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.