and other persons of instable, emotional temperament, subject to
nervous explosions that burst out at intervals and relieve the system.
The mad outbreaks of women in convict prisons is a most curious
phenomenon. Some of them are apt from time to time to have a
gradually increasing desire that at last becomes irresistible, to
"break out," as it is technically called; that is, to smash and tear
everything they can within reach, and to shriek, curse, and howl. At
length the fit expends itself; the devil, as it were, leaves them,
and they begin to behave again in their ordinary way. The highest
form of emotional instability exists in confirmed epilepsy, where
its manifestations have often been studied; it is found in a high
but somewhat less extraordinary degree in the hysterical and allied
affections. In the confirmed epileptic constitution the signs of
general instability of nervous action are muscular convulsions,
irregularities of bodily temperature, mobile intellectual activity,
and extraordinary oscillations between opposed emotional states. I
am assured by excellent authority that instable manifestations of
extreme piety and of extreme vice are almost invariably shown by
epileptics, and should be regarded as a prominent feature of their
peculiar constitution. These unfortunate beings see no incongruity
between the pious phrases that they pour out at one moment and their
vile and obscene language in the next; neither do they show
repentance for past misconduct when they are convicted of crimes,
however abominable these may be. They are creatures of the moment,
possessing no inhibitory check upon their desires and emotions, which
drive them headlong hither and thither.
Madness is often associated with epilepsy; in all cases it is a
frightful and hereditary disfigurement of humanity, which appears,
from the upshot of various conflicting accounts, to be on the
increase. The neurotic constitution from which it springs is however
not without its merits, as has been well pointed out, since a large
proportion of the enthusiastic men and women to whose labour the
world is largely indebted, have had that constitution, judging from
the fact that insanity existed in their families.
The phases of extreme piety and extreme vice which so rapidly
succeed one another in the same individual among the epileptics, are
more widely separated among those who are simply insane. It has been
noticed that among the morbid organic conditions which accompany the
show of excessive piety and religious rapture in the insane, none are
so frequent as disorders of the sexual organisation. Conversely, the
frenzies of religious revivals have not unfrequently ended in gross
profligacy. The encouragement of celibacy by the fervent leaders of
most creeds, utilises in an unconscious way the morbid connection
between an over-restraint of the sexual desires and impulses towards
extreme devotion.
Another remarkable phase among the insane consists in strange views
about their individuality. They think that their body is made of
glass, or that their brains have literally disappeared, or that
there are different persons inside them, or that they are somebody
else, and so forth. It is said that this phase is most commonly
associated with morbid disturbance of the alimentary organs. So in
many religions fasting has been used as an agent for detaching the
thoughts from the body and for inducing ecstasy.
There is yet a third peculiarity of the insane which is almost
universal, that of gloomy segregation. Passengers nearing London by
the Great Western Railway must have frequently remarked the unusual
appearance of the crowd of lunatics when taking their exercise in
the large green enclosure in front of Hanwell Asylum. They almost
without exception walk apart in moody isolation, each in his own way,
buried in his own thoughts. It is a scene like that fabled in
Vathek's hall of Eblis. I am assured that whenever two are seen in
company, it is either because their attacks of madness are of an
intermittent and epileptic character and they are temporarily sane,
or otherwise that they are near recovery. Conversely, the curative
influence of social habits is fully recognised, and they are promoted
by festivities in the asylums. On the other hand, the great teachers
of all creeds have made seclusion a prominent religious exercise. In
short, by enforcing celibacy, fasting, and solitude, they have done
their best towards making men mad, and they have always largely
succeeded in inducing morbid mental conditions among their followers.
Floods of light are thrown upon various incidents of devotee life,
and also upon the disgusting and not otherwise intelligible
character of the sanctimonious scoundrel, by the everyday
experiences of the madhouse. No professor of metaphysics, psychology,
or religion can claim to know the elements of what he teaches,
unless he is acquainted with the ordinary phenomena of idiocy,
madness, and epilepsy. He must study the manifestations of disease
and congenital folly, as well as those of sanity and high intellect.
GREGARIOUS AND SLAVISH INSTINCTS.
I propose in this chapter to discuss a curious and apparently
anomalous group of base moral instincts and intellectual deficiencies,
that are innate rather than acquired, by tracing their analogies in
the world of brutes and examining the conditions through which they
have been evolved. They are the slavish aptitudes from which the
leaders of men are exempt, but which are characteristic elements in
the disposition of ordinary persons. The vast majority of persons of
our race have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility
of standing and acting alone; they exalt the _vox populi_, even when
they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the
_vox Dei_, and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority,
and custom. The intellectual deficiencies corresponding to these
moral flaws are shown by the rareness of free and original thought as
compared with the frequency and readiness with which men accept the
opinions of those in authority as binding on their judgment. I shall
endeavour to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct
consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of
the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of
his subsequent civilisation. My argument will be, that gregarious
brute animals possess a want of self-reliance in a marked degree;
that the conditions of the lives of these animals have made a want
of self-reliance a necessity to them, and that by the law of natural
selection the gregarious instincts and their accompanying slavish
aptitudes have gradually become evolved. Then I shall argue that our
remote ancestors have lived under parallel conditions, and that
other causes peculiar to human society have acted up to the present
day in the same direction, and that we have inherited the gregarious
instincts and slavish aptitudes which have been needed under past
circumstances, although in our advancing civilisation they are
becoming of more harm than good to our race.
It was my fortune, in earlier life, to gain an intimate knowledge of
certain classes of gregarious animals. The urgent need of the camel
for the close companionship of his fellows was a never-exhausted
topic of curious admiration to me during tedious days of travel
across many North African deserts. I also happened to hear and read
a great deal about the still more marked gregarious instincts of the
llama; but the social animal into whose psychology I am conscious of
having penetrated most thoroughly is the ox of the wild parts of
western South Africa. It is necessary to insist upon the epithet
"wild," because an ox of tamed parentage has different natural
instincts; for instance, an English ox is far less gregarious than
those I am about to describe, and affords a proportionately less
valuable illustration to my argument. The oxen of which I speak
belonged to the Damaras, and none of the ancestry of these cattle
had ever been broken to harness. They were watched from a distance
during the day, as they roamed about the open country, and at night
they were driven with cries to enclosures, into which they rushed
much like a body of terrified wild animals driven by huntsmen into a
trap. Their scared temper was such as to make it impossible to lay
hold of them by other means than by driving the whole herd into a
clump, and lassoing the leg of the animal it was desired to seize,
and throwing him to the ground with dexterous force. With oxen and
cows of this description, whose nature is no doubt shared by the
bulls, I spent more than a year in the closest companionship.
I had nearly a hundred of the beasts broken in for the waggon, for
packs, and for the saddle. I travelled an entire journey of
exploration on the back of one of them, with others by my side,
either labouring at their tasks or walking at leisure; and with
others again who were wholly unbroken, and who served the purpose of
an itinerant larder. At night, when there had been no time to erect
an enclosure to hold them, I lay down in their midst, and it was
interesting to observe how readily they then availed themselves of
the neighbourhood of the camp fire and of man, conscious of the
protection they afforded from prowling carnivora, whose cries and
roars, now distant, now near, continually broke upon the stillness.
These opportunities of studying the disposition of such peculiar
cattle were not wasted upon me. I had only too much leisure to think
about them, and the habits of the animals strongly attracted my
curiosity. The better I understood them, the more complex and worthy
of study did their minds appear to be. But I am now concerned only
with their blind gregarious instincts, which are conspicuously
distinct from the ordinary social desires. In the latter they are
deficient; thus they are not amiable to one another, but show on the
whole more expressions of spite and disgust than of forbearance or
fondness. They do not suffer from an ennui, which society can remove,
because their coarse feeding and their ruminant habits make them
somewhat stolid. Neither can they love society, as monkeys do, for
the opportunities it affords of a fuller and more varied life,
because they remain self-absorbed in the middle of their herd, while
the monkeys revel together in frolics, scrambles, fights, loves, and
chatterings. Yet although the ox has so little affection for, or
individual interest in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a
momentary severance from his herd. If he be separated from it by
stratagem or force, he exhibits every sign of mental agony; he
strives with all his might to get back again, and when he succeeds,
he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body with the comfort
of closest companionship. This passionate terror at segregation is a
convenience to the herdsman, who may rest assured in the darkness or
in the mist that the whole herd is safe whenever he can get a
glimpse of a single ox. It is also the cause of great inconvenience
to the traveller in ox-waggons, who constantly feels himself in a
position towards his oxen like that of a host to a company of
bashful gentlemen at the time when he is trying to get them to move
from the drawing-room to the dinner-table, and no one will go first,
but every one backs and gives place to his neighbour. The traveller
finds great difficulty in procuring animals capable of acting the
part of fore-oxen to his team, the ordinary members of the wild herd
being wholly unfitted by nature to move in so prominent and isolated
a position, even though, as is the custom, a boy is always in front
to persuade or pull them onwards. Therefore, a good fore-ox is an
animal of an exceptionally independent disposition. Men who break in
wild cattle for harness watch assiduously for those who show a
self-reliant nature, by grazing apart or ahead of the rest, and
these they break in for fore-oxen. The other cattle may be
indifferently devoted to ordinary harness purposes, or to slaughter;
but the born leaders are far too rare to be used for any less
distinguished service than that which they alone are capable of
fulfilling. But a still more exceptional degree of merit may
sometimes be met with among the many thousands of Damara cattle. It
is possible to find an ox who may be ridden, not indeed as freely as
a horse, for I have never heard of a feat like that, but at all
events wholly apart from the companionship of others; and an
accomplished rider will even succeed in urging him out at a trot
from the very middle of his fellows. With respect to the negative
side of the scale, though I do not recollect definite instances, I
can recall general impressions of oxen showing a deficiency from the
average ox standard of self-reliance, about equal to the excess of
that quality found in ordinary fore-oxen. Thus I recollect there
were some cattle of a peculiarly centripetal instinct, who ran more
madly than the rest into the middle of the herd when they were
frightened; and I have no reason to doubt from general recollections
that the law of deviation from an average would be as applicable to
independence of character among cattle as one might expect it
theoretically to be. The conclusion to which we are driven is, that
few of the Damara cattle have enough originality and independence of
disposition to pass unaided through their daily risks in a tolerably
comfortable manner. They are essentially slavish, and seek no better
lot than to be led by any one of their number who has enough
self-reliance to accept that position. No ox ever dares to act
contrary to the rest of the herd, but he accepts their common
determination as an authority binding on his conscience.
An incapacity of relying on oneself and a faith in others are
precisely the conditions that compel brutes to congregate and live
in herds; and, again, it is essential to their safety in a country
infested by large carnivora, that they should keep closely together
in herds. No ox grazing alone could live for many days unless he
were protected, far more assiduously and closely than is possible to
barbarians. The Damara owners confide perhaps 200 cattle to a couple
of half-starved youths, who pass their time in dozing or in grubbing
up roots to eat. The owners know that it is hopeless to protect the
herd from lions, so they leave it to take its chance; and as regards
human marauders they equally know that the largest number of cattle
watchers they could spare could make no adequate resistance to an
attack; they therefore do not send more than two, who are enough to
run home and give the alarm to the whole male population of the
tribe to run in arms on the tracks of their plundered property.
Consequently, as I began by saying, the cattle have to take care of
themselves against the wild beasts, and they would infallibly be
destroyed by them if they had not safeguards of their own, which are
not easily to be appreciated at first sight at their full value. We
shall understand them better by considering the precise nature of
the danger that an ox runs. When he is alone it is not simply that he
is too defenceless, but that he is easily surprised. A crouching
lion fears cattle who turn boldly upon him, and he does so with
reason. The horns of an ox or antelope are able to make an ugly
wound in the paw or chest of a springing beast when he receives its
thrust in the same way that an over-eager pugilist meets his
adversary's "counter" hit. Hence it is that a cow who has calved by
the wayside, and has been temporarily abandoned by the caravan, is
never seized by lions. The incident frequently occurs, and as
frequently are the cow and calf eventually brought safe to the camp;
and yet there is usually evidence in footprints of her having
sustained a regular siege from the wild beasts; but she is so
restless and eager for the safety of her young that no beast of prey
can approach her unawares. This state of exaltation is of course
exceptional; cattle are obliged in their ordinary course of life to
spend a considerable part of the day with their heads buried in the
grass, where they can neither see nor smell what is about them. A
still larger part of their time must be spent in placid rumination,
during which they cannot possibly be on the alert. But a herd of
such animals, when considered as a whole, is always on the alert; at
almost every moment some eyes, ears, and noses will command all
approaches, and the start or cry of alarm of a single beast is a
signal to all his companions. To live gregariously is to become a
fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to
become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in
all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air;
it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground
whence the approach of a wild beast might be overlooked. The
protective senses of each individual who chooses to live in
companionship are multiplied by a large factor, and he thereby
receives a maximum of security at a minimum cost of restlessness.
When we isolate an animal who has been accustomed to a gregarious
life, we take away his sense of protection, for he feels himself
exposed to danger from every part of the circle around him, except
the one point on which his attention is momentarily fixed; and he
knows that disaster may easily creep up to him from behind.
Consequently his glance is restless and anxious, and is turned in
succession to different quarters; his movements are hurried and
agitated, and he becomes a prey to the extremest terror. There can
be no room for doubt that it is suitable to the well-being of cattle
in a country infested with beasts of prey to live in close
companionship, and being suitable, it follows from the law of
natural selection that the development of gregarious and therefore
of slavish instincts must be favoured in such cattle. It also
follows from the same law that the degree in which those instincts
are developed is on the whole the most conducive to their safety. If
they were more gregarious they would crowd so closely as to
interfere with each other when grazing the scattered pasture of
Damara land; if less gregarious, they would be too widely scattered
to keep a sufficient watch against the wild beasts.
I now proceed to consider more particularly why the range of
deviation from the average is such that we find about one ox out of
fifty to possess sufficient independence of character to serve as a
pretty good fore-ox. Why is it not one in five or one in five hundred?
The reason undoubtedly is that natural selection tends to give but
one leader to each suitably-sized herd, and to repress superabundant
leaders. There is a certain size of herd most suitable to the
geographical and other conditions of the country; it must not
be too large, or the scattered puddles which form their only
watering-places for a great part of the year would not suffice; and
there are similar drawbacks in respect to pasture. It must not be
too small, or it would be comparatively insecure; thus a troop of
five animals is far more easy to be approached by a stalking
huntsman than one of twenty, and the latter than one of a hundred. We
have seen that it is the oxen who graze apart, as well as those who
lead the herd, who are recognised by the trainers of cattle as
gifted with enough independence of character to become fore-oxen.
They are even preferred to the actual leaders of the herd; they dare
to move more alone, and therefore their independence is undoubted.
The leaders are safe enough from lions, because their flanks and rear
are guarded by their followers; but each of those who graze apart,
and who represent the superabundant supply of self-reliant animals,
have one flank and the rear exposed, and it is precisely these whom
the lions take. Looking at the matter in a broad way, we may justly
assert that wild beasts trim and prune every herd into compactness,
and tend to reduce it into a closely-united body with a single
well-protected leader. That the development of independence of
character in cattle is thus suppressed below its otherwise natural
standard by the influence of wild beasts, is shown by the greater
display of self-reliance among cattle whose ancestry for some
generations have not been exposed to such danger.
What has been said about cattle, in relation to wild beasts, applies
with more or less obvious modifications to barbarians in relation to
their neighbours, but I insist on a close resemblance in the
particular circumstance, that many savages are so unamiable and
morose as to have hardly any object in associating together, besides
that of mutual support. If we look at the inhabitants of the very
same country as the oxen I have described, we shall find them
congregated into multitudes of tribes, all more or less at war with
one another. We shall find that few of these tribes are very small,
and few very large, and that it is precisely those that are
exceptionally large or small whose condition is the least stable. A
very small tribe is sure to be overthrown, slaughtered, or driven
into slavery by its more powerful neighbour. A very large tribe
falls to pieces through its own unwieldiness, because, by the nature
of things, it must be either deficient in centralisation or
straitened in food, or both. A barbarian population is obliged to
live dispersedly, since a square mile of land will support only a
few hunters or shepherds; on the other hand, a barbarian government
cannot be long maintained unless the chief is brought into frequent
contact with his dependants, and this is geographically impossible
when his tribe is so scattered as to cover a great extent of
territory. The law of selection must discourage every race of
barbarians which supplies self-reliant individuals in such large
numbers as to cause tribes of moderate size to lose their blind
desire of aggregation. It must equally discourage a breed that is
incompetent to supply such men in sufficiently abundant ratio to the
rest of the population to ensure the existence of tribes of not too
large a size. It must not be supposed that gregarious instincts are
equally important to all forms of savage life; but I hold, from what
we know of the clannish fighting habits of our forefathers, that
they were every whit as applicable to the earlier ancestors of our
European stock as they are still to a large part of the black
population of Africa.
There is, moreover, an extraordinary power of tyranny invested in
the chiefs of tribes and nations of men, that so vastly outweighs
the analogous power possessed by the leaders of animal herds as to
rank as a special attribute of human society, eminently conducive to
slavishness. If any brute in a herd makes itself obnoxious to the
leader, the leader attacks him, and there is a free fight between the
two, the other animals looking on the while. But if a man makes
himself obnoxious to his chief, he is attacked, not by the chief
single-handed, but by the overpowering force of his executive. The
rebellious individual has to brave a disciplined host; there are
spies who will report his doings, a local authority who will send a
detachment of soldiers to drag him to trial; there are prisons ready
built to hold him, civil authorities wielding legal powers of
stripping him of all his possessions, and official executioners
prepared to torture or kill him. The tyrannies under which men have
lived, whether under rude barbarian chiefs, under the great
despotisms of half-civilised Oriental countries, or under some of
the more polished but little less severe governments of modern days,
must have had a frightful influence in eliminating independence of
character from the human race. Think of Austria, of Naples, and even
of France under Napoleon III. It was stated[1] in 1870 that,
according to papers found at the Tuileries, 26,642 persons had been
arrested in France for political offences since 2nd December, 1851,
and that 14,118 had been transported, exiled, or detained in prison.
I have already spoken in _Hereditary Genius_ of the large effects of
religious persecution in comparatively recent years, on the natural
character of races, and shall not say more about it here; but it
must not be omitted from the list of steady influences continuing
through ancient historical times down, in some degree, to the
present day, in destroying the self-reliant, and therefore the
nobler races of men.