into account before all things the biological character of man,
would understand that his condition is necessarily progressive along
the lines of his natural endowments or downward to destruction. It
would abandon the static view of society as something merely to be
maintained, and adopt a more dynamic conception of statesmanship as
something active, progressive, and experimental, reaching out towards
new powers for human activity and new conquests for the human will.
{163} It would discover what natural inclinations in man must be
indulged, and would make them respectable, what inclinations in him
must be controlled for the advantage of the species, and make them
insignificant. It would cultivate intercommunication and altruism on
the one hand, and bravery, boldness, pride, and enterprise on the
other. It would develop national unity to a communion of interest and
sympathy far closer than anything yet dreamed of as possible, and by
doing so would endow the national unit with a self-control, fortitude,
and moral power which would make it so obviously unconquerable
that war would cease to be a possibility. To a people magnanimous,
self-possessed, and open-eyed, unanimous in sentiment and aware of
its strength, the conquest of fellow-nations would present its full
futility. They would need for the acceptable exercise of their powers
some more difficult, more daring, and newer task, something that
stretches the human will and the human intellect to the limit of their
capacity; the mere occupation and re-occupation of the stale and
blood-drenched earth would be to them barbarians’ work; time and space
would be their quarry, destiny and the human soul the lands they would
invade; they would sail their ships into the gulfs of the ether and lay
tribute upon the sun and stars.
* * * * *
It is one of the features of the present crisis that gives to it its
biological significance, that one of the antagonists—Germany—has
discovered the necessity and value of conscious direction of the social
unit. This is in itself an epoch-making event. Like many other human
discoveries of similar importance, it has been incomplete, and it has
not been accompanied by the corresponding knowledge of man and his
natural history which alone could have given it full fertility and
permanent value. {164}
It seems to have been in no way a revelation of genius, and, indeed,
the absence of any great profundity and scope of speculation is rather
remarkable in the minds of the numerous German political philosophers.
The idea would appear rather to have been developed out of the
circumstances of the country, and to have been almost a habit before it
became a conception. At any rate, its appearance was greatly favoured
by the political conditions and history of the region in which it
arose. If this had not been the case, it is scarcely conceivable that
the principle could have been accepted so readily by the people, and in
a form which was not without its asperities and its hardships for them,
or that it could have been discovered without the necessary biological
corollaries which are indispensable to the successful application of it.
Germany in some ways resembles a son who has been educated at home,
and has taken up the responsibilities of the adult, and become bound
by them without ever tasting the free intercourse of the school and
university. She has never tasted the heady liquor of political liberty,
she has had no revolution, and the blood of no political martyrs calls
to her disturbingly from the ground. To such innocent and premature
gravity the reasonable claims of what, after all, had to her the
appearance of no more than an anxiously paternal Government could not
fail to appeal.
Explain it how we may, there can be no doubt that to the German
peoples the theoretical aspects of life have long had a very special
appeal. Generalizations about national characteristics are notoriously
fallacious, but it seems that with a certain reserve one may fairly
say that there is a definite contrast in this particular between the
Germans and, let us say, the English.
To minds of a theoretical bias the appeal of a {165} closely
regulative type of Government, with all the advantages of organization
which it possesses, must be very strong, and there is reason to believe
that this fact has had influence in reconciling the people to the
imposition upon it of the will of the Government.
Between a docile and intelligent people and a strong, autocratic,
and intelligent Government the possibilities of conscious national
direction could scarcely fail to become increasingly obvious and to
be increasingly developed. A further and enormously potent factor in
the progress of the idea was an immense accession of national feeling,
derived from three almost bewilderingly successful wars, accomplished
at surprisingly small cost, and culminating in a grandiose and no less
successful scheme of unification. Before rulers and people an imperial
destiny of unlimited scope, and allowing of unbounded dreams, now
inevitably opened itself up. Alone, amongst the peoples of Europe,
Germany saw herself a nation with a career. No longer disunited and
denationalized, she had come into her inheritance. The circumstances
of her rebirth were so splendid, the moral exaltation of her new unity
was so great that she could scarcely but suppose that her state was the
beginning of a career of further and unimagined glories and triumphs.
There were not lacking enthusiastic and prophetic voices to tell her
she was right.
The decade that followed the foundation of the Empire was, perhaps,
more pregnant with destiny than that which preceded it, for it saw the
final determination of the path which Germany was to follow. She had
made the immense stride in the biological scale of submitting herself
to conscious direction; would she also follow the path which alone
leads to a perfect concentration of national life and a permanent moral
stability? {166}
To a nation with a purpose and a consciously realized destiny some
principle of national unity is indispensable. Some strand of feeling
which all can share, and in sharing which all can come into communion
with one another, will be the framework on which is built up the
structure of national energy and effort.
The reactions in which the social instinct manifests itself are not
all equally developed in the different social species. It is true
that there is a certain group of characteristics common to all social
animals; but it is also found that in one example there is a special
development of one aspect of the instinct, while another example will
show a characteristic development of a different aspect. Taking a broad
survey of all gregarious types, we are able to distinguish three fairly
distinct trends of evolution. We have the aggressive gregariousness
of the wolf and dog, the protective gregariousness of the sheep and
the ox, and, differing from both these, we have the more complex
social structure of the bee and the ant, which we may call socialized
gregariousness. The last-named is characterized by the complete
absorption of the individual in the major unit, and the fact that the
function of the social habit seems no longer to be the simple one of
mere attack or defence, but rather the establishment of a State which
shall be, as a matter of course, strong in defence and attack, but a
great deal more than this as well. The hive is no mere herd or pack,
but an elaborate mechanism for making use by co-ordinate and unified
action of the utmost powers of the individual members. It is something
which appears to be a complete substitute for individual existence,
and as we have already said, seems like a new creature rather than a
congeries united for some comparatively few and simple purposes. The
hive and the ant’s nest stand to the flock and the {167} pack as the
fully organized multicellular animal stands to the primitive zooglœa
which is its forerunner. The wolf is united for attack, the sheep is
united for defence, but the bee is united for all the activities and
feelings of its life.
Socialized gregariousness is the goal of man’s development. A
transcendental union with his fellows is the destiny of the human
individual, and it is the attainment of this towards which the
constantly growing altruism of man is directed. Poets and prophets
have, at times, dimly seen this inevitable trend of Nature, biology
detects unmistakable evidence of it, and explains the slowness of
advance, which has been the despair of those others, by the variety
and power of man’s mind, and consoles us for the delay these qualities
still cause by the knowledge that they are guarantees of the exactitude
and completeness that the ultimate union will attain.
When a nation takes to itself the idea of conscious direction, as by
a fortunate combination of circumstances Germany has been induced to
do, it is plain that some choice of a principle of national unity
will be its first and most important task. It is plain, also, from
the considerations we have just laid down, that such a principle of
national unity must necessarily be a manifestation of the social
instinct, and that the choice is necessarily limited to one of three
types of social habit which alone Nature has fitted gregarious animals
to follow. No nation has ever made a conscious choice amongst these
three types, but circumstances have led to the adoption of one or
another of them often enough for history to furnish many suggestive
instances.
The more or less purely aggressive or protective form has been adopted
for the most part by primitive peoples. The history of the natives of
North America and Australia furnishes examples of {168} almost pure
types of both. The aggressive type was illustrated very fully by the
peoples who profited by the disintegration of the Roman Empire. These
northern barbarians showed in the most perfect form the lupine type
of society in action. The ideals and feelings exemplified by their
sagas are comprehensible only when one understands the biological
significance of them. It was a society of wolves marvellously
indomitable in aggression but fitted for no other activity in any
corresponding degree, and always liable to absorption by the peoples
they had conquered. They were physically brave beyond belief, and
made a religion of violence and brutality. To fight was for them
man’s supreme activity. They were restless travellers and explorers,
less out of curiosity than in search of prey, and they irresistibly
overran Europe in the missionary zeal of the sword and torch, each
man asking nothing of Fate but, after a career of unlimited outrage
and destruction, to die gloriously fighting. It is impossible not to
recognize the psychological identity of these ideals with those which
we might suppose a highly developed breed of wolves to entertain.
With all its startling energy, and all its magnificent enterprise, the
lupine type of society has not proved capable of prolonged survival.
Probably its inherent weakness is the very limited scope of interest
it provides for active and progressive minds, and the fact that it
tends to engender a steadily accumulating hostility in weaker but more
mentally progressive peoples to which it has no correspondingly steady
resistiveness to oppose.
The history of the world has shown a gradual elimination of the lupine
type. It has recurred sporadically at intervals, but has always been
suppressed. Modern civilization has shown a constantly increasing
manifestation of the socialized type of gregariousness in spite of the
complexities {169} and disorders which the slowness of its development
towards completeness has involved. It may be regarded now as the
standard type which has been established by countless experiments,
as that which alone can satisfy and absorb the moral as well as the
intellectual desires of modern man.
From the point of view of the statesman desiring to enforce an
immediate and energetic national unity, combined with an ideal of
the State as destined to expand into a larger and larger sphere, the
socialized type of gregarious evolution is extremely unsatisfactory.
Its course towards the production of a truly organized State is slow,
and perplexed by a multitudinous confusion of voices and ideals; its
necessary development of altruism gives the society it produces an
aspect of sentimentality and flabbiness; its tendency slowly to evolve
towards the moral equality of its members gives the State an appearance
of structural insecurity.
* * * * *
If Germany was to be capable of a consistent aggressive external
policy as a primary aim, the peculiarity of her circumstances rendered
her unable to seek national inspiration by any development of the
socialized type of instinctive response, because that method can
produce the necessary moral power only through a true unity of its
members, such as implies a moral, if not a material, equality among
them. That the type is capable of yielding a passion of aggressive
nationalism is shown by the early enterprise and conquests of the
first French Republic. But that outburst of power was attained only
because it was based on a true, though doubtless imperfect, moral
equality. Such a method was necessarily forbidden to the German Empire
by the intense rigidity of its social segregation, with its absolute
differentiation between the aristocracy and the common people. In such
a society there could {170} be no thought of permitting the faintest
hint of even moral equality.
This is the reason, therefore, why the rulers of Germany, of course in
complete ignorance of how significant was their choice, were compelled
to abandon the ideals of standard civilization, to relapse upon the
ideals of a more primitive type of gregariousness, and to throw
back their people into the anachronism of a lupine society. In this
connection it is interesting to notice how persistently the political
philosophers of Germany have sought their chief inspiration in the
remote past, and in times when the wolf society and the wolf ideals
were widespread and successful.
It is not intended to imply that there was here any conscious choice.
It is remarkable enough that the rulers of Germany recognized the
need for conscious direction of all the activities of a nation which
proposes for itself a career; it would have been a miracle if they
had understood the biological significance of the differentiation
of themselves from other European peoples that they were to bring
about. To them it doubtless appeared merely that they were discarding
the effete and enfeebling ideals which made other nations the fit
victims of their conquests. They may be supposed to have determined to
eradicate such germs of degeneracy from themselves, to have seen that
an ambitious people must be strong and proud and hard, enterprising,
relentless, brave, and fierce, prepared to believe in the glory of
combat and conquest, in the supreme moral greatness of the warrior,
in force as the touchstone of right, honour, justice, and truth. Such
changes in moral orientation seem harmless enough, and it can scarcely
be suspected that their significance was patent to those who adopted
them. They were impressed upon the nation with all the immense power of
suggestion at the disposal of {171} an organized State. The readiness
with which they were received and assimilated was more than could be
accounted for by even the power of the immense machine of officials,
historians, theologians, professors, teachers, and newspapers by which
they were, in season and out of season, enforced. The immense success
that was attained owed much to the fact that suggestion was following a
natural, instinctive path. The wolf in man, against which civilization
has been fighting for so long, is still within call and ready to
respond to incantations much feebler than those the German State could
employ. The people were intoxicated with the glory of their conquests
and their imposing new confederation; if we are to trust the reputation
the Prussian soldier has had for a hundred years, they were perhaps
already less advanced in humanity than the other European peoples.
The fact is unquestionable that they followed their teachers with
enthusiasm.
It may be well for us, before proceeding farther, to define precisely
the psychological hypothesis we are advancing in explanation of the
peculiarities of the German national character as now manifested.
Herd instinct is manifested in three distinct types, the aggressive,
the protective, and the socialized, which are exemplified in Nature by
the wolf, the sheep, and the bee respectively. Either type can confer
the advantages of the social habit, but the socialized is that upon
which modern civilized man has developed. It is maintained here that
the ambitious career consciously planned for Germany by those who had
taken command of her destinies, and the maintenance at the same time
of her social system, were inconsistent with the further development
of gregariousness of the socialized type. New ideals, new motives, and
new sources of moral power had therefore to be sought. They were found
in a {172} recrudescence of the aggressive type of gregariousness—in a
reappearance of the society of the wolf. It is conceivable that those
who provided Germany with her new ideals thought themselves to be
exercising a free choice. The choice, however, was forced upon them by
Nature. They wanted some of the characters of the wolf; they got them
all. One may imagine that those who have so industriously inculcated
the national gospel have wondered at times that while it has been easy
to implant certain of the desired ideals, it has not been possible to
prevent the appearance of others which, though not so desirable, belong
to the same legacy and must be taken up with it.
Before examining the actual mental features of Germany to-day, it
may be desirable to consider _a priori_ what would be the mental
characteristics of an aggressive gregarious animal were he to be
self-conscious in the sense that man is.
The functional value of herd instinct in the wolf is to make the pack
irresistible in attacking and perpetually aggressive in spirit. The
individual must, therefore, be especially sensitive to the leadership
of the herd. The herd must be to him, not merely as it is to the
protectively gregarious animal, a source of comfort, and stimulus, and
general guidance, but must be able to make him _do things_ however
difficult, however dangerous, even however senseless, and must make him
yield an absolute, immediate, and slavish obedience. The carrying out
of the commands of the herd must be in itself an absolute satisfaction
in which there can be no consideration of self. Towards anything
outside the herd he will necessarily be arrogant, confident, and
inaccessible to the appeals of reason or feeling. This tense bond of
instinct, constantly keyed up to the pitch of action, will give him
a certain simplicity of character and even ingenuousness, a {173}
coarseness and brutality in his dealings with others, and a complete
failure to understand any motive unsanctioned by the pack. He will
believe the pack to be impregnable and irresistible, just and good, and
will readily ascribe to it any other attribute which may take his fancy
however ludicrously inappropriate.
The strength of the wolf pack as a gregarious unit is undoubtedly, in
suitable circumstances, enormous. This strength would seem to depend
on a continuous possibility of attack and action. How far it can be
maintained in inactivity and mere defence is another matter. . . .
* * * * *
Since the beginning of this war attracted a really concentrated
attention to the psychology of the German people, it has been very
obvious that one of the most striking feelings amongst Englishmen
has been bewilderment. They have found an indescribable strangeness
in the utterances of almost all German personages and newspapers,
in their diplomacy, in their friendliness to such as they wished
to propitiate, in their enmity to those they wished to alarm and
intimidate. This strange quality is very difficult to define or even
to attempt to describe, and has very evidently perplexed almost all
writers on the war. The only thing one can be sure of is that it is
there. It shows itself at times as a simplicity or even childishness,
as a boorish cunning, as an incredible ant-like activity, as a sudden
blast of maniacal boasting, a reckless savagery of gloating in blood,
a simple-minded sentimentality, as outbursts of idolatry, not of the
pallid, metaphorical, modern type, but the full-blooded African kind,
with all the apparatus of idol and fetish and tom-tom, and with it all
a steady confidence that these are the principles of civilization, of
truth, of justice, and of Christ. {174}
I have tried to put down at random some of the factors in this curious
impression as they occur to the memory, but the mere enumeration of
them is not possible without risking the objective composure of one’s
attitude—an excellent incidental evidence that the strangeness is a
reality.
The incomprehensibility to the English of the whole trend of German
feeling and expression suggests that there is some deeply rooted
instinctive conflict of attitude between them. One may risk the
speculation that this conflict is between socialized gregariousness
and aggressive gregariousness. As the result of the inculcation of
national arrogance and aggression, Germany has lapsed into a special
type of social instinct which has opened a gulf of separation in
feeling between her and other civilized peoples. Such an effect is
natural enough. Nothing produces the sense of strangeness so much as
differences of instinctive reaction. A similar though wider gap in
instinctive reaction gives to us the appearance of strangeness and
queerness in the behaviour of the cat as contrasted with the dog, which
is so much more nearly allied in feeling to ourselves.
If, then, we desire to get any insight into the mind and moral power of
Germany, we must begin with the realization that the two peoples are
separated by a profound difference in instinctive feeling. Nature has
provided but few roads for gregarious species to follow. Between the
path England finds herself in and that which Germany has chosen there
is a divergence which almost amounts to a specific difference in the
biological scale. In this, perhaps, lies the cause of the desperate
and unparalleled ferocity of this war. It is a war not so much of
contending nations as of contending species. We are not taking part in
a mere war, but in one of Nature’s august experiments. It is as if she
had {175} set herself to try out in her workshop the strength of the
socialized and the aggressive types. To the socialized peoples she has
entrusted the task of proving that her old faith in cruelty and blood
is at last an anachronism. To try them, she has given substance to the
creation of a nightmare, and they must destroy this werewolf or die.[P]
[P] It may be noted that the members of the small group of
so-called “pro-German” writers and propagandists for the most
part make it a fundamental doctrine, either explicit or implicit,
that there is no psychological difference between the English
and the Germans. They seem to maintain that the latter are moved
and are to be influenced by exactly the same series of feelings
and ideals as the former, and show in reality no observable
“strangeness” in their expressions and emotions. By arguments
based on this assumption very striking conclusions are reached.
All moral advancement has been the work of unpopular minorities,
the members of which have been branded as cranks or criminals
until time has justified their doctrine. Even the greatest of
such pioneers have not, however, been invariably right. Their
genius has usually been shown most clearly in matters with which
they have been most familiar, while in matters less intimately
part of their experience their judgments have often not stood the
test of time any better than those of smaller men. If therefore
our “pro-Germans” include amongst them men of moral genius, we
may expect that such of their psychological intuitions as deal
with England are more likely to prove true than those that deal
with Germany. The importance of this reservation lies in the
probability that the chief psychological problems connected with
the origin and prosecution of this war relate to the Germans
rather than to the English.
In attempting to estimate the actual phenomena of the German mind
at the present time, we must remember that our sources of knowledge
are subject to a rigid selection. Those of us who are unable to give
time to the regular reading of German publications must depend on
extracts which owe their appearance in our papers to some striking
characteristic which may be supposed to be pleasing to the prejudices
or hopes of the English reader. The main facts, however, are clear
enough to yield {176} valuable conclusions, if such are made on broad
lines without undue insistence on minor points.