I see no reason to doubt that, at its origin, human society was as much
a product of organic necessity as that of the bees.* The human family,
to begin with, rested upon exactly the same conditions as those which
gave rise to similar associations among animals lower in the scale.
Further, it is easy to see that every increase in the duration of the
family ties, with the resulting co-operation of a larger and larger
number of descendants for protection and defence, would give the
families in which such modification took place a distinct advantage
over the others. And, as in the hive, the progressive limitation of
the struggle for existence between the members of the family would
involve increasing efficiency as regards outside competition.
But there is this vast and fundamental difference between bee society
and human society. In the former, the members of the society are each
organically predestined to the performance of one particular class of
functions only. If they were endowed with desires, each could desire
to perform none but those offices for which its organization specially
fits it; and which, in view of the good of the whole, it is proper it
should do. So long as a new queen does not make her appearance,
rivalries, and competition are absent from the bee polity.
* Collected Essays, vol v., Prologue, pp. 50-54,
[27] Among mankind, on the contrary, there is no such predestination to
a sharply defined place in the social organism. However much men may
differ in the quality of their intellects, the intensity of their
passions, and the delicacy of their sensations, it cannot be said that
one is fitted by his organization to be an agricultural labourer and
nothing else, and another to be a landowner and nothing else.
Moreover, with all their enormous differences in natural endowment,
men agree in one thing, and that is their innate desire to enjoy the
pleasures and to escape the pains of life; and, in short, to do
nothing but that which it pleases them to do, without the least
reference to the welfare of the society into which they are born. That
is their inheritance (the reality at the bottom of the doctrine of
original sin) from the long series of ancestors, human and semi-human
and brutal, in whom the strength of this innate tendency to
self-assertion was the condition of victory in the struggle for
existence. That is the reason of the aviditas vitae*--the insatiable
hunger for enjoyment--of all mankind, which is one of the essential
conditions of success in the war with the state of nature outside; and
yet the sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed free play
within.
* See below. Romanes' Lecture, note 7.
The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or natural liberty,
which is the necessary condition for the origin of human society, is
the product [28] of organic necessities of a different kind from those
upon which the constitution of the hive depends. One of these is the
mutual affection of parent and offspring, intensified by the long
infancy of the human species. But the most important is the tendency,
so strongly developed in man, to reproduce in himself actions and
feelings similar to, or correlated with, those of other men. Man is
the most consummate of all mimics in the animal world; none but
himself can draw or model; none comes near him in the scope, variety,
and exactness of vocal imitation; none is such a master of gesture;
while he seems to be impelled thus to imitate for the pure pleasure of
it. And there is no such another emotional chameleon. By a purely
reflex operation of the mind, we take the hue of passion of those who
are about us, or, it may be, the complementary colour. It is not by
any conscious "putting one's self in the place" of a joyful or a
suffering person that the state of mind we call sympathy usually
arises; * indeed, it is often contrary to one's sense of [29] right,
and in spite of one's will, that "fellow-feeling makes us wondrous
kind," or the reverse. However complete may be the indifference to
public opinion, in a cool, intellectual view, of the traditional sage,
it has not yet been my fortune to meet with any actual sage who took
its hostile manifestations with entire equanimity. Indeed, I doubt if
the philosopher lives, or ever has lived who could know himself to be
heartily despised by a street boy without some irritation. And,
though one cannot justify Haman for wishing to hang Mordecai on such a
very high gibbet, yet, really, the consciousness of the Vizier of
Ahasuerus, as he went in and out of the gate, that this obscure Jew
had no respect for him, must have been very annoying.**
* Adam Smith makes the pithy observation that the man who
sympathises with a woman in childbed, cannot be said to put
himself in her place. ("The Theory of the Moral Sentiments,"
Part vii. sec. iii. chap. i.) Perhaps there is more humour than
force in the example; and, in spite of this and other
observations of the same tenor, I think that the one defect of
the remarkable work in which it occurs is that it lays too much
stress on conscious substitution, too little on purely reflex
sympathy.
** Esther v. 9-13. ". . . but when Haman saw Mordecai in the
king's gate, that he stood not up, nor moved for him, he was
full of indignation against Mordecai. . . . And Haman told them
of the glory of his riches . . . and all the things wherein the
king had promoted him . . . Yet all this availeth me nothing,
so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate."
What a shrewd exposure of human weakness it is!
It is needful only to look around us, to see that the greatest
restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men is fear, not of the
law, but of the opinion of their fellows. The conventions of honour
bind men who break legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while
people endure the extremity of physical pain rather than part with
life, shame drives the weakest to suicide.
Every forward step of social progress brings [30] men into closer
relations with their fellows, and increases the importance of the
pleasures and pains derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of others
by our own sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sympathies of
others, every day and all day long, from childhood upwards, until
associations, as indissoluble as those of language, are formed between
certain acts and the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It
becomes impossible to imagine some acts without disapprobation, or
others without approbation of the actor, whether he be one's self, or
any one else. We come to think in the acquired dialect of morals. An
artificial personality, the "man within," as Adam Smith* calls
conscience, is built up beside the natural personality. He is the
watchman of society, charged to restrain the anti-social tendencies of
the natural man within the limits required by social welfare.
* "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part iii. chap. 3. On the
Influence and Authority of Conscience.