expounded many years ago by Pearson that human altruism is a natural
instinctive product. The obvious dependence of the evolution of
altruism upon increase in knowledge and inter-communication has led to
its being regarded as a late and a conscious development—as something
in the nature of a judgment by the individual that it pays him to be
unselfish. This is an interesting rationalization of the facts because
in the sense in which “pay” is meant it is so obviously false. Altruism
does not at present, and cannot, pay the individual in anything but
feeling, as theory declares it must. It is clear, of course, that as
long as altruism is regarded as in the nature of a judgment, the fact
is overlooked that necessarily its only reward can be in feeling.
Man is altruistic because he must be, not because reason recommends
it, for herd suggestion opposes any advance in altruism, and when it
can the herd executes the altruist, not of course as such but as an
innovator. This is a remarkable instance of the protean character of
the gregarious instinct and the complexity it introduces into human
affairs, for we see one instinct producing manifestations directly
hostile to each other—prompting to ever advancing developments of
altruism, while it necessarily leads to any new product of advance
being attacked. It shows, moreover, as will be pointed out again later,
that a gregarious species rapidly developing a complex society can be
saved from inextricable confusion only by the appearance of reason and
the application of it to life. {47}
When we remember the fearful repressing force which society has always
exercised on new forms of altruism and how constantly the dungeon, the
scaffold, and the cross have been the reward of the altruist, we are
able to get some conception of the force of the instinctive impulse
which has triumphantly defied these terrors, and to appreciate in some
slight degree how irresistible an enthusiasm it might become if it were
encouraged by the unanimous voice of the herd.
In conclusion we have to deal with one more consequence of the social
habit in man, a consequence the discussion of which involves some
speculation of a necessarily quite tentative kind.
If we look in a broad, general way at the four instincts which
bulk largely in man’s life, namely, those of self-preservation,
nutrition, sex, and the herd, we shall see at once that there is a
striking difference between the mode of action of the first three
and that of the last. The first three, which we may, for convenience
and without prejudice, call the primitive instincts, have in common
the characteristic of attaining their maximal activities only over
short periods and in special sets of circumstances, and of being
fundamentally pleasant to yield to. They do not remain in action
concurrently, but when the circumstances are appropriate for the
yielding to one, the others automatically fall into the background,
and the governing impulse is absolute master. Thus these instincts
cannot be supposed at all frequently to conflict amongst themselves,
and the animal possessing them alone, however highly developed his
consciousness might be, would lead a life emotionally quite simple, for
at any given moment he would necessarily be doing what he most wanted
to do. We may, therefore, imagine him to be endowed with the feelings
of free-will and reality to a superb degree, wholly unperplexed by
doubt and wholly secure in his unity of purpose. {48}
The appearance of the fourth instinct, however, introduces a profound
change, for this instinct has the characteristic that it exercises a
controlling power upon the individual from without. In the case of
the solitary animal yielding to instinct the act itself is pleasant,
and the whole creature, as it were body and soul, pours itself out in
one smooth concurrence of reaction. With the social animal controlled
by herd instinct it is not the actual deed which is instinctively
done, but the order to do it which is instinctively obeyed. The deed,
being ordained from without, may actually be unpleasant, and so be
resisted from the individual side and yet be forced instinctively into
execution. The instinctive act seems to have been too much associated
in current thought with the idea of yielding to an impulse irresistibly
pleasant to the body, yet it is very obvious that herd instinct at once
introduces a mechanism by which the sanctions of instinct are conferred
upon acts by no means necessarily acceptable to the body or mind. This,
of course, involves an enormous increase of the range through which
instinct can be made use of. Its appearance marks the beginning of
the multifarious activities of man and of his stupendous success as a
species; but a spectator watching the process at its outset, had he
been interested in the destiny of the race, might have felt a pang of
apprehension when he realized how momentous was the divorce which had
been accomplished between instinct and individual desire. Instinctive
acts are still done because they are based on “_a priori_ syntheses of
the most perfect sort,” but they are no longer necessarily pleasant.
Duty has first appeared in the world, and with it the age-long conflict
which is described in the memorable words of Paul: “I delight in the
law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members
{49} warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity
to the law of sin which is in my members.”
Into the features and consequences of this conflict it is now necessary
for us to probe a little farther.
The element of conflict in the normal life of all inhabitants of a
civilized state is so familiar that no formal demonstration of its
existence is necessary. In childhood the process has begun. The child
receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that truthfulness
is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is the best
policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and that there
is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight. And yet
experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as often as
not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has as good
if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks from
death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted
by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold upon this
imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares to be the
certainty of future bliss. To the child, of course, experience has but
little suggestive force, and he is easily consoled by the perfunctory
rationalizations offered him as explanations by his elders. Yet who of
us is there who cannot remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction,
the obscure and elusive sense of something being wrong, which is left
by these and similar conflicts?
When the world begins to open out before us and experience to flow
in with rapidly increasing volume, the state of affairs necessarily
becomes more obvious. The mental unrest which we, with a certain
cynicism, regard as normal to adolescence is evidence of the heavy
handicap we lay upon the developing mind in forcing it to attempt
to assimilate with {50} experience the dicta of herd suggestion.
Moreover, let us remember, to the adolescent experience is no longer
the shadowy and easily manipulable series of dreams which it usually
is to the child. It has become touched with the warmth and reality of
instinctive feeling. The primitive instincts are now fully developed
and finding themselves balked at every turn by herd suggestion;
indeed, even products of the latter are in conflict among themselves.
Not only sex, self-preservation, and nutrition are at war with the
pronouncements of the herd, but altruism, the ideal of rationality, the
desire for power, the yearning for protection, and other feelings which
have acquired instinctive force from group suggestion.
The sufferings entailed by this condition are commonplace knowledge,
and there is scarcely a novelist who has not dealt with them. It is
around matters of sex and of religion that the conflict is most severe,
and while it is no part of our purpose to make any detailed survey of
the condition, it may be of interest to point out some of the more
obvious significances of this localization.
Religion has always been to man an intensely serious matter, and when
we realize its biological significance we can see that this is due to
a deeply ingrained need of his mind. The individual of a gregarious
species can never be truly independent and self-sufficient. Natural
selection has ensured that as an individual he must have an abiding
sense of incompleteness, which, as thought develops in complexity,
will come to be more and more abstractly expressed. This is the
psychological germ which expresses itself in the religious feelings, in
the desire for completion, for mystical union, for incorporation with
the infinite, which are all provided for in Christianity and in all
the successful sub-varieties of Christianity which modern times have
{51} seen develop. This need seems with the increasing complexity of
society to become more and more imperious, or rather to be satisfiable
only by more and more elaborately rationalized expressions. The
following is a representative passage from a recent very popular book
of mystical religion: “The great central fact in human life, in your
life and in mine, is the coming into a conscious vital realization of
our oneness with the Infinite Life and the opening of ourselves fully
to this divine inflow.” It is very interestingly shown here to what
lengths of rationalization may be forced the consequences of that
yearning in us which is identical with the mechanism that binds the
wolf to the pack, the sheep to the flock, and to the dog makes the
company of his master like walking with God in the cool of the evening.
Did an opportunity offer, it would be interesting to inquire into the
relation of the same instinctive impulse to the genesis of philosophy.
Such an attempt would, however, involve too great a digression from the
argument of this essay.
That sex should be a chief field for the conflicts we are discussing is
comprehensible not only from the immense strength of the impulse and
the fact that it is a mode of man’s activity which herd suggestion has
always tried to regulate, but also because there is reason to believe
that the sex impulse becomes secondarily associated with another
instinctive feeling of great strength, namely, altruism. We have seen
already that altruism is largely antagonized by herd tradition, and
it is plausible to suppose that the overwhelming rush of this feeling
which is usually associated with sex feelings is not altogether
sexual in quality, but secondarily associated therewith as being
the only outlet through which it is allowed by the herd to indulge
manifestations of really passionate intensity. {52} If this were so
it would clearly be of great practical importance should the rational
method ever come to be applied to the solution of the problems for the
sociologist and statesman which surround the relations of the sexes.
The conflicts which we are discussing are of course by no means limited
to the periods of childhood and adolescence, but are frequently carried
over into adult life. To understand how the apparent calm of normal
adult life is attained, it is necessary to consider the effects upon
the mind of these processes of contention.
Let us consider the case of a person caught in one of those dilemmas
which society presents so abundantly to its members—a man seized
with a passion for some individual forbidden to him by the herd, or
a man whose eyes have been opened to the vision of the cruelty which
everywhere lies close below the surface of life, and yet has deeply
ingrained in him the doctrine of the herd that things, on the whole,
are fundamentally right, that the universe is congruous with his
moral feelings, that the seeming cruelty is mercy and the apparent
indifference long-suffering. Now, what are the possible developments in
such a tormented soul?
The conflict may end through the subsidence of either antagonist.
Years, other instincts, or grosser passions may moderate the intensity
of ungratified love or take away the sharpness from the sight of
incomprehensible pain.
Again, scepticism may detect the nature of the herd suggestion and
deprive it of its compelling force.
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.