Chapter IV: Mental Characteristics of the Gregarious Animal (2)

Thirdly, the problem may be shirked by the easy mechanism of rationalization. The man may take his forbidden pleasure and endow a chapel, persuading himself that his is a special case, that at any rate he is not as bad as X, or Y, or Z, who {53} committed such and such enormities, that after all there is Divine mercy, and he never beat his wife, and was always regular with his subscriptions to missions and the hospitals. Or, if his difficulty is the ethical one, he will come to see how right the herd view really is; that it is a very narrow mind which cannot see the intrinsic excellence of suffering; that the sheep and cattle we breed for eating, the calf we bleed to death that its meat may be white, the one baby out of four we kill in the first year of life, that cancer, consumption, and insanity and the growing river of blood which bathes the feet of advancing mankind, all have their part in the Increasing Purpose which is leading the race ever upwards and onwards to a Divine consummation of joy. Thus the conflict ceases, and the man is content to watch the blood and the Purpose go on increasing together and to put on flesh unperplexed by the shallow and querulous scruples of his youth.

Of these three solutions that of scepticism is unquestionably the least common, though the impression that this is not the case is created by the frequency of apparent scepticism, which, in fact, merely masks the continuation of conflict in the deeper strata of the mind. A man the subject of such submerged conflict, though he may appear to others, and, of course, to himself, to have reached a secure and uncontested basis of stability, may, after a period of apparently frictionless mental life, betray by unmistakable evidence the fact that conflict has continued disastrously below the surface.

The solutions by indifference and by rationalization or by a mixture of these two processes are characteristic of the great class of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State. In {54} them herd suggestion shows its capacity to triumph over experience, to delay the evolution of altruism, and to obscure the existence and falsify the results of the contest between personal and social desires. That it is able to do so has the advantage of establishing existing society with great firmness, but it has also the consequence of entrusting the conduct of the State and the attitude of it towards life to a class which their very stability shows to possess a certain relative incapacity to take experience seriously, a certain relative insensibility to the value of feeling and to suffering, and a decided preference for herd tradition over all other sources of conduct.

Early in history the bulk of mankind must have been of this type, because experience, being still relatively simple, would have but little suggestive force, and would therefore readily be suppressed by herd suggestion. There would be little or no mental conflict, and such as there was would be readily stilled by comparatively simple rationalizations. The average man would then be happy, active, and possessed of an inexhaustible fund of motive and energy, capable of intense patriotism and even of self-immolation for the herd. The nation consequently, in an appropriate environment, would be an expanding one and rendered ruthless and formidable by an intense, unshakable conviction of its divine mission. Its blindness towards the new in experience would keep its patriots narrow and fierce, its priests bigoted and bloodthirsty, its rulers arrogant, reactionary, and over-confident. Should chance ordain that there arose no great environmental change rendering necessary great modifications, such a nation would have a brilliant career of conquest as has been so often demonstrated by history.

Amongst the first-class Powers to-day the mentally stable are still the directing class, and their {55} characteristic tone is discernible in national attitudes towards experience, in national ideals and religions, and in national morality. It is this possession of the power of directing national opinion by a class which is in essence relatively insensitive towards new combinations of experience; this persistence of a mental type which may have been adequate in the simpler past, into a world where environments are daily becoming more complex—it is this survival, so to say, of the waggoner upon the footplate of the express engine, which has made the modern history of nations a series of such breathless adventures and hairbreadth escapes. To those who are able to view national affairs from an objective standpoint, it is obvious that each of these escapes might very easily have been a disaster, and that sooner or later one of them must be such.

Thus far we have seen that the conflict between herd suggestion and experience is associated with the appearance of the great mental type which is commonly called normal. Whether or not it is in fact to be regarded as such is comparatively unimportant and obviously a question of statistics; what is, however, of an importance impossible to exaggerate is the fact that in this type of mind personal satisfactoriness or adequacy, or, as we may call it, mental comfort, is attained at the cost of an attitude towards experience which greatly affects the value to the species of the activities of minds of this type. This mental stability, then, is to be regarded as, in certain important directions, a loss; and the nature of the loss resides in a limitation of outlook, a relative intolerance of the new in thought, and a consequent narrowing of the range of facts over which satisfactory intellectual activity is possible. We may, therefore, for convenience, refer to this type as the resistive, a name which serves as a reminder of the exceedingly important fact that, {56} however “normal” the type may be, it is one which falls far short of the possibilities of the human mind.

If we now turn to a consideration of the mental characteristics of the constituents of society other than those of the resistive type, we shall find a common quality traceable, and another great type capable of broad definition. We must at once, however, guard ourselves against being misled by the name “normal” as applied to the resistant into the supposition that this type is in a numerical majority in society. Intellectually unquestionably of inferior value, there is good reason to suppose that in mere numbers it has already passed its zenith, as may be gathered from the note of panic which what is called the increase of degeneracy is beginning to excite.

Outside the comfortable and possibly diminishing ranks of the “normal,” society is everywhere penetrated by a steadily increasing degree of what we may call in the broadest possible way mental instability. All observers of society, even the most optimistic, are agreed that the prevalence of this mental quality is increasing, while those who are competent to trace its less obtrusive manifestations find it to be very widespread.

When the twenty years just past come to be looked back upon from the distant future, it is probable that their chief claim to interest will be that they saw the birth of the science of abnormal psychology. That science, inconspicuous as has been its development, has already given us a few generalizations of the first importance. Amongst such, perhaps the most valuable is that which has taught us that certain mental and physical manifestations which have usually been regarded as disease in the ordinary sense are due to the effects upon the mind of the failure to assimilate the {57} experience presented to it into a harmonious unitary personality. We have seen that the stable-minded deal with an unsatisfactory piece of experience by rejecting its significance. In certain minds such successful exclusion does not occur, and the unwelcome experience persists as an irritant, so to say, capable neither of assimilation nor rejection. Abnormal psychology discloses the fact that such minds are apt to develop the supposed diseases we have just referred to, and the fact that these and other manifestations of what we have called mental instability are the consequences of mental conflict.

Now, we have already seen that a gregarious animal, unless his society is perfectly organized, must be subject to lasting and fierce conflict between experience and herd suggestion.[N] It is natural, therefore, to assume that the manifestations of mental instability are not diseases of the individual in the ordinary sense at all, but inevitable consequences of man’s biological history and exact measures of the stage now reached of his assimilation into the gregarious life. The manifestations of mental instability and disintegration were at first supposed to be of comparatively rare occurrence and limited to certain well-known “diseases,” but they are coming to be recognized over a larger and larger field, and in a great variety of phenomena.

[N] The word “experience” is used here in a special sense that
perhaps renders necessary a word or two of definition. The
experience meant is everything that comes to the individual, not
only his experience of events in the external world, but also his
experience of the instinctive and often egoistic impulses at work
within his own personality. 1915.

Conditions which at first sight give rise to no suspicion of being acquired injuries to the mind, when they are looked at in the light of the facts we have been considering, reveal themselves as being scars inflicted by conflict as certainly as are some {58} forms of insanity. Characteristics which pass as vices, eccentricities, defects of temper, peculiarities of disposition, come when critically examined to be explicable as minor grades of defective mental stability, although, on account of their great frequency, they have been looked upon as normal, or at any rate in the natural order of things.

Few examples could be found to illustrate better such conditions than alcoholism. Almost universally regarded as either, on the one hand, a sin or vice, or on the other hand, as a disease, there can be little doubt that in fact it is essentially a response to a psychological necessity. In the tragic conflict between what he has been taught to desire and what he is allowed to get, man has found in alcohol, as he has found in certain other drugs, a sinister but effective peacemaker, a means of securing, for however short a time, some way out of the prison house of reality back to the Golden Age. There can be equally little doubt that it is but a comparatively small proportion of the victims of conflict who find a solace in alcohol, and the prevalence of alcoholism and the punishments entailed by the use of that dreadful remedy cannot fail to impress upon us how great must be the number of those whose need was just as great, but who were too ignorant, too cowardly, or perhaps too brave to find a release there.

We have seen that mental instability must be regarded as a condition extremely common, and produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other. It remains for us to estimate in some rough way the characteristics of the unstable, in order that we may be able to judge of their value or otherwise to the State and the species. Such an estimate must necessarily be exaggerated, over-sharp in its outlines, omitting {59} much, and therefore in many respects false. The most prominent characteristic in which the mentally unstable contrast with the “normal” is what we may vaguely call motive. They tend to be weak in energy, and especially in persistence of energy. Such weakness may translate itself into a vague scepticism as to the value of things in general, or into a definite defect of what is popularly called will power, or into many other forms, but it is always of the same fundamental significance, for it is always the result of the thwarting of the primary impulses to action resident in herd suggestion by the influence of an experience which cannot be disregarded. Such minds cannot be stimulated for long by objects adequate to normal ambition; they are apt to be sceptical in such matters as patriotism, religion, politics, social success, but the scepticism is incomplete, so that they are readily won to new causes, new religions, new quacks, and as readily fall away therefrom.

We saw that the resistive gain in motive what they lose in adaptability; we may add that in a sense the unstable gain in adaptability what they lose in motive. Thus we see society cleft by the instinctive qualities of its members into two great classes, each to a great extent possessing what the other lacks, and each falling below the possibilities of human personality. The effect of the gradual increase of the unstable in society can be seen to a certain extent in history. We can watch it through the careers of the Jews and of the Romans. At first, when the bulk of the citizens were of the stable type, the nation was enterprising, energetic, indomitable, but hard, inelastic, and fanatically convinced of its Divine mission. The inevitable effect of the expansion of experience which followed success was that development of the unstable and sceptical which ultimately allowed the nation, no longer {60} believing in itself or its gods, to become the almost passive prey of more stable peoples.

In regard to the question of the fundamental significance of the two great mental types found in society, a tempting field for speculation at once opens up, and many questions immediately arise for discussion. Is, for example, the stable normal type naturally in some special degree insensitive to experience, and if so, is such a quality inborn or acquired? Again, may the characteristics of the members of this class be the result of an experience relatively easily dealt with by rationalization and exclusion? Then again, are the unstable naturally hypersensitive to experience, or have they met with an experience relatively difficult to assimilate? Into the discussion of such questions we shall here make no attempt to enter, but shall limit ourselves to reiterating that these two types divide society between them, that they both must be regarded as seriously defective and as evidence that civilization has not yet provided a medium in which the average human mind can grow undeformed and to its full stature.

GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE FUTURE OF MAN.

Thus far we have attempted to apply biological conceptions to man and society as they actually exist at present. We may now, very shortly, inquire whether or not the same method can yield some hint as to the course which human development will take in the future.

As we have already seen reason to believe, in the course of organic development when the limits of size and efficiency in the unicellular organism were reached, the only possible access of advantage to the competing organism was gained by the appearance of combination. In the scale of the metazoa {61} we see the advantages of combination and division of labour being more and more made use of, until the individual cells lose completely the power of separate existence, and their functions come to be useful only in the most indirect way and through the organisms of which the cells are constituents. This complete submergence of the cell in the organism indicates the attainment of the maximum advantages to be obtained from this particular access in complexity, and it indicates to us the direction in which development must proceed within the limits which are produced by that other access of complexity—gregariousness.

The success and extent of such development clearly depend on the relation of two series of activities in the individual which may in the most general way be described as the capacity for varied reaction and the capacity for communication. The process going on in the satisfactorily developing gregarious animal is the moulding of the varied reactions of the individual into functions beneficial to him only indirectly through the welfare of the new unit—the herd. This moulding process is a consequence of the power of intercommunication amongst the individual constituents of the new unit. Intercommunication is thus seen to be of cardinal importance to the gregarious, just as was the nervous system to the multicellular.

Moreover, in a given gregarious species the existence of a highly developed power of reaction in the individual with a proportionately less developed capacity for communication will mean that the species is not deriving the advantages it might from the possession of gregariousness, while the full advantages of the type will be attained only when the two sets of activities are correspondingly strong.

Here we may see perhaps the explanation of the astounding success and completeness of {62} gregariousness in bees and ants. Their cycle of development was early complete because the possibilities of reaction of the individual were so small, and consequently the capacity for intercommunication of the individual was relatively soon able to attain a corresponding grade. The individual has become as completely merged in the hive as the single cell in the multicellular animal, and consequently the whole of her activities is available for the uses of the State. It is interesting to notice that, considered from this aspect, the wonderful society of the bee, with its perfect organization and its wonderful adaptability and elasticity, owes its early attainment of success to the smallness of the brain power of the individual.

For the mammals with their greater powers of varied reaction the path to the consummation of their possibilities must be longer, more painful, and more dangerous, and this applies in an altogether special degree to man.

The enormous power of varied reaction possessed by man must render necessary for his attainment of the full advantages of the gregarious habit a power of intercommunication of absolutely unprecedented fineness. It is clear that scarcely a hint of such power has yet appeared, and it is equally obvious that it is this defect which gives to society the characteristics which are the contempt of the man of science and the disgust of the humanitarian.

We are now in a position to understand how momentous is the question as to what society does with the raw material of its minds to encourage in them the potential capacity for intercommunication which they undoubtedly by nature possess. To that question there is but one answer. By providing its members with a herd tradition which is constantly at war with feeling and with experience, {63} society, drives them inevitably into resistiveness on the one hand, or into mental instability on the other, conditions which have this in common, that they tend to exaggerate that isolation of the individual which is shown us by the intellect to be unnatural and by the heart to be cruel.

Another urgent question for the future is provided by the steady increase, relative and absolute, of the mentally unstable. The danger to the State constituted by a large unstable class is already generally recognized, but unfortunately realization has so far only instigated a yet heavier blow at the species. It is assumed that instability is a primary quality, and therefore only to be dealt with by breeding it out. With that indifference to the mental side of life which is characteristic of the mentally resistant class, the question as to the real meaning of instability has been begged by the invention of the disastrous word “degenerate.” The simplicity of the idea has charmed modern speculation, and the only difficulty in the whole problem has come to be the decision as to the most expeditious way of getting rid of this troublesome flaw in an otherwise satisfactory world.

The conception that the natural environment of man must be modified if the body is to survive has long been recognized, but the fact that the mind is incomparably more delicate than the body has scarcely been noticed at all. We assume that the disorderly environment with which we surround the mind has no effect, and are ingenuously surprised when mental instability arises apparently from nowhere; but although we know nothing of its origin our temerity in applying the cure is in no sense daunted.

It has already been pointed out how dangerous it would be to breed man for reason—that is, against suggestibility. The idea is a fit companion for the {64} device of breeding against “degeneracy.” The “degenerate”—that is, the mentally unstable—have demonstrated by the mere fact of instability that they possess the quality of sensitiveness to feeling and to experience, for it is this which has prevented them from applying the remedy of rationalization or exclusion when they have met with experience conflicting with herd suggestion. There can be no doubt as to the value to the State of such sensitiveness were it developed in a congruous environment. The “degeneracy,” therefore, which we see developed as a secondary quality in these sensitive minds is no evidence against the degenerate, but an indictment of the disorderly environment which has ruined them, just as the catchword associating insanity and genius tells us nothing about genius but a great deal about the situation into which it has had the misfortune to be born.

Sensitiveness to feeling and experience is undoubtedly the necessary antecedent of any high grade of that power of intercommunication which we have seen to be necessary to the satisfactory development of man. Such sensitiveness, however, in society as it now is, inevitably leads merely to mental instability. That such sensitiveness increases with civilization is shown by the close association between civilization and mental instability. There is no lack, therefore, of the mental quality of all others most necessary to the gregarious animal. The pressing problem which in fact faces man in the immediate future is how to readjust the mental environment in such a way that sensitiveness may develop and confer on man the enormous advantages which it holds for him, without being transformed from a blessing into the curse and menace of instability. To the biologist it is quite clear that this can be effected only by an extension of the rational method to the whole field of experience, a {65} process of the greatest difficulty, but one which must be the next great variation in man’s development if that development is to continue to be an evolution.

Outside this possibility the imagination can see nothing but grounds for pessimism. It needs but little effort of foresight to realize that without some totally revolutionary change in man’s attitude towards the mind, even his very tenure of the earth may come to be threatened. Recent developments in the study of disease have shown us how blind and fumbling have been our efforts against the attacks of our immemorial enemies the unicellular organisms. When we remember their capacities for variation and our fixity, we can see that for the race effectually and permanently to guard itself against even this one danger are necessary that fineness and complexity of organization, that rendering available of the utmost capacity of its members, against which the face of society seems at present to be so steadily set. We see man to-day, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief no less firm that his traditions and laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. Living as he does in a world where outside his race no allowances are made for infirmity, and where figments however beautiful never become facts, it needs but little imagination to see how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures, ignominously to be swept from her work-table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity and patience.

1909.

{66} SPECULATIONS UPON THE HUMAN MIND IN 1915

MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE AND NATURE’S PLACE IN MAN

As the nineteenth century draws away into the past and it is possible to get a comprehensive view of the intellectual legacies it has left to its successor, certain of its ideas stand out from the general mass by reason of the greatness of their scale and scope. Ideas of the first order of magnitude are from their very greatness capable of full appreciation only in a comparatively distant view. However much they have been admired and studied by contemporary thought, it is with the passage of time only that all their proportions come gradually into focus. The readjustments of thought as to what used to be called man’s place in nature, which were so characteristic a work of the latter half of the nineteenth century, embodied an idea of this imperial type which, fruitful as it has proved, has even now yielded far less than its full harvest of truth.

The conception of man as an animal, at first entertained only in a narrow zoological sense, has gradually extended in significance, and is now beginning to be understood as a guiding principle in the study of all the activities of the individual and the species. In the early days such a conception was regarded by non-scientific thought as degrading to man, and as denying to him the possibility of moral progress {67} and the reality of his higher æsthetic and emotional capabilities; at the same time, men of science found themselves compelled, however unwillingly, to deny that the moral activities of man could be made consistent with his status as an animal. It may still be remembered how even the evolutionary enthusiasm of Huxley was baffled by the incompatibility he found to subsist between what he called the ethical and the cosmical processes, and how he stood bewildered by the sight of moral beauty blossoming incorrigibly amidst the cruelty, lust, and bloodshed of the world.

The passage of time has tended more and more to clear up these lingering confusions of an anthropocentric biology, and thought is gradually gaining courage to explore, not merely the body of man but his mind and his moral capacities, in the knowledge that these are not meaningless intrusions into an otherwise orderly world, but are partakers in him and his history just as are his vermiform appendix and his stomach, and are elements in the complex structure of the universe as respectably established there, and as racy of that soil as the oldest saurian or the newest gas.

Man is thus not merely, as it were, rescued from the inhuman loneliness which he had been taught was his destiny and persuaded was his pride, but he is relieved from perplexities and temptations which had so long proved obstacles to his finding himself and setting out valiantly on an upward path. Cut off from his history and regarded as an exile into a lower world, he can scarcely fail to be appalled and crushed by the discrepancy between his lofty pretensions and his lowly acts. If he but recognize that he himself and his virtues and aspirations are integral strands in the fabric of life, he will learn that the great tissue of reality loses none of its splendour by the fact that near by where the pattern {68} glows with his courage and his pride it burns with the radiance of the tiger, and over against his intellect and his genius it mocks in the grotesques of the ape.

The development of an objective attitude towards the status of man has had, perhaps, its most significant effect in the influence it has exercised upon the study of the human mind.

The desire to understand the modes of action of the mind, and to formulate about them generalizations which shall be of practical value, has led to inquiries being pursued along three distinct paths. These several methods may be conveniently distinguished as the primitive, the human, and the comparative.

What I have called the primitive method of psychological inquiry is also the obvious and natural one. It takes man as it finds him, accepts his mind for what it professes to be, and examines into its processes by introspection of a direct and simple kind. It is necessarily subject to the conditions that the object of study is also the medium through which the observations are made, and that there is no objective standard by which the accuracy of transmission through this medium can be estimated and corrected. In the result the materials collected are subjected to a very special and very stringent kind of censorship. If an observation is acceptable and satisfactory to the mind itself, it is reported as true; if it contains material which is unwelcome to the mind, it is reported as false; and in both cases the failure is in no sense due to any conscious dishonesty in the observing mind, but is a fallacy necessarily inherent in the method. A fairly characteristic product of inquiries of this type is the conception, which seems so obvious to common sense, that introspection does give access to all mental processes, so that a conscious motive must be discoverable for all the acts of the subject. Experience {69} with more objective methods has shown that when no motive is found for a given act or no motive consistent with the mind’s pretensions as to itself, there will always be a risk of a presentable one being extemporized.

Psychology of this primitive type—the naïve psychology of common sense—is always necessarily tainted with what may be called in a special sense anthropomorphism; it tells us, that is to say, not what man is but what he thinks and feels himself to be. Judged by its fruits in enabling us to foretell or to influence conduct, it is worthless. It has been studied for thousands of years and infinite ingenuities have been expended on it, and yet at its best it can only tell us how the average man thinks his mind works—a body of information not sensibly superior in reality to the instructions of a constitutional monarch addressed to an unruly parliament. It has distracted thought with innumerable falsifications, but in all its secular cultivation has produced no body of generalizations of value in the practical conduct of life.

COMMENTS ON AN OBJECTIVE SYSTEM OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

I

Until comparatively recent years the fact that what was called psychology did not even pretend to be of any practical value in affairs was tolerated by its professors and regarded as more or less in the nature of things. The science, therefore, outside a small class of specialists was in very dismal reputation. It had come to comprise two divergent schools, one which busied itself with the apparatus of the experimental physiologist and frankly studied the physiology of the nervous system, the other {70} which occupied itself with the faded abstractions of logic and metaphysics, while both agreed in ignoring the study of the mind. This comparative sterility may in a broad way be traced back to the one fundamental defect from which the science suffered—the absence of an objective standard by which the value of mental observations could be estimated. Failing such a standard, any given mental phenomenon might be as much a product of the observing mind as of the mind observed, or the varying degrees in which both of these factors contributed might be inextricably mixed. Of late years the much-needed objective standard has been sought and to some extent found in two directions. What I have called “human” psychology has found it in the study of diseases of the mind. In states of disease mental processes and mechanisms which had eluded observation in the normal appear in an exaggerated form which renders recognition less difficult. The enlightenment coming from the understanding of such pathological material has made it possible to argue back to the less obtrusive or more effectively concealed phenomena of the normal and more or less to exclude the fallacies of the observing mind, and, at any rate in part, to dissipate the obscurity which for so long had successfully hidden the actual mental phenomena themselves.

The most remarkable attack upon the problems of psychology which has been made from the purely human standpoint is that in which the rich genius of Sigmund Freud was and still is the pioneer. The school which his work has founded was concerned at first wholly with the study of abnormal mental states, and came into notice as a branch of medicine finding the verification of its principles in the success it laid claim to in the treatment of certain mental diseases. It now regards itself as possessing a body {71} of doctrine of general applicability to mental phenomena, normal or abnormal. These principles are the product of laborious and minute inquiries into the working of the mind, rendered possible by the use of a characteristic method known as psycho-analysis. This method, which constitutes a definite and elaborate technique of investigation, is looked upon by those who practise it as the sole means by which access can be obtained to the veritable phenomena of the mind, and as rendering possible a truly objective view of the facts. It is no part of my purpose to examine the validity of psycho-analysis as a scientific method. It is enough to notice that the exponents of it completely repudiate the teachings of what I have called “common-sense” psychology, that they maintain that objectivity in the collection and collation of psychical facts is in no way to be obtained by the light of nature but demands very special methods and precautions, and that their claims to the possession of a truly objective method appear to be open to verification or disproof by actual experiment in the treatment of disease. Whatever value, then, psycho-analysis may ultimately prove to possess in solving the peculiar difficulties of psychological research, the evolution of it marks a very definite advance in principle and shows that it is the product of a mind determined by whatever effort to get to close quarters with the facts.

The body of doctrine enunciated by Freud concerns us more directly than the peculiarities of his method. Some very general and summary account may therefore be attempted as illustrating the characteristics of this vigorous, aggressive, and essentially “human” school of research.

The Freudian psychology regards the mind of the adult as the outcome of a process of development the stages of which are within limits, orderly {72} and inevitable. The trend of this development in each individual is determined by forces which are capable of precise definition, and the final product of it is capable of yielding to expert examination clear evidence of the particular way in which these forces have acted and interacted during the developmental process. The mind of the adult, then, is like the body in bearing traces which betray to the skilled observer the events of its developmental history. Inconspicuous and apparently insignificant structures and peculiarities in the one no less than in the other prove to have had a meaning and a function in the past, however little significance their final form may seem to possess, and thus the psychologist is able to reconstruct the history of a given subject’s mind, although the most important stages of its development are hidden from direct observation as effectively as is the prenatal growth of the body.

It seems to be a fundamental conception of the Freudian system that the development of the mind is accompanied and conditioned by mental conflict. The infant is regarded as being impelled by instinctive impulses which at first are solely egoistic. From the earliest moments of its contact with the world resistance to the full indulgence of these impulses is encountered. With the growth and intensification of such impulses, the resistance from external interference—the beginnings of social pressure—becomes more formidable, until at a quite unexpectedly early age a veritable condition of mental conflict is established—egoistic impulses fatally pressing for indulgence regardless of their acceptability to the environment, while environmental influences bear equally heavily against any indulgence unwelcome to surrounding standards of discipline, taste, or morality.

Of the two parties in this conflict—the instinctive {73} impulse and the repressive force—the first, according to Freud, is wholly the product of the sex instinct. This instinct is conceived of as being much more active and potent in the infant and child than had been suspected by any previous investigator. The normal sexual interest and activity as manifested in the adult are developed out of the sexual impulse of the child by a regular series of modifications, which appear to be regarded as due partly to a process of natural development and partly to the influence of external repressive forces. In the infant the instinct is egocentric and the object of its interest is the individual’s own body; with the increase of the mental field consequent on enlarging experience the instinctive activity is externalized, and its object of interest changes so that the child acquires a specific inclination towards other individuals without distinction of sex; finally, as a last stage of development the instinctive inclination is localized to members of the opposite sex. This series of transformations is regarded as normal by Freud, and as essential to the appearance of the “normal” adult type. The evolution of this series is sensitive to interference by outside influences, and any disturbance of it either by way of anticipation or delay will have profound effects upon the ultimate character and temperament of the subject. The psychical energy of an instinct so important as that of sex is very great, and is not dissipated by the forces of repression brought to bear upon it, but transformed into activities ostensibly quite different and directed into channels having no obvious connection with their source. It is a fundamental characteristic of the mind to be able to accept these substitutes for the actual indulgence of the instinct, and to enjoy a symbolical gratification in manifestations which have no overt sexual significance. When development proceeds normally the {74} surplus energy of the sex instinct finds an outlet in activities of social value—æsthetic, poetic, altruistic; when development is interfered with the outflow of energy is apt to result in definite disease of the mind or in peculiarities of character scarcely to be distinguished therefrom.

Thus the mind of the adult, according to Freud, in addition to activities which are conscious and fully accessible to the subject, carries on activities and holds memories which are unconscious and totally inaccessible to the subject by any ordinary method of introspection. Between these two fields there is a barrier sedulously guarded by certain repressive forces. The unconscious is the realm of all the experiences, memories, impulses, and inclinations which during the subject’s life have been condemned by the standards of the conscious, have proved incompatible with it and have therefore been outlawed from it. This banishment in no way deprives these excluded mental processes of their energy, and they constantly influence the feelings and behaviour of the subject. So strict, however, is the guard between them and the conscious that they are never allowed to pass the barrier between one sphere and the other except in disguised and fantastically distorted forms by which their true meaning is closely concealed. It has been perhaps Freud’s most remarkable thesis that dreams are manifestations of this emergence of desires and memories from the unconscious into the conscious field. During sleep the repressing force which guards the frontier between conscious and unconscious is weakened. Even then, however, such ideas as emerge into the conscious can do so only in a worked up and distorted form, so that their significance can be disengaged from the grotesque jumble of the actual dream only by a minute inquiry according to a difficult and highly technical method. {75} By this method, however, is to be obtained a deep insight into the otherwise irrecoverable emotional history of the individual, the structure of his temperament, and, if he is mentally abnormal, the meaning of his symptoms.

II

The foregoing enumeration of the chief doctrines of the Freudian psychology is intended to be no more than a mere outline to serve as a basis for certain comments which seem to be relevant to the general argument of this essay. The point of view from which this slight sketch is made, that of an interested but detached observer, is naturally somewhat different from that of the actual authorities themselves. Here it is desired to get the broadest possible view in the most general terms, and as we have no concern with immediate problems of practical therapeutics—which remain at least the chief preoccupation of writers of the psycho-analytic school—an effort has been made to avoid the use of the rich and rather forbidding technical vocabulary in which the writings of the school abound. It may well be that this generalized method of description has yielded an ill-proportioned or distorted picture. The subject has proved to be so much at the mercy of prejudice that the least impassioned spectator, however completely he may believe himself to be free from advocacy or detraction, is far from being able to claim immunity from these influences.

Keeping constantly in mind this general caution, which is at least as necessary in the field of criticism as in that of mere description, we may pass on to make certain comments on the psychology of Freud which are relevant to the general argument being followed out here. {76}

A discussion in any way detailed of this immense subject is very obviously impossible here, but it is desirable to say a few words as to the general validity of Freud’s chief thesis. However much one may be impressed by his power as a psychologist and his almost fierce resolution to get at the actual facts of mental processes, one can scarcely fail to experience in reading Freud’s works that there is a certain harshness in his grasp of facts and even a trace of narrowness in his outlook which tend to repel the least resistant mind and make one feel that his guidance in many matters—perhaps chiefly of detail—is open to suspicion. He seems to have an inclination for the enumeration of absolute rules, a confidence in his hypotheses which might be called superb if that were not in science a term of reproach, and a tendency to state his least acceptable propositions with the heaviest emphasis as if to force belief upon an unwilling and shrinking mind were an especial gratification. All these traits of manner—at the worst mere foibles of a distinguished and successful investigator—appear to exercise some considerable effect on the acceptance his writings meet with, and are perhaps indications in which direction, if he is open to fallacy, such might be looked for.

Nevertheless with regard to the main propositions of his system there can be little doubt that their _general validity_ will be increasingly accepted. Among such propositions must be put the conception of the significance of mental conflict, the importance of the emotional experiences of infancy and childhood in the determination of character and the causing of mental disease, and his conception of the general structure of the mind as comprising conscious and unconscious fields.

The comments which I shall venture to make upon the work of Freud will be such as are suggested {77} by the biological point of view of which this essay is intended to be an exposition. The standard of interest upon which they are based will therefore necessarily differ to some extent from that which is usually adopted in writings of the psycho-analytic school.

To the biologist perhaps the most striking characteristic of the work of this school is its complete acceptance of what one may call the human point of view. It seems to be satisfied that no useful contribution to psychology is to be obtained outside the limits of human feeling and behaviour, and to feel no impatience to expand its inquiries into a still larger field. It is not that the school has failed to show an extremely vigorous movement of expansion. Beginning as a mere province of medicine, and while its foothold there was still far from general recognition, it invaded the regions of general psychology, of æsthetics, ethnology, the study of folklore and myth, and indeed of all matters in which it could find its essential material—the records of human feeling and conduct. Beyond the human species it has shown remarkably little of this aggressive spirit, and it seems to feel no need of bringing its principles into relation with what little is known of the mental activities of the non-human animals.

The absence of any strong pressure in the direction of establishing a correlation of all mental phenomena, whether human or not, is not a matter of merely theoretical interest. The actual practical success to be obtained to-day in such an attempt might possibly be insignificant and yet of great value in moulding the whole attitude of mind of the investigator towards matters lying wholly within the sphere of human psychology. However much one may be impressed by the greatness of the edifice which Freud has built up and by the soundness of {78} his architecture, one can scarcely fail, on coming into it from the bracing atmosphere of the biological sciences, to be oppressed by the odour of humanity with which it is pervaded. One finds everywhere a tendency to the acceptance of human standards and even sometimes of human pretensions which cannot fail to produce a certain uneasiness as to the validity, if not of his doctrines, at any rate of the forms in which they are expounded. The quality I am trying to describe is extremely difficult to express in concrete terms without exaggeration or distortion. To those who have approached Freud’s work solely by the path of medicine the idea that it can give any one the feeling of a certain conventionality of standard and outlook and of a certain over-estimation of the objectivity of man’s moral values will seem perhaps merely absurd. That this is an impression which I have not been able altogether to escape I record with a good deal of hesitation and diffidence and without any wish to lay stress upon it.

Psycho-analytic psychology has grown up under conditions which may very well have encouraged the persistence of the human point of view. Originally its whole activity was concentrated upon the investigation and treatment of disease. Many of its early disciples were those who had received proof of its value in their own persons, those, that is to say, who had been sufferers from their very susceptibility to the influence of human standards. The objective standard of validity by which the system was judged was necessarily that of the physician, namely the capacity to restore the abnormal mind to the “normal.” Normal in this sense is of course no more than a statistical expression implying the condition of the average man. It could scarcely fail, however, to acquire the significance of “healthy.” If once the statistically {79} normal mind is accepted as being synonymous with the psychologically healthy mind (that is, the mind in which the full capacities are available for use), a standard is set up which has a most fallacious appearance of objectivity. The statistically normal mind can be regarded only as a mind which has responded in the usual way to the moulding and deforming influence of its environment—that is, to human standards of discipline, taste, and morality. If it is to be looked upon as typically healthy also, the current human standards of whose influence it is a product must necessarily be accepted as qualified to call forth the best in the developing mind they mould. Writers of the psycho-analytic school seem in general to make some such assumption as this.

III

The conception of mental conflict is the central feature of the Freudian system. Of its importance and validity there can be no doubt. In a general way the idea is familiar and even commonplace, but Freud had developed it and shown how deeply the principle penetrates the structure and development of the mind from the earliest period and to an extent quite unsuspected by earlier psychologists.

From an early period of life the child finds the gratification of its instinctive impulses checked or even prevented by the pressure of its environment. Conflict is thus set up between the two forces of instinctive pressure within and social pressure from without. Instinctive impulses which thus come into conflict with the repressing force are not destroyed but are deflected from their natural outlet, are repressed within the mind and ultimately prevented from rising into the conscious field at all except in disguised or symbolic forms. To the adult his childhood seems to have been altogether free from {80} any kind of sexual activity or interest, not because, as is generally supposed, such has never existed, but because it proved incapable of persisting in the conscious field and was suppressed into the unconscious with the increase of the social repressing forces. Similarly impulses experienced in adult life which are for the same reason incompatible with conscious recognition do not become conscious, but live their life in the unconscious, though they may exercise the profoundest influence on the happiness and health of the subject.

The work of Freud has been concentrated chiefly upon the one party in these conflicts—the instinctive impulse of which the only considerable one according to him is the sexual. To the other party—the repressing forces—he has given very much less attention, and in them has found apparently much less interest. By most writers of his school also they seem to be taken very much as a matter of course.

When we consider, however, what they can accomplish—how they can take the immensely powerful instinct of sex and mould and deform its prodigious mental energy—it is clear that the repressing forces are no less important than the antagonist with which they contend.

It is desirable, perhaps, to discuss a little more closely the nature of mental conflict, and especially first to define the precise meaning of the conception.

It may readily be granted that the young child’s mind is wholly egocentric, though the proposition is not without a certain element of assumption which it is not wise altogether to ignore. He experiences certain desires and impulses which he assumes with the blandest unconsciousness of any other desires but his own are there to be gratified. The failure to gratify such an impulse may come about in several ways, not all of which are equally significant in {81} establishing mental conflict. The gratification may be physically impossible. Here there is no basis for internal conflict. The resistance is wholly external; the whole child still desires its pleasure and its whole resources, mental and physical, are directed to gain the object. Mere failure may be painful and may lead to an outburst of rage which possibly even discharges some of the mental energy of the wish, but the situation psychically is simple and the incident tends of itself to go no farther.

The gratification may prove to be physically painful in itself. This seems to promise certain elements of mental conflict in balancing the pleasure of the gratification against the remembered pain it involves. We are assuming that the pain is the immediate consequence of the act, as when, for example, a child makes the immemorial scientific discovery that fire burns fingers. Such a direct experience without the interposition of a second person or the pointing of a moral does not in fact involve any real mental conflict. The source of the pain is external, its only emotional quality is that of its simple unpleasantness, and this cannot, as it were, enter into the child’s mind and divide it against itself.

True conflict, the conflict which moulds and deforms, must be actually within the mind—must be endopsychic to use a term invented by Freud, though not used by him in this exact application. In order that a desire may set up conflict it must be thwarted, not by a plain impossibility or by a mere physical pain, but by another impulse within the mind antagonizing it. It seems clear that the counter-impulse to be strong enough to contend with an impulse having in it the energy of the sex instinct must itself derive its force from some potent instinctive mechanism. We cannot suppose that the immense power of the sex impulse can be {82} controlled, moulded, and directed by any influence except such as have access to the stores of psychical energy which the instinctive activities alone possess.