very fully isolated from the common body, but may be the seat of an
actual corporate hostility to it, or rather to the aggregated minor
groups which have come officially to represent it. When war breaks
upon a society thus constituted {216} the intense stimulation of herd
instinct that results tends to break down the moral restrictions set up
by segregation, to throw back the individual citizen on to the nation
at large for the satisfaction of his moral needs, and to replace class
feeling by national feeling. The apprehended danger of the given war is
the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of
minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and
the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will
determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree
to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with
which the war is defended and conducted. If a minor group has already
developed a certain hostility to the common body and resists the
solvent effect of the outbreak of war, it becomes a potential source
of anti-national feeling and of opposition to the national policy.
Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility,
its character as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can
endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness
a herd can give. Thus we may say, that in a country at war _every_
citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd
instinct characteristic of that state. In the individual who follows
in feeling the general body of his fellows, and in him who belongs
to a dissentient minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious
animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which
interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in
accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion
that our citizen of the majority is no more—if no less—liable to the
distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we
conclude that in a country at war _all_ opinion is necessarily more or
less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to {217} bias is a
herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.
It is undoubtedly depressing to have to recognize this universality
of prejudice and to have to abandon the opinion sometimes held that
the characteristics of herd belief are limited to the judgments of the
vulgar. The selectness of a minority in no way guarantees it against
the fallacies of the mob. A minority sufficiently unpopular is, in
a sense, a mob in which smallness is compensated for by density.
The moral vigour and fortitude which unpopular minorities enjoy are
evidences of herd instinct in vigorous action; the less admirable
liability to prejudice being a part of the same instinctive process is
a necessary accompaniment. We may lay it down, then, as fundamental
that all opinion among the members of a nation at war is liable to
prejudice, and when we remember with what vehemence such opinion
is pronounced and with what fortitude it is defended we may regard
as at least highly probable that such opinion always actually is
prejudiced—rests, that is to say, on instinct rather than reason. Now,
it is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in
a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war.
All of it sharing the common characteristic of war opinion in being
prejudiced, some will pronounce more or less clearly that the war is
just and necessary, some will pronounce more or less clearly against
that view; there will be a division into what we may call pro-national
and anti-national currents of opinion, each accompanied respectively
by its counterpart of what we may call anti-hostile and pro-hostile
opinion. It is a significant fact that the relative development of
pro-national and anti-national feeling varies according to the degree
in which the given war is apprehended as dangerous. A {218} war
apprehended as dangerous produces a more complete solution of the
minor herds of society into the common body than does a war not so
regarded; in consequence there is a nearer approach to homogeneity,
and pro-national opinion is far in excess of anti-national opinion,
which, if recognizable, is confined to insignificant minorities. A war
regarded as not dangerous produces a less complete solution in the
common body, a less degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national
opinion, that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the
national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been
clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War
of 1899–1902 was not apprehended as dangerous in this country, and in
consequence, though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority,
anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority.
The war of 1914–1918, regarded from the first as of the greatest
gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance,
and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The
Russo-Japanese War provided an excellent double illustration of these
mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left
national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war
confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly
dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national
opinion, and made the conduct of the war correspondingly vigorous. In
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a further point is illustrated.
The essential factor in the stimulation of herd instinct by war is not
the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it.
The Prussians were dangerous enough to France, but were not generally
regarded as such by the French, and in consequence national {219}
homogeneity did not develop as it did on a later occasion in face of
the same menace.
If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the
justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly
important psychological factor—the apprehended danger to the nation of
the war in question—it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed
grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is
commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people
responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and
probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the
causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which
are usually regarded as so important in determining the people’s
response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion
agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the
conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914–1918 each of
the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its
participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side
defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable
to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such
certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something
other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any
information as to the objective realities of the distribution of
justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and
manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at
war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its
objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice.
The fact that such a sense of rectitude is a universal and inevitable
accompaniment of war, and as strong in a predatory and {220} criminal
belligerent as in a generally pacific one, gives us a convenient
measure of the extent to which prejudice must prevail in warfare.[T]
[T] It is important that it should be quite clear that we have
been speaking here of the reaction of the general body of a nation
to the occurrence of war, and not of the reasons for which a given
war was undertaken. In England and in Germany the feeling of
the people that the late war was just and necessary was equally
intense and equally a direct consequence of the danger to the
herd it represented. It was therefore a non-rational instinctive
response without reference to objective justice in either case.
Had the threat to the herd on either side seemed less grave,
opinion as to the justice of the war would in that country have
been correspondingly more divided. By her calculated truculence
in the years before the war Germany—intending doubtless to
intimidate a decaying people—had made it certain that when the
threat to this country did come it should be apprehended at once
as dangerous to the last degree, and had thus herself organized
the practical unanimity of her chief enemy. All such reactions
upon the outbreak of war are instinctively determined. It is the
burden of the statesman that his decision in a crisis in favour of
war _automatically_ renders impossible _rational_ confirmation by
the people.
We thus arrive at the discouraging conclusion that in a belligerent
country all opinion in any way connected with the war is subject to
prejudice, either pro-national or anti-national, and is very likely in
consequence to be of impaired validity. Must we then conclude further
that speculation upon war themes is so liable to distortion that
reasoned judgments of any practical value are impossible? Now, it is
guidance in just such a difficulty as this that a psychology having any
pretensions to be called practical may fairly be expected to yield, and
psychology does in fact provide certain broad precautionary principles,
which, although by no means infallible guides, do profess to be able
to keep within bounds the disturbing effects of prejudice on judgment
and so render possible the not wholly unprofitable discussion even of
matters the most deeply implicated by war-time passion.
First among such principles is the recognition of the fact that
prejudice does not display itself as such to direct introspection. One
who is being {221} influenced by prejudice will never be able to detect
his biassed judgments by an apparent defect in their plausibility or
by any characteristic logical weakness. Agreement or disagreement
with common opinion will as such be no help, since prejudice infests
minorities no less than majorities. To suppose that when one has
admitted the liability to prejudice one can free oneself from it by a
direct voluntary effort is a common belief and an entirely fallacious
one. Such a task is far beyond the powers of the most fully instructed
mind, and is not likely to be undertaken except by those who have
least chance of success. Prejudice, in fact, is for the individual
like the ether of the physicist, infinitely pervasive and potent, but
insusceptible of direct detection; its presence is to be assumed as
general, but it escapes before immediate search by introspection as the
ether eludes the balance and the test-tube.
Secondly, it is possible for the investigator, having admitted the
existence of prejudice as a condition of thought, to recognize the
general direction of its action in his own mind, to recognize, that is
to say, whether the tone of it is pro-national or anti-national, and
thus to obtain a certain orientation for his efforts to neutralize it.
Having frankly recognized this general tendency in his thinking, he
will be able to do something towards correcting it by making allowance
for it in his conclusion as a whole. If his tendency of feeling is
pro-national, he will say to himself of any judgment favourable to
his country, “This is a conclusion likely to have been influenced
by prejudice, therefore for all the precautions I may have taken in
forming it, and whatever scientific care and caution I may have used,
in spite even of its agreeable appearance of self-evident truth, I must
regard its validity as subject to some subtraction before it {222} can
safely be made the basis for further speculation.” If his tendency of
feeling is anti-national, he will have a similar task of attenuation to
carry out upon the conclusions unfavourable to his country that he may
reach, and will be prudent to make very drastic deductions in view of
the supposed immunity to prejudice with which minorities are rather apt
to assume the absence of vulgar approval endows them.[U]
[U] It is perhaps of interest to note in passing that war-time
opinion and prejudice are characteristically pro-national
and anti-national, rather than anti-hostile and pro-hostile
respectively. The impulse that might have led an isolated German
to defend the English at the expense of his countrymen, or an
isolated Englishman to defend the Germans at the expense of his
countrymen, was in its psychological essence anti-national and
animated by no love of the enemy; it was an instinctive revolt
against his country, or rather the groups which in the process
of social segregation had come to represent it. Such terms,
therefore, as pro-German, and in another association pro-Boer,
though doubtless convenient implements of abuse, were inexactly
descriptive psychologically. “Anti-English” would have been
more just, but immensely less effective, as vituperation, for
the prejudice it was desired to decry was for the most part a
hostility not to the nation, but to its official embodiment.
Probably, however, it was the very element of injustice in the
term pro-German that made it so satisfactory a vehicle for
exasperated feeling.
Finally, one who attempts to deal usefully with matters in which strong
feeling is inevitable will do well, however thoroughly he may try to
guard himself from the effects of prejudice, to bring his speculative
conclusions into such form that they are automatically tested by the
progress of events. Symmetry and internal consistency are unfortunately
but too often accepted as evidences of objective validity. That the
items of a series of conclusions fit into one another neatly and
compose a system logically sound and attractive to the intellect gives
us practically no information of their truth. For this a frequently
repeated contact with external reality is necessary, and of such
contacts the most thoroughly satisfactory one is the power to foretell
the course of events. Foresight is the supreme {223} test of scientific
validity, and the more a line of argument is liable to deflection by
non-rational processes the more urgent is the need for it constantly
to be put into forms which will allow its capacity for foresight to
be tested. This was the one great advantage amongst heavy handicaps
enjoyed by those who ventured into speculation upon the international
situation during the late war. Events were moving so quickly from
crisis to crisis that it was possible for the psychologist to see his
judgments confirmed or corrected almost from day to day, to see in the
authentic fabric of reality as it left the loom where he had had any
kind of foreknowledge, where he had been altogether unprepared, and
where he had failed in foresight of some development that should have
been within his powers.
These three principles were those in accordance with which it was
attempted to conduct the discussion in this book of topics connected
with the war. The writer was aware that neither was he by nature or
art immune to prejudice nor able by some miracle of will power to
lay down passion when he took up the pen, and he admitted to himself
with what frankness he could command the liability under which his
conclusions would lie of having been arrived at under the influence of
pro-national prejudice. He hoped, however, that a liberal allowance
for the direction of his instinctive bias and a grateful use of the
diurnal corrective of events might enable him to reach at any rate some
conclusions not altogether without a useful tincture of validity.
It was possible, moreover, to put certain conclusions in a form
which the development of the war must confirm or disprove, and it
may be interesting as a test of what was put forward as an essay in
an essentially practical psychology briefly {224} to review these
theoretical anticipations in the light of what actually has happened.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTICIPATIONS
The hypothesis was put forward that in the German people the reactions
in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance
with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather
than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western
civilizations. The next step was naturally to inquire whether the known
characters of what we called aggressive gregariousness were able to
account for the observed German peculiarities in reaction, and then to
indicate what special features we might expect to appear in Germany
under the developing stress of war if our hypothesis was sound.
Under the guidance of the hypothesis we found reason to believe
that the morale of the German people was of a special kind, and
essentially dependent for the remarkable vigour it then showed upon
the possibility of continued successful aggression. This suggestion
was borne out by the long series of offensive movements, increasing
in weight and culminating in the spring of 1918, in the great attacks
on which Germany broke herself. From the way in which these movements
were announced and expected it became evident that during an enforced
defensive the morale of Germany declined more rapidly than did that of
her opponents. This was the essential confirmation of the psychological
view we had put forward. Apart from all question of the strategic
and merely military advantages of the offensive it was plain that
Germany’s moral need for the posture of attack was peculiarly and
characteristically great. That she continually and convincedly—though
perhaps injudiciously—declared the war to be one of defence only, that
she had {225} everything to hope from disunion among her enemies and
little to fear from disunion among her friends, that she was in assured
possession of the most important industrial districts of France,
that she had successfully brought into something like equilibrium
the resistance to the effects of the blockade, and had proved like
her animal prototypes only to be more fierce and eager when she was
hungry—all of these strong objective reasons for fighting a defensive
delaying war were over-whelmed by the crucially important requirement
of keeping the aggressive spirit strung up to the highest pitch. The
fighting spirit must be that of attack and conquest, or it would break
altogether. Our hypothesis, therefore, enabled us to foresee that she
would have to go on torturing her declining frame with one great effort
after another until she had fought herself to a standstill, and then,
if her enemies but just succeeded in holding her, her morale would
begin to decline, and to decline with terrible abruptness. We were
even able to regard it as probable that for all the talk of the war on
the German side being defensive only, for all the passionate devotion
to the Fatherland and the profound belief in the sanctity of its
frontiers, as a matter of cold and dry reality, if it came to invasion,
Germany would not be defended by its inhabitants.
Another subject upon which the psychological method of inquiry
professed to yield some degree of foresight was that—at that
time—fruitful cause of discussion, the objects for which the enemies
of Germany were fighting. Opinion at that time was much ruled by the
conception of a Germany gradually forced back upon and beyond her
frontiers, grim, implacable, irreconcilable, her national spirit
energized and made resilient by humiliation, and clinging unconquerably
to the thought of a resurrection of her glory through the {226} faith
of her sons. Under the influence of ideas of this romantic type, it was
not always possible for opinion to be very precise upon what was to be
made the object of the war in order to secure from Germany the safety
of the civilizations opposed to hers. Psychologically, however, the
moral condition of a beaten Germany seemed relatively easy to foretell.
If the behaviour of other predaceous types was of any value as a guide,
it was plain that a sound beating alone and in itself would produce all
the effect that was needful. There could be no fear of the national
morale being invigorated by defeat, but an enemy successfully invading
Germany would necessarily find the one essential condition on which any
subsequent security must be set up—the replacement of the aggressive
and predaceous morale by complete moral collapse. These were the
considerations that enabled one to say that considered psychologically
the mere beating of Germany was the single object of the war. The
completeness of the moral collapse which accompanied her beating seems
to have been found remarkable and astonishing by very many, but can
have been so only to those who had not interested themselves in the
psychological aspects of the problem.
In stating, in 1915, these conclusions as to the social type and
moral structure of Germany and in formulating the indications they
seemed to give of the course of future events, it was necessary to
make considerable deductions from the precision and detail with which
one made one’s small efforts at foresight in order to allow for the
effects one’s pro-national bias may have had in deflecting judgment.
Enough, however, was stated definitely to enable the progress of events
very clearly to confirm or disprove the conclusions arrived at. The
not inconsiderable correspondences between the {227} theoretical
considerations and the actual development of events is perhaps enough
to suggest that the method of speculation used has a certain validity.
* * * * *
In considering the psychological case of England we came to the
conclusion that her morale depended on mechanisms different from those
which were in action in Germany, and indicating that social development
had in her followed a different type. We saw reason to suppose that
this social type would be very much more resistant to discouragement
and disaster than the aggressive type embodied in Germany, and that
if England won the war it would be by virtue of the toughness of her
nerve. The form of social organization represented by England was seen
to contain a germ of strength not possessed by her enemy, an intensely
resistant nucleus of moral power that underlay the immeasurable waste
and the inextricable confusion of her methods. If the moral structure
of Germany was of its kind fully developed, it was also primitive; if
the moral structure of England was embryonic, it was also integrative
and still capable of growth. If it was very obvious at that time how
immensely responsive to intelligent and conscious direction the moral
powers of England would have been, if it was obvious how largely such
direction would have diminished the total cost of the war in time and
suffering, if it was obvious that such direction would not, and almost
certainly could not, be forthcoming, it was equally clear that the
muddle, the mediocrity, the vociferation with which the war was being
conducted were phenomena within the normal of the type and evolutionary
stage of our society, and were not much more than froth on the surface
of an invisible and unsounded stream.