PART II

THE GROUP MIND

A SKETCH OF THE PRINCIPLES OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY WITH SOME

ATTEMPT TO APPLY THEM TO THE INTERPRETATION OF NATIONAL LIFE

AND CHARACTER

BY

WILLIAM McDOUGALL, F.R.S.

LATE FELLOW OF ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, FELLOW OF CORPUS

CHRISTI COLLEGE AND WILDE READER IN MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

“Une nation est une âme, un principe spirituel. Deux choses

qui, à vrai dire, n’en font qu’une constituent cette âme, ce

principe spirituel. L’une est dans le passé, l’autre dans le

présent. L’une est la possession en commun d’un riche legs de

souvenirs; l’autre est le consentement actuel, le désir de

vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir

l’héritage qu’on a reçu indivis.”

ERNEST RENAN.

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1920

TO

PROFESSOR L. T. HOBHOUSE

in admiration of his work in philosophy, psychology, and sociology,

and in the hope that he may discern in this book some traces of the

spirit by which his own writings have been inspired.

PREFACE

In this book I have sketched the principles of the mental life of groups

and have made a rough attempt to apply these principles to the

understanding of the life of nations. I have had the substance of the

book in the form of lecture notes for some years, but have long

hesitated to publish it. I have been held back, partly by my sense of

the magnitude and difficulty of the subject and the inadequacy of my own

preparation for dealing with it, partly because I wished to build upon a

firm foundation of generally accepted principles of human nature.

Some fifteen years ago I projected a complete treatise on Social

Psychology which would have comprised the substance of the present

volume. I was prevented from carrying out the ambitious scheme, partly

by the difficulty of finding a publisher, partly by my increasing sense

of the lack of any generally accepted or acceptable account of the

constitution of human nature. I found it necessary to attempt to provide

such a foundation, and in 1908 published my _Introduction to Social

Psychology_. That book has enjoyed a certain popular success. But it was

more novel, more revolutionary, than I had supposed when writing it; and

my hope that it would rapidly be accepted by my colleagues as in the

main a true account of the fundamentals of human nature has not been

realised.

All this part of psychology labours under the great difficulty that the

worker in it cannot, like other men of science, publish his conclusions

as discoveries which will necessarily be accepted by any persons

competent to judge. He can only state his conclusions and his reasonings

and hope that they may gradually gain the general approval of his

colleagues. For to the obscure questions of fact with which he deals it

is in the nature of things impossible to return answers supported by

indisputable experimental proofs. In this field the evidence of an

author’s approximation towards truth can consist only in his success in

gradually persuading competent opinion of the value of his views. My

sketch of the fundamentals of human nature can hardly claim even that

degree of success which would be constituted by an active criticism and

discussion of it in competent quarters. Yet there are not wanting

indications that opinion is turning slowly towards the acceptance of

some such doctrine as I then outlined. Especially the development of

psycho-pathology, stimulated so greatly by the esoteric dogmas of the

Freudian school, points in this direction. The only test and

verification to which any scheme of human nature can be submitted is the

application of it to practice in the elucidation of the concrete

phenomena of human life and in the control and direction of conduct,

especially in the two great fields of medicine and education. And I have

been much encouraged by finding that some workers in both of these

fields have found my scheme of use in their practice and have even, in

some few cases, given it a cordial general approval. But group

psychology is itself one of the fields in which such testing and

verification must be sought. And I have decided to delay no longer in

attempting to bring my scheme to this test. I am also impelled to

venture on what may appear to be premature publication by the fact that

five of the best years of my life have been wholly given up to military

service and the practical problems of psycho-therapy, and by the

reflection that the years of a man’s life are numbered and that, even

though I should delay yet another fifteen years, I might find that I had

made but little progress towards securing the firm foundation I desired.

It may seem to some minds astonishing that I should now admit that the

substance of this book was committed to writing before the Great War;

for that war is supposed by some to have revolutionised all our ideas of

human nature and of national life. But the war has given me little

reason to add to or to change what I had written. This may be either

because I am too old to learn, or because what I had written was in the

main true; and I am naturally disposed to accept the second explanation.

I wish to make it clear to any would-be reader of this volume that it is

a sequel to my _Introduction to Social Psychology_, that it builds upon

that book and assumes that the reader is acquainted with it. That former

volume has been criticised as an attempted outline of _Social

Psychology_. One critic remarks that it may be good psychology, but it

is very little social; another wittily says “Mr McDougall, while giving

a full account of the genesis of instincts that act in society, hardly

shows how they issue into society. He seems to do a great deal of

packing in preparation for a journey on which he never starts.” The last

sentence exactly describes the book. I found myself, like so many of my

predecessors and contemporaries, about to start on a voyage of

exploration of societies with an empty trunk, or at least with one very

inadequately supplied with the things essential for successful

travelling. I decided to avoid the usual practice of starting without

impedimenta and of picking up or inventing bits of make-shift equipment

as each emergency arose; I would pack my trunk carefully before

starting. And now although my fellow travellers have not entirely

approved my outfit, I have launched out to put it to the test; and I

cannot hope that my readers will follow me if they have not at their

command a similar outfit—namely, a similar view of the constitution of

human nature.

I would gratefully confess that the resolve to go forward without a

further long period of preparation has been made possible for me largely

by the encouragement I have had from the recently published work of Dr

James Drever, _Instinct in Man_. For the author of that work has

carefully studied the most fundamental part of my _Social Psychology_,

in the light of his wide knowledge of the cognate literature, and has

found it to be in the main acceptable.

The title and much of the substance of the present volume might lead a

hasty reader to suppose that I am influenced by, or even in sympathy

with, the political philosophy associated with German ‘idealism.’ I

would, therefore, take this opportunity both to prevent any such

erroneous inference and to indicate my attitude towards that system of

thought in plainer language than it seemed possible to use before the

war. I have argued that we may properly speak of a group mind, and that

each of the most developed nations of the present time may be regarded

as in process of developing a group mind. This must lay me open to the

suspicion of favouring the political philosophy which makes of the state

a super-individual and semi-divine person before whom all men must bow

down, renouncing their claims to freedom of judgment and action; the

political philosophy in short of German ‘idealism,’ which derives in the

main from Hegel, which has been so ably represented in this country by

Dr Bosanquet, which has exerted so great an influence at Oxford, and

which in my opinion is as detrimental to honest and clear thinking as it

has proved to be destructive of political morality in its native

country. I am relieved of the necessity of attempting to justify these

severe strictures by the recent publication of _The Metaphysical Theory

of the State_ by Prof. L. T. Hobhouse. In that volume Prof. Hobhouse has

subjected the political philosophy of German ‘idealism,’ and especially

Dr Bosanquet’s presentation of it, to a criticism which, as it seems to

me, should suffice to expose the hollowness of its claims to all men

for all time; and I cannot better define my own attitude towards it than

by expressing the completeness of my sympathy with the searching

criticism of Mr Hobhouse’s essay. In my youth I was misled into

supposing that the Germans were the possessors of a peculiar wisdom; and

I have spent a large part of my life in discovering, in one field of

science after another, that I was mistaken. I can always read the works

of some German philosophers, especially those of Hermann Lotze, with

admiration and profit; but I have no longer any desire to contend with

the great systems of ‘idealism,’ and I think it a cruel waste that the

best years of the lives of many young men should be spent struggling

with the obscure phrases in which Kant sought to express his profound

and subtle thought. My first scientific effort was to find evidence in

support of a new hypothesis of muscular contraction; and, in working

through the various German theories, I was dismayed by their lack of

clear mechanical conceptions. My next venture was in the physiology of

vision, a branch of science which had become almost exclusively German.

Starting with a prepossession in favour of one of the dominant German

theories, I soon reached the conclusion that the two German leaders in

this field, Helmholtz and Hering, with their hosts of disciples, had, in

spite of much admirable detailed work, added little of value and much

confusion to the theory of vision left us by a great Englishman,—namely,

Thomas Young; and in a long series of papers I endeavoured to restate

and supplement Young’s theory. Advancing into the field of physiological

psychology, I attacked the ponderous volumes of Wundt with enthusiasm;

only to find that his physiology of the nervous system was a tissue of

unacceptable hypotheses and that he failed to connect it in any

profitable manner with his questionable psychology. And, finding even

less satisfaction in such works as Ziehen’s _Physiologische

Psychologie_, with its crude materialism and associationism, or in the

dogmatic speculations of Verworn, I published my own small attempt to

bring psychology into fruitful relations with the physiology of the

nervous system. This brought me up against the great problem of the

relations between mind and body; and, having found that, in this sphere,

German ‘idealism’ was pragmatically indistinguishable from

thorough-going materialism, and that those Germans who claimed to

reconcile the two did not really rise much above the level of Ernst

Haeckel’s wild flounderings, I published my _History and Defense of

Animism_. And in this field, though I found much to admire in the

writings of Lotze, I derived most encouragement and stimulus from Prof.

Bergson. In working at the foundations of human nature, I found little

help in German psychology, and more in French books, especially in those

of Prof. Ribot. In psycho-pathology I seemed to find that the claims of

the German and Austrian schools were far outweighed by those of the

French writers, especially of Prof. Janet. So now, in attacking the

problems of the mental life of societies, I have found little help from

German psychology or sociology, from the elaborations of Wundt’s

_Völkerpsychologie_ or the ponderosities of Schäffle, and still less

from the ‘idealist’ philosophy of politics. In this field also it is

French authors from whom I have learnt most and with whom I find myself

most in sympathy, especially MM. Fouillée, Boutmy, Tarde, and Demolins;

though I would not be thought to hold in low esteem the works of many

English and American authors, notably those of Buckle, Bagehot, Maine,

Lecky, Lowell, and of many others, to some of which I have made

reference in the chapters of this book.

I have striven to make this a strictly scientific work, rather than a

philosophical one; that is to say, I have tried to ascertain and state

the facts and principles of social life as it is and has been, without

expressing my opinion as to what it should be. But, in order further to

guard myself against the implications attached by German ‘idealism’ to

the notion of a collective mind, I wish to state that politically my

sympathies are with individualism and internationalism, although I have,

I think, fully recognised the great and necessary part played in human

life by the Group Spirit and by that special form of it which we now

call ‘Nationalism.’

I know well that those of my readers whose sympathies are with

Collectivism, Syndicalism, or Socialism in any of its various forms will

detect in this book the cloven foot of individualism and leanings

towards the aristocratic principle. I know also that many others will

reproach me with giving countenance to communistic and ultra-democratic

tendencies. I would, therefore, point out explicitly at the outset that,

if this book affords justification for any normative doctrine or ideal,

it is for one which would aim at a synthesis of the principles of

individualism and communism, of aristocracy and democracy, of

self-realization and of service to the community. I can best express

this ideal in the wise words of Mr F. H. Bradley, which I extract from

his famous essay on ‘My Station and its Duties.’ “The individual’s

consciousness of himself is inseparable from the knowing himself as an

organ of the whole; ... for his nature now is not distinct from his

‘artificial self.’ He is related to the living moral system not as to a

foreign body; his relation to it is ‘too inward even for faith,’ since

faith implies a certain separation. It is no other-world that he can not

see but must trust to; he feels himself in it, and it in him; ... the

belief in this real moral organism is the one solution of ethical

problems. It breaks down the antithesis of despotism and individualism;

it denies them, while it preserves the truth of both. The truth of

individualism is saved, because, unless we have intense life and

self-consciousness in the members of the state, the whole state is

ossified. The truth of despotism is saved, because, unless the member

realizes the whole by and in himself, he fails to reach his own

individuality. Considered in the main, the best communities are those

which have the best men for their members, and the best men are the

members of the best communities.... The two problems of the best man and

best state are two sides, two distinguishable aspects of the one

problem, how to realize in human nature the perfect unity of homogeneity

and specification; and when we see that each of these without the other

is unreal, then we see that (speaking in general) the welfare of the

state and the welfare of its individuals are questions which it is

mistaken and ruinous to separate. Personal morality and political and

social institutions can not exist apart, and (in general) the better the

one the better the other. The community is moral, because it realizes

personal morality; personal morality is moral, because and in so far as

it realizes the moral whole.”

Since correcting the proofs of this volume I have become acquainted with

two recent books whose teaching is so closely in harmony with my own

that I wish to direct my readers’ attention to them. One is Sir Martin

Conway’s _The Crowd in Peace and War_, which contains many valuable

illustrations of group life. The other is Miss M. P. Follett’s _The New

State; Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government_, which

expounds the principles and advantages of collective deliberation with

vigour and insight.

I am under much obligation to the general editor of this series, Prof.

G. Dawes Hicks. He has read the proofs of my book, and has helped me

greatly with many suggestions; but he has, of course, no responsibility

for the views expressed in it.

W. McD.

OXFORD,

_March 1920_.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

PAGES

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. THE PROVINCE OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

The need for a more concrete psychology—the conception of the

group mind—objections to the conception examined—the conception

not a new one but familiar in political philosophy and law—the

essential problem 1-20

CHAPTER II. THE MENTAL LIFE OF THE CROWD

The crowd presents the phenomena of collective life in crude

and simple forms—the formation of the psychological crowd—its

peculiarities—spread and intensification of emotions—how that

takes place—the notion of ‘collective consciousness’

provisionally rejected—the submergence of personality in the

crowd—the low intelligence of crowds—suggestibility—lack of

individual responsibility 21-47

CHAPTER III. THE HIGHLY ORGANISED GROUP

The principal conditions of organisation—the army as the

type—how its organisation raises the soldier to a higher plane

of collective life—the nature of collective will

illustrated—influence of leaders 48-61

CHAPTER IV. THE GROUP SPIRIT

The self-consciousness of the group—the group idea and the

group sentiment—the group consciousness in primitive

life—views of Cornford and Lévy Bruhl examined—‘collective

representations’—the peculiar merit of the group

spirit—multiple group consciousness—the hierarchy of

groups—interaction of groups 62-87

CHAPTER V. PECULIARITIES OF GROUPS OF VARIOUS TYPES

Rudimentary groups—natural and artificial groups—purposive,

traditional and mixed groups 88-95

PART II. THE NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER

CHAPTER VI. WHAT IS A NATION?

Difficulty of defining nationhood—Prof. Ramsay Muir’s

definition not adequate—mental organisation, resting on

tradition, the most essential condition—lack of clear

conceptions has given currency to many obscure notions—the

study of nationhood essentially the work of group psychology 96-105

CHAPTER VII. THE MIND OF A NATION

National character defined—conditions essential to its

formation—homogeneity a prime condition—the influence of

racial qualities on national character—the durability of

racial qualities—acquired mental homogeneity as illustrated by

the American nation—the influence upon it of geographical

conditions 106-130

CHAPTER VIII. FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION AS A CONDITION OF NATIONAL LIFE

Large nations impossible in the ancient world—the tendency of

nations to grow larger with increase of means of communication 131-134

CHAPTER IX. THE PART OF LEADERS IN NATIONAL LIFE

Nations owe their existence to influence of leaders—men of

genius—men of talent—their _rôle_ in national life 135-141

CHAPTER X. OTHER CONDITIONS OF NATIONAL LIFE

A common purpose—war the unifier—national

responsibilities—continuity of national life—organisation of

the national mind analogous to that of the individual

mind—national self-consciousness—types of organisation 142-154

CHAPTER XI. THE WILL OF THE NATION

Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will—Prof. Bosanquet’s view

inadequate—the national mind has both organic unity and the

unity of self-consciousness—increase of national

self-consciousness the leading fact of recent world

history—self-consciousness of nations developed by rivalry and

intercourse between them 155-168

CHAPTER XII. IDEAS IN NATIONAL LIFE

The idea of the nation is constitutive—ideas work as forces in

national life only in virtue of sentiments grown up about

their objects—the notions of society as an organism and as

founded on contract synthesised in the conception of the

nation as a contractual organism—the value of nationality

examined—ideas of conquest—of ancestor worship—of liberty and

equality—of progress—of solidarity 169-186

CHAPTER XIII. NATIONS OF THE HIGHER TYPE

National deliberation—the influence on it of organisation

and of traditions—certain advantages of the representative

system—public opinion arises from an informal organisation—the

problem of the high level of public opinion—its solution

to be found in the influence of leaders 187-199

PART III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER

CHAPTER XIV. FACTORS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Civilisation does not imply improvement of racial qualities—it

abolishes selection by the physical environment—it consists

in improved intellectual and moral traditions and is dependent

on favourable social organisation 200-207

CHAPTER XV. THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD

Differentiation of races from a common stock—human evolution

differs from that of the animals in becoming group

evolution—physical environment supplanted by social environment

and organisation—the direct effects of climate

on the body—on the mind 208-219

CHAPTER XVI. THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD (_continued_)

Physical environment determines racial adaptation directly

by selection—indirectly by determining occupations and

social organisation—the protective spirit in France—the

spirit of independence in England—attempts of Buckle,

Boutmy and Sir H. Maine to account for these not successful 220-232

CHAPTER XVII. THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD (_continued_)

The influence of occupations—the leading principle of the

school of Le Play—the development of the spirit of protection

in the people of Gaul—the development of the spirit of

independence in the ancestors of the English—the crossing of

races—its bad and its good results 233-245

CHAPTER XVIII. RACIAL CHANGES DURING THE HISTORIC PERIOD

Race substitution—the population of Greece—internal

selection—its effects in Spain—various forms of social

selection—mostly negative or injurious to national

stock—economic selection and the social ladder—the innate

moral disposition—the question of its improvement 246-269

CHAPTER XIX. THE PROGRESS OF NATIONS IN THEIR YOUTH

The rarity of progress—the conditions enabling progress—group

selection—in what has progress consisted?—views of Buckle and

Kidd—conquest and domination an early condition of

progress—variability of crossed races—influence of physical

environment—western civilisation and social organisation 270-286

CHAPTER XX. THE PROGRESS OF NATIONS IN THEIR MATURITY

Liberty and social organisation—caste makes for rigidity—the

growth of toleration—imaginative sympathy increases with

increasing freedom of intercourse, bringing strife and

understanding—the group spirit as the main agent of further

progress 287-301

INDEX 302-304

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

THE PROVINCE OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

To define exactly the relations of the several special sciences is a

task which can never be completely achieved so long as these sciences

continue to grow and change. It is a peculiarly difficult task in

respect of the biological sciences, because we have not yet reached

general agreement as to the fundamental conceptions which these sciences

should employ. To illustrate this difficulty I need only refer to a

recent symposium of the Aristotelian Society in which a number of

distinguished philosophers and biologists discussed the question “Are

physical, biological and psychological categories irreducible?” The

discussion revealed extreme differences of opinion, and failed to bring

the disputants nearer to a common view. The difficulty is still greater

in respect of the human sciences—anthropology, psychology, ethics,

politics, economics, sociology, and the rest; and it is not to be hoped

that any general agreement on this difficult question will be reached in

the near future. Yet it seems worth while that each writer who aspires

to break new ground in any part of this field of inquiry should

endeavour to make clear to himself and others his conception of the

relations of that part to the rest of the field. It is, then, in no

dogmatic spirit, or with any belief in the finality of the position

assigned to my topic, that I venture the following definition of the

province of psychology with which this book is concerned.

I have chosen the title, “The Group Mind,” after some hesitation in

favour of the alternative, “Collective Psychology.” The latter has the

advantage that it has already been used by several continental authors,

more especially French and Italian psychologists. But the title I have

chosen is, I think, more distinctively English in quality and denotes

more clearly the topic that I desire to discuss.

An alternative and not inappropriate title would have been “An Outline

of Social Psychology”; but two reasons prevented the adoption of this.

First, my _Introduction to Social Psychology_ has become generally known

by the abbreviated title _Social Psychology_. This was an unforeseen

result and unfortunate designation; for, as I have explained in the

Preface to the present volume, that other work was designed merely as a

propaedeutic; it aimed merely at clearing the ground and laying the

foundations for Social Psychology, while leaving the topic itself for

subsequent treatment. Secondly, I conceive Group Psychology to be a part

only, though a very large part, of the total field of Social Psychology;

for, while the former has to deal only with the life of groups, the

latter has also to describe and account for the influence of the group

on the growth and activities of the individual. This is the most

concrete part of psychology and naturally comes last in the order of

development of the science; for, like other sciences, psychology began

with the most abstract notions, the forms of activity of mind in

general, and, by the aid of the abstract conceptions achieved by the

earlier workers, progresses to the consideration of more concrete

problems, the problems presented by actual living persons in all their

inexhaustible richness and complexity.

Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psychology continued

to concern itself almost exclusively with the mind of man conceived in

an abstract fashion, not as the mind of any particular individual, but

as the mind of a representative individual considered in abstraction

from his social settings as something given to our contemplation fully

formed and complete.

Two important changes of modern thought have shown the necessity of a

more concrete treatment of psychological problems. The first has been

the coming into prominence of the problems of genesis which, although

not originated by Darwin, received so great an impetus from his work.

The second has been the increasing realisation of the need for a more

synthetic treatment of all fields of science, the realisation that

analysis alone carries us ever farther away from concrete problems and

leads only to a system of abstract conceptions which are very remote

from reality, however useful they may prove in the physical sciences.

The biological and the human sciences especially have been profoundly

affected by these two changes of modern thought. As Theodore Merz has so

well shown in the fourth volume of his monumental work[1], the need has

been increasingly felt of the _vue d’ensemble_, of the synthetic mode of

regarding organisms, men, and institutions, not as single things,

self-contained and complete in themselves, but as merely nodes or

meeting points of all the forces of the world acting and reacting in

unlimited time and space.

Psychology was, then, until recent years the science of the abstract

individual mind. Each worker aimed at rendering by the aid of

introspection an analytic description of the stream of his own

consciousness, a consistent classification of the elements or features

that he seemed to discover therein, and some general laws or rules of

the order of succession and conjunction of these features; postulating

in addition some one or more explanatory principles or active agencies

such as ‘the will’ or the desire of pleasure, the aversion from pain, or

‘the association of ideas,’ to enable him to account for the flow of the

distinguishable elements of consciousness. The psychology achieved by

these studies, necessary and valuable as they were, was of little help

to men who were struggling with the concrete problems of human life and

was therefore largely ignored by them. But, as I have pointed out in the

Introduction to my _Social Psychology_, those who approached these

problems were generally stimulated to do so by their interest in

questions of right and wrong, in questions of norms and standards of

conduct, the urgency of which demanded immediate answers for the

practical guidance of human life in all its spheres of activity, for the

shaping of laws, institutions, governments, and associations of every

kind; or, as frequently perhaps, for the justification and defence of

standards of conduct, modes of belief, and forms of institution, which

men had learnt to esteem as supremely good.

Thus the political science of Hobbes was the expression of his attempt

to justify the monarchy established by the Tudors and endangered by the

failings of the Stuart kings; while that of Locke was equally the

outcome of his desire to justify the revolution of 1668. Hobbes felt it

worth while to preface his _magnum opus_ on political philosophy with a

fanciful sketch of human nature and of primitive society; yet, as Mr

Gooch remarks, “neither Hobbes nor his contemporaries knew anything of

the actual life of primitive communities[2].” And it may be added that

they knew as little of the foundations of human nature. Again, the

social doctrines of Rousseau, with all their false psychology, were

formulated in order to stir men to revolt against the conditions of

social life then prevalent in Europe. In a similar way, in the

development of all that body of social doctrine that went under the name

of Utilitarianism and which culminated in the political science and

economy of the Manchester School, every step was prompted by the desire

to find theoretical guidance or justification for rules governing human

activity. And, if we go back to the _Politics_ of Aristotle, we find the

normative or regulative aim still more prominent.

Thus, in all the human sciences, we see that the search for what is has

been inextricably confused with and hampered by the effort to show what

ought to be; and the further back we go in their history, the more does

the normative point of view predominate. They all begin in the effort to

describe what ought to be; and incidentally give some more or less

fallacious or fantastic account of what is, merely in order to support

the normative doctrines. And, as we trace their history forward towards

the present time, we find the positive element coming more and more to

the front, until it tends to preponderate over and even completely to

supplant the normative aim. Thus even in Ethics there is now perceptible

in some quarters a tendency to repudiate the normative standpoint. All

the social sciences have, then, begun their work at what, from the

strictly logical point of view, was the wrong end; instead of first

securing a basis of positive science and then building up the normative

doctrines upon that basis, they have advanced by repeatedly going

backwards towards what should have been their foundations. Now the most

important part of the positive basis of the social sciences is

psychology; we find accordingly the social sciences at first ignoring

psychology and then gradually working back to it; they became gradually

more psychological and, in proportion as they did so, they became more

valuable. Modern writers on these topics fall into two classes; those

who have attempted to work upon a psychological foundation, and those

who have ignored or denied the need of any such basis. The earlier

efforts of the former kind, among which we may reckon those of Adam

Smith, Bentham, and the Mills, although they greatly influenced

legislation and practice in general, have nevertheless brought the

psychological method into some disrepute, because they reasoned from

psychological principles which were unduly simplified and in fact

misleading, notably the famous principle of psychological hedonism on

which they so greatly relied. Their psychology was, in brief, too

abstract; it had not achieved the necessary concreteness, which only the

introduction of the genetic standpoint and the _vue d’ensemble_ could

give it. Other writers on the social sciences were content to ignore the

achievements of psychology; but, since they dealt with the activities of

human beings and the products of those activities, such as laws,

institutions and customs, they could hardly avoid all reference to the

human mind and its processes; they then relied upon the crude

unanalysed psychological conceptions of popular speech; often they went

further and, aspiring to explain the phenomena they described, made vast

assumptions about the constitution and working of the human mind. Thus,

for example, Renan, when he sought to explain some feature of the

history of a nation or society, was in the habit, like many others, of

ascribing it to some peculiar instinct which he postulated for this

particular purpose, such as a political or a religious instinct or an

instinct of subordination or of organisation. Comte made egoism and

altruism the two master forces of the mind. Sir Henry Maine asserted

that “satisfaction and impatience are the two great sources of political

conduct,” and, after asserting that “no force acting on mankind has been

less carefully examined than Party, and yet none better deserves

examination,” he was content to conclude that “Party is probably nothing

more than a survival and a consequence of the primitive combativeness of

mankind[3].” More recently Prof. Giddings has discovered the principal

force underlying all human associations in _Consciousness of Kind_.

Butler and the intuitive moralists postulated ‘conscience’ or moral

sense as something innately present in the souls of men; while the

creators of the classical school of political economy were for the most

part content to assume that man is a purely rational being who always

intelligently pursues his own best interest, a false premise from which

they deduced some conclusions that have not withstood the test of time.

Similar vague assumptions may be found in almost every work on the

social sciences,—all illustrating the need for a psychology more

concrete than the older individual psychology, as a basis for these

sciences, a positive science, not of some hypothetical Robinson Crusoe,

but of the mental life of men as it actually unfolds itself in the

families, tribes, nations, societies of all sorts, that make up the

human world.

The general growth of interest in genetic problems, stimulated so

greatly by the work of Darwin, turned the attention of psychologists to

the problem of the genesis of the developed human mind,—the problem of

its evolution in the race and its development in the individual. Then it

at once became apparent that both these processes are essentially

social; that they involve, and at every step are determined by,

interactions between the individual and his social environment; that,

while the growth of the individual mind is moulded by the mental forces

of the society in which it grows up, those forces are in turn the

products of the interplay of the minds composing the society; that,

therefore, we can only understand the life of individuals and the life

of societies, if we consider them always in relation to one another. It

was realised that each man is an individual only in an incomplete sense;

that he is but a unit in a vast system of vital and spiritual forces

which, expressing themselves in the form of human societies, are working

towards ends which no man can foresee; a unit whose chief function it is

to transmit these forces unimpaired, which can change or add to them

only in infinitesimal degree, and which, therefore, has but little

significance and cannot be accounted for when considered in abstraction

from that system. It became clear that the play of this system of forces

at any moment of history is predominantly determined by conditions which

are themselves the products of an immensely long course of evolution,

conditions which have been produced by the mental activities of

countless generations and which are but very little modified by the

members of society living at any one time; so that, as has been said,

society consists of the dead as well as of the living, and the part of

the living in determining its life is but insignificant as compared with

the part of the dead.

Any psychology that recognises these facts and attempts to display the

reciprocal influences of the individual and the society in which he

plays his part may be called Social Psychology. Collective or Group

Psychology is, then, a part of this larger field. It has to study the

mental life of societies of all kinds; and such understanding of the

group life as it can achieve has then to be used by Social Psychology in

rendering more concrete and complete our understanding of the individual

life.

Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, that which is

concerned to discover the most general principles of group life, and

that which applies these principles to the study of particular kinds and

examples of group life. The former is logically prior to the second;

though in practice it is hardly possible to keep them wholly apart. The

present volume is concerned chiefly with the former branch. Only when

the general principles of group life have been applied to the

understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold

system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social

Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate

account in all its concrete fulness.

The nature of Group Psychology may be illustrated by reference to

Herbert Spencer’s conception of sociology. Spencer pointed out that, if

you set out to build a stable pile of solid bodies of a certain shape,

the kind of structure resulting is determined by the shapes and

properties of these units, that for example, if the units are spheres,

there are only very few stable forms which the pile can assume. The same

is true, he said, of such physical processes as crystallisation; the

form and properties of the whole or aggregate are determined by the

properties of the units. He maintained with less plausibility that the

same holds good of animal and vegetable forms and of the elements of

which they are composed. And he went on to argue that, in like manner,

the structure and properties of a society are determined by the

properties of the units, the individual human beings, of which it is

composed.

This last proposition is true in a very partial sense only. For the

aggregate which is a society has, in virtue of its past history,

positive qualities which it does not derive from the units which compose

it at any one time; and in virtue of these qualities it acts upon its

units in a manner very different from that in which the units as such

interact with one another. Further, each unit, when it becomes a member

of a group, displays properties or modes of reaction which it does not

display, which remain latent or potential only, so long as it remains

outside that group. It is possible, therefore, to discover these

potentialities of the units only by studying them as elements in the

life of the whole. That is to say, the aggregate which is a society has

a certain individuality, is a true whole which in great measure

determines the nature and the modes of activity of its parts; it is an

organic whole. The society has a mental life which is not the mere sum

of the mental lives of its units existing as independent units; and a

complete knowledge of the units, if and in so far as they could be known

as isolated units, would not enable us to deduce the nature of the life

of the whole, in the way that is implied by Spencer’s analogies.

Since, then, the social aggregate has a collective mental life, which is

not merely the sum of the mental lives of its units, it may be contended

that a society not only enjoys a collective mental life but also has a

collective mind or, as some prefer to say, a collective soul.

The tasks of Group Psychology are, then, to examine the conception of

the collective or group mind, in order to determine whether and in what

sense this is a valid conception; to display the general principles of

collective mental life which are incapable of being deduced from the

laws of the mental life of isolated individuals; to distinguish the

principal types of collective mental life or group mind; to describe the

peculiarities of those types and as far as possible to account for them.

More shortly, Group Psychology has, first, to establish the general

principles of group life (this is general collective psychology);

secondly, it has to apply these principles in the endeavour to

understand particular examples of group life. Group Psychology, thus

conceived, meets at the outset a difficulty which stands in the way of

every attempt of psychology to leave the narrow field of highly abstract

individual psychology. It finds the ground already staked out and

occupied by the representatives of another science, who are inclined to

resent its intrusion as an encroachment on their rights. The science

which claims to have occupied the field of Group Psychology is

Sociology; and it is of some importance that the claims of these

sciences should be reconciled, so that they may live and work

harmoniously together. I have no desire to claim for Group Psychology

the whole province of Sociology. As I conceive it, that province is much

wider than that of Group Psychology. Sociology is essentially a science

which has to take a comprehensive and synthetic view of the life of

mankind, and has to accept and make use of the conclusions of many other

more special sciences, of which psychology, and especially Group

Psychology, is for it perhaps the most important. But other special

sciences have very important if less intimate contributions to make to

it. Thus, if it be true that great civilisations have decayed owing to

changes of climate of their habitats, or owing to the introduction of

such diseases as malaria into them, then Climatology and Epidemiology

have their contributions to make to Sociology. If peculiarities of diet

or the crossing of racial stocks may profoundly affect the vigour of

peoples, Physiology must have its say. General biology and the science

of Genetics are bringing to light much that must be incorporated in

Sociology. Economics, although needing to be treated far more

psychologically than it commonly has been, has its special contribution

to make. These are only a few illustrations of the fact that the field

of Sociology is very much wider and more general than that of Group

Psychology, however important to it the conclusions of the narrower

science may be.

In this book it will be maintained that the conception of a group mind

is useful and therefore valid; and, since this notion has already

excited some opposition and criticism and is one that requires very

careful definition, some attempt to define and justify it may usefully

be made at the outset; though the completer justification is the

substance of the whole book. Some writers have assumed the reality of

what is called the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society, meaning

thereby a unitary consciousness of the society over and above that of

the individuals comprised within it. This conception is examined in

Chapter II and provisionally rejected. But it is maintained that a

society, when it enjoys a long life and becomes highly organised,

acquires a structure and qualities which are largely independent of the

qualities of the individuals who enter into its composition and take

part for a brief time in its life. It becomes an organised system of

forces which has a life of its own, tendencies of its own, a power of

moulding all its component individuals, and a power of perpetuating

itself as a self-identical system, subject only to slow and gradual

change.

In an earlier work, in which I have sketched in outline the program of

psychology[4], I wrote: “When the student of behaviour has learnt from

the various departments of psychology ... all that they can teach him of

the structure, genesis, and modes of operation of the individual mind, a

large field still awaits his exploration. If we put aside as unproven

such speculations as that touched on at the end of the foregoing chapter

(the view of James that the human mind can enter into an actual union or

communion with the divine mind) and refuse to admit any modes of

communication or influence between minds other than through the normal

channels of sense-perception and bodily movement, we must nevertheless

recognise the existence in a certain sense of over-individual or

collective minds. We may fairly define a mind as an organised system of

mental or purposive forces; and, in the sense so defined, every highly

organised human society may properly be said to possess a collective

mind. For the collective actions which constitute the history of any

such society are conditioned by an organisation which can only be

described in terms of mind, and which yet is not comprised within the

mind of any individual; the society is rather constituted by the system

of relations obtaining between the individual minds which are its units

of composition. Under any given circumstances the actions of the society

are, or may be, very different from the mere sum of the actions with

which its several members would react to the situation in the absence of

the system of relations which render them a society; or, in other words,

the thinking and acting of each man, in so far as he thinks and acts as

a member of a society, are very different from his thinking and acting

as an isolated individual.”

This passage has been cited by the author of a notable work on

Sociology[5], and made by him the text of a polemic against the

conception of the group mind. He writes: “This passage contains two

arguments in favour of the hypothesis of super-individual ‘collective’

minds, neither of which can stand examination. The ‘definition’ of a

mind as ‘an organised system of mental or purposive forces’ is totally

inadequate. When we speak of the mind of an individual we mean something

more than this. The mind of each of us has a unity other than that of

such a system.” But I doubt whether Mr Maciver could explain exactly

what kind of unity it is that he postulates. Is it the unity of soul

substance? I have myself contended at some length that this is a

necessary postulate or hypothesis[6], but I do not suppose that Maciver

accepts or intends to refer to this conception. Is it the unity of

consciousness or of self-consciousness? Then the answer is that this

unity is by no means a general and established function of the

individual mind; modern studies of the disintegration of personality

have shown this to be a questionable assumption, undermined by the many

facts of normal and abnormal psychology best resumed under Dr Morton

Prince’s term ‘co-consciousness.’

The individual mind is a system of purposive forces, but the system is

by no means always a harmonious system; it is but too apt to be the

scene of fierce conflicts which sometimes (in the graver psychoneuroses)

result in the rupture and disintegration of the system. I do not know

how otherwise we are to describe the individual mind than as a system of

mental forces; and, until Maciver succeeds in showing in what other

sense he conceives it to have “a unity other than that of such a

system,” his objection cannot be seriously entertained. He asks, of the

alleged collective mind: “Does the system so created think and will and

feel and act[7]?” My answer, as set out in the following pages, is that

it does all of these things. He asks further: “If a number of minds

construct by their interactivity an organisation ‘which can only be

described in terms of mind,’ must we ascribe to the construction the

very nature of the forces which constructed it?” To this I reply—my

point is that the individual minds which enter into the structure of the

group mind at any moment of its life do not construct it; rather, as

they come to reflective self-consciousness, they find themselves

already members of the system, moulded by it, sharing in its activities,

influenced by it at every moment in every thought and feeling and action

in ways which they can neither fully understand nor escape from,

struggle as they may to free themselves from its infinitely subtle and

multitudinous forces. And this system, as Maciver himself forcibly

insists in another connection, does not consist of relations that exist

external to and independently of the things related, namely the minds of

individuals; it consists of the same stuff as the individual minds, its

threads and parts lie within these minds; but the parts in the several

individual minds reciprocally imply and complement one another and

together make up the system which consists wholly of them; and

therefore, as I wrote, they can “only be described in terms of mind.”

Any society is literally a more or less organised mental system; the

stuff of which it consists is mental stuff; the forces that operate

within it are mental forces. Maciver argues further: “Social

organisations occur of every kind and every degree of universality. If

England has a collective mind, why not Birmingham and why not each of

its wards? If a nation has a collective mind, so also have a church and

a trade union. And we shall have collective minds that are parts of

greater collective minds, and collective minds that intersect other

collective minds.” By this my withers are quite unwrung. What degree of

organisation is necessary before a society can properly be said to enjoy

collective mental life or have a group mind is a question of degree; and

the exponent of the group mind is under no obligation to return a

precise answer to this question. My contention is that the most highly

organised groups display collective mental life in a way which justifies

the conception of the group mind, and that we shall be helped to

understand collective life in these most complex and difficult forms by

studying it in the simpler less elaborated groups where the conception

of a group mind is less clearly applicable. As regards the overlapping

and intersection of groups and the consequent difficulty of assigning

the limits of groups whose unity is implied by the term group mind, I

would point out that this difficulty arises only in connexion with the

lower forms of group life and that a parallel difficulty is presented by

the lower forms of animal life. Is Maciver acquainted with the

organisation of a sponge, or of the so-called coral ‘insect,’ or with

that of the Portuguese man-o’-war? Would he deny the unity of a human

being, or refuse to acknowledge his possession of a mind, because in

these lower organisms the limits of the unit are hard or impossible to

assign? Maciver goes on: “The second argument is an obvious fallacy. If

each man thinks and acts differently as a member of a crowd or

association and as an individual standing out of any such immediate

relation to his fellows, it is still each who thinks and acts; the new

determinations are determinations still of individual minds as they are

influenced by aggregation.... But this is merely an extreme instance of

the obvious fact that every mind is influenced by every kind of

environment. To posit a super-individual mind because individual minds

are altered by their relations to one another (as indeed they are

altered by their relations to physical conditions) is surely

gratuitous[8].” To this I reply—the environment which influences the

individual in his life as a member of an organised group is neither the

sum of his fellow members as individuals, nor is it something that has

other than a mental existence. It is the organised group as such, which

exists only or chiefly in the persons of those composing it, but which

does not exist in the mind of any one of them, and which operates upon

each so powerfully just because it is something indefinitely greater,

more powerful, more comprehensive than the mere sum of those

individuals. Maciver feels that “it is important to clear out of the way

this misleading doctrine of super-individual minds corresponding to

social or communal organisations and activities,” and therefore goes on

to say that “there is no more a great ‘collective’ mind beyond the

individual minds in society than there is a great ‘collective’ tree

beyond all the individual trees in nature. A collection of trees is a

wood, and that we can study as a unity; so an aggregation of men is a

society, a much more determinate unity; but a collection of trees is not

a collective tree, and neither is a collection of persons or minds a

collective person or mind. We can speak of qualities of tree in

abstraction from any particular tree, and we can speak of qualities of

mind as such, or of some particular kind of mind in relation to some

type of situation. Yet in so doing we are simply considering the

characteristic of like elements of individual minds, as we might

consider the characteristic or like elements discoverable in individual

trees and kinds of trees. To conceive because of these identities, a

‘collective’ mind as existing _beside_ those of individuals or a

collective tree beside the variant examples is to run against the wall

of the Idea theory.” Now, I am not proposing to commit myself to this

last-named theory. It is not because minds have much in common with one

another that I speak of the collective mind, but because the group as

such is more than the sum of the individuals, has its own life

proceeding according to laws of group life, which are not the laws of

individual life, and because its peculiar group life reacts upon and

profoundly modifies the lives of the individuals. I would not call a

forest a collective tree; but I would maintain that in certain respects

a forest, a wood, or a copse, has in a rudimentary way a collective

life. Thus the forest remains the same forest though, after a hundred or

a thousand years, all its constituent trees may be different

individuals; and again the forest as a whole may and does modify the

life of each tree, as by attracting moisture, protecting from violent

and cold winds, harbouring various plants and animals which affect the

trees, and so on.

But I will cite an eloquent passage from a recent work on sociology in

support of my view. “The bonds of society are in the members of society,

and not outside them. It is the memories, traditions, and beliefs of

each which make up the social memories, traditions and beliefs. Society

like the kingdom of God is within us. Within us, within each of us, and

yet greater than the thoughts and understandings of any of us. For the

social thoughts and feelings and willings of each, the socialised mind

of each, with the complex scheme of his relation to the social world, is

no mere reproduction of the social thoughts and feelings and willings of

the rest. Unity and difference here too weave their eternal web, the

greater social scheme which none of us who are part of it can ever see

in its entirety, but whose infinite subtlety and harmony we may more and

more comprehend and admire. As a community grows in civilisation and

culture, its traditions are no longer clear and definite ways of

thinking, its usages are no longer uniform, its spirit is no longer to

be summed up in a few phrases. But the spirit and tradition of a people

become no less real in becoming more complex. Each member no longer

embodies the whole tradition, but it is because each embodies some part

of a greater tradition to which the freely-working individuality of each

contributes. In this sense the spirit of a people, though existing only

in the individual members, more and more surpasses the measure of any

individual mind. Again, the social tradition is expressed through

institutions and records more permanent than the short-lived members of

community. These institutions and records are as it were stored social

values (just as, in particular, books may be called stored social

knowledge), _in themselves nothing_, no part of the social mind, but the

instruments of the communication of traditions from member to member, as

also from the dead past to the living present. In this way too, with

the increase of these stored values, of which members realise parts but

none the whole, the spirit of a people more and more surpasses the

measure of any individual mind. It is these social forces within and

without, working in the minds of individuals whose own social

inheritance is an essential part of their individuality, stored in the

institutions which they maintain from the past or establish in the

present, that mould the communal spirit of the successive generations.

In this sense too a community may be called greater than its members who

exist at any one time, since the community itself marches out of the

past into the present, and its members at any time are part of a great

succession, themselves first moulded by communal forces before they

become, so moulded, the active determinants of its future moulding.” An

admirable statement! “The greater social scheme which none of us can see

in its entirety”—“the spirit of a people” which “more and more surpasses

the measure of any individual mind”—“the communal spirit of the

successive generations”—“the community” which is “greater than its

members who exist at any one time”; all these are alternative

designations of that organised system of mental forces which exists over

and above, though not independently of, the individuals in each of whom

some fragment of it is embodied and which is the group mind. And the

writer of this statement is Mr R. M. Maciver; the passage occurs in the

section of his book designed to “clear out of the way this misleading

doctrine of super-individual minds.” In the same section he goes on to

say that “every association, every organised group, may and does have

rights and obligations which are not the rights and obligations of any

or all of its members taken distributively but only of the association

acting as an organised unity.... As a unity the association may become a

‘juristic person,’ a ‘corporation,’ and from the legal standpoint the

character of unity so conceived is very important.... The ‘juristic

person’ is a real _unity_, and therefore more than a _persona ficta_,

but the reality it possesses is of a totally different order of being

from that of the persons who establish it.” But, perversely as it seems

to me, Maciver adds “the unity of which we are thinking is not mechanic

or organic or even psychic.” I cannot but think that, in thus denying

the organic and psychic nature of this unity, Maciver is under the

influence of that unfortunate and still prevalent way of thinking of the

psychic as identical with the conscious which has given endless trouble

in psychology; because it has prompted the hopeless attempt, constantly

renewed, to describe the structure and organisation of the mind in

terms of conscious stuff, ignoring the all-important distinction between

mental activity, which is sometimes, though perhaps not always,

consciousness, and mental structure which is not. The structure and

organisation of the spirit of the community is in every respect as

purely mental or psychic as is the structure and organisation of the

individual mind.

Maciver very properly goes on to bring his conclusions to the pragmatic

test, the test of practical results. He writes: “These false analogies

... are the sources of that most misleading antithesis which we draw

between the individual and society, as though society were somehow other

than its individuals.... Analyse these misleading analogies, and in the

revelation of their falsity there is revealed also the falsity of this

essential opposition of individual and society. Properly understood, the

interests of ‘the individual’ are the interests of society[9].” But is

it true that the interests of the individual are identical with the

interests of society? Obviously not. We have only to think of the

condemned criminal; of the mentally defective to whom every enlightened

society should deny the right of procreation; of the young soldier who

sacrifices his health, his limbs, his eyesight, or his life, and perhaps

the welfare of his loved ones, in serving his country. It is true that

the progress of society is essentially an approximation towards an ideal

state in which this identification would be completed; but that is an

ideal which can never be absolutely realised. Nor is it even true that

the interests of society are identical with the interests of the

majority of its members existing at any one time. It is, I think, highly

probable that, if any great modern nation should unanimously and

wholeheartedly embark upon a thorough-going scheme of state-socialism,

the interests of the vast majority of individuals would be greatly

promoted; they would be enabled to live more prosperously and

comfortably with greater leisure and opportunity for the higher forms of

activity. It is, however, equally probable that the higher interests of

the nation would be gravely endangered, that it would enter upon a

period of increasing stagnation and diminishing vitality and, after a

few generations had passed away, would have slipped far down the slope

which has led all great societies of the past to destruction.

The question may be considered in relation to the German nation. As will

be pointed out in a later chapter, the structure of that nation was,

before the Great War, a menace to European civilisation. If the Germans

had succeeded in their aims and had conquered Europe or the world,

their individual interests would have been vastly promoted; they would

have enjoyed immense material prosperity and a proud consciousness of

having been chosen by God to rule the rest of mankind for their good.

And this would have confirmed the nation in all its vices and would have

finally crushed out of it all its potentialities for developing into a

well-organised nation of the higher type, fitted to play an honourable

part in the future evolution of mankind. The same truth appears if we

consider the problem of the responsibility of the German nation for the

War. So long as that people might retain its former organisation, which,

I repeat, rendered it a menace to the civilisation and culture of the

whole world, its antagonists could only treat it as a criminal and an

outlaw to be repressed at all costs and punished and kept down with the

utmost severity. But, if it should achieve a new organisation, one which

will give preponderance to the better and saner elements and traditions

still preserved within it, then, although it will consist of the same

individuals in the main, it will have become a new or at least a

transformed nation, one with which the other nations could enter into

normal relations of amity or at least of mutual toleration, one which

could be admitted to a place in the greater society which the League of

Nations is to become. In other words, the same population would in

virtue of a changed organisation, have become a different nation.

Although Maciver, in making his attack upon the conception of the group

mind, has done me the honour to choose me as its exponent, I do not

stand alone in maintaining it. I am a little shy of citing in its

support the philosophers of the school of German ‘idealism,’ because, as

I have indicated in the Preface, I have little sympathy with that

school. Yet, though one may disapprove of the methods and of most of the

conclusions of a school of thought, one may still adduce in support of

one’s opinion such of its principles as seem to be well founded. I may,

then, remind the reader that the conception of the State as a

super-individual, a superhuman quasi-divine personality, is the central

conception of the political philosophy of German ‘idealism.’ That

conception has, no doubt, played a considerable part in bringing upon

Europe its present disaster. It was an instance of one of those

philosophical ideas which claim to be the product of pure reason, yet in

reality are adopted for the purpose of justifying and furthering some

already existing interest or institution. In this case the institution

in question was the Prussian state and those, Hegel and the rest, who

set up this doctrine were servants of that state. They made of their

doctrine an instrument for the suppression of individuality which

greatly aided in producing the servile condition of the German people.

Yet the distortions and exaggerations of the political philosophy of

German ‘idealism’ should not prejudice us against the germ of truth

which it contains; and the more enlightened British disciples of this

school, from T.H. Green onwards, have sought with much success to winnow

the grain from the chaff of the doctrine; and I cannot adduce better

support for the conception of the group mind than the sentences in which

a recent English writer, a sympathetic student of German ‘idealism,’

sums up the results of this winnowing process[10]. Discussing the

deficiencies of the individualist philosophy of the English utilitarian

school, he writes: “Not a modification of the old Benthamite premises,

but a new philosophy was needed; and that philosophy was provided by the

idealist school, of which Green is the greatest representative. That

school drew its inspiration immediately from Kant and Hegel, and

ultimately from the old Greek philosophy of the city-state. The vital

relation between the life of the individual and the life of the

community, which alone gives the individual worth and significance,

because it alone gives him the power of full moral development; the

dependence of the individual, for all his rights and for all his

liberty, on his membership of the community; the correlative duty of the

community to guarantee to the individual all his rights (in other words,

all the conditions necessary for his, and therefore for its own, full

moral development)—these were the premisses of the new philosophy. That

philosophy could satisfy the new needs of social progress, because it

refused to worship a supposed individual liberty which was proving

destructive of the real liberty of the vast majority, and preferred to

emphasise the moral well-being and betterment of the whole community,

and to conceive of each of its members as attaining his own well-being

and betterment in and through the community. Herein lay, or seemed to

lie, a revolution of ideas. Instead of starting from a central

individual, to whom the social system is supposed to be adjusted, the

idealist starts from a central social system, in which the individual

must find his appointed orbit of duty. But after all the revolution is

only a restoration; and what is restored is simply the _Republic_ of

Plato[11].” The same writer reminds us that “both Plato and Hegel thus

imply the idea of a moral organism”; and he adds, “It is this conception

of a moral organism which Bradley urges. It is implied in daily

experience, and it is the only explanation of that experience. ‘In fact,

what we call an individual man is what he is because of and by virtue of

community, and communities are not mere names, but something real.’

Already at birth the child is what he is in virtue of communities: he

has something of the family character, something of the national

character, something of the civilised character which comes from human

society. As he grows, the community in which he lives pours itself into

his being in the language he learns and the social atmosphere he

breathes, so that the content of his being implies in its every fibre

relations of community. He is what he is by including in his essence the

relations of the social State.... And regarding the State as a system,

in which many spheres (the family, for instance) are subordinated to one

sphere, and all the particular actions of individuals are subordinated

to their various spheres, we may call it a moral organism, a systematic

whole informed by a common purpose or function. As such it has an outer

side—a body of institutions; it has an inner side—a soul or spirit which

sustains that body. And since it is a moral organism—since, that is to

say, its parts are themselves conscious moral agents—that spirit resides

in those parts and lives in their consciousness. In such an organism—and

this is where it differs from an animal organism, and why we have to use

the word moral—the parts are conscious: they know themselves in their

position as parts of the whole, and they therefore know the whole of

which they are parts. So far as they have such knowledge, and a will

based upon it, so far is the moral organism self-conscious and

self-willing.... Thus, on the one hand, we must recognise that the State

lives; that there is a nation’s soul, self-conscious in its citizens;

and that to each citizen this living soul assigns his field of

accomplishment[12].” On a later page of the same book we read—“All the

institutions of a country, so far as they are effective, are not only

products of thought and creations of mind: they _are_ thought, and they

_are_ mind. Otherwise we have a building without a tenant, and a body

without a mind. An Oxford college is not a group of buildings, though

common speech gives that name to such a group: it is a group of men. But

it is not a group of men in the sense of a group of bodies in

propinquity: it is a group of men in the sense of a group of minds. That

group of minds, in virtue of the common substance of an uniting idea,

is itself a group-mind. There is no group-mind existing apart from the

minds of the members of the group; the group-mind only exists in the

minds of its members. But nevertheless it exists. There is a college

mind, just as there is a Trade Union mind, or even a ‘public mind’ of

the whole community; and we are all conscious of such a mind as

something that exists in and along with the separate minds of the

members, and over and above any sum of those minds created by mere

addition[13].”

The political philosophers of the idealist school have not stood alone

in recognising the reality of the group mind. Some of the lawyers,

notably Maitland, have arrived at a very similar doctrine; and I cannot

better summarise their conclusions than Barker has done in the following

passage in the book from which I have already cited so freely. “The new

doctrine,” he writes, “runs somewhat as follows. No permanent group,

permanently organised for a durable object, can be regarded as a mere

sum of persons, whose union, to have any rights or duties, must receive

a legal confirmation. Permanent groups are themselves persons,

group-persons, with a group-will of their own and a permanent character

of their own; and they have become group-persons of themselves, without

any creative act of the State. In a word, group-persons are real

persons; and just because they are so, and possess such attributes of

persons as will and character, they cannot have been made by the

State[14].”

I am not alone, then, in postulating the reality of the group mind. And

I am glad to be able to cite evidence of this, because I know well that

very many readers may at first find themselves repelled by this notion

of a group mind, and that some of them will incline to regard it as the

fantastic fad of an academic crank.

I would say at once that the crucial point of difference between my own

view of the group mind and that of the German ‘idealist’ school (at

least in its more extreme representatives) is that I repudiate,

provisionally at least, as an unverifiable hypothesis the conception of

a collective or super-individual consciousness, somehow comprising the

consciousness of the individuals composing the group. I have examined

this conception in the following chapter and have stated my grounds for

rejecting it. The difference of practical conclusions arising from this

difference of theory must obviously be very great.

Several books dealing with collective psychology have been published in

recent years. Of these perhaps the most notable are G. le Bon’s

_Psychology of the Crowd_, his _Evolution psychologique des peuples_;

Sighele’s _La foule criminelle_; the _Psychologie collective_ of Dr A.

A. Marie; and Alfred Fouillée’s _La Science sociale contemporaine_. It

is noteworthy that, with the exception of the last, all these books deal

only with crowds or groups of low organisation; and their authors, like

almost all others who have touched on this subject, are concerned

chiefly to point out how participation in the group life degrades the

individual, how the group feels and thinks and acts on a much lower

plane than the average plane of the individuals who compose it.

On the other hand, many writers have insisted on the fact that it is

only by participation in the life of society that any man can realise

his higher potentialities; that society has ideals and aims and

traditions loftier than any principles of conduct the individual can

form for himself unaided; and that only by the further evolution of

organised society can mankind be raised to higher levels; just as in the

past it has been only through the development of organised society that

the life of man has ceased to deserve the epithets ‘nasty, brutish and

short’ which Hobbes applied to it.

We seem then to stand before a paradox. Participation in group life

degrades the individual, assimilating his mental processes to those of

the crowd, whose brutality, inconstancy, and unreasoning impulsiveness

have been the theme of many writers; yet only by participation in group

life does man become fully man, only so does he rise above the level of

the savage.

The resolution of this paradox is the essential theme of this book. It

examines and fully recognises the mental and moral defects of the crowd

and its degrading effects upon all those who are caught up in it and

carried away by the contagion of its reckless spirit. It then goes on to

show how organisation of the group may, and generally does in large

measure, counteract these degrading tendencies; and how the better kinds

of organisation render group life the great ennobling influence by aid

of which alone man rises a little above the animals and may even aspire

to fellowship with the angels.

PART I

GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER II

THE MENTAL LIFE OF THE CROWD

It is a notorious fact that, when a number of men think and feel and act

together, the mental operations and the actions of each member of the

group are apt to be very different from those he would achieve if he

faced the situation as an isolated individual. Hence, though we may know

each member of a group so intimately that we can, with some confidence,

foretell his actions under given circumstances, we cannot foretell the

behaviour of the group from our knowledge of the individuals alone. If

we would understand and be able to predict the behaviour of the group,

we must study the way in which the mental processes of its members are

modified in virtue of their membership. That is to say, we must study

the interactions between the members of the group and also those between

the group as a whole and each member. We must examine also the forms of

group organisation and their influence upon the life of the group.

Groups differ greatly from one another in respect of the kind and degree

of organisation they possess. In the simplest case the group has no

organisation. In some cases the relations of the constituent individuals

to one another and to the whole group are not in any way determined or

fixed by previous events; such a group constitutes merely a mob. In

other groups the individuals have certain determinate relations to one

another which have arisen in one or more of three ways:

(1) Certain relations may have been established between the individuals,

before they came together to form a group; for example, a parish council

or a political meeting may be formed by persons belonging to various

definitely recognised classes, and their previously recognised relations

will continue to play a part in determining the collective

deliberations and actions of the group; they will constitute an

incipient organisation.

(2) If any group enjoys continuity of existence, certain more or less

constant relations, of subordination, deference, leadership and so

forth, will inevitably become established between the individuals of

which it is composed; and, of course, such relations will usually be

deliberately established and maintained by any group that is united by a

common purpose, in order that its efficiency may be promoted.

(3) The group may have a continued existence and a more or less

elaborate and definite organisation independently of the individuals of

which it is composed; in such a case the individuals may change while

the formal organisation of the group persists; each person who enters it

being received into some more or less well-defined and generally

recognised position within the group, which formal position determines

in great measure the nature of his relations to other members of the

group and to the group as a whole.

We can hardly imagine any concourse of human beings, however fortuitous

it may be, utterly devoid of the rudiments of organisation of one or

other of these three kinds; nevertheless, in many a fortuitous concourse

the influence of such rudimentary organisation is so slight as to be

negligible. Such a group is an unorganised crowd or mob. The unorganised

crowd presents many of the fundamental phenomena of collective

psychology in relative simplicity; whereas the higher the degree of

organisation of a group, the more complicated is its psychology. We

shall, therefore, study first the mental peculiarities of the

unorganised crowd, and shall then go on to consider the modifications

resulting from a simple and definite type of organisation.

Not every mass of human beings gathered together in one place within

sight and sound of one another constitutes a crowd in the psychological

sense of the word. There is a dense gathering of several hundred

individuals at the Mansion House Crossing at noon of every week-day; but

ordinarily each of them is bent upon his own task, pursues his own ends,

paying little or no regard to those about him. But let a fire-engine

come galloping through the throng of traffic, or the Lord Mayor’s state

coach arrive, and instantly the concourse assumes in some degree the

character of a psychological crowd. All eyes are turned upon the

fire-engine or coach; the attention of all is directed to the same

object; all experience in some degree the same emotion, and the state of

mind of each person is in some degree affected by the mental processes

of all those about him. Those are the fundamental conditions of

collective mental life. In its more developed forms, an awareness of the

crowd or group as such in the mind of each member plays an important

part; but this is not an essential condition of its simpler

manifestations. The essential conditions of collective mental action

are, then, a common object of mental activity, a common mode of feeling

in regard to it, and some degree of reciprocal influence between the

members of the group. It follows that not every aggregation of

individuals is capable of becoming a psychological crowd and of enjoying

a collective life. For the individuals must be capable of being

interested in the same objects and of being affected in a similar way by

them; there must be a certain degree of similarity of mental

constitution among the individuals, a certain mental homogeneity of the

group. Let a man stand on a tub in the midst of a gathering of a hundred

Englishmen and proceed to denounce and abuse England; those individuals

at once become a crowd. Whereas, if the hundred men were of as many

races and nations, their attention would hardly be attracted by the

orator; for they would have no common interest in the topic of his

discourse. Or let the man on the tub denounce the establishment of the

Church of England, and the hundred Englishmen do not become a crowd;

for, although all may be interested and attentive, the words of the

orator evoke in them very diverse feelings and emotions, the sentiments

they entertain for the Church of England being diverse in character.

There must, then, be some degree of similarity of mental constitution,

of interest and sentiment, among the persons who form a crowd, a certain

degree of mental homogeneity of the group. And the higher the degree of

this mental homogeneity of any gathering of men, the more readily do

they form a psychological crowd and the more striking and intense are

the manifestations of collective life. All gatherings of men that are

not purely fortuitous are apt to have a considerable degree of mental

homogeneity; thus the members of a political meeting are drawn together

by common political opinions and sentiments; the audience in a concert

room shares a common love of music or a common admiration for the

composer, conductor, or great executant; and a still higher degree of

homogeneity prevails when a number of persons of the same religious

persuasion are gathered together at a great revival meeting. Consider

how under such circumstances a very ordinary joke or point made by a

political orator provokes a huge delight; how, at a concert, the

admiration of the applauding audience swells to a pitch of frantic

enthusiasm; how, at the skilfully conducted and successful revival

meeting, the fervour of emotion is apt to rise, until it exceeds all

normal modes of expression and men and women give way to loud weeping or

even hysterical convulsions.

Such exaltation or intensification of emotion is the most striking

result of the formation of a crowd, and is one of the principal sources

of the attractiveness of the crowd. By participation in the mental life

of a crowd, one’s emotions are stirred to a pitch that they seldom or

never attain under other conditions. This is for most men an intensely

pleasurable experience; they are, as they say, carried out of

themselves, they feel themselves caught up in a great wave of emotion,

and cease to be aware of their individuality and all its limitations;

that isolation of the individual, which oppresses every one of us,

though it may not be explicitly formulated in his consciousness, is for

the time being abolished. The repeated enjoyment of effects of this kind

tends to generate a craving for them, and also a facility in the spread

and intensification of emotion in this way; this is probably the

principal cause of the greater excitability of urban populations as

compared with dwellers in the country, and of the well-known violence

and fickleness of the mobs of great cities.

There is one kind of object in the presence of which no man remains

indifferent and which evokes in almost all men the same emotion, namely

impending danger; hence the sudden appearance of imminent danger may

instantaneously convert any concourse of people into a crowd and produce

the characteristic and terrible phenomena of a panic. In each man the

instinct of fear is intensely excited; he experiences that horrible

emotion in full force and is irresistibly impelled to save himself by

flight. The terrible driving power of this impulse, excited to its

highest pitch under the favouring conditions, suppresses all other

impulses and tendencies, all habits of self-restraint, of courtesy and

consideration for others; and we see men, whom we might have supposed

incapable of cruel or cowardly behaviour, trampling upon women and

children, in their wild efforts to escape from the burning theatre, the

sinking ship, or other place of danger.

The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective mental life.

Groups of gregarious animals are liable to panic; and the panic of a

crowd of human beings seems to be generated by the same simple

instinctive reactions as the panic of animals. The essence of the panic

is the collective intensification of the instinctive excitement, with

its emotion of fear and its impulse to night. The principle of primitive

sympathy[15] seems to afford a full and adequate explanation of such

collective intensification of instinctive excitement. The principle is

that, in man and in the gregarious animals generally, each instinct,

with its characteristic primary emotion and specific impulse, is capable

of being excited in one individual by the expressions of the same

emotion in another, in virtue of a special congenital adaptation of the

instinct on its Cognitive or perceptual side. In the crowd, then, the

expressions of fear of each individual are perceived by his neighbours;

and this perception intensifies the fear directly excited in them by the

threatening danger. Each man perceives on every hand the symptoms of

fear, the blanched distorted faces, the dilated pupils, the high-pitched

trembling voices, and the screams of terror of his fellows; and with

each such perception his own impulse and his own emotion rise to a

higher pitch of intensity, and their expressions become correspondingly

accentuated and more difficult to control. So the expressions of each

member of the crowd work upon all other members within sight and hearing

of him to intensify their excitement; and the accentuated expressions of

the emotion, so intensified, react upon him to raise his own excitement

to a still higher pitch; until in all individuals the instinct is

excited in the highest possible degree.

This principle of direct induction of emotion by way of the primitive

sympathetic response enables us to understand the fact that a concourse

of people (or animals) may be quickly turned into a panic-stricken crowd

by some threatening object which is perceptible by only a few of the

individuals present. A few persons near the stage of a theatre see

flames dart out among the wings; then, though the flames may be

invisible to the rest of the house, the expressions of the startled few

induce fear in their neighbours, and the excitement sweeps over the

whole concourse like fire blown across the prairie.

The same principle enables us to understand how a few fearless

individuals may arrest the spread of a panic. If they experience no

fear, or can completely arrest its expressions, and can in any way make

themselves prominent, can draw and hold the attention of their fellows

to themselves, then these others, instead of perceiving on every hand

only the expressions of fear, perceive these few calm and resolute

individuals; the process of reciprocal intensification of the excitement

is checked and, if the danger is not too imminent and obvious, the panic

may die away, leaving men ashamed and astonished at the intensity of

their emotion and the violent irrational character of their behaviour.

Other of the cruder primary emotions may spread through a crowd in very

similar fashion, though the process is rarely so rapid and intense as in

the case of fear[16]. And in every case the principal cause of the

intensification of the emotion is the reciprocal action between the

members of the crowd, according to the principle of sympathetic

induction of emotion in one individual by its expressions in others.

In panic, the dominance of the one emotion and its impulse is so

complete as to allow no scope for any of the subtler modes of collective

mental operation. But in other cases other conditions co-operate to

determine the character of the emotional response of the crowd. Of these

the most important are the awareness of the crowd as a whole in the mind

of each member of it and his consciousness of his membership in the

whole. When a common emotion pervades the crowd, each member becomes

more or less distinctly aware of the fact; and this gives him a sense of

sharing in a mighty and irresistible power which renders him reckless of

consequences and encourages him to give himself up to the prevailing

emotion without restraint. Thus, in the case of an audience swept by an

emotion of admiration for a brilliant singer, the thunder of applause,

which shows each individual that his emotion is shared by all the rest,

intensifies his own emotion, not only by way of sympathetic induction,

but also because it frees him from that restraint of emotion which is

habitual with most of us in the presence of any critical or adversely

disposed spectators, and which the mere thought of such spectators tends

to maintain and strengthen. Again, the oratory of a demagogue, if

addressed to a large crowd, will raise angry emotion to a pitch of

intensity far higher than any it will attain if he is heard by a few

persons only; and this is due not only to accentuation of the emotion by

sympathetic induction, but also to the fact that, as the symptoms of the

emotion begin to be manifested on all sides, each man becomes aware that

it pervades the crowd, that the crowd as a whole is swayed by the same

emotion and the same impulse as he himself feels, that none remains to

criticise the violence of his expressions. To which it must be added

that the consciousness of the harmony of one’s feelings with those of a

mass of one’s fellows, and the consequent sense of freedom from all

restraint, are highly pleasurable to most men; they find a pleasure in

letting themselves go, in being swept away in the torrent of collective

emotion. This is one of the secrets of the fascination which draws many

thousands of spectators to a football match, and brings together the

multitudes of base-ball ‘fans’ bubbling over with eager anticipation of

an emotional orgy.

The fact that the emotions of crowds are apt to be very violent has long

been recognised, and the popular mind, in seeking to account for it, has

commonly postulated very special and even supernatural causes. The negro

author of a most interesting book[17] has given the following

description of the religious frenzy of a crowd of Christian negroes: “An

air of intense excitement possessed the mass of black folk. A suppressed

terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a

demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The

massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to

his lips. The people moaned and fluttered and then a gaunt brown woman

suddenly leaped into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round

about came wail and groan and outcry, a scene of human passion such as I

had never even imagined.” The author goes on to say that this frenzy is

attributed by the black folk to the direct influence of the Spirit of

the Lord, making mad the worshippers with supernatural joy, and that

this belief is one of the leading features of their religion. Similar

practices, depending upon the tendency of collective emotion to rise to

an extreme intensity, have been common to the peoples of many lands in

all ages; and similar supernatural explanations have been commonly

devised and accepted. I need only remind the reader of the Dionysiac

orgies of ancient Greece.

The facts are so striking that for the popular mind they remain

unaccountable, and not to be mentioned without some vague reference to

magnetism, electricity, hypnotism, or some mysterious contagion; and

even modern scientific writers have been led to adopt somewhat

extravagant hypotheses to account for them. Thus Dr Le Bon[18] speaks of

“the magnetic influence given out by the crowd” and says that, owing to

this influence, “or from some other cause of which we are ignorant, an

individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon

finds himself in a special state, which much resembles the state of

fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the

hands of the hypnotiser.” He goes on to say that in the hypnotised

subject the conscious personality disappears and that his actions are

the outcome of the unconscious activities of the spinal cord. Now,

crowds undoubtedly display great suggestibility, but great

suggestibility does not necessarily imply hypnosis; and there is no

ground for supposing that the members of a crowd are thrown into any

such condition, save possibly in very rare instances.

There are however two hypotheses, sometimes invoked for the explanation

of the peculiarities of collective mental life, which demand serious

consideration and which we may with advantage consider at this point.

One is the hypothesis of telepathy. A considerable amount of respectable

evidence has been brought forward in recent years to prove that one mind

may directly influence another by some obscure mode of action that does

not involve the known organs of expression and of perception; and much

of this evidence seems to show that one mind may directly induce in

another a state of consciousness similar to its own. If, then, such

direct interaction between two minds can take place in an easily

appreciable degree in certain instances, it would seem not improbable

that a similar direct interaction, producing a lesser, and therefore

less easily appreciable, degree of assimilation of the states of

consciousness of the minds concerned, may be constantly and normally at

work. If this were the case, such telepathic interaction might well play

a very important part in collective mental life, and, where a large

number of persons is congregated, it might tend to produce that

intensification of emotion which is so characteristic of crowds. In

fact, if direct telepathic communication of emotion in however slight a

degree is possible and normal, and especially if the influence is one

that diminishes with distance, it may be expected to produce its most

striking results among the members of a crowd; for the emotion of each

member might be expected to be intensified by the telepathic influence

radiating from every other member. Some slight presumption in favour of

such a mode of explanation is afforded by the fact that the popular use

of the word contagion in the present connexion seems to imply, however

vaguely, some such direct communication of emotion. But telepathic

communication has not hitherto been indisputably established; and the

observations that afford so strong a presumption in its favour indicate

that, if and in so far as it occurs, it does so sporadically and only

between individuals specially attuned to one another or in some abnormal

mental state that renders them specially sensitive to the influence[19].

And, while the acceptance of the principle of sympathetic induction of

an emotion, as an instinctive perceptual response to the expressions of

that emotion, renders unnecessary any further principle of explanation,

the consideration of the conditions of the spread of emotion through

crowds affords evidence that this mode of interaction of the individuals

is all-important and that telepathic communication, if it occurs, is of

secondary importance. For the spreading and the great intensification of

emotion seem to depend upon its being given expressions that are

perceptible by the senses. So long as its expressions are suppressed,

the emotion of an assembly does not become excessive. It is only by

eliciting and encouraging the expressions of emotions that the

revivalist, the political orator, or the comic man on the music-hall

stage, achieves his successes. That the expressions of an emotion are

far more effective in this way than the emotion itself is recognised by

the practice of the _claqueurs_. When an audience has once been induced

to give expression to a common emotion, its members are, as it were, set

in tune with one another; each man is aware that he is in harmony with

all the rest as regards his feelings and emotions, and, even in the

periods during which all expressions are suppressed by the audience,

this awareness serves to sustain the mood and to prepare for fresh

outbursts. The mere silence of an audience, the absence of coughs,

shufflings, and uneasy movements, suffices to make each member aware

that all his fellows are attentive and are responding with the

appropriate emotion; but it is not until the applause, the indignation,

or the laughter, breaks out in free expression that the emotion reaches

its highest pitch. And a skilful orator or entertainer, recognising

these facts, takes care to afford frequent opportunities for the

collective displays of emotion.

We must recognise, then, that, even if telepathic communication be

proved to be possible in certain cases, there is not sufficient evidence

of its operation in the spread of emotion through crowds, and that the

facts are sufficiently explained by another principle of general and

indisputable validity, the principle of primitive sympathy.

The second hypothesis to be considered in this connexion is that of the

‘collective consciousness.’ The conception of a collective consciousness

has been reached by a large number of authors along several lines of

observation and reasoning and is seriously defended at the present time,

more especially by several French and German writers. They maintain

that, in some sense and manner, the consciousnesses of individuals are

not wholly shut off from one another, but may co-operate in the genesis

of, or share in the being of, a more comprehensive consciousness that

exists beside and in addition to them. The conception varies according

to the route by which it is reached and the use that is made of it; but

in all its varieties the conception remains extremely obscure; no one

has succeeded in making clear how the relation of the individual

consciousness to the collective consciousness is to be conceived. In the

writings of many metaphysicians, of whom Hegel is the most prominent,

‘the Absolute’ seems to imply such a collective consciousness, an

all-inclusive world-consciousness of which the individual consciousness

of each man is somehow but a constituent element or fragmentary

manifestation. But it would be unprofitable to attempt any discussion of

the conception. We are concerned only with the empirical conception of a

collective consciousness based on observation and induction.

Such a conception finds its strongest support in the analogy afforded by

a widely current view of the nature and conditions of the psychical

individuality of men and animals; the view, namely, that the individual

consciousness of any man or animal is the collective consciousness of

the cells of which his body, or his nervous system, is composed. We

know that the nervous system is made up of cells each of which is a

vital unit, capable of living, of achieving its essential vital

processes, independently of other cells; and we see free living cells

that in many respects are comparable with these and to which we seem

compelled, according to the principle of continuity, to attribute some

germ of psychical life however rudimentary. What is known of the

phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of the multicellular animal

seems to justify us in regarding it as essentially an aggregate of such

independent vital units, which, being formed by repeated fission from a

single cell, adhere together and undergo differentiation and

specialisation of functions. If then the parent cell, the germ cell, has

a rudimentary psychical life, it is difficult to deny it altogether to

the cells formed from it by fission; and it is argued that all these

cells continue to enjoy a psychical life and that the consciousness of

the individual man or animal is the collective consciousness of some or

all of these cells. Now we know that the consciousness of any one of the

higher animals has for its physical correlate at any moment processes

going on simultaneously in many different parts and elements of the

brain. It is argued, then, that we must suppose each cell of the brain

to enjoy, whenever it is active, its own psychical life, and at the same

time to contribute something towards the unitary ‘collective

consciousness’ of the whole organism, which thus exists beside, but not

independently of, these rudimentary consciousnesses of the cells. If the

view be accepted, it affords a close analogy with the supposed

‘collective consciousness’ of a group of men or a society.

This conception of the collective nature of the consciousness of complex

organisms finds strong support in two classes of facts. First, it finds

support in the fact that, if individuals of many of the animal species

of an intermediate grade of complexity, such as some of the worms and

some of the radiate animals, be cut into two or more parts, each part

may continue to live and may become a complete organism by

reconstitution of the lost parts. Since, then, we can hardly deny some

integrated psychical life to such organisms, some rudimentary

consciousness, we seem compelled to believe that this consciousness may

be divided into two or more consciousnesses, each of them being

associated with the vital activities of one of the parts into which the

organism is divided by the knife. Division of the organism into two

parts is also the normal mode of reproduction in the animal world. Even

the coming into existence of every human being seems to be bound up with

the separation of a cell from the parent organism; and his existence as

a separate psychical individual seems to result from the same process of

physical division. And if one cell, when thus separated from the parent

organism, can thus prove its possession of a psychical life by

developing into a fully conscious organism, it is difficult to deny that

all other cells have also their own psychical lives, even though they

may be incapable of making it manifest to us by growing up into complex

organisms when separated.

The second class of facts that seem to justify this conception of the

consciousness of complex organisms are facts which have been studied and

discussed widely in recent years under the head of mental dissociation

or disintegration of personalities. Such disintegration seems to occur

spontaneously as the essential feature of severe hysteria, and to be

producible artificially and temporarily in some subjects, when they are

thrown into deep hypnosis. In certain of these cases the behaviour of

the human being seems to imply that it is the expression of two separate

psychical individuals, formed by the splitting of the stream of

consciousness and of mental activity of the individual into two streams.

The two streams may be of co-ordinate complexity; but more frequently

one of them seems to be a mere trickle diverted from the main stream of

personal consciousness. Since it is, from the nature of the case, always

impossible to obtain any direct and certain proof that any behaviour

other than one’s own is the expression of conscious mental processes, it

is not possible to prove that such division or disintegration of the

personal consciousness actually takes place. But the facts appear to

many of the psychologists who have studied them most carefully[20] to

demand this interpretation; and this psychical disintegration seems to

be accompanied by a functional dissociation of the nervous system into

two or more systems each of which functions independently of the

others,—that is to say, a division of the nervous system comparable with

the division of the nervous system of the worm by the stroke of the

knife which seems to split the psychical individual into two.

The facts of both these orders would appear, then, to indicate that the

physical organisation of the cells of a complex organism is accompanied

by an organisation of their psychical lives to form a ‘collective

consciousness,’ which in the human being becomes a personal

self-consciousness; and they would seem to show that the unity of

personal consciousness has for its main condition the functional

continuity of the protoplasm of the cells of the nervous system.

Even before the facts of disintegration of personalities were known,

several authors, notably von Hartmann[21] and G. T. Fechner[22], did not

hesitate to make this last assumption; and to assert that, if the brain

of a man could be divided by a knife into two parts each of which

continued to function, his consciousness would thus be divided into two

consciousnesses; and conversely, that, if a functional bridge of nervous

matter could be established between the brains of two men, their

consciousnesses would fuse to a single consciousness. The discovery of

these facts has greatly strengthened the case for this view; and it has

been accepted by so sound a psychologist and sober a philosopher as

Fouillée[23].

It may be claimed that the consideration of the nature and behaviour of

animal societies points to a similar conclusion, and supplements in an

important manner the argument founded on the divisibility of individual

organisms. Such a line of reasoning has been most thoroughly pursued by

Espinas in his very interesting book on animal societies[24]. He begins

by considering the lower polycellular forms of animal life. Among them,

especially among the hydrozoa or polypes, we find compound or colonial

animals; such an animal is a single living mass of which all the parts

are in substantial and vital connexion with one another, but is yet made

up of a number of parts each of which is morphologically a complete or

almost complete creature; and these parts, though specialised for the

performance of certain functions subserving the economy of the whole

animal or coherent group of animals, are yet capable, if separated from

the mass (as they sometimes are by a natural process), of continuing to

live, of growing, and of multiplying. There are found among such

creatures very various degrees of specialisation of parts and of

interdependence of parts; and in those cases in which the specialisation

and interdependence of parts is great, the whole compound animal

exhibits in its reactions so high a degree of integration that we seem

justified in supposing that a common or ‘collective consciousness’ is

the psychical correlate of these integrated actions of the separable

parts. Why then, it is asked, should this ‘collective consciousness’

cease to be, when the substantial continuity of the parts is

interrupted?

Espinas then goes on to describe animal societies of many types, and

shows how, as we follow up the evolutionary scale, association and

intimate interdependence and co-operation of their members tend to

replace more and more completely the individualistic antagonism and

unmitigated competition of the lowest free-living organisms. He

considers first the type of animal society which is essentially a

family, a society of individuals all of which are derived from the same

parent by fission or by budding. He argues that each such society of

blood-relatives is a harmonious whole only because it enjoys a

‘collective consciousness’ over and above the consciousnesses of its

constituent members; that, for example, a swarm of bees, which exhibits

so great a uniformity of feeling and action and of which all the members

come from the body of one parent, is in reality the material basis of a

‘collective consciousness,’ which presides over and is expressed by

their collective actions; that the ants of one household have such a

collective consciousness, that they “are, in truth, a single thought in

action, like the various cellules and fibres of the brain of a mammal.”

For, as he maintains, “the consciousness of animals is not an absolute,

indivisible thing. It is on the contrary a reality capable of being

divided and diffused ... thought in general and the impulses illuminated

by it, are, like the forces of nature, susceptible of diffusion, of

transmission, of being shared, and can like these lie dormant where they

are thinly diffused, or become vivid and intensified by concentration.

The beings that have these attributes are no doubt monads; but these

monads are open to and communicate with one another.”

Espinas extends the view to other animal societies of which the members

are not all derived from one parent, including human societies; and

concludes that, except in the case of the Infusoria at the bottom of the

scale and of the highly organised societies at the top of it, every

individual consciousness is a part of a superior more comprehensive

consciousness of an individual of a higher order. He illustrates at

length the fact with the consideration and explanation of which this

chapter is concerned, the fact namely that, in all social groups,

emotions and impulses are communicated and intensified from one

individual to another; and he asks—“If the essential elements of

consciousness add themselves together and accumulate from one

consciousness to another, how should the consciousness itself of the

whole not be participated in by each?” He argues that to be real is not

to be known to some other consciousness, but is to exist for oneself, to

be conscious of oneself; that, in this sense, the ‘collective

consciousness’ of a society is the most real of all things; that every

society is therefore a living individual; and that, if we deny

self-conscious individuality to a society, we must deny it equally to

the mass of cells that make up an animal body; that, in short, we can

find unity and individuality nowhere.

This doctrine of the ‘collective consciousness’ of societies may seem

bizarre to those to whom it is altogether novel; but it is one that

cannot be lightly put aside; it demands serious consideration from any

one who seeks the general principles of Collective Psychology. We have

no certain knowledge from which its impossibility can be deduced; and

the new light thrown upon individuality by modern studies in

psycho-pathology shows us that the indivisibility and strictly bounded

unity of the individual human soul is a postulate that we must not

continue to accept without critical examination. Nor is the conception

one that figures only in the writings of philosophers and therefore to

be regarded with contemptuous indulgence by men of affairs as but one of

the strange harmless foibles of such persons. It has a certain vogue in

more popular writings; thus Renan wrote—“It has been remarked that in

face of a peril a nation or a city shows, like a living creature, a

divination of the common danger, a secret sentiment of its own being and

the need of its conservation. Such is the obscure impulsion which

provokes from time to time the displacement of a whole people or the

emigration of masses, the crusades, the religious, political, or social

revolutions.” Phrases such as the soul of a people, the genius of a

people, have long been current, and in almost every newspaper one may

find important events and tendencies ascribed to the instinct of a

people. It is probable that these phrases are written in many instances

without any explicit intention to imply a ‘collective national

consciousness,’ but merely as well-sounding words that cloak our

ignorance and give a vague appearance of understanding. Nevertheless,

from its application to the life of nations, the doctrine of a

collective consciousness mainly derives its importance. It is seriously

used by a number of vigorous contemporary writers, of whom Schaeffle[25]

is perhaps the most notable, to carry to its extreme the doctrine of

Comte and Spencer that Society is an organism. Spencer specifically

refused to complete his analogy between society and an animal organism

by the acceptance of the hypothesis of a collective consciousness; and

he insisted strongly on the importance, for legislation and social

effort of every kind, of holding fast to the consciousness of

individual men as the final court of appeal, by reference to which the

value of every institution and every form of social activity must be

judged, the importance of regarding the welfare and happiness of

individual men as the supreme end, in relation to which the welfare of

the State is but a means. But those who, like Schaeffle, complete the

analogy by acceptance of this hypothesis, regard a nation as an organism

in the fullest sense of the word, as an organism that has its own

pleasure and pain and its own conscious ends and purposes and strivings;

as in fact a great individual which is conscious and may be more or less

perfectly self-conscious, conscious of itself, its past, its future, its

purposes, its joys and its sorrows. And they do not scruple to draw the

logical conclusion that the welfare of the individual should be

completely subjected to that of the State; just as the welfare of an

organ or cell of the human body is rightly held to be of infinitesimal

value in comparison with that of the whole individual and to derive its

importance only from its share in the constitution of the whole. This

conception of the ‘collective consciousness’ has thus been used as one

of the supports of ‘Prussianism’ and has played its part in bringing

about the Great War with all its immense mass of individual anguish.

We must, then, examine the arguments upon which the doctrine is based,

and ask—Do they suffice to render it probable, or to compel our

acceptance of it, and to justify the complete subjection of the

individual to the State?

We have seen that a strong case is made out for the view that the

consciousness of a complex organism is the ‘collective consciousness’ of

all its cells, or of the cells of its nervous system; and it must be

admitted that, if this view could be definitely established, it would go

far to justify the doctrine of the collective consciousness of

societies. Yet the view is by no means established; there are great

difficulties in the way of its acceptance. There is the difficulty which

meets a doctrine of ‘collective consciousness’ in all its forms from

that of Haeckel to that of Hegel,—the difficulty that the consciousness

of the units is used twice over, once as the individual consciousness,

once as an element entering into the collective consciousness; and no

one has been able to suggest how this difficulty can be surmounted. It

has been argued also, most forcibly perhaps by Lotze[26], that what we

know of the structure and functions of the brain compels us to adopt a

very different interpretation of the facts. It is said that, since we

cannot find any evidence of a unitary brain-process that might be

regarded as the immediate physical correlate of the unitary stream of

consciousness of the individual, but find rather that the physical

correlate of the individual’s consciousness at any moment is a number of

discrete processes taking place simultaneously in anatomical elements

widely scattered in different parts of the brain, we are compelled to

assume that each of these acts upon some unitary substance, some

immaterial entity (which may be called the soul) producing a partial

affection of its state. According to this view, then, the consciousness

of any moment is the unitary resultant of all these influences

simultaneously exerted on the soul, the unitary reaction of the soul

upon these many influences[27].

But, even if we could accept the view that the consciousness of the

complex organism is the ‘collective consciousness’ of its cells, the

analogy between an organism and a society, which constitutes the

argument for the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society, would remain

defective in one very important respect. If we accept that view, we must

believe that the essential condition of the fusion of the

consciousnesses of the cells is their spatial continuity, no matter how

utterly unintelligible this condition may seem; for the apparent

disruption of consciousness on the solution of material continuity

between the cells is the principal ground on which this view is founded.

Now, no such continuity of substance exists between the members of any

human group or society, and its absence constitutes a fatal flaw in the

analogical argument.

If we pass by these serious difficulties, others arise as soon as we

inquire what kinds of human groups have such ‘collective consciousness.’

Does the simple fortuitously gathered crowd possess it? Or is it

confined to highly organised groups such as the leading modern nations?

If every psychological crowd possesses it and owes its peculiarities of

behaviour to it, does it come into being at the moment the individuals

have their attention attracted to a common object and begin to be

stirred by a common emotion? And does it cease to be as soon as the

crowd is resolved into its elements? Or, if it is confined to nations or

other highly organised groups, at what stage of their development does

it come into being, and what are the limits of the groups of which it is

the ‘collective consciousness’? Do the Poles share in the ‘collective

consciousness’ of the German nation, or the Bavarians in that of

Prussia? Or do the Irish or the Welsh contribute their share to that of

the English nation?

Coming now to close quarters with the doctrine, we may ask those who,

like Schaeffle and Espinas, regard the ‘collective consciousness’ as a

bond which unites the members of a society and makes of them one living

individual,—Is this ‘collective consciousness’ merely epiphenomenal in

character? Or are we to regard it as reacting upon the consciousnesses

or minds of the individuals of the group, and, through such reaction,

playing a part in determining the behaviour of the group, or rather of

the individuals of which the group is composed? For the actions of the

group are merely the sum of the actions of its individuals. If the

former alternative be adopted, then we may confidently say that the

existence of a ‘collective consciousness’ must from the nature of the

case remain a mere speculation, incapable of verification; and that, if

it does exist, since it cannot make any difference, cannot in any way

affect human life and conduct, it is for us unreal, no matter how real

it may be for itself, as Espinas maintains; and we certainly are not

called upon to have any regard for it or its happiness, nor can we

invoke its aid in attempting to explain the course of history and the

phenomena of social life. If, on the other hand, the ‘collective

consciousness’ of groups and societies and peoples reacts upon

individual minds and so plays a part in shaping the conduct of men and

societies, then the conception is a hypothesis which can only be

justified by showing that it affords explanations of social phenomena

which in its absence remain inexplicable. If it were found that social

aggregates of any kind really do exhibit, as has often been maintained,

great mass-movements, emigrations, religious or political uprisings, and

so forth, for which no adequate explanations can be found in the mental

processes of individuals and the mental interactions of individuals by

the ordinary means of expression and perception, a resort to some such

hypothesis would be permissible; but it is an offence against the

principles of scientific method to invoke its aid, before we have

exhausted the possibilities of explanation offered by well-known

existents and forces. That certainly has not yet been done, and the

upholders of the doctrine have hardly made any attempt to justify it in

this the only possible manner in which it could be justified. The only

evidence of this sort adduced by Espinas is the rapid spread of a common

emotion and impulse throughout the members of animal and human groups;

and of such phenomenon we have already found a sufficient explanation in

those special adaptations of the instincts of all gregarious creatures

which are unmistakably implied by the way in which the expression of an

emotion directly evokes a display of the same emotion in any onlooking

member of the species.

We may, then, set aside the conception of a ‘collective consciousness’

as a hypothesis to be held in reserve until the study of group life

reveal phenomena that cannot be explained without its aid. For it may be

confidently asserted that up to the present time no such evidence of a

‘collective consciousness’ has been brought forward, and that there is

no possibility of any such evidence being obtained before the principles

of social psychology have been applied far more thoroughly than has yet

been done to the explanation of the course of history. In adopting a so

far unsympathetic attitude towards this doctrine, we ought to admit

that, if there be any truth in it, the ‘collective consciousness’ of

even the most highly organised society may be still in a rudimentary

stage, and that it may continue to gain in effectiveness and

organisation with the further evolution of the society in question.

After this digression we may return to the consideration of the

emotional characteristics of simple crowds. We have to notice not only

that the emotions of crowds are apt to be excessively strong, but also

that certain types of emotion are more apt than others to spread through

a crowd, namely the coarser simpler emotions and those which do not

imply the existence of developed and refined sentiments. For many of the

individuals of most crowds will be incapable of the more subtle complex

emotions and will be devoid of the more refined sentiments; while such

sentiments as the individuals possess will be in the main more diverse

in proportion to their refinement and special character; hence the

chances of any crowd being homogeneous as regards these emotions and

sentiments is small. Whereas the primary emotions and the coarser

sentiments may be common to all the members of a crowd; any crowd is

likely to be homogeneous in respect to them.

On the other hand, a crowd is more apt to be swayed by the more generous

of the coarser emotions, impulses, and sentiments than by those of a

meaner universally reprobated kind. For each member of the crowd acts

in full publicity; and his knowledge of, and regard for, public opinion

will to some extent incline him to suppress the manifestation of

feelings which he might indulge in private but would be ashamed of in

public. Hence a crowd is more readily carried away by admiration for a

noble deed, or by moral indignation against an act of cruelty, than by

self-pity or jealousy or envy or a meanly vengeful emotion.

At the same time, a crowd is apt to express feelings which imply less

consideration and regard for others than the individual, representing

the average morality and refinement of its members, would display when

not under the influence of the crowd. Thus men, when members of a crowd,

will witness with enjoyment scenes of brutality and suffering which,

under other circumstances, they would turn away from, or would seek to

terminate. To see a man thrown heavily to the ground is not pleasing to

most individuals; yet the spectacle provokes roars of delight from the

crowd at a football match. How many of the spectators, who, as members

of a crowd, hugely enjoy looking on at a prize-fight or a bull-fight,

would shrink from witnessing it as isolated individuals! How many boys

will join with a crowd of others in cruelly teasing another boy, an

animal, an old woman, or a drunken man, who individually are incapable

of such ‘thoughtless’ conduct! It may be doubted whether even the

depraved population of Imperial Rome could have individually witnessed

without aversion the destruction of Christians in the Coliseum.

This character of crowds seems to be due to two peculiarities of the

collective mental state. In the first place, the individual, in becoming

one of a crowd, loses in some degree his self-consciousness, his

awareness of himself as a distinct personality, and with it goes also

something of his consciousness of his specifically personal relations;

he becomes to a certain extent depersonalised. In the second place, and

intimately connected with this last change, is a diminution of the sense

of personal responsibility: the individual feels himself enveloped and

overshadowed and carried away by forces which he is powerless to

control; he therefore does not feel called upon to maintain the attitude

of self-criticism and self-restraint which under ordinary circumstances

are habitual to him, his more refined ideals of behaviour fail to assert

themselves against the overwhelming forces that envelope him.

THE INTELLECTUAL PROCESSES OF SIMPLE CROWDS

No fact has been more strongly insisted upon by writers on the

psychology of crowds than the low degree of intelligence implied by

their collective actions. Not only mobs or simple crowds, but such

bodies as juries, committees, corporations of all sorts, which are

partially organised groups, are notoriously liable to pass judgments, to

form decisions, to enact rules or laws, so obviously erroneous, unwise,

or defective that anyone, even the least intelligent member of the group

concerned, might have been expected to produce a better result.

The principal ground of the low order of intelligence displayed by

simple crowds is that the ideas and reasonings which can be collectively

understood and accepted must be such as can be appreciated by the lower

order of minds among the crowd. These least intelligent minds bring down

the intelligence of the whole to their own level. This is true in some

degree even of crowds composed of highly educated persons; for, as in

the case of the emotions and sentiments, the higher faculties are always

more or less specialised and differentiated in various ways through

differences of nurture and training; whereas the simpler intellectual

faculties and tendencies are common to all men.

A second condition, which co-operates with the foregoing to keep the

intellectual processes of crowds at a low level, is the increased

suggestibility of its members. Here is one of the most striking facts of

collective mental life. A crowd impresses each of its members with a

sense of its power, its unknown capacities, its unlimited and mysterious

possibilities; and these, as I have shown in Chapter III of my _Social

Psychology_, are the attributes that excite in us the instinct of

subjection and so throw us into the receptive suggestible attitude

towards the object that displays them. Mere numbers are capable of

exerting this effect upon most of us; but the effect of numbers is

greatly increased if all display a common emotion and speak with one

voice; the crowd has then, if we are in its presence, a well nigh

irresistible prestige. Hence even the highly intelligent and

self-reliant member of a crowd is apt to find his critical reserve

broken down; and, when an orator makes some proposition which the mass

of the crowd applauds but which each more intelligent member would as an

individual reject with scorn, it is apt to be uncritically accepted by

all alike; because it comes to each, not as the proposition of the

orator alone, but as a proposition which voices the mind of the crowd,

which comes from the mass of men he sees around him and so comes with

the power of a mass-suggestion.

A further ground of the suggestibility of the crowd is that prevalence

of emotional excitement which was discussed in the foregoing pages. It

is well recognised that almost any emotional excitement increases the

suggestibility of the individual, though the explanation of the fact

remains obscure. I have suggested that the explanation is to be found in

the principle of the vicarious usage of nervous energy, the principle

that nervous energy, liberated in any one part of the nervous system,

may overflow the channels of the system in which it is liberated and

re-enforce processes initiated in other systems. If this be true, we can

see how any condition of excitement will favour suggestibility; for it

will re-enforce whatever idea or impulse may have been awakened and made

dominant by ‘suggestion.’ The principle requires perhaps the following

limitation. Emotion which is finding outlet in well-directed action is

probably unfavourable to all such ‘suggestions’ as are not congruent

with its tendencies. It is vague emotion, or such as finds no

appropriate expression in action, that favours suggestibility. The most

striking illustrations of the greatly increased suggestibility of crowds

are afforded by well-authenticated instances of collective

hallucination, instances which, so long as we fail to take into account

the abnormal suggestibility of the members of crowds, seem utterly

mysterious, incredible, and super-normal.

Again, the capacity of crowds to arrive at correct conclusions by any

process of reasoning is apt to be diminished in another way by the

exaltation of emotion to which, as we have seen, they are peculiarly

liable. It is a familiar fact that correct observation and reasoning are

hampered by emotion; for all ideas congruent with the prevailing emotion

come far more readily to consciousness and persist more stably than

ideas incongruent with it, and conclusions congruent with the prevailing

emotion and desire are accepted readily and uncritically; whereas those

opposed to them can hardly find acceptance in the minds of most men, no

matter how simple and convincing be the reasoning that leads to them.

The diminution or abolition of the sense of personal responsibility,

which results from membership in a crowd and which, as we have seen,

favours the display of its emotions, tends also to lower the level of

its intellectual processes. Wherever men have to come to a collective

decision or to undertake collective action of any sort, this effect

plays an important part. The weight of responsibility that would be

felt by any one man, deciding or acting alone, is apt to be divided

among all the members of the group; so that for each man it is

diminished in proportion to the number of persons taking part in the

affair. Hence the attention and care devoted by each man to the task of

deliberation, observation, or execution, are less keen and continuously

sustained, and a judgment or decision is more lightly and easily arrived

at, grounds which the individual, deliberating alone, would reject or

weigh again and again serving to determine an immediate judgment. The

principle is well recognised in practical life. We do not set ten men to

keep the look-out on ship-board, but only one; though the safety of the

ship and of all that it carries depends upon his unremitting alertness.

We see the principle recognised in the institution of the jury. But for

the weakening of the individual sense of responsibility, juries would

seldom be found capable of finding a prisoner guilty of murder and so

condemning him to death; while, by the restriction of the jury to a

comparatively small number, the worst features of collective mental life

are avoided.

We see the working of the principle not only in simple crowds, but also

in groups of very considerable degrees of organisation. We see it in the

way in which many a man, who would shrink from the responsibility of

directing a great and complicated commercial undertaking, will

cheerfully join a board of directors each of whom is perhaps no better

qualified than himself to conduct the business of the concern. We may

recognise its effects also in the cheerful levity, not to say hilarity,

that frequently pervades our House of Commons; for most of its

well-meaning members would be utterly crushed under the weight of their

legislative responsibility, were it not divided in small fractions among

them.

But the low sense of responsibility of the crowd is not due to the

division of responsibility alone. In the case of the simple crowd, it is

due also in large part to the fact that such a crowd has but a very low

grade of self-consciousness and no self-regarding sentiment; that is to

say, the members of the crowd have but a dim consciousness of the crowd

as a whole, but very little knowledge of its tendencies and capacities,

and no sentiment of love, respect, or regard of any kind for it and its

reputation in the eyes of men. Hence, since the responsibility falls on

the whole crowd, and any loss or gain of reputation affects the crowd

and hardly at all the individuals who are merged in it, they are not

stimulated to exert care and self-restraint and critical deliberation in

forming their judgments, in arriving at decisions, or in executing any

task collectively undertaken. The results of these two conditions of

collective mental life are well summed up in the popular dictum that a

corporation has no conscience.

Since all these factors co-operate to keep the intellectual activity of

the simple crowd on a low level, it follows that very simple

intellectual processes must be relied on by the orator who would sway a

crowd; he must rely on abuse and ridicule of opponents, or unmeasured

praise of friends; on flattery; on the _argumentum ad hominem_; on

induction by simple enumeration of a few striking instances; on obvious

and superficial analogies; on the evocation of vivid representative

imagery rather than of abstract ideas; and, above all, on confident

assertion and reiteration, and on a display of the coarser emotions.

Since the individuals comprised in a crowd are apt to be influenced in

all these ways by the mass of their fellows, it follows that the mental

processes, the thoughts and feelings and actions, of each one will be as

a rule very different from what they would be if he faced a similar

situation as an isolated individual; the mental processes of each one

are profoundly modified by his mental interactions with all the other

members of the crowd. Therefore the collective actions of a crowd are

not simply the resultants of all the tendencies to thought and action of

the individuals, as such, but may be very different from any such

resultant. And they are not merely the expression of the individual

tendencies of the average member, nor yet of the mass of least

intelligent and refined members; they may be, and often are, such as no

one of the members acting alone would ever display or attempt.

It must be added that all the peculiarities of collective mental process

mentioned above express themselves very readily in the actions of simple

crowds, because such a crowd is incapable of resolution and volition in

the true sense of the words. I have shown[28] that individual resolution

and volition are only rendered possible by the possession of a

well-developed self-consciousness and self-regarding sentiment. But a

simple crowd has at the most only a rudimentary self-consciousness and

has no self-regarding sentiment. Hence its actions are the direct issue

of the various impulses that are collectively evoked; and, though it may

be collectively conscious of the end towards which it is impelled, and

though all the individuals may desire to effect or realise this end, and

to that extent may be said to be capable of purpose; yet such an

impulse or desire cannot be steadied, strengthened, renewed, or

supported and maintained, in opposition to any other impulse that may

come into play, by an impulse springing from the self-regarding

sentiment in the way which constitutes resolution and volition. Just so

far as the self-regarding sentiment of individuals comes into play and

they exert their individual volitions, they cease to act as members of a

crowd. The actions of the simple crowd are thus not the outcome of a

general will, nor are they the resultant of the wills of all its

members; they are simply not volitional in the true sense, but rather

impulsive. They are comparable with the actions of an animal rather than

with those of a man. It is the lack of the conditions necessary to

collective resolution and volition that renders a crowd so fickle and

inconsistent; so capable of passing from one extreme of action to

another, of hurrying to death the man whom it glorified at an earlier

moment, or of turning from savage butchery to tender and tearful

solicitude. Such incapacity of the crowd for resolution and volition,

together with the increased suggestibility of its members, accounts for

the fact that a crowd may be easily induced to follow as a leader any

one who, by means of the elementary reasoning processes suited to its

intellectual capacity, can succeed in suggesting to it the desirability

of any course of action.

We may sum up the psychological characters of the unorganised or simple

crowd by saying that it is excessively emotional, impulsive, violent,

fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action, displaying only

the coarser emotions and the less refined sentiments; extremely

suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty in judgment, incapable of

any but the simpler and imperfect forms of reasoning; easily swayed and

led, lacking in self-consciousness, devoid of self-respect and of sense

of responsibility, and apt to be carried away by the consciousness of

its own force, so that it tends to produce all the manifestations we

have learnt to expect of any irresponsible and absolute power. Hence its

behaviour is like that of an unruly child or an untutored passionate

savage in a strange situation, rather than like that of its average

member; and in the worst cases it is like that of a wild beast, rather

than like that of human beings.

All these characteristics of the crowd were exemplified on a great scale

in Paris at the time of the great revolution, when masses of men that

were little more than unorganised crowds escaped from all control and

exerted supreme power; and writers on the topic have drawn many

striking illustrations from the history of the days of the Terror[29].

The understanding of these more elementary facts and principles of group

psychology will prevent us falling into such an error as was committed

by our greatest political philosopher, Edmund Burke, when he condemned

the French people in the most violent terms on account of the terrible

events of the Revolution; for he attributed to the inhabitants of France

in general, as individuals, the capacities for violence and brutality

and the gross defects of intelligence and self-restraint that were

displayed by the Parisian crowds of the time; whereas the study of

collective psychology has led us to see that the actions of a crowd

afford no measure of the moral and intellectual status of the

individuals of which it is composed. So, when we hear of minor outrages

committed by a crowd of undergraduates or suffragettes, a knowledge of

group psychology will save us from the error of attributing to the

individuals concerned the low grade of intelligence and decency that

might seem to be implied by the deeds performed by them collectively.

The same understanding will also resolve for us some seeming paradoxes;

for example, the paradox that, while in the year 1906 the newspapers

contained many reports of almost incredible brutalities committed by the

peasants in many different parts of Russia, an able correspondent, who

was studying the peasants at that very time, ascribed to them, as the

most striking quality of their characters, an exceptional humaneness and

kindliness[30].

It will be maintained on a later page that we may properly speak not

only of a collective will, but also of the collective mind of an

organised group, for example, of the mind and will of a nation. We must,

then, ask at this stage—Can we properly speak of the collective mind of

an unorganised crowd? The question is merely one as to the proper use of

words and therefore not of the first importance. If we had found reason

to accept the hypothesis of a ‘collective consciousness’ of a group, and

to believe that the peculiarities of behaviour of a crowd are due to a

‘collective consciousness,’ then we should certainly have to admit the

propriety of regarding the crowd as having a collective mind. But we

have provisionally rejected that hypothesis, and have maintained that

the only consciousness of a crowd or other group is the consciousnesses

of its constituent individuals. In the absence of any ‘collective

consciousness’ we may still speak of collective minds; for we have

defined a mind as an organised system of interacting mental or psychical

forces. This definition, while allowing us to speak of the collective

mind of such a group as a well-developed nation, hardly allows us to

attribute such a mind to a simple crowd: for the interplay of its mental

forces is not determined by the existence of an organised system of

relations between the elements in which the forces are generated; and

such determination is an essential feature of whatever can be called a

mind.

CHAPTER III

THE HIGHLY ORGANISED GROUP

The peculiarities of simple crowds tend to appear in all group life; but

they are modified in proportion as the group is removed in character

from a simple crowd, a fortuitous congregation of men of more or less

similar tendencies and sentiments. Many crowds are not fortuitous

gatherings, but are brought together by the common interest of their

members in some object or topic. These may differ from the simple

fortuitous crowd only in being more homogeneous as regards the

sentiments and interests of their members; their greater homogeneity

does not in itself raise them above the mental level of the fortuitous

crowd; it merely intensifies the peculiarities of group life, especially

as regards the intensity of the collective emotion.

There is, however, one condition that may raise the behaviour of a

temporary and unorganised crowd to a higher plane, namely the presence

of a clearly defined common purpose in the minds of all its members.

Such a crowd, for example a crowd of white men in one of the Southern

States of North America setting out to lynch a negro who is supposed to

have committed some flagrant crime, will display most of the

characteristics of the common crowd, the violence and brutality of

emotion and impulse, the lack of restraint, the diminished sense of

responsibility, the increased suggestibility and incapacity for arriving

at correct conclusions by deliberation and the weighing of evidence. But

it will not exhibit the fickleness of a common crowd, the easy yielding

to distracting impressions and to suggestions that are opposed to the

common purpose. Such a crowd may seize and execute its victim with

inflexible determination, perhaps with a brutality and a ruthless

disregard of all deterrent considerations of which no one of its members

would be individually capable; and may then at once break up, each man

returning quietly and seriously to his home, in a way which has often

been described by witnesses astonished at the contrast between the

behaviour of the crowd and that of the individuals into which it

suddenly resolves itself.

The behaviour of a crowd of this kind raises the problem of the general

or collective will. It was said in the foregoing chapter that the

actions of a common crowd cannot properly be regarded as volitional,

because they are the immediate outcome of the primary impulses. Yet the

actions of a crowd of the kind we are now considering are the issue of

true resolutions formed by each member of the crowd, and are, therefore,

truly volitional. Nevertheless, they are the expression not of a general

or collective will, but merely of the wills of all the individuals; and,

even if there arise differences between the members and a conflict of

wills as to the mode of achieving the common end, and if the issue be

determined simply by the stronger party overbearing the weaker and

securing their co-operation, that still does not constitute the

expression of a general will. For a collective or general will only

exists where some idea of the whole group and some sentiment for it as

such exists in the minds of the persons composing it. But we may with

advantage examine the nature of collective volition on a later page, in

relation to the life of a highly organised group, such as an army.

There are five conditions of principal importance in raising collective

mental life to a higher level than the unorganised crowd can reach, no

matter how homogeneous the crowd may be in ideas and sentiments nor how

convergent the desires and volitions of its members. These are the

principal conditions which favour and render possible the formation of a

group mind, in addition to those more fundamental conditions of

collective life which we have noted in the foregoing chapter.

The first of these conditions, which is the basis of all the rest, is

some degree of continuity of existence of the group. The continuity may

be predominantly material or formal; that is to say, it may consist

either in the persistence of the same individuals as an

intercommunicating group, or in the persistence of the system of

generally recognised positions each of which is occupied by a succession

of individuals. Most permanent groups exhibit both forms of continuity

in a certain degree; for, the material continuity of a group being

given, some degree of formal continuity will commonly be established

within it. The most highly organised groups, such as well-developed

nations, exhibit both forms in the highest degree.

A second very important condition, essential to any highly developed

form of collective life, is that in the minds of the mass of the members

of the group there shall be formed some adequate idea of the group, of

its nature, composition, functions, and capacities, and of the relations

of the individuals to the group. The diffusion of this idea among the

members of the group, which constitutes the self-consciousness of the

group mind, would be of little effect or importance, if it were not

that, as with the idea of the individual self, a sentiment of some kind

almost inevitably becomes organised about this idea and is the main

condition of its growth in richness of meaning; a sentiment for the

group which becomes the source of emotions and of impulses to action

having for their objects the group and its relations to other groups.

A third condition very favourable to the development of the collective

mind of a group, though not perhaps absolutely essential, is the

interaction (especially in the form of conflict and rivalry) of the

group with other similar groups animated by different ideals and

purposes, and swayed by different traditions and customs. The importance

of such interaction of groups lies chiefly in the fact that it greatly

promotes the self-knowledge and self-sentiment of each group.

Fourthly, the existence of a body of traditions and customs and habits

in the minds of the members of the group determining their relations to

one another and to the group as a whole.

Lastly, organisation of the group, consisting in the differentiation and

specialisation of the functions of its constituents—the individuals and

classes or groups of individuals within the group. This organisation may

rest wholly or in part upon the conditions of the fourth class,

traditions, customs, and habits. But it may be in part imposed on the

group and maintained by the authority of some external power.

The capacity for collective life of an organised group whose

organisation is imposed upon it and wholly maintained by an external

authority is but little superior to that of a simple crowd. Such a group

will differ from the simple crowd chiefly in exhibiting greater control

of its impulses and a greater continuity of direction of its activities;

but these qualities are due to the external compelling power and are not

truly the expression of its collective mental life. An army of slaves

or, in a less complete degree, an army of mercenaries is the type of

this kind of organised group; and a people ruled by a strong despot

relying on a mercenary or foreign army approximates to it. The first aim

of the power that would maintain such an organisation must always be to

prevent and suppress collective life, by forbidding gatherings and

public discussions, by rendering communications between the parts

difficult, and by enforcing a rigid discipline. For such an organisation

is essentially unstable.

We may illustrate the influence of these five conditions by considering

how in a group of relatively simple kind, in which they are all

present, they favour collective life and raise it to a higher level of

efficiency. Such a group is a patriot army fighting in a cause that

elicits the enthusiasm of its members; such were the armies of Japan in

the late Russo-Japanese war; they exhibited in a high degree and in

relative simplicity the operation of all the conditions we have

enumerated.

Such an army exhibits the exaltation of emotion common to all

psychological crowds. This intensification of emotion enables men to

face danger and certain death with enthusiasm, and on other occasions

may, even in the armies of undoubtedly courageous and warlike nations,

result in panic and a rout. But in all other respects the

characteristics of the simple crowd are profoundly modified. The formal

continuity of the existence of the army and of its several units secures

for it, even though its personnel be changed at a rapid rate, a past and

therefore a tradition, a self-consciousness and a self-regarding

sentiment, a pride in its past and a tradition of high conduct and

achievement; for past failures are discreetly forgotten and only its

past successes and glories are kept in memory. The traditional group

consciousness and sentiment are fostered by every wise commander, both

in the army as a whole and in each separate department and regiment. Is

not the superiority in battle of such bodies as the famous Tenth Legion

due as much to such self-conscious tradition and sentiment as to the

presence of veterans in its ranks? And is not the same true of such

regiments as the Black Watch, the Gordons, the Grenadier Guards, and the

other famous regiments of the British army?

The third of the conditions mentioned above is also very obviously

present in the case of an army in the field—namely, interaction with a

similar group having different purposes, traditions, and sentiments. And

in this case the interaction, being of the nature of direct competition

and conflict, is of the kind most favourable to the development of the

collective mind. It accentuates the self-consciousness of the whole;

that is to say, it defines more clearly in the mind of each individual

the whole of which he is a part, his position in, his organic connexion

with, and his dependence upon, the whole; with each succeeding stage of

the conflict he conceives the whole more clearly, obtains a fuller

knowledge of the capacities and weaknesses of the whole and its parts.

Each soldier learns, too, something of the character of the opposing

army; and, in the light of this knowledge, his conception of his own

army becomes better defined and richer in meaning. In short, through

interaction with the opposing army, the army as a whole becomes more

clearly reflected in the mind of each of its members, its

self-consciousness is clarified and enriched. In a similar way,

intercourse and rivalry between the various regiments greatly promotes

the growth of the self-knowledge and self-sentiment of each of these

lesser groups. A standing army inevitably possesses a wealth of

traditions, habits and customs, over and above its formal organisation,

and these play an important part in promoting the smooth working of the

whole organism; the lack of these is one of the chief difficulties in

the way of the creation of a new army, as was vividly illustrated in the

making of the ‘Kitchener army’ during the Great War. The customs of the

various officers’ messes were but a small part of this mass of custom

which does so much to bind the whole army together.

An army obviously possesses organisation, generally in a very high

degree. The formal continuity of its existence enables the organisation

impressed upon it by external authority to acquire all the strength that

custom alone can give; while its material continuity enables its

organisation to generate, in the individual soldiers, habits through

which the inferior members are raised, as regards the moral qualities

required for efficiency in the field, towards the level of the best.

The organisation of the whole army has two aspects and two main

functions; the one is executive, the securing of the co-ordination of

action of the parts in the carrying out of the common plan; the other is

recipient and deliberative, the co-ordination of the data supplied by

the parts through deliberation upon which the choice of means is arrived

at. Deliberation and choice of means are carried out by the

commander-in-chief and his staff, the persons who have shown themselves

best able to execute this part of the army’s task. It is important to

note that, in the case of such an army as we are considering, the

private soldier in the ranks remains a free agent performing truly

volitional actions; that he in no sense becomes a mechanical agent or

one acting through enforced or habitual obedience merely. He wills the

common end; and, believing that the choice of means to that end is best

effected by the appropriate part of the whole organisation, he accepts

the means chosen, makes of them his proximate end, and wills them.

This is the essential character of the effective organisation of any

human group; it secures that while the common end of collective action

is willed by all, the choice of means is left to those best qualified

and in the best position for deliberation and choice; and it secures

that co-ordination of the voluntary actions of the parts which brings

about the common end by the means so chosen. In this way the collective

actions of the well-organised group, instead of being, like those of the

simple crowd, merely impulsive or instinctive actions, implying a degree

of intelligence and of morality far inferior to that of the average

individual of the crowd, become truly volitional actions expressive of a

degree of intelligence and morality much higher than that of the average

member of the group: i.e. the whole is raised above the level of its

average member; and even, by reason of exaltation of emotion and

organised co-operation in deliberation, above that of its highest

members.

Here we must consider a little more fully the nature of the collective

or general will, a subject that has figured largely in the discussions

of political philosophers on the nature of the State. Rousseau

wrote—“There is often a great difference between the will of all and the

general will; the latter looks only to the common interest; the former

looks to private interest, and is nothing but a series of individual

wills; but take away from these same wills the plus and minus that

cancel one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the

general will.” “Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will.”

By this he seems to mean that a certain number of men will the general

good, while many will only their private goods; and that while the

latter neutralise one another, as regards their effects on the general

interest, the former co-operate and so form an effective force to

promote the general good. This doctrine was an approximation towards the

truth, though like all Rousseau’s social speculations, his handling of

it was vitiated by his false psychology, which set out from the fiction

of man as an independent purely self-contained and self-determining

absolute individual. Later writers do not seem to have improved upon

Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will to any great extent.

The problem of the general will, like all problems of collective

psychology, becomes extremely complex when we consider the life of

nations; and it is, therefore, important to make ourselves clear as to

the nature of collective volition by consideration of the relatively

simple case of a patriot army. It is of course impossible to arrive at a

clear notion of collective volition, until individual volition has been

clearly defined and the nature of the distinction between it, on the one

hand, and mere impulsive action, desire, and simple conflict of desires,

on the other hand, has been made clear. The lack of such clear notions

and adequate definitions has rendered much of the discussion of this

topic by political philosophers sterile and obscure. In the light of the

conclusions reached in my chapter on individual volition[31], the

question of the nature of collective volition presents little

difficulty. It was found that volition may be defined and adequately

marked off from the simpler modes of conation by saying that it is the

reinforcement of any impulse or conation by one excited within the

system of the self-regarding sentiment. And in an earlier chapter[32] it

was shewn how the self-regarding sentiment may become extended to other

objects than the individual self, to all objects with which the self

identifies itself, which are regarded as belonging to the self or as

part of the wider self. This extension depends largely on the fact that

others identify us with such an object, so that we feel ourselves to be

an object of all the regards and attitudes and actions of others

directed towards that object, and are emotionally affected by them in

the same ways that we are affected by similar regards, attitudes, and

actions directed towards us individually. It was shewn also that such a

sentiment may become wider and emotionally richer than the purely

self-regarding sentiment, through fusing with a sentiment of love for

the object that has grown up independently. These facts were illustrated

by consideration of the parental sentiment for the child, which, it was

said, has commonly this twofold character and source, being formed by

the compounding of the self-regarding sentiment with the sentiment of

love of which the dominant disposition is that of the tender or

protective instinct.

In a similar way a similarly complex sentiment may become organised

about the idea of one’s family, or of any still larger group having

continuity of existence of which one becomes a member. In the case of

the patriot’s sentiment for his country or nation, the self-regarding

sentiment and the sentiment of love may be from the first combined in

the patriotic sentiment; since he knows himself to be a part of the

whole from the time that an idea of the whole first takes shape in his

mind.

In this respect the case of the soldier in a patriot army is relatively

simple. As a boy he may have acquired a sentiment of loving admiration

for the army; and, when he becomes a member of it, the dispositions that

enter into the constitution of his self-regarding sentiment, become

incorporated with this previously existing sentiment, so that the

reputation of the army becomes as important to him as his own; praise

and approval of it become for him objects of desire and sources of

elation; disapproval and blame of it, or the prospect of them, affect

him as painfully as if directed to himself individually, fill him with

shame and mortification.

A similar complex sentiment, the sentiment of patriotism, becomes

organised about the idea of his country as a whole; and, when war breaks

out and the army is pitted against that of another nation, while the

eyes of the whole world are turned upon it, it becomes the

representative of the nation and the special object of the patriotic

sentiment, which thus adds its strength to that of the more special

sentiment of the soldier for the army[33]. When, then, the patriot army

takes the field, it is capable of collective volition in virtue of the

existence of this sentiment in the minds of all its members. The

soldiers of a purely mercenary army are moved by the desire of

individual glory, of increased pay, of loot, by the habit of obedience

and collective movement acquired by prolonged drilling, by the

pugnacious impulse, by the desire of self-preservation; and they may be

led on to greater exertions by the influence of an admired captain. But

such an army is incapable of collective volition, because no sentiment

for the army as a whole is common to all its members. The soldiers of

the patriot army on the other hand may act from all the individual

motives enumerated above; but all alike are capable also of being

stirred by a common motive, a desire excited within the collective

self-regarding sentiment, the common sentiment for the army; and this,

adding itself to whatever individual motives are operative, converts

their desires into collective resolutions and renders their actions the

expressions of a collective volition.

Each soldier of the mercenary army may desire that his side shall win

the battle and may resolve that he will do his best to bring victory to

his side, and he may perform many truly volitional actions; and, in so

far as the actions of the army express these individual volitions

towards a common result, they are the expressions of the ‘will of all,’

but not of the collective will; because these volitions, though they are

directed to the one common end, spring from diverse motives and are

individual volitions.

The essence of collective volition is, then, not merely the direction of

the wills of all to the same end, but the motivation of the wills of all

members of a group by impulses awakened within the common sentiment for

the whole of which they are the parts. It is the extension of the

self-regarding sentiment of each member of the group to the group as a

whole that binds the group together and renders it a collective

individual capable of collective volition.

The facts may be illustrated more concretely by taking a still simpler

example of collective volition. Consider the case of a regiment in

battle commanded to occupy a certain hill-top in face of fierce

opposition. If the regiment is one to which the self-regarding sentiment

of each member has become extended, the soldiers may be animated

individually by the pugnacious impulse and by the desire of individual

glory, but they are moved also by the common desire to show what the

regiment can do, to sustain its glorious reputation; they resolve that

we, the regiment, will accomplish this feat. As they charge up the hill,

the hail of bullets decimates their ranks and they waver, the impulse of

fear checking their onward rush; if then their officer appeals to the

common sentiment, each man feels the answering impulse; and this is

strengthened by the cheer which shows him that the same impulse rises in

all his comrades; and so this impulse, awakened within the collective

self-regarding sentiment and strengthened by sympathetic induction from

all to each, comes to the support of the pugnacious impulse or whatever

other motives sustain each man, enables these to triumph over the

impulse to flight, and sweeps them all on to gain their object by truly

collective volitional effort. If, on the other hand, the men of the

regiment have no such common sentiment, then, when the advancing line

wavers, the onward impulsion checked by the impulse of retreat, there is

no possibility of arousing a collective volition; the regiment, which

from the first was a crowd organised only by external authority and the

habits created by it, acts as a crowd and yields to the rising impulse

of the emotion of fear, which, becoming intensified by induction from

man to man, rises to a panic; and the regiment is routed.

We may distinguish, then, five modes of conation which will carry all

the members of a group towards a common object, five levels of

collective action.

Let the group be a body of men on a road leading across a wilderness to

a certain walled city. A sudden threat of danger from a band of robbers

or from wild beasts may send them all flying in panic towards the city

gate. That is a purely impulsive collective action. It is not merely a

sum of individual actions, because the fear and, therefore, the impulse

to flight of each man is intensified by the influence of his fellows.

Secondly, let them be a band of pilgrims, fortuitously congregated, each

of whom has resolved to reach the city for his own private purposes. The

whole body moves on steadily, each perhaps aided in maintaining his

resolution in face of difficulties by the presence of the rest and the

spectacle of their resolute efforts. Here there is a certain

collectivity of action, the individual wills are strengthened by the

community of purpose. But the arrival of the band is not due to

collective volition; nor can it properly be said to be due to the will

of all; for each member cares nothing for the arrival of the band as a

whole; he desires and wills only his own arrival.

Thirdly, let each member of the band be aware that, at any point of the

road, robbers may oppose the passage of any individual or of any company

not sufficiently strong to force its way through. Each member will then

desire that the whole band shall cohere and shall reach the city, and

the actions of the group will display a higher degree of co-operation

and collective efficiency than in the former cases; but the successful

passage of the band will be desired by each member simply in order that

his own safe arrival may be secured. There is direction of all wills

towards the production of the one result, the success of the whole band;

but this is not truly collective volition because the motives are

private and individual and diverse.

Fourthly, let the band be an army of crusaders, a motley throng of

heterogeneous elements of various nationalities, united by one common

purpose, the capture of the city, but having no sentiment for the army.

In this case all members not only will the same collective action and

desire the same end of that action, but they have similar motives

arising from their sentiment for the city or that which it contains.

Still their combined actions are not the issue of a collective volition

in the full and proper sense of the words, but of a coincidental

conjunction of individual volitions. They might perhaps be said to be

the expression of the general will; and by giving that meaning to the

term ‘general will,’ while reserving the expression collective will or

volition for the type of case illustrated by our next instance, we may

usefully differentiate the two expressions.

Lastly, let the band approaching the city be an army of crusaders of one

nationality, and let us suppose that this army has enjoyed a

considerable continuity of existence and that in the mind of each member

the self-regarding sentiment has become extended to the army as a whole,

so that, as we say, each one identifies himself with it and prizes its

reputation and desires its success as an end in itself. Such a

sentiment would be greatly developed and strengthened by rivalry in

deeds of arms with a second crusading army. Each member of this army

would have the same motives for capturing the city as those of the army

of our last instance; but, in addition to these motives, there would be

awakened within the extended self-regarding sentiment of each man an

impulse to assert the power, to sustain the glory of the army; and this,

adding its force to those other motives, would enable them to triumph

over all conflicting tendencies and render the resolution of the army to

capture the city a true collective volition; so that the army might

properly be said to possess and to exercise a general or collective

will.

This distinction between the will of all and the collective will, which

we have considered at some length, may seem to be of slight importance

in the instances chosen. But it becomes of the greatest importance when

we have to consider the life of a nation or other enduring community.

The power of truly collective volition is no small advantage to any body

of fighting men and receives practical recognition from experienced

captains.

The importance of these different types of volition was abundantly

illustrated by the incidents of the Boer war and of the Russo-Japanese

war. That the success of its undertaking shall be strongly willed by all

is perhaps the most important factor contributing to the success of an

army; and if also the army exercises a true collective volition, in the

sense defined above, it becomes irresistible. Though it is questionable

whether the Boer armies can be said to have exercised a collective

volition, it is at least certain that individually the Boers strongly

willed their common end, the defeat of the British. On the other hand,

the British armies were defective in these respects. The motives of

those who fought in the British armies against the Boers were very

diverse. The pay of the regulars, the five shillings a day of the

volunteers, the desire to live for a time an adventurous exciting life,

the desire to get home again on the sick-list as soon as possible, the

desire for personal distinction; all these and other motives were in

many minds mixed in various proportions with the desire to assert the

supremacy of the British rule and support the honour of the flag. This

difference between the Boer and British armies was undoubtedly a main

cause of many of the surprising successes of the former. In the

Russo-Japanese war the opposed armies probably differed even more widely

in this respect. The Japanese soldiers not only willed intensely the

common end, but their armies would appear to have exercised truly

collective volition. Many of the several regiments also, being recruited

on the territorial system, were animated by collective sentiments rooted

in local patriotism. The Russian armies on the other hand were largely

composed of peasants drawn from widely separated regions of the Russian

empire, knowing little or nothing of the grounds of quarrel or of the

ends to be achieved by their efforts, caring nothing individually for

those ends, and having but little patriotic sentiment and still less

sentiment for the army.

It would, then, be a grave mistake to infer from the course of events in

these two wars that the British soldier was individually inferior to the

Boer, or the Russian to the Japanese; in both cases the principal

psychological condition of successful collective action—namely, a common

end intensely desired and strongly willed, individually or

collectively—was present in high degree on the one side, because the

preservation of the national existence was the end in view; while it was

lacking or comparatively deficient on the other side. As Sir Ian

Hamilton, a close observer of both these wars, has said—“the army that

will not surrender under any circumstances will always vanquish the army

whose units are prepared to do so under sufficient pressure.”

The same considerations afford an explanation of a peculiarity of

Russian armies which has often been noted in previous wars, and which

was very conspicuous in the late wars; namely, their weakness in attack

and their great strength when on the defensive. For, in attacking, a

Russian army is in the main merely obeying the will of the

commander-in-chief in virtue of custom, habit, and a form of strong

collective suggestion; but in retreat and on the defensive, each man’s

action becomes truly volitional, all are animated by a common purpose,

and all will the same end, the safety of the whole with which that of

each member is bound up.

The psychology of a patriot army is peculiarly simplified, as compared

with that of most other large human groups, by two conditions; on the

one hand, the restriction of the intellectual processes, by which the

large means for the pursuit of the common end are chosen, to one or a

few minds only; on the other hand, the definiteness and singleness of

its purpose and the presence of this clear and strong purpose in the

minds of all.

Other groups that enjoy in some degree the latter condition of

simplicity of collective mental life are associations voluntarily formed

and organised for the attainment of some single well-defined end. In

them the former condition is generally completely lacking and the

deliberative processes, by which their means are chosen, are apt to be

very complex and ineffective, owing to lack of customary organisation.

Such associations illustrate more clearly than any other groups the part

played by the idea of the whole in the minds of the individuals in

constituting and maintaining the whole. A desire or purpose being

present in many minds, the idea of the association arises in some one or

more of them, and, being communicated to others, becomes the immediate

instrument through which the association is called into being; and only

so long as this idea of the whole as an instrument for attaining the

common end persists in the minds of the individuals does the association

continue to exist. In this respect such an association is at the

opposite end of the scale from the fortuitous crowd, which owes its

existence to the accidents of time and place merely. Human groups of

other kinds owe their existence in various proportions to these two

conditions; such groups, for example, as are constituted by the members

of a church, of a university or a school, of a profession or a township.

Others, such as nations, owe their inception to the accidents of time

and place, to physical boundaries and climatic conditions; and, in the

course of their evolution, become more and more dependent for their

existence on the idea of the whole and the sentiment organised about it

in the minds of their members; and they may, like the Jewish people,

arrive in the course of time at complete dependence on the latter

condition.

The life of an army illustrates better than that of any other group the

influence of leadership. That great strategists and skilful tacticians

perform intellectual services of immeasurable importance for the common

end of the army goes without saying. But the moral influence of

leadership is more subtle in its workings, and is perhaps less generally

recognised in all its complexity and scope. It is well known that such

commanders as Napoleon inspired unlimited confidence and enthusiasm in

the veteran armies that had made many campaigns under their leadership.

Yet in the Great War, in which the British armies were, in its later

stages, composed so largely of new recruits, the same influence was

perceptible. Both the British and the French armies were very fortunate

in having in supreme command men in whom the common soldier felt

confidence. The solidity, the justice, the calm resolution of Marshal

Joffre were felt throughout the French army in the early days of the war

to be the one certain and fixed point in a crumbling universe. “Il est

solid, le Père Joffre” was repeated by thousands who, remembering the

disaster of 1870, were inclined to suspect treachery and weakness on

every hand. And the genius of Marshal Foch and of other brilliant

generals was a main source of the astonishing dogged resolution with

which the French armies, in spite of their terrible losses, sustained

the prolonged agony. The British army also was fortunate in having in

Field-Marshal Haig a man at its head who was felt to be above all things

resolute and calm and just; and, when the British armies in France were

placed under the supreme control of Foch, it was generally felt

throughout the ranks that this would not only give unity of control and

purpose, but also supply that touch of genius which perhaps had been

lacking in British strategy.

But it was not only the supreme command that exercised this influence

over the minds of all ranks. At every level confidence in the leadership

was of supreme importance. The character and talents of each general and

colonel, of each captain, lieutenant, sergeant and corporal, made

themselves felt by all under their control; felt not only individually

but corporately and collectively. The whole area under the command of

any particular general might be seen to reflect and to express in some

degree his attributes. The reputations of the higher officers filtered

down through the ranks in an astonishingly rapid and accurate manner;

perhaps owing largely to the fact that these armies, in a degree unknown

before, were composed of men accustomed to read and to think and to

discuss and criticise the conduct of affairs. If the German higher

command had been exercised from the first by a man who inspired the just

confidence that was felt in the old Field-Marshal v. Moltke by the

Prussian armies of 1870, it is probable that the issue of the Great War

would have been fatally different.

The moral effects of good leadership are, perhaps, of more importance to

an army than its intellectual qualities, especially in a prolonged

struggle; and these work throughout the mass of men by subtle processes

of suggestion and emotional contagion rather than by any process of

purely intellectual appreciation. And the whole organisation of any

wisely directed army is designed to render as effective as possible

these processes by which the influence of leaders is diffused through

the whole.

CHAPTER IV

THE GROUP SPIRIT

In considering the mental life of a patriot army, as the type of a

highly organised group, we saw that _group self-consciousness_ is a

factor of very great importance—that it is a principal condition of the

elevation of its collective mental life and behaviour above the level of

the merely impulsive violence and unreasoning fickleness of the mob.

This self-consciousness of the group is the essential condition of all

higher group life; we must therefore study it more nearly as it is

manifested in groups of various types. It is unfortunate that our

language has no word that accurately translates the French expression

‘esprit de corps’; for this conveys exactly the conception that we are

examining. I propose to use the term group spirit as the equivalent of

the French expression, the frequent use of which in English speech and

writing sufficiently justifies the attempt to specialise this compound

word for psychological purposes.

We have seen that, in virtue of the sentiment developed about the idea

of the army, all its members exhibit _group loyalty_; it is only as the

sentiment develops about the idea that this idea of the whole, present

to the mind of each member, becomes a power which can hold the whole

group together, in spite of all physical and moral difficulties. We see

this if we reflect how armies of mercenaries, in which this collective

sentiment is lacking or rudimentary only, are apt to dissolve and fade

away by desertion as soon as serious difficulties are encountered.

The importance of the collective idea and sentiment appears still more

clearly, when we reflect on the type of army which has generally proved

the most efficient of all—namely, an army of volunteers banded together

to achieve some particular end. Such an army (for example the army of

Garibaldi) owes its existence to the operation of this idea in the minds

of all. The idea of the army is formed in the mind perhaps of one only

(Garibaldi); he communicates it to others, who accept it as a means to

the end desired by all of them individually. The idea of the whole thus

operates to create the group, to bring it into existence; and then, as

the idea is realised, it becomes more definite, of richer and more

exact meaning; the collective sentiment grows up about it, and habit and

formal organisation begin to aid in holding the group together; yet

still the idea of the whole remains constitutive of the whole.

Any group that owes its creation and its continued existence to the

collective idea may be regarded from the psychological standpoint as of

the highest type; while a fortuitously gathered crowd that owes its

existence to accidents of time and place and has the barest minimum of

group self-consciousness is of the lowest type. Every other form of

association or of human group may be regarded as occupying a position in

a scale between these extreme types; according to the relative

predominance of the mental or the physical conditions of its origin and

continuance, that is to say, according to the degree in which its

existence is teleologically or mechanically determined.

The group spirit, the idea of the group with the sentiment of devotion

to the group developed in the minds of all its members, not only serves

as a bond that holds the group together or even creates it, but, as we

saw in the case of the patriot army, it renders possible truly

collective volition; this in turn renders the actions of the group much

more resolute and effective than they could be, so long as its actions

proceed merely from the presence of an impulse common to all members, or

from the strictly individual volitions of all, even though these be

directed to one common end.

Again, the group spirit plays an important part in raising the

intellectual level of the group; for it leads each member deliberately

to subordinate his own judgment and opinion to that of the whole; and,

in any properly organised group, this collective opinion will be

superior to that of the average individual, because in its formation the

best minds, acting upon the fullest knowledge to the gathering of which

all may contribute, will be of predominant influence. Each member, then,

willing the common end, accepts the means chosen by the organised

collective deliberation, and, in executing the actions prescribed for

him, makes them his own immediate ends and truly wills them for the sake

of the whole, not executing them in the spirit of merely mechanical

unintelligent obedience or even of reluctance.

In a similar way the group spirit aids in raising the moral level of an

army. The organised whole embodies certain traditional sentiments,

especially sentiments of admiration for certain moral qualities,

courage, endurance, trustworthiness, and cheerful obedience; and these

sentiments, permeating the whole, are impressed upon every member,

especially new members, by way of mass suggestion and sympathetic

contagion; every new recruit finds that his comrades accept without

question these traditional moral sentiments and confidently express

moral judgments upon conduct and character in accordance with them, and

that they also display the corresponding emotional reactions towards

acts; that is to say, they express in verbal judgments and in emotional

reactions their scorn for treachery or cowardice, their admiration for

courageous self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. The recruit quickly

shares by contagion these moral emotions and soon finds his judgment

determined to share these opinions by the weight of mass suggestion; for

these moral propositions come to him with all the irresistible force of

opinion held by the group and expressed by its unanimous voice; and this

force is not merely the force derived from numbers, but is also the

force of the prestige accumulated by the whole group, the prestige of

old and well-tried tradition, the prestige of age; and the more fully

the consciousness of the whole group is present to the mind of each

member, the more effectively will the whole impress its moral precepts

upon each.

And the organisation of the army renders it possible for the leaders to

influence and to mould the form of these moral opinions and sentiments.

Thus Lord Kitchener, by issuing his exhortation to the British Army on

its departure to France, did undoubtedly exert a considerable influence

towards raising the moral level of the whole force, because he

strengthened the influence of those who were already of his way of

thinking against the influence of those whose sentiments and habits and

opinions made in the opposite direction. His great prestige, which was

of a double kind, both personal and due to his high office, enabled him

to do this. In the same way, every officer in a less degree can do

something to raise the moral level of the men under his command. Thus,

then, the organisation of the whole group, with its hierarchy of offices

which confer prestige, gives those who hold these higher offices the

opportunity to raise the moral level of all members.

Of course, if those who occupy these positions of prestige feel no

responsibility of this sort and make no effort to exert such influence,

but rather aim at striking terror in the foe at all costs, if they

countenance acts of savagery such as the destruction of cities, looting,

and rapine, if they publicly instruct their soldiers to behave as Huns

or savages; then the organisation of the army works in the opposite

way—namely, to degrade all members below their normal individual level,

rather than to raise them above it; and then we hear of acts of

brutality on the part of the rank and file which are almost incredible.

But the main point to be insisted on here is that the raising of the

moral level is not effected only by example, suggestion, and emotional

contagion, spreading from those in the positions of prestige; that,

where the group spirit exists, those enjoying prestige can, if they

wish, greatly promote the end of raising the moral tone of the whole by

appealing to that group spirit; as when Lord Kitchener asked the men to

obey his injunctions for the sake of the honour of the British Army.

And the group spirit not only yields this direct response to moral

exhortation; it operates in another no less important manner. Each

member of a group pervaded by the collective sentiment, such as a

well-organised army of high traditions, becomes in a special sense his

brother’s keeper. Each feels an interest in the conduct of every other

member, because the conduct of each affects the reputation of the whole;

each man, therefore, punishes bad conduct of any fellow soldier by scorn

and by withdrawal of sympathy and companionship; and each one rewards

with praise and admiration the conduct that conforms to the standards

demanded and admired. And so each member acts always under the jealous

eyes of all his fellows, under the threat of general disapprobation,

contempt, and moral isolation for bad conduct; under the promise of

general approval and admiration for any act of special excellence.

The development of the group spirit, with the appropriate sentiment of

attachment or devotion to the whole and therefore also to its parts, is

the essence of the higher form of military discipline. There is a lower

form of discipline which aims only at rendering each man perfectly

subservient to his officers and trained to respond promptly and

invariably, in precise, semi-mechanical, habitual fashion, to every word

of command. But even the drill and the system of penalties and minute

supervision, which are the means chosen to bring about this result,

cannot fail to achieve certain effects on a higher moral and

intellectual level than the mere formation of bodily habits of response.

By rendering each soldier apt and exact in his response to commands,

they enable each one to foresee the actions of his fellows in all

ordinary circumstances, and therefore to rely upon that co-operation

towards the common end, be it merely a turning movement on the drill

ground or the winning of a battle, which is the essential aim and

justification of all group life.

The group spirit, involving knowledge of the group as such, some idea of

the group, and some sentiment of devotion or attachment to the group, is

then the essential condition of all developed collective life, and of

all effective collective action; but it is by no means confined to

highly developed human associations of a voluntary kind.

Whether the group spirit is possessed in any degree by animal societies

is a very difficult question. We certainly do not need to postulate it

in order to account for the existence of more or less enduring

associations of animals; just as we do not need to postulate it to

account for the coming together of any fortuitous human mob. Even in

such animal societies as those of the ants and bees, its presence,

though often asserted, seems to be highly questionable. When we observe

the division of labour that characterises the hive, how some bees

ventilate, some build the comb, some feed the larvae and so on; and

especially when we hear that the departure of a swarm from the hive is

preceded by the explorations of a small number which seek a suitable

place for the new home of the swarm and then guide it to the chosen

spot, it seems difficult to deny that some idea of the community and its

needs is present to the minds of its members. But we know so little as

yet of the limits of purely instinctive behaviour (and by that I mean

immediate reactions upon sense-perceptions determined by the innate

constitution) that it would be rash to make any such inference. The same

may be said of associations of birds or mammals, in which division of

labour is frequently displayed; when, for example, it is found that one

or more sentinels constantly keep watch while a flock or herd feeds or

rests, as is reported of many gregarious species.

But, however it may be with animal societies, we may confidently assert

that the group spirit has played an important part in the lives of all

enduring human groups, from the most primitive ages onwards.

It has even been maintained with some plausibility that group

self-consciousness preceded individual self-consciousness in the course

of the evolution of the human mind. That again is, it seems to me, a

proposition which cannot be substantiated. But it is, I think, true to

say that the two kinds of self-consciousness must have been achieved by

parallel processes, which constantly reacted upon one another in

reciprocal promotion.

In the lives of the humblest savages the group spirit plays an immensely

important part. It is the rule that a savage is born into a small

closed community. Such a community generally has its own locality within

which it remains, even if nomadic; and, if settled, it wholly lives in a

village, widely separated in space from all others. In this small

community the child grows up, becoming more or less intimately

acquainted with every member of it, and having practically no

intercourse with any other persons. Throughout his childhood he learns

its laws and traditions, becomes acutely aware of its public opinion,

and finds his welfare absolutely bound up with that of the village

community. He cannot leave it if he would; the only alternative open to

him is to become an outcast, as which he would very soon succumb in the

struggle for life. There is nothing comparable with this in our complex

civilised societies. The nearest parallel to it is the case of the young

child growing up in a peculiarly secluded family isolated in the depths

of the country.

This restriction of the intercourse of the young savage to the members

of his own small society and his absolute dependence upon it for all

that makes his survival possible would in themselves suffice to develop

his group consciousness in a high degree. But two other conditions,

well-nigh universal in savage life, tend strongly towards the same

result.

When the young savage begins to come into contact with persons other

than those of his own group, he learns to know them, not as individuals,

John Smith or Tom Brown, but as men of such or such a group; and he

himself is known to them as a man of his group, as representing his

group, his village community, tribe, or what not; and he displays

usually some mark or marks of his group, either in dress or ornament or

speech.

The other great condition of the development of the group spirit in

primitive societies is the general recognition of communal

responsibility. This no doubt is largely the result of the two

conditions previously mentioned, especially of the recognition of an

individual by members of other groups as merely a representative of his

group, rather than as an individual, and of the fact that his deeds, or

those of any one of his fellows, determine the attitudes of other groups

towards his group as a whole. But the influence of the principle of

communal responsibility, thus established, becomes immensely

strengthened by its recognition in a number of superstitious and

religious observances. The savage lives, generally speaking, bound hand

and foot by _tabus_ and precise prescriptions of behaviour for all

ordinary situations; and the breach of any one of these by any member of

the community is held to bring down misfortune or punishment on the

whole group; so far is this principle carried, that the breach of custom

by some individual is confidently inferred from the incidence of any

communal misfortune[34].

The recognition of communal responsibility is the great conservator of

savage society and customary law, the very root and stem of all savage

morality; it is the effective moral sanction without which the

superstitious and religious sanctions would be of little effect. By its

means, the idea of the community is constantly obtruded on the

consciousness of the individual. Through it he is constantly led, or

forced, to control his individualistic impulses and to undertake action

with regard to the welfare of the group rather than to his own private

interest. Through it the tendency of each to identify himself and each

of his fellows with the whole group is constantly fostered; because it

identifies their interests.

We may then say that, just as the direct induction of emotion and

impulse by sense-perception of their bodily expressions is the cement of

animal societies, so group self-consciousness is the cement and

harmonising principle of primitive human societies.

And the group spirit is not only highly effective in promoting the life

and welfare of the group; it is also the source of peculiar

satisfactions. The individual revels in his group-consciousness; hence

the principle is apt to run riot in savage societies, and we find that

in very many parts of the world a great variety of complex forms of

association is maintained, beside the primary and fundamental form of

association of the village community or nomadic band (the kinship or

subsistence group), apparently for no other reason than the attainment

and intensification of the satisfactions of the group spirit. Hence,

among peoples so low in the scale of savagery as the Australians, we

find a most complex system of grouping cutting across the subsistence

grouping; hence totem clans and phratries, exogamous groups, secret

societies, initiation ceremonies.

I lay stress on the satisfaction which group self-consciousness brings

as a condition or cause of these complexities of savage society,

because, I think, it has been unduly neglected as a socialising factor

and a determinant of the forms of association. If we ask—What are the

sources of this satisfaction?—we may find two answers. First, the

consciousness of the group and of oneself as a member of it brings a

sense of power and security, an assurance of sympathy and co-operation,

a moral and physical support without which man can hardly face the

world. In a thousand situations it is a source of settled opinions and

of definite guidance of conduct which obviates the most uncomfortable

and difficult necessity of exerting independent judgment and making up

one’s own mind. And in many such situations, not only does the savage

find a definite code prescribed for his guidance, but he shares the

collective emotion and feels the collective impulse that carries him on

to action without hesitation or timidity.

Secondly, we may, I think, go back to a very fundamental principle of

instinctive life, the principle, namely, that, in gregarious animals,

the satisfaction of the gregarious impulse is greater or more complete

the more nearly alike are the individuals congregated together. This

seems to be true of the animals, but it is true in a higher degree of

man; and, in proportion as his mind becomes more specialised and

refined, the more exacting is he in this respect. To the uncultivated

any society is better than none; but in the cultivated classes we become

extraordinarily exacting; we find the gregarious satisfaction in our own

peculiar _set_ only—a process carried furthest, perhaps, in university

circles. In savage life this shows itself in practices which accentuate

the likeness of members of a group and mark it off more distinctly from

other groups—for example, totems, peculiarities of dress, ornaments and

ceremonies; things which are closely paralleled by the clubs, blazers,

colours, cries, and so forth of our undergraduate communities.

The life of the savage, then, is in general dominated by that of the

group; and this domination is not effected by physical force or

compulsion (save in exceptional instances) but by the group spirit which

is inevitably developed in the mind of the savage child by the material

circumstances of his life and by the traditions, especially the

superstitious and religious traditions, of his community. Such group

self-consciousness is the principal moralising influence, and to this

influence is due in the main the fact that savages conform so strictly

to their accepted moral codes.

Group self-consciousness in savage communities brings then, I suggest,

two great advantages which account for the spontaneous development and

persistence among so many savage peoples of what, from a narrowly

utilitarian point of view, might seem to be an excess of group

organisation, such as the totemic systems of the Australians and of the

American Indians;—namely, firstly, the moralising influences of the

group spirit; secondly, the satisfactions or enjoyments immediately

accruing to every participant in active group life.

And these two advantages, being in some degree appreciated, lead to a

deliberate cultivation of group life for the securing of them in higher

measure. The cultivation of group life shows itself in the many

varieties of grouping on a purely artificial basis and in the practice

of rites and ceremonies, especially dances, often accompanied by song

and other music. There is nothing that so intensifies group

consciousness, at the cost of consciousness of individuality, as

ceremonial dancing and singing; especially when the dance consists of a

series of extravagant bizarre movements, executed by every member of the

group in unison, the series of movements being at the same time peculiar

to the particular group that practises them and symbolical of the

peculiar functions or properties claimed by the group. Many savage

dances have these characters in perfection; as, for example, those of

the Murray islanders of Torres Straits, where, as I have witnessed, the

several totemic groups—the dog-men, the pigeon-men, the shark-men, and

other such groups—continue, in spite of the partial destruction by

missionaries of their totemistic beliefs, to revel in night-long

gatherings, at which each group in turn mimics, in fantastic dances and

with solemn delight, the movements of its totem animal.

The importance of group consciousness in savage life has been recently

much insisted on by some anthropologists, and indeed, in my view,

overstated. Cornford[35] writes “When the totem-clan meets to hold its

peculiar dance, to work itself up till it feels the pulsing of its

common life through all its members, such nascent sense of individuality

as a savage may have—it is always very faint—is merged and lost; his

consciousness is filled with a sense of sympathetic activity. The group

is now feeling and acting as one soul, with a total force much greater

than any of its members could exercise in isolation. The individual is

lost, ‘beside himself,’ in one of those states of contagious enthusiasm

in which it is well known that men become capable of feats which far

outrange their normal powers.” And again “Over and above their

individual experience, all the members of the group alike partake of

what has been called the collective consciousness of the group as a

whole. Unlike their private experience, this pervading consciousness is

the same in all, consisting in those epidemic or infectious states of

feeling above described, which, at times when the common functions are

being exercised, invade the whole field of mentality, and submerge the

individual areas. To this group-consciousness belong also, from the

first moment of their appearance all representations which are

collective, a class in which all religious representations are included.

These likewise are diffused over the whole mentality of the group, and

identical in all its members.... The collective consciousness is thus

super-individual. It resides, of course, in the individuals composing

the group. There is nowhere else for it to exist, but it resides in all

of them together and not completely in any one of them. It is both in

myself and yet not myself. It occupies a certain part of my mind and yet

it stretches beyond and outside me to the limits of my group. And since

I am only a small part of my group, there is much more of it outside me

than inside. Its force therefore is much greater than my individual

force, and the more primitive I am the greater this preponderance will

be. Here, then, there exists in the world a power which is much greater

than any individual’s—super-individual, that is to say superhuman.”

“Because this force is continuous with my own consciousness, it is, as

it were, a reservoir to which I have access, and from which I can absorb

superhuman power to reinforce and enhance my own. This is its positive

aspect—in so far as this power is not myself and greater than myself, it

is a moral and restraining force, which can and does impose upon the

individual the necessity of observing the uniform behaviour of the

group.” This writer makes group consciousness the source of both

morality and religion. “The collective consciousness is also immanent in

the individual himself, forming within him that unreasoning impulse

called conscience, which like a traitor within the gates, acknowledges

from within the obligation to obey that other and much larger part of

the collective consciousness which lies outside. Small wonder that

obedience is absolute in primitive man, whose individuality is still

restricted to a comparatively small field, while all the higher levels

of mentality are occupied by this overpowering force[36].” The first

religious idea is that of “this collective consciousness, the only moral

power which can come to be felt as imposed from without.” And Cornford

goes yet further and makes of the group self-consciousness the source of

magic as well as of religion and morality. This primary reservoir of

super-individual power splits, he says, into two pools, human and

non-human; the former is magic power, the latter is divine power.

On this I would comment as follows. Although Cornford is right in

insisting upon the large influence of group consciousness, he is wrong,

I think, in underestimating individuality. He does not go so far as

some writers who suggest that group self-consciousness actually precedes

individual self-consciousness, but he says of individual

self-consciousness that it is but very faint in savages. I am more

inclined to agree with Lotze, who in a famous passage asserted that even

the crushed worm is in an obscure way aware of itself and its pain as

set over against the world. Many facts of savage behaviour forbid us to

accept the extreme view that denies them individual

self-consciousness—individual names, secret names, private property,

private rites, religious and magical, individual revenge, jealousy,

running _amok_, leadership, self-assertion, pride, vanity, competition

in games of skill and in technical and artistic achievement. The

flourishing of these and many other such things in primitive communities

reveals clearly enough to the unbiassed observer in the field the

effective presence of individual self-consciousness in the savage mind.

In this connexion I may refer to two pieces of evidence bearing very

directly on the question reported by Dr C. Hose and myself. Among the

Sea-Dayaks or Ibans of Borneo we discovered the prevalence of the belief

in the ‘nyarong’ or private ‘spirit helper,’ some spiritual or animated

individual power which a fortunate individual here and there finds

reason to believe is attached to him personally for his guidance and

help in all difficult situations. His belief in this personal helper and

the rites by aid of which he communicates with it are kept secret from

his fellows; so that it was only after long and intimate acquaintance

with these people that Dr Hose began to suspect the existence of this

peculiarly individualistic belief[37]. In the same volumes we have

described the Punans of Borneo, a people whose mode of life is in every

respect extremely primitive. In this respect they are perhaps unequalled

by any other existing people. Yet no one who is acquainted with these

amiable folk could doubt that, although their group consciousness is

highly developed, they enjoy also a well developed individual

self-consciousness. How otherwise can we interpret the fact that a Punan

who suffers malicious injury from a member of another tribe will nurse

his vengeful feeling for an indefinite period and, after the lapse of

years, will find an opportunity to bring down his enemy secretly with

blow-pipe and poisoned dart?

With Mr Cornford’s view of the part played by the group spirit in

moralising conduct I agree. I agree also that it is the collective life

or mind that develops religion and in part magic; but in my view

Cornford attributes to the savage far too much reflective theorising; he

represents him as formulating a theory of the collective consciousness

which is really almost identical with the interesting speculation of M.

Lévy Bruhl presently to be noticed, and he regards his conduct, his

religious and magical practices, as guided by these theories. But that

is to reverse the true order of things—to make theory precede practice;

whereas in reality, especially in religion and magic, practice has

everywhere preceded theory, often, as in this case, by thousands of

generations[38].

It is true that the savage often behaves as though he held this theory

of the collective consciousness as a field of force in which he

participates; that his conduct seems to require such a theory for its

rational justification. But it by no means follows that he has

formulated any theory at all. What the savage is conscious of is, not a

collective consciousness as a mysterious superhuman power, but the group

itself, the group of concrete embodied fellow men. He behaves and feels

as he does, because participation in the life of the group directly

modifies his individual tendencies and directly evokes these feelings

and actions; he does not discover, or seek, any theory by which to

explain them. Still less is it true that he performs these actions

because he has formulated a theory of a collective consciousness.

Mr Cornford regards the savage idea of a collective consciousness as the

germ of the idea of divine power or of God. Now this is connected with

the question of animism, preanimism, and dynanimism. It may be true that

the notion of _mana_ is the common prime source of religious and magical

ideas, but it does not follow that the idea of God is arrived at by way

of a notion of collective _mana_. No doubt that would be the probable

course of events, if the savage had so little sense of his individuality

as Cornford supposes; but it seems to me rather that the savage’s strong

sense of individuality has led at an early stage to the personalisation,

the individuation, of _mana_, the vaguely conceived spiritual power and

influence, and that it was only by a long course of religious and

philosophical speculation that men reached the conception of the

Absolute or of God as a universal power of which each personal

consciousness is a partial manifestation.

It is interesting to note that, if we could accept Cornford’s views, we

could now claim to witness the completion of one full cycle of the

wheel of speculation, the last step having been made in an article in a

recent number of the _Hibbert Journal_[39]; for it is there suggested

that the only God or super-individual power we ought to recognise and

revere is, not a collective consciousness conceived as a

supra-individual unity of consciousness, but the collective mind of

humanity in the sense in which I am using the term, a system of mental

forces that slowly progresses towards greater harmony and integration.

M. Lévy Bruhl has written an interesting, though highly speculative,

account of savage mental life which he represents as differing

profoundly from our own, chiefly in that it is dominated by ‘collective

representations[40].’ His view is not unlike that put forward by

Cornford.

Collective representations or ideas are rightly said to be the product

of the group mind rather than of any individual mind; that is to say,

they have been gradually evolved by collective mental life; and they are

said to differ from our ideas in being “states more complex in which the

emotional and motor elements are integral parts of the ideas.” Thinking

by aid of these collective representations is said to have its own laws

quite distinct from the laws of logic.

These statements are no doubt correct; but both Lévy Bruhl and Cornford

commit the great error of assuming that the mental life of civilised man

is conducted by each individual in a purely rational and logical manner;

they overlook the fact that we also are largely dominated by collective

representations; for these collective representations are nothing but

ideas of objects to which traditional sentiments, sentiments of awe, of

fear, of respect, of love, of reverence, are attached. Almost the whole

of the religion and morality of the average civilised man is based on

his acquisition of such collective representations, traditional

sentiments grown up about ideas of objects, ideas which he receives

ready made and sentiments which are impressed upon him by the community

that has evolved them.

It is no doubt true that in the main the field of objects to which

collective representations apply is larger in savage life; and these

ideas are more uniform and more powerful and unquestioned, because the

group is more homogeneous in its sentiments. But it is, fortunately,

only a rare individual here and there among us who in considerable

degree emancipates himself from the influence of such representations

and becomes capable of confronting all objects about him in a perfectly

cool, critical, logical attitude—who can “peep and botanise upon his

mother’s grave.” Only by strict intellectual discipline do we progress

towards strictly logical operations in relation to real life, towards

pure judgments of fact as opposed to judgments of value. For our

judgments of value are rooted in our sentiments; and whatever is for us

an object of a sentiment of love or hate, of attachment or aversion, can

only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, be made an object of a

pure judgment of fact.

And Cornford and Lévy Bruhl make the same mistake in regard to

‘collective representations’ as in regard to the group

self-consciousness—namely, they credit the savage with theories for the

explanation of the beliefs implicitly involved in the ‘collective

representations,’ for example, the theory of mystic participation, which

is said to replace for the savage the civilised man’s theory of

mechanical causation. But, when we regard any material object as holy,

or sacred, or as of peculiar value, because it was given us by a

departed friend, or belonged to and perhaps was once worn by a beloved

person, our behaviour towards it is not determined by any theory of

participation; if, for example, we touch it tenderly and with reverent

care, that is the direct expression of our feeling. We even behave as if

we held the theory of participation, to the extent of believing that the

dead or distant person will suffer pain if we ill-use or neglect the

object which is associated with him in our minds, but without actually

holding that belief; and still more without elaborating a theory of the

nature of the process by which our action will produce such an effect.

It is only a late and highly sophisticated reflection upon behaviour of

this kind which leads to theories for the justification of such

behaviour. It is not true, then, that we are logical individuals, while

savages are wholly prelogical in virtue of the dominance among them of

the collective mental life. The truth rather is that, wherever emotion

qualifies our intellectual operations, it renders them other than purely

and strictly logical; and the savage or the civilised man departs more

widely from the strictly logical conduct of his intellect, in proportion

as his conceptions of things are absorbed without critical reflection

and analysis and are coloured with the traditional sentiments of his

community. The average savage, being more deeply immersed in his group,

suffers these effects more strongly than the average civilised man. Yet

the interval in this respect between the modern man of scientific

culture and the average citizen of our modern states is far greater

than that between the latter and the savage.

If one had to name the principal difference between the conditions of

life of the typical savage and those of the average civilised man, one

would, I think, have to point to the lack in civilised life of those

conditions which so inevitably develop the group consciousness of the

savage. The family circle supplies to the young child something of these

conditions, but in a very imperfect degree only. At an early age this

influence is much weakened by general intercourse. As the individual

approaches maturity, he finds himself at liberty to cut himself off

completely from all his natural setting, to transplant himself to any

part of the world, and to share in the life of any civilised community.

He can earn his livelihood anywhere, and he knows nothing of communal

responsibility.

Progressive weakening of the conditions that force the development of

group self-consciousness has characterised the whole course of the

development of civilisation, and has reached its climax in the

conditions of life in our large cities.

In primitive communities the conditions of group self-consciousness are,

as we have seen, fourfold; namely kinship, territorial, traditional and

occupational association. All these are present in the highest degree in

the nomadic group under the typical patriarchal system.

When kinship groups take to agriculture and become permanently settled

on one spot, the kinship factor tends to be weakened, through the

inclusion of alien elements; and the territorial factor becomes the most

important condition. Throughout European history the territorial factor,

expressing itself in the form of the village-community, remained of

universal importance in this respect; the Roman Empire and the Roman

Church weakened it greatly; but everywhere outside those spheres it

continued to be of dominant importance until the great social revolution

of the modern industrial period.

The village community maintained much of the tradition and custom that

tend to develop group self-consciousness with its moralising influence.

But at the present time almost the only condition of wide and general

influence that continues in times of peace to foster group

self-consciousness is occupational association. And so we find men

tending more and more to be grouped for all serious collective

activities according to their occupations. From the earliest development

of European industry this tendency has been strong; it produced the

trading and craft guilds which played so great a part in medieval

Europe; and, though the monarchical and capitalistic regimes of modern

times have done all they can to repress and break up these occupational

groups, and have greatly restricted their influence, they have failed to

suppress them entirely. The climax of this tendency for the occupational

to replace and overshadow all other forms of self-conscious grouping is

present-day Syndicalism.

The natural conditions of group self-consciousness, which in primitive

societies rendered its development inevitable and spontaneous in every

man, have then been in the main destroyed. But man cannot stand alone;

men cannot live happily as mere individuals; they desire and crave and

seek membership in a group, in whose collective opinions and emotions

and self-consciousness and activities they may share, with which they

may identify themselves, thereby lessening the burden of individual

responsibility, judgment, decision and effort.

Hence in this age the natural groupings and the involuntary developments

of group consciousness are largely replaced by an enormous development

of artificial voluntary groupings, over and above the natural groupings

that are still only in very imperfect measure determined by the weakened

force of the natural conditions, namely kinship, neighbourhood and

occupation.

In part these artificial groupings are designed to reinforce the natural

conditions, as, for example, village festivals. The whole population of

a country such as our own is permeated by a vast and complexly

interwoven, or rather tangled, skein of the bonds of voluntary

associations. Many of these are, of course, formed to undertake some

definite work, to achieve some end which can only be achieved by

co-operative effort. But in the majority of such cases the satisfactions

yielded by group life play a very great part in leading to the formation

of and in maintaining the groups, for example, groups of philanthropic

workers, the makers of charity bazaars, the salvation army, the

churches, the chapels, the sects. Most of such associations that have

any success and continuity of existence contain a nucleus of persons who

identify themselves in the fullest possible manner with the group, make

its interest their leading concern, the desire of its welfare their

dominant motive, and find in its service their principal satisfaction

and happiness.

And in very many voluntary associations the group-motives, the desire

for the satisfactions to be found in group life, are of prime

importance, predominating vastly over the desire to achieve any

particular end by co-operative action. Such are our countless clubs and

societies formed frankly for recreation, or for mutual improvement, and

for all kinds of ostensible purposes which serve merely as excuses or

reasons for the existence of the club. In the majority of instances

these declared purposes really serve merely or chiefly to exert a

certain natural selection of persons, to bring together persons of

similar tastes as voluntary associates, to enable, in short, birds of a

feather to flock together. Even some of our enduring historical

institutions owe their continuance chiefly to the advantages and

satisfactions that proceed from group consciousness, for example,

colleges, school-houses, and political parties, especially perhaps in

America. Party feeling, as Sir H. Maine rightly said, is frequently a

remedy for the inertia of democracy.

The savage, when he maintains associations other than those determined

by natural conditions, intensifies his group consciousness by wearing

badges and totem marks, by tatooing and scarring, and by indulging in

various rites and ceremonies, about which a certain secrecy and mystery

is maintained. And civilised men exhibit just the same tendency and take

very similar measures to intensify group consciousness. We have our club

colours and ribbons and blazers, our college gowns and colours, our

Oxford accent, our badges of membership, and so on. Freemasonry, with

its lodges and badges and mysterious rites, seems to be the purest

example on a large scale. And, when the group consciousness and the

group sentiment have been acquired, we continue to cultivate it purely

for its own sake, by holding annual dinners and reunions of old boys,

and so forth.

It is of the greatest importance that this tendency to seek and maintain

a share in group consciousness, which, as we have seen, manifests itself

everywhere even under the most adverse conditions, not merely yields

comfort and satisfaction to individuals, but brings about results which

are in almost every way extremely advantageous for the higher

development of human life in general.

We have seen that, in the well-organised group, collective deliberation,

judgment, and action are raised to a higher plane of effectiveness than

is possible to the average member of the group. But apart from that, the

group spirit continues with us, as with the savage (though in a less

effective degree) to be the great socialising agency. In the majority of

cases it is the principal, if not the sole, factor which raises a man’s

conduct above the plane of pure egoism, leads him to think and care and

work for others as well as for himself. Try to imagine any man wholly

deprived of his group consciousness and set over against all his

fellowmen as an individual unit, and you will see that you could expect

but little from him in the way of self-sacrifice or public service—at

most a care for his wife and children and sporadic acts of kindliness

when direct appeals are made to his pity; but none of that energetic and

devoted public service and faithful self-sacrificing co-operation

without which the continued welfare of any human society is impossible.

The group spirit destroys the opposition and the conflict between the

crudely individualistic and the primitive altruistic tendencies of our

nature.

This is the peculiar merit and efficiency of the complex motives that

arise from the group spirit; they bring the egoistic self-seeking

impulses into the service of society and harmonise them with the

altruistic tendencies. The group spirit secures that the egoistic and

the altruistic tendencies of each man’s nature, instead of being in

perpetual conflict, as they must be in its absence, shall harmoniously

co-operate and re-enforce one another throughout a large part of the

total field of human activity.

For it is of the essence of the group spirit that the individual

identifies himself, as we say, with the group more or less; that is to

say, in technical language, his self-regarding sentiment becomes

extended to the group more or less completely, so that he is moved to

desire and to work for its welfare, its success, its honour and glory,

by the same motives which prompt him to desire and to work for his own

welfare and success and honour; as in the case of the student working

for a scholarship or university prize, or the member of an exploring

expedition or fighting group. Further, the motives supplied by the group

spirit may be stronger than, and may overpower, the purely

individualistic egoistic motives, just because they harmonise with, and

are supported by, any altruistic tendency or tendencies comprised in the

make up of the individual; which altruistic tendencies will, where the

group spirit is lacking, oppose and weaken the effects of purely

egoistic motives. To illustrate this principle, let us imagine an

Englishman who, in a Congo forest, finds a white man sick or in

difficulties. To succour the sick man may be to incur grave risks, and

he is tempted to pass on; but the thought comes to him that in so doing

he will lower the prestige of the white man in the eyes of the natives;

and this idea, evoking the motives of the group spirit which unites all

white men in such a land, brings victory to his sense of pity in its

struggle with selfish fear.

In this way, that is by extension to the group, the egoistic impulses

are transmuted, sublimated, and deprived of their individualistic

selfish character and effects and are turned to public service. Hence it

is that it is generally so difficult or impossible to analyse the

motives of any public service or social activity and to display them as

either purely egoistic or altruistic; for they are, as Herbert Spencer

called them, ego-altruistic. And hence it comes about that both the

cynic and the idealist can make out plausible cases, when they seek to

show that either egoism or altruism predominates in human life. Both are

right in a partial sense.

Another noteworthy feature of the group spirit renders it extremely

effective in promoting social life; namely the fact that, although the

group sentiment is apt to determine an attitude of rivalry, competition,

and antagonism towards similarly constituted groups, yet a man may share

in the self-consciousness of more groups than one, so long as their

natures and aims do not necessarily bring them into rivalry. And in our

complex modern societies this principle of multiple group consciousness

in each man is of extreme importance; for without it, and in the absence

or comparative lack of the natural conditions of grouping other than the

occupational, the whole population would become divided into

occupational groups, each fighting collectively against every other for

the largest possible share of the good things of life. A tendency

towards this state of things is very perceptible, in spite of the

correcting cross-connexions of kinship, of church and political party,

and of territorial association.

But another principle of multiple group consciousness is, perhaps, of

still greater importance, namely that it allows the formation of a

hierarchy of group sentiments for a system of groups in which each

larger group includes the lesser; each group being made the object of

the extended self-regarding sentiment in a way which includes the

sentiment for the lesser group in the sentiment for the larger group in

which it is comprised. Thus the family, the village, the county, the

country as a whole, form for the normal man the objects of a harmonious

hierarchy of sentiments of this sort, each of which strengthens rather

than weakens the others, and yields motives for action which on the

whole co-operate and harmonise rather than conflict.

Such a hierarchy is seen in savage life. It often happens that a man is

called on to join in the defence of some village of the tribe other than

his own. In such cases he is moved not only by his tribal sentiment, but

also by his sentiments for his village and family. The sentiment for the

part supports the sentiment for the whole.

It is of considerable importance also that in general the development of

a sentiment of attachment to one group not only does not prevent, but

rather facilitates, the development of similar sentiments for other

groups. And this is especially true when the groups concerned are

related to one another as parts and wholes, that is, when they form a

hierarchy of successively more widely inclusive groups. The sentiment

for the smaller group (e.g. the family) naturally develops first in the

child’s mind; if only for the reason that this is the group of which he

can first form a definite idea, and with the whole of which he is in

immediate relations. The strong development of this first group

sentiment prepares the child’s mind for the development of other and

wider group sentiments. For it increases his power of grasping

intellectually the group of persons as a complex whole; and it

strengthens by exercise those impulses or primary tendencies which must

enter into the constitution of any group sentiment; and, thirdly, it

prevents the excessive development of the purely individualistic

attitude, of the habit of looking at every situation and weighing all

values from the strictly individualistic and egoistic standpoint; which

attitude, if once it becomes habitual, must form a powerful hindrance to

the development of the wider group sentiments, when the child arrives at

an age to grasp the idea of the larger group.

The organisation of an army again illustrates these principles in

relatively clear and simple fashion. In our own army the regiment is the

traditional self-conscious unit about which traditional sentiment and

ritual have been carefully fostered, in part through realisation of

their practical importance, in part because this unit is of such a size

and nature as to be well suited to call out strongly the natural group

tendencies of its component individuals. On the whole the military

authorities, and especially Lord Haldane in the formation of the

territorial army, seem to have wisely recognised the importance of the

group spirit of the regiment; although during the Great War it was,

under the pressure of other considerations, apparently lost sight of at

certain times and places, with, I believe, deplorable consequences.

In modern warfare, and especially in the Great War, the Division has

tended to become of predominant importance as the unit of organisation;

and accordingly, without destroying or superseding regimental group

consciousness, the sentiment for the Division has been in many instances

a very strong factor in promoting the spiritual cohesion and efficiency

of the army. Certain Divisions, such as the 10th and the 29th, have

covered themselves with glory, so that the soldiers have learnt to feel

a great pride in and a devotion to the Division.

This larger group, although of comparatively ephemeral existence and

therefore devoid of long traditions coming down from the past, is in

perfect and obvious harmony, in purpose and spirit and material

organisation, with the battalions and other units of which it is

composed; and, accordingly, the sentiment for the larger group does not

enter into rivalry with that for the battalion, the battery, or other

smaller unit; rather it comprises this within its own organisation and

derives energy and stability from it.

These psychological principles of group consciousness are, I think, well

borne out inductively, by any comparative survey; that is to say, we

find that, where family sentiment and the sentiment for the local group

are strong, there also the wider group sentiments are strong, and good

citizenship, patriotism, and ready devotion to public services of all

kinds are the rule. The strongest most stable States have always been

those in which family sentiment has been strong, especially those in

which it has been strengthened and supported by the custom of ancestor

worship, as in Rome, Japan and China. Scotchmen again (Highlanders

especially) are noted for clannishness, and Scotch cousins have become a

bye-word; a fact which implies the great strength of the family

sentiment. The clan sentiment, which is clearly only an extension of the

family sentiment, is also notoriously strong. The sentiment for Scotland

as a whole is no less strong in the hearts of all her sons. But, and

this is the important point, these strong group sentiments are perfectly

compatible with and probably conducive to a sentiment for the still

wider group, Great Britain or the British Empire; and the public

services rendered to these larger groups by men of Scottish birth are

equally notorious.

In these considerations we may see, I think, a principal ground of the

importance of the institution of the family for the welfare of the

state. The importance has often been insisted upon; but too much stress

is usually laid upon the material aspects, and not enough upon the

mental effects, of family life.

It has been a grave mistake on the part of many collectivists, from

Plato onwards, that they have sought to destroy the family and to bring

up all children as the children of the state only, in some kind of

barrack system. It is not too much to say that, if they could succeed in

this (and in this country great strides in this direction are being

rapidly made), they would destroy the mental foundations of all

possibility of collective life of the higher type.

We touch here upon a question of policy of the highest importance. There

are, it seems to me, three distinct policies which may be deliberately

pursued, for the securing of the predominance of public or social

motives over egoistic motives. First, we may aim at building up group

life on the foundation of a system of discipline which will result in

more or less complete suppression of the egoistic tendencies of

individuals, the building up in them of habits of unquestioning

obedience to authority. I imagine that the Jesuit system of education

might fairly be taken as the most successful and thorough-going

application of this principle. The organisation of an army of unwilling

conscripts to fight for a foreign power must rest on the same basis.

Some group spirit no doubt will generally grow up. But, though wonderful

results have been obtained in this way, the system has two great

weaknesses. First, it seeks to repress and destroy more than half of the

powerful forces that move men to action—namely, the egoistic motives in

general—instead of making use of them, directing them to social ends.

Secondly, it necessarily crushes individuality and therefore all

capacity of progress and further development in various directions; it

results in a rigidly conservative system without possibility of

spontaneous development.

The second system is that which aims at developing in all members of the

state or inclusive group a sentiment of devotion to the whole, while

suppressing the growth of sentiments for any minor groups within the

whole. This was the system of Plato’s _Republic_ and is essentially the

collectivist ideal. It is the policy of those who would suppress all

sentimental groupings, all local loyalties and patriotisms, in favour of

the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the cosmopolitan ideal. I have

already pointed out one great weakness of this plan,—namely, that this

sentiment for the all-inclusive group cannot be effectively developed

save by way of development of the minor group sentiments. And, though it

may succeed with some persons, there will always be many who cannot

grasp the idea of the larger whole sufficiently firmly and intelligently

to make it the object of any strong and enlightened sentiment of

attachment; such persons will be left on the purely egoistic level,

whereas their energies might have been effectively socialised by the

development of some less inclusive group consciousness.

Again, the smaller group is apt to call out a man’s energies more

effectively, because he can see and foresee more clearly the effects of

his own actions on its behalf. Whereas the larger the group, the more

are the efforts of individuals and their effects obscured and lost to

view in vast movements of the collective life. That is to say, the

smaller groups harmonise more effectively than the larger groups the

purely egoistic and the altruistic motives (except of course in the case

of those few persons who can play leading parts in the life of the

larger group). For, though a man may be moved by his devotion to the

group to work for its welfare, he will work still more energetically if,

at the same time, he is able to achieve personal distinction and

acknowledgment, if the purely egoistic motives can also find

satisfaction in his activities. Hence this second policy also, no matter

how successful, fails to make the most of men, fails to bring to the

fullest exercise all their powers in a manner that will promote the

welfare of the whole. Thirdly, this system loses the advantages of the

healthy rivalry between groups within the whole; which rivalry is a

means to a great liberation of human energies. These are the weaknesses

of the over-centralised state, such as modern France or the Roman

Empire.

Only the third policy can liberate and harmonise the energies of men to

the fullest extent; namely, that which aims at developing in each

individual a hierarchy of group sentiments in accordance with the

natural course of development.

One other virtue of the group spirit must be mentioned. Although it

tends to bring similar groups into keen rivalry and even into violent

conflict, the antagonism between men who are moved to conflict by the

group spirit is less bitter than that between individuals who are

brought into conflict by personal motives; for the members of each group

or party, though they may wish to frustrate or even to destroy the other

party as such, may remain benevolent towards its members individually.

And this is rendered easier by the fact that the members of each group,

recognising that their antagonists are also moved by the group spirit,

by loyalty and devotion to the group, will sympathise with and respect

their motives far more readily and fully than they would, if they

ascribed to their opponents purely egoistic motives. This recognition,

even though it be not clearly formulated, softens the conflict and

moderates the hostile feelings that opposition inevitably arouses in men

keenly pursuing any end, especially one which they hold to be a public

good; in this way it renders possible that continuance of friendly

relations between members of bitterly opposed parties which has happily

been the rule and at the same time the seeming anomaly of English public

life.

In our older educational system, and especially in the ‘public schools’

and older universities, the advantages and the importance of developing

the group spirit have long been practically recognised—‘esprit de corps’

has been cultivated by the party system, by rivalry of groups within the

group; by forms, school-houses, colleges, clubs, teams, games, and by

keeping the honour and glory of the school, college, or other unit,

prominently before the minds of the scholars in many effective ways. It

is, I think, one of the gravest defects of our primary system of

education that it makes so little provision for development of this

kind; that, while it weakens the family sentiment, it provides no

effective substitute for it. Something has been done in recent years to

remedy this defect, notably the fostering of the boy-scout movement; but

every opportunity of supplying this need should be seized by those who

are responsible for the direction of educational policy.

The importance of the group spirit may be illustrated by pointing to

those individuals and classes which are denied its benefits. The tramp,

the cosmopolitan globe-trotter, the outcast in general, whether the

detachment from group life be due to the disposition or choice of the

individual or to unfortunate circumstances, is apt to show, only too

clearly, how little man is able, standing alone, to maintain a decent

level of conduct and character. On a large scale this is illustrated by

the casteless classes in caste communities, and especially by Eurasians

of India and by other persons and classes of mixed descent, who fail to

identify themselves wholly with either of the groups from which they

derive their blood. The moral defects of persons of these classes have

often been deplored, and they have usually been attributed to the

mixture of widely different hereditary strains. There is probably some

truth in the view; but in general the moral shortcomings of persons of

these classes are chiefly due to the fact that they do not fully share

in the life of any group having old established moral traditions and

sentiments.

SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL CONDITIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GROUP SPIRIT

We have seen that the group spirit plays a vastly important part in

raising men above the purely animal level of conduct, in extending each

man’s interests beyond the narrow circle of his own home and family, in

inspiring him to efforts for the common good, in stimulating him to

postpone his private to public ends, in enabling the common man to rise

at times, as shown by a multitude of instances during the Great War, to

lofty heights of devotion and self-sacrifice.

The development of the group spirit consists in two essential processes,

namely, the acquisition of knowledge of the group and the formation of

some sentiment of attachment to the group as such. It is essential that

the group shall be apprehended or conceived as such by its members.

Therefore the group spirit is favoured by whatever tends to define the

group, to mark it off distinctly from other groups; by geographical

boundaries; by peculiarities of skin-colour or of physical type, of

language, or accent, of dress, custom, or habit, common to the members

of the group; that is to say, by homogeneity and distinctiveness of type

within the group.

And, though definition of the group as such within the minds of its

members is the prime condition of the growth of the group spirit, that

spirit will be the more effective the fuller and truer is the knowledge

of the group in the minds of its members. Just as individual

self-knowledge favours self-direction and wisdom of choice, so group

self-knowledge must, if it is to be fully effective, comprise not only

the conception of the group as a whole but also the fullest possible

knowledge of the component parts and individuals and an understanding of

their relations to one another. In this respect smallness and

homogeneity of the group are obviously favourable. But knowledge of the

group, however exact and widely diffused, is of itself of no effect, if

there be not also widely diffused in the members some sentiment of

attachment to the group. The prevailing group sentiment is almost

inevitably one of attachment. There are exceptional instances in which

men are compelled to act as members of a group which they hate or

despise, notably in some cases of compulsory military service and in

convict gangs; but it must be rare that, even under such conditions,

some sense of common interest, some fellow feeling for other members in

like distressing circumstances, does not lead to the growth of some

group spirit, provided only that the group has some continuity and some

homogeneity in essentials.

In all natural and spontaneously formed groups, the extension of the

self-regarding sentiment to the group is a normal and inevitable

process; and, like the self-regarding sentiment, the sentiment so formed

may range from an insane and incorrigible pride (as often in the case of

the family sentiment) to a decent self-respect that is perfectly

compatible with a modest attitude and with reasonable claims upon and

regard for the interests of other groups.

The main difference between the self-regarding sentiment and the

developed group sentiment is that the latter commonly involves an

element of devotion to the group for its own sake and the sake of one’s

fellow members. That is to say, the group sentiment is a synthesis of

the self-regarding and the altruistic tendencies in which they are

harmonised to mutual support and re-enforcement: the powerful egoistic

impulses being sublimated to higher ends than the promotion of the

self’s welfare[41].

Further, the group has, or may have, a greater continuity of existence

than the individual, both in the past and in the future; and for this

reason, and because also it includes the purely altruistic tendency, the

group sentiment is capable of idealisation in a high degree and of

yielding satisfactions far more enduring and profound than the most

refined self-sentiment.

Both knowledge of the group and the growth of the group sentiment are

greatly promoted by two processes, in the absence of which the group

spirit can attain only a very modest development. These are free

intercourse within the group and free intercourse between the group and

other groups. We shall have occasion to discuss and illustrate them in

later chapters.

CHAPTER V

PECULIARITIES OF GROUPS OF VARIOUS TYPES

We have discussed the psychology of the simple crowd or unorganised

group; and taking an army as an extreme and relatively simple type of

the highly organised group, we have used it to illustrate the principal

ways in which organisation of the group modifies its collective life,

raising it in many respects high above that of the crowd.

I propose now to discuss very briefly the peculiarities of groups of

several types. Some classification of groups seems desirable as an aid

to the discovery of the general principles of collective life and their

application to the understanding of social life in general. It seems

impossible to discover any single principle of classification. Almost

every group that enjoys a greater continuity of existence than the

simple crowd partakes in some degree of qualities common to all. But we

may distinguish the most important qualities and roughly classify groups

according to the degrees in which they exhibit them.

Apart from crowds, which, as we have seen, may be either fortuitously

gathered or brought together by some common purpose, there are many

simple groups which, though accidental in origin (i.e. not brought

together by common purpose or interest) and remaining unorganised, yet

present in simple and rudimentary form some of the features of group

life.

The persons seated in one compartment of a railway train during a long

journey may be entirely strangers to one another at the outset; yet,

even in the absence of conversation, they in the course of some hours

will begin to manifest some of the peculiarities of the psychological

group. To some extent they will have come to a mutual understanding and

adjustment; and, when a stranger adds himself to their company, his

entrance is felt to some extent as an intrusion which at the least

demands readjustments; he is regarded with curious and to some extent

hostile glances. If an outsider threatens to encroach on the rights of

one of the company, the others will readily combine in defence of their

member; and any little incident affecting their one common interest

(namely, punctual arrival of the train at its destination) quickly

reveals, and in doing so strengthens, the bond of common feeling.

On a sea voyage the group spirit of the passenger ship attains a greater

development, by reason of the longer continuance of the group, its more

complete detachment and definition, the sense of greater hazard

affecting all alike, the sense of dependence on mutual courtesy and

good-will and sympathy for the comfort and enjoyment of all. Very soon

the experienced traveller, contrasting and comparing this present

company with those of previous voyages, sums up its qualities and

defects and lays his plans accordingly. And by the time that an

intermediate port is reached, where perhaps the most ‘grumpy’ and least

entertaining member of the company disembarks, even his departure is

felt by the rest as a loss that leaves a gap in the structure of the

group.

Such fortuitous and ephemeral groups apart, all others may be classed in

the two great divisions of natural and artificial groups.

The natural groups again fall into two main classes which partly

coincide,—namely, those rooted in kinship and those determined by

geographical conditions. The family is the pure example of the former;

the population of a small island, the type of the latter kind. The main

difference is that the bonds of the kinship group are purely or

predominantly mental and therefore can, and commonly do, remain

effective in spite of all spatial separation and of all lack of common

purpose or of material benefits accruing from membership in the group.

The artificial groups may be divided into three great classes, the

purposive, the customary or traditional, and the mixed; those of the

last kind combining the purposive and the traditional characters in

various proportions.

The purposive group is brought together and maintained by the existence

of a common purpose in the minds of all its members. It is, in respect

of efficiency, the highest type; for it is essentially self-conscious,

aware of its ends and of its own nature, and it deliberately adopts an

organisation suited to the attainment of those ends. The simplest and

purest type is the social club, a body of people who meet together to

satisfy the promptings of the gregarious instinct and to enjoy the

pleasures of group life. In the great majority of instances, the social

club adopts some form of recreation—debating, music, chess, whist,

football, tennis, cycling—the practice of which gives point and

definition to the activities of members and secures secondary

advantages. It is noteworthy that on this purely recreational plane,

clubs and societies of all sorts seek in almost all cases to enhance the

group consciousness and hence the satisfactions of group life by

entering into relations, generally relations of friendly rivalry, but

sometimes merely of affiliation and formal intercourse, with other like

groups. For not only is the group consciousness enriched and

strengthened by such intercourse; but, when the rival or communicating

groups, becoming aware of one another, become informally or, more

generally, formally allied to constitute a larger whole, the

consciousness of participation in this larger whole gratifies more fully

the gregarious impulse and enhances the sense of power and confidence in

each member of each constituent group. This seems to be the main ground

of that universal tendency to the formation of ever more inclusive

associations of clubs and societies, which, overleaping even national

boundaries and geographical and racial divisions, has produced numerous

world-wide associations.

Another very numerous class of strictly purposive groups is to be found

in the commercial companies. In these the group spirit commonly remains

at the lowest level; for the dominant motive is individual financial

gain, and the only common bond among the shareholders is their interest

in the management of the company so far as it affects the private and

individual end of each one. Group self-knowledge, organisation,

tradition, and group sentiment are all at a minimum; accordingly the

group remains incapable of effective deliberation or action. It operates

through its board of directors and officers and, owing to its incapacity

for group action, has to rely upon the provisions of the Company Laws

for the control of their actions.

A third large class of purposive groups are the associations formed for

the furthering of some public end. Many such groups are purely

altruistic or philanthropic; but in the majority the members hope to

share in some degree in the public benefits for the attainment of which

the group is formed. In many such associations, group life hardly rises

above the low level of the commercial company; the main difference being

that, in virtue of the ‘disinterested’ or public-spirited nature of the

dominant purpose, the members regard one another and their executive

officers with greater confidence and sympathy; even though remaining

personally unacquainted. Notable instances of such associations,

achieving great public ends, are ‘The National Trust for the

Preservation of Places of Natural Beauty or Historic Interest,’ and ‘The

Public Footpaths Association.’ Other associations of this kind have

something of the nature of a commercial company: e.g. ‘The First Garden

City Company,’ and ‘The Trust Houses Company.’ The peculiarity of these

is that the motive of financial gain is subordinated to, while

co-operating with, the desire for achievement of a public good, a

benefit to the whole community in which the members of the group share

in an almost inappreciable degree only. Such associations are very

characteristic of the life of this country; and it may be hoped that

their multiplication and development will prove to be one of the

ameliorating factors of the future, softening the asperities of

commercial life, correcting to some degree that narrowing of the

sympathies, and preventing that tendency to class antagonisms, which

purely commercial associations inevitably produce. The great

co-operative societies seem to have something of this character; for,

although the dominant motive of membership is probably in most cases

private advantage, yet membership brings with it some sense of

participation in a great movement for better social organisation, some

sense of loyalty to the group, some rudimentary group knowledge and

group spirit, some interest in and satisfaction in the prosperity of the

group for its own sake, over and above the strictly private interest of

each member. The introduction of various forms of profit sharing will

give something of this character to commercial companies.

The recent investments in government loans by millions of individuals,

acting in part from patriotic motives, must have a similar tendency; and

a similar effect on a large scale must be produced by any

nationalisation of industries, a fact which is one of the weightiest

grounds for desiring such nationalisation; though it remains uncertain

whether, when the scale of the association becomes so large as to

include the whole nation, the bulk of the citizens will be able

effectively to discern the identity of their public and private

interests, and whether, therefore, such nationalisation will greatly

promote that fusion or co-operation of public and private motives which

is the essential function and merit of the group spirit.

The most characteristic British group of the purposive type is the

association formed for some public or quasi-public end and operating

through a democratically elected committee or committees and

sub-committees. Such groups are the cradle of the representative

principle and the training ground of the democratic spirit, especially

of its deliberative and executive faculties. In them each member, taking

part in the election of the committee, delegates to them his share of

authority, but continues to exert control over them by his vote upon

reports of the committee and in the periodic re-election of its

members. On this ground the citizens are trained to understand the

working of the representative principle; to yield to the opinion of the

majority on the choice of means, without ceasing loyally to co-operate

towards the common end; to observe the necessary rules of procedure; to

abide by group decisions; to influence group opinion in debate, and in

turn to be influenced by it and respect it; to differ without enmity; to

keep the common end in view, in spite of the inevitable working of

private and personal motives; to understand the necessity for

delegation, and to respect the organisation through which alone the

group raises itself above the level of the crowd.

Traditional groups of pure or nearly pure character are relatively

infrequent. Perhaps the castes of the Hindu world are, of all large

groups, those which most nearly approach the pure type. Traditional

grouping is characteristic of stagnant old established populations, of

which it is the basis of organisation and principal cement. No doubt in

almost every case the formation of the traditional group was in some

degree purposive; but the original purpose has generally been lost sight

of; myths and legends have grown up to explain the origin of and give a

fictitious purpose or ‘raison d’être’ to the group. In the absence of

any definite practical purpose animating the group and holding it

together, its stability is secured and its tradition is re-enforced and

given a visible presentation by the development of ritual. Of all the

great groups among us the Free Masons perhaps afford the best

illustration of this type.

Far more important in the British world are the groups of the mixed

type, partly traditional and partly purposive, groups having a long

history and origins shrouded in the mists of antiquity, but having some

strong and more or less definite common purpose. Of such groups the

Christian Church is the greatest example. In the Roman Church, whose

history has been so little interrupted, tradition attains its fullest

power, and the regard for the past is strengthened and supplemented by

the prospect of an indefinitely prolonged future directed towards the

same ends. Its organisation has grown gradually under the one continued

overshadowing purpose, every addition becoming embodied and established

in the great tradition, the strength of which is perpetually maintained

by ritual. And this traditional organisation is not only borne in the

minds of each generation of members of the Church, but, in an ever

increasing degree, has embodied itself in a material system of stone and

glass and metal and printed words; these constitute a visible and

enduring presentment which, though entirely disconnected and

heterogeneous in a merely material sense, yet provides fixed points in

the whole organisation, contributing immensely to its stability, and

aiding greatly in bringing home to the minds of its members the unity of

the whole group in the past, the present, and the future. Many groups or

sects having the same essential purpose as the Roman Church have aimed

to establish a tradition without the aid of such material embodiments:

but their ephemeral histories illustrate the wisdom of the mother Church

which, in building up her vast organisation, has recognised the

limitations and the frailties of the human mind and has not scorned to

adapt herself to them in order to overcome them.

On a smaller scale our ancient universities and their colleges

illustrate the same great type of the partly traditional partly

purposive group, and the same great principles of collective

life,—namely, the stability derived from the continuity of tradition,

from its careful culture, and its partial embodiment in ritual and

material structure.

An essential weakness of all such groups in a progressive community is

that tradition tends to overshadow purpose; hence every such group tends

towards the rigidity and relative futility of the purely traditional

group. Its organisation tends to set so rigidly that it is incapable of

adapting itself to the changing needs of the present and the future; the

maintenance of tradition, which is but a means towards the acknowledged

end, becomes an end in itself to which the primary purpose of the whole

is in danger of being subordinated.

The churches and the universities alike illustrate vividly the

principles of a group within a group. Each of the older universities is

a microcosm, a small model of the national life, and largely to this

fact is due its educational value as a place of residence. Each college

evokes a strong group spirit in all its members; and this sentiment for

the college, though it may and does in some minor matters conflict with

the sentiment for the university, is in the main synthesised within

this, and indeed is the chief factor in the strength of that sentiment.

The group spirit of each college owes much of its strength to the

carefully fostered, but perfectly friendly, rivalry between the several

colleges in sports and studies and other activities. The close

companionship and emulation between a number of small communities of

similar constitution and purpose, each having a long and distinct

tradition as well as a clearly defined material habitat which embodies

and symbolises its traditions in a thousand different ways, has raised

the self-knowledge and sentiment of the groups to a high level. It is

well known that the few years spent in one of the colleges develops in

every member (with few exceptions) a sentiment of attachment that

persists through life and extends itself in some degree to every other

member, past, present and future; so that, in whatever part of the world

and under whatever circumstances two such men may meet, the discovery of

their common membership of the college at once throws them into a

friendly attitude towards each other and prepares each to make

disinterested efforts on behalf of the other.

The same is true in a less degree of the universities themselves. Oxford

and Cambridge have, partly in consequence of their proximity and close

intercourse, developed on closely parallel lines. They are therefore so

similar in constitution and aims as to be keen though friendly rivals.

This has been of great benefit to both, the self-knowledge and group

sentiment of each having been greatly promoted by this close

intercourse, rivalry, and reciprocal criticism. And this rivalry has not

prevented the growth of some sentiment for the larger group constituted

by the members of both universities, each of whom is always ready to

defend the common interests of the larger group against the rest of the

world.

Again, within each college there are numerous smaller groups, each with

its traditions and group spirit; and, so long as these groups do not

become too exclusive, do not absorb all the devotion of their members,

but leave each one free to join in the life of other minor groups, their

influence is good, the group spirit of each such minor group

contributing to the strength of the larger group sentiment and enriching

the spiritual life of the whole.

In the middle ages occupational groups were of great importance and

influence. They were of the mixed type, for most of them, though

essentially purposive, developed strong traditions; and in their remote

origins many of them were perhaps rather natural than artificial

formations. The violent changes of industrial life, the development of

the capitalist system and modern industrialism, dislocated and largely

destroyed these occupational groups to the great detriment of social

well-being. At the present time we see a strong tendency to the growth

of occupational groups of the purely purposive type, which, lacking the

guidance and conservative power of old traditions, and depending for

their strength largely upon the identification of the material interests

of each member with those of the group, show a narrowness of outlook, a

lack of stability and internal cohesion, and a tendency to ignore the

place and function of the group in the whole community. They show, in

short, a lack of the enlightened group spirit which only time, with

increasing experience and understanding of the nature and functions of

group life, can remedy. It may be hoped that with improved internal

organisation, with the growth of more insight into the mutual dependence

of the various groups on one another and on the whole community, these

groups, which at present seem to some observers to threaten to destroy

our society and to replace the rivalry of nations by an even more

dangerous rivalry of vast occupational groups, may become organised

within the structure of the whole and play a part of the greatest value

in the national life.

PART II

THE NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER