throughout the animal kingdom show, in addition to the instincts of
self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, specialized inherited modes
of response to the needs, not directly of the individual but of the
herd to which he belongs. These responses, which are perfectly well
marked and characteristic, are those of the herd instinct. It is
{98} important to grasp clearly the relation of this instinct to
the individual. It must be understood that each separate member of
a gregarious species inherits characters deeply rooted in his being
which effectually differentiate him from any non-gregarious animal.
These characters are such that in presence of certain stimuli they
will ensure his responding in a specialized way which will be quite
different from the response of a solitary animal. The response when
examined will be found not necessarily to favour the survival of
the individual as such, but to favour his survival as a member of a
herd. A very simple example will make this plain. The dog and the cat
are our two most familiar examples of the social and the solitary
animal respectively. Their different attitudes towards feeding must
have been observed by all. The cat takes her food leisurely, without
great appearance of appetite and in small amounts at a time; the dog
is voracious and will eat hurriedly as much as he can get, growling
anxiously if he is approached. In doing so he is expressing a deeply
ingrained characteristic. His attitude towards food was built up
when he hunted in packs and to get a share of the common kill had
to snatch what came in his way and gulp it down before it could be
taken from him. In slang which has a sound biological basis we say he
“wolfs” his food. When in domestication his food supply is no longer
limited in the primitive way, his instinctive tendency persists; he
is typically greedy and will kill himself by overeating if he is
allowed to. Here we have a perfect instance of an instinctive response
being disadvantageous to the survival of the individual as such, and
favouring his survival only as a member of a herd. This example,
trivial as it may seem, is worthy of close study. It shows that the
individual of the gregarious species, as an individual and in {99}
isolation, possesses indelible marks of character which effectually
distinguish him from all solitary animals.
The same principle applies with equal force to man. Whether he is
alone or in company, a hermit philosopher or a mere unit of a mob, his
responses will bear the same stamp of being regulated by the existence
and influence of his fellows.
The foregoing considerations, elementary and incomplete as they are,
suggest that there is a strong prima facie case for rejecting the
common conceptions that man is among animals the least endowed with
an inheritance of instinct, and that civilization has produced in
him profound modifications in his primitive instinctive impulses. If
the conception which I have put forward be correct, namely, that man
is not at all less subject to instinctive impulsions than any other
animal but disguises the fact from the observer and from himself by
the multiplicity of the lines of response his mental capacity enables
him to take, it should follow that his conduct is much less truly
variable and much more open to generalization than has generally been
supposed. Should this be possible, it would enable the biologist to
study the actual affairs of mankind in a really practical way, to
analyse the tendencies of social development, to discover how deeply
or superficially they were based in the necessity of things, and above
all, to foretell their course. Thus might be founded a true science of
politics which would be of direct service to the statesman.
Many attempts have been made to apply biological principles to the
interpretation of history and the guidance of statecraft, especially
since the popularization of the principles associated with the name
of Darwin. Such attempts have generally been undertaken less in the
spirit of the scientific {100} investigator than in that of the
politician; the point of departure has been a political conviction and
not a biological truth; and as might be expected, when there has been
any conflict between political conviction and biological truth it is
the latter that has had to give way. Work of this kind has brought the
method into deserved contempt by its crudity, its obvious subservience
to prejudice, and its pretentious gestures of the doctrinaire. England
has not been without her examples of these scientific politicians and
historians, but they cannot be said to have flourished here as they
have in the more scholastic air of Germany. The names of several such
are now notorious in this country and their works are sufficiently
familiar for it to be obvious that their claims to scientific
value do not admit of discussion. It is not necessary to consider
their conclusions, they are condemned by their manner; and however
interesting their political vociferation may be to fellow-patriots,
it plainly has no meaning whatsoever as science. In face of the
spectacle presented by these leather-lunged doctrinaires, it needs
some little hardihood to maintain that it is possible profitably to
apply biological principle to the consideration of human affairs;
nevertheless, that is an essential thesis of this essay.
In attempting to illuminate the records of history by the principles
of biology, an essential difficulty is the difference of scale in time
upon which these two departments of knowledge work. Historical events
are confined within a few thousands of years, the biological record
covers many millions; it is scarcely to be expected, therefore, that
even a gross movement on the cramped historical scale will be capable
of detection in the vast gulf of time the biological series represents.
A minor difficulty is the fact that the data of history come to us
through a dense and reduplicated veil of human {101} interpretation,
whereas the biological facts are comparatively free from this kind of
obscuration. The former obstacle is undoubtedly serious. It is to be
remarked, however, that there is strong reason to suppose that the
process of organic evolution has not been and is not always infinitely
slow and gradual. It is more than suspected that, perhaps as the result
of slowly accumulated tendency or perhaps as the result of a sudden
variation of structure or capacity, there have been periods of rapid
change which might have been perceptible to direct observation. The
infinitely long road still tending upwards comes to where it branches
and meets another path, tending perhaps downwards or even upwards at
a different slope. May not the meeting or branching form, as it were,
a node in the infinite line, a resting place for the eye, a point in
the vast extension capable of recognition by a finite mind and of
expression in terms of human affairs? It is the belief of the writer
that the human race stands at such a nodal point to-day.
THE BIOLOGY OF GREGARIOUSNESS.
In order to set forth the evidence on which is based the conclusion
that the present juncture of affairs is not merely, as it very
obviously is, a meeting-place of epochs in the historical series,
but also marks a stage in the biological series which will prove to
have been a moment of destiny in the evolution of the human species,
it will be necessary to inquire somewhat closely into the biological
meaning of the social habit in animals. In an earlier essay certain
speculations in the same subject were indulged, and a certain amount
of repetition will be necessary. The point of view then taken up,
however, was different from that from which I shall now attempt to
review the facts. Then the main {102} interest lay in an examination
of the meaning of gregariousness for the individual mind, and although
reasons enough were found for uneasiness at the course of events,
and at the instability of civilization which any radical examination
displayed, the inquiry was not pursued under any immediate imminence of
disaster to the social fabric as it must be now. Naturally, therefore,
at the present time certain aspects of the subject which before were
of no special relevance become of great importance and demand close
examination.
In a general view of the social habit in animals certain outstanding
facts are readily to be observed. It is of wide distribution and
sporadic occurrence, it varies much in the completeness of its
development, and there seems to be an inverse relation between its
completeness and the brain power of the animal concerned.
From the wideness of its distribution the social habit may be supposed
to represent a forward step in complexity which comes about readily. It
has the appearance of being upon a path which species have a natural
tendency to follow, a line of evolution which is perhaps rendered
possible by constantly occurring small variations common to all animals
and taken advantage of only under certain circumstances of pressure
or increase. It seems not to depend on any sudden large variation of
type, and such is not necessary to account for it. It differs from
many other modifications which we know animal life to have undergone
in being immediately useful to the species from its very beginning and
in its least perfect forms. Once started, however imperfectly, the new
habit will have a natural tendency to progress towards fuller forms of
sociality by reason of special selective forces which it inevitably
sets going. The fact that it is valuable to the species in which it
develops even in its most larval forms, {103} combined with its
tendency to progress, no doubt accounts for the wonderful series of all
degrees of gregariousness which the field of natural history presents.
I have pointed out elsewhere that the fundamental biological meaning of
gregariousness is that it allows of an indefinite enlargement of the
unit upon which the undifferentiated influence of natural selection is
allowed to act, so that the individual merged in the larger unit is
shielded from the immediate effects of natural selection and is exposed
directly only to the special form of selection which obtains within the
new unit.
There seems little doubt that this sheltering of the individual allows
him to vary and to undergo modifications with a freedom which would
have been dangerous to him as an isolated being, but is safe under the
new conditions and valuable to the new unit of which he now is a part.
In essence the significance of the passage from the solitary to the
gregarious seems to be closely similar to that of the passage from the
unicellular to the multicellular organism—an enlargement of the unit
exposed to natural selection, a shielding of the individual cell from
that pressure, an endowment of it with freedom to vary and specialize
in safety.
Nature has thus made two great experiments of the same type, and if one
be reasonably careful to avoid arguing from analogy, it is possible
to use one case to illuminate the other by furnishing hints as to
what mechanisms may be looked for and in what directions inquiry may
profitably be pursued.
The sporadic occurrence of gregariousness at widely separated points
of the animal field—in man and sheep, in ant and elephant—inclines one
to suppose that multicellularity must have arisen also at multiple
points, and that the metazoa did not arise from the protozoa by a
single line of descent. It {104} suggests also that there is some
inherent property in mobile living organisms that makes combination
of individuals into larger units a more or less inevitable course
of development under certain circumstances and without any gross
variation being necessary to initiate it. The complex evolution which
multicellularity made possible, and perhaps enforced, can scarcely
fail to make one wonder whether the gregarious animal has not entered
upon a path which must of necessity lead to increasing complexity and
co-ordination, to a more and more stringent intensity of integration or
to extinction.
The varying degrees to which the social habit has developed among
different animals provide a very interesting branch of study. The class
of insects is remarkable in furnishing an almost inexhaustible variety
of stages to which the instinct is developed. Of these that reached by
the humble bee, with its small, weak families, is a familiar example of
a low grade; that of the wasp, with its colonies large and strong, but
unable to survive the winter, is another of more developed type; while
that of the honey bee represents a very high grade of development in
which the instinct seems to have completed its cycle and yielded to the
hive the maximum advantages of which it is capable. In the honey bee,
then, the social instinct may be said to be complete.
It is necessary to examine somewhat closely into what is denoted by the
completeness or otherwise of the social habit in a given species.
To return for a moment to the case of the change from the unicellular
to the multicellular, it is obvious that in the new unit, to get the
full advantage of the change there must be specialization involving
both loss and gain to the individual cell; one loses power of digestion
and gains a special sensitiveness to stimulation, another loses
locomotion {105} to gain digestion, and so forth in innumerable
series as the new unit becomes more complex. Inherent, however, in
the new mechanism is the need for co-ordination if the advantages
of specialization are to be obtained. The necessity of a nervous
system—if progress is to be maintained—early becomes obvious, and it
is equally clear that the primary function of the nervous system is
to facilitate co-ordination. Thus it would seem that the individual
cell incorporated in a larger unit must possess a capacity for
specialization, the ability to originate new methods of activity,
and a capacity for response—that is, the ability to limit itself to
action co-ordinated suitably to the interests of the new unit rather
than to those that would have been its own if it had been a free unit
in itself. Specialization and co-ordination will be the two necessary
conditions for success of the larger unit, and advance in complexity
will be possible as long only as these two are unexhausted. Neither, of
course, will be of avail without the other. The richest specialization
will be of no good if it cannot be controlled to the uses of the whole
organism, and the most perfect control of the individual cells will
be incapable of ensuring progress if it has no material of original
variation to work on.
The analogy is helpful in the consideration of the mechanisms brought
into play by the social habit. The community of the honey bee bears a
close resemblance to the body of a complex animal. The capacity for
actual structural specialization of the individuals in the interests of
the hive has been remarkable and has gone far, while at the same time
co-ordination has been stringently enforced, so that each individual
is actually absorbed into the community, expends all its activities
therein, and when excluded from it is almost as helpless as a part of
the naked flesh of an animal {106} detached from its body. The hive
may, in fact, without any very undue stretch of fantasy, be described
as an animal of which all the individual cells have retained the power
of locomotion. When one watches the flight of a swarm of bees its
unanimity and directness very easily produce the illusion that one is
witnessing the migration of a single animal usually sedentary but at
times capable of undertaking journeys with a formidable and successful
energy. This new animal differs from the other animals of the metazoa
which it has outdistanced in the race of evolution, not merely in
its immense power, energy, and flexibility, but also in the almost
startling fact that it has recovered the gift of immortality which
seemed to have been lost with its protozoal ancestors.
The extent to which the hive makes use of the powers of its individuals
is the measure of the completeness with which the social habit is
developed in it. The worker bee has practically no activities which are
not directly devoted to the hive, and yet she goes about her ceaseless
tasks in a way that never fails to impress the observer with its
exuberant energy and even its appearance of joyfulness. It is thought
that the average worker bee _works herself to death_ in about two
months. That is a fact which can scarcely fail to arouse, even in the
least imaginative, at any rate a moment of profound contemplation.
If we could suppose her to be conscious in the human sense, we
must imagine the bee to be possessed by an enthusiasm for the hive
more intense than a mother’s devotion to her son, without personal
ambitions, or doubts or fears, and if we are to judge by the
imperfect experience man has yet had of the same lofty passion, we
must think of her consciousness, insignificant spark as it is, as a
little fire ablaze with altruistic feeling. Doubtless, such {107}
an attribution of emotion to the bee is a quite unjustified fallacy
of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, it is not altogether valueless
as a hint of what social unity might effect in an animal of larger
mental life. There can be little doubt that the perfection to which
the communal life of the bee has attained is dependent on the very
smallness of the mental development of which the individuals are
capable. Their capacity to assimilate experience is necessarily from
their structure, and is known by experience to be, small and their
path is marked out so plainly by actual physical modifications that
the almost miraculous absorption of the worker in the hive is after
all perhaps natural enough. If she were able to assimilate general
experience on a larger scale, to react freely and appropriately to
stimuli external to the hive, there can be little doubt that the
community would show a less concentrated efficiency than it does
to-day. The standing miracle of the bee—her sensitiveness to the voice
of the hive and her capacity to communicate with her fellows—would
undoubtedly be less marvellously perfect if she were not at the same
time deaf to all other voices.
When we come to consider animals in which the anatomist can recognize
a brain and the psychologist an individual mind, the types of
gregariousness we meet with are found to have lost the magnificent
intensity of the bee. This decline in intensity seems to be due to
the greatly increased variety of reaction of which the individual
is capable. The gregarious mammalia are most of them relatively
intelligent, they are capable of assimilating experience to a certain
extent and have a definite capacity for individual existence. In them
the social habit shows comparatively little tendency to a gradual
intensification, but is a more static condition. Doubtless, there are
other conditions {108} which also limit it. For example, the slowness
of multiplication and fixity of structure in the mammalia obviously
deprive them of the possibility of undergoing a continuous social
integration as the insects have. Be this as it may, we find in them
the social habit but little or scarcely at all expressed in physical
specialization but shown as a deeply ingrained mental character which
profoundly influences their habits and their modes of reaction to
bodily and external impressions. Among the mammalia other than man
and possibly apes and monkeys, gregariousness is found in two broadly
distinguishable types according to the function it subserves. It may
be either protective as in the sheep, the deer, the ox, and the horse,
or aggressive as in the wolf and allied animals. In both forms it will
involve certain common types of capacity, while the distinguishing
characteristic of each will be a special kind of reaction to certain
stimuli. It is important to understand that these peculiarities are
possessed by each individual of the larger unit, and will be displayed
by him in a characteristic way whether he is in the company of his
fellows or not. It is not necessary to repeat here in any detail the
characters of the gregarious mammal. They have been dealt with in an
earlier essay, but it is desirable to emphasize here certain features
of exceptional importance and some which were but little discussed
before.
The quite fundamental characteristic of the social mammal, as of the
bee, is sensitiveness to the voice of his fellows. He must have the
capacity to react fatally and without hesitation to an impression
coming to him from the herd, and he must react in a totally different
way to impressions coming to him from without. In the presence of
danger his first motion must be, not to fly or to attack as the case
may be, but to notify the herd. This characteristic is beautifully
demonstrated in the low {109} growl a dog will give at the approach of
a stranger. This is obviously in no way part of the dog’s programme of
attack upon his enemy—when his object is intimidation he bursts into
barking—but his first duty is to put the pack on its guard. Similarly
the start of the sheep is a notification and precedes any motion of
flight.
In order that the individual shall be sensitive in a special degree
to the voice of the herd, he must have developed in him an infallible
capacity for recognizing his fellow-members. In the lower mammalia
this seems almost exclusively a function of the sense of smell, as is
natural enough since that sense is as a general rule highly developed
in them. The domestic dog shows admirably the importance of the
function of recognition in his species. Comparatively few recognize
even their masters at any distance by sight or sound, while obviously
with their fellows they are practically dependent on smell. The extent
to which the ceremonial of recognition has developed in the dog is, of
course, very familiar to every one. It shows unmistakable evidence of
the rudiments of social organization, and is not the less illuminating
to the student of human society for having a bodily orientation and
technique which at first sight obscures its resemblance to similar, and
it is supposed more dignified, mechanisms in man.
Specialization fitting the animal for social life is obviously in
certain directions restrictive; that is, it denies him certain
capacities and immunities which the solitary animal possesses;
equally obviously is it in certain directions expansive and does it
confer qualities on the social which the solitary does not possess.
Among qualities of restrictive specialization are inability to live
satisfactorily apart from the herd or some substitute for it, the
liability to loneliness, a dependence on leadership, custom, and
tradition, a {110} credulity towards the dogmas of the herd and an
unbelief towards external experience, a standard of conduct no longer
determined by personal needs but influenced by a power outside the
ego—a conscience, in fact, and a sense of sin—a weakness of personal
initiative and a distrust of its promptings. Expansive specialization,
on the other hand, gives the gregarious animal the sense of power and
security in the herd, the capacity to respond to the call of the herd
with a maximum output of energy and endurance, a deep-seated mental
satisfaction in unity with the herd, and a solution in it of personal
doubts and fears.
All these characters can be traced in an animal such as the dog. The
mere statement of them, necessarily in mental terms, involves the
liability to a certain inexactitude if it is not recognized that no
hypothesis as to the consciousness of the dog is assumed but that the
description in mental terms is given because of its convenient brevity.
An objective description of the actual conduct on which such summarized
statements are founded would be impossibly voluminous.
* * * * *