does not display itself as such to direct introspection. One who is being {221} influenced by prejudice will never be able to detect his biassed judgments by an apparent defect in their plausibility or by any characteristic logical weakness. Agreement or disagreement with common opinion will as such be no help, since prejudice infests minorities no less than majorities. To suppose that when one has admitted the liability to prejudice one can free oneself from it by a direct voluntary effort is a common belief and an entirely fallacious one. Such a task is far beyond the powers of the most fully instructed mind, and is not likely to be undertaken except by those who have least chance of success. Prejudice, in fact, is for the individual like the ether of the physicist, infinitely pervasive and potent, but insusceptible of direct detection; its presence is to be assumed as general, but it escapes before immediate search by introspection as the ether eludes the balance and the test-tube.

Secondly, it is possible for the investigator, having admitted the existence of prejudice as a condition of thought, to recognize the general direction of its action in his own mind, to recognize, that is to say, whether the tone of it is pro-national or anti-national, and thus to obtain a certain orientation for his efforts to neutralize it. Having frankly recognized this general tendency in his thinking, he will be able to do something towards correcting it by making allowance for it in his conclusion as a whole. If his tendency of feeling is pro-national, he will say to himself of any judgment favourable to his country, “This is a conclusion likely to have been influenced by prejudice, therefore for all the precautions I may have taken in forming it, and whatever scientific care and caution I may have used, in spite even of its agreeable appearance of self-evident truth, I must regard its validity as subject to some subtraction before it {222} can safely be made the basis for further speculation.” If his tendency of feeling is anti-national, he will have a similar task of attenuation to carry out upon the conclusions unfavourable to his country that he may reach, and will be prudent to make very drastic deductions in view of the supposed immunity to prejudice with which minorities are rather apt to assume the absence of vulgar approval endows them.[U]

[U] It is perhaps of interest to note in passing that war-time
opinion and prejudice are characteristically pro-national
and anti-national, rather than anti-hostile and pro-hostile
respectively. The impulse that might have led an isolated German
to defend the English at the expense of his countrymen, or an
isolated Englishman to defend the Germans at the expense of his
countrymen, was in its psychological essence anti-national and
animated by no love of the enemy; it was an instinctive revolt
against his country, or rather the groups which in the process
of social segregation had come to represent it. Such terms,
therefore, as pro-German, and in another association pro-Boer,
though doubtless convenient implements of abuse, were inexactly
descriptive psychologically. “Anti-English” would have been
more just, but immensely less effective, as vituperation, for
the prejudice it was desired to decry was for the most part a
hostility not to the nation, but to its official embodiment.
Probably, however, it was the very element of injustice in the
term pro-German that made it so satisfactory a vehicle for
exasperated feeling.

Finally, one who attempts to deal usefully with matters in which strong feeling is inevitable will do well, however thoroughly he may try to guard himself from the effects of prejudice, to bring his speculative conclusions into such form that they are automatically tested by the progress of events. Symmetry and internal consistency are unfortunately but too often accepted as evidences of objective validity. That the items of a series of conclusions fit into one another neatly and compose a system logically sound and attractive to the intellect gives us practically no information of their truth. For this a frequently repeated contact with external reality is necessary, and of such contacts the most thoroughly satisfactory one is the power to foretell the course of events. Foresight is the supreme {223} test of scientific validity, and the more a line of argument is liable to deflection by non-rational processes the more urgent is the need for it constantly to be put into forms which will allow its capacity for foresight to be tested. This was the one great advantage amongst heavy handicaps enjoyed by those who ventured into speculation upon the international situation during the late war. Events were moving so quickly from crisis to crisis that it was possible for the psychologist to see his judgments confirmed or corrected almost from day to day, to see in the authentic fabric of reality as it left the loom where he had had any kind of foreknowledge, where he had been altogether unprepared, and where he had failed in foresight of some development that should have been within his powers.

These three principles were those in accordance with which it was attempted to conduct the discussion in this book of topics connected with the war. The writer was aware that neither was he by nature or art immune to prejudice nor able by some miracle of will power to lay down passion when he took up the pen, and he admitted to himself with what frankness he could command the liability under which his conclusions would lie of having been arrived at under the influence of pro-national prejudice. He hoped, however, that a liberal allowance for the direction of his instinctive bias and a grateful use of the diurnal corrective of events might enable him to reach at any rate some conclusions not altogether without a useful tincture of validity.

It was possible, moreover, to put certain conclusions in a form which the development of the war must confirm or disprove, and it may be interesting as a test of what was put forward as an essay in an essentially practical psychology briefly {224} to review these theoretical anticipations in the light of what actually has happened.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTICIPATIONS

The hypothesis was put forward that in the German people the reactions in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western civilizations. The next step was naturally to inquire whether the known characters of what we called aggressive gregariousness were able to account for the observed German peculiarities in reaction, and then to indicate what special features we might expect to appear in Germany under the developing stress of war if our hypothesis was sound.