New York State College of Agriculture At Cornell University Ithaca, N. Y. The Professor Dwight Sanderson Rural Sociology Library Cornell University Library HM 251.W26g The great society; a psychologic^^^^ 3 1924 013 869 593 THE GREAT SOCIETY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NBW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS ■ ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • 0>LCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. 01 CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE GREAT SOCIETY A Psychological Analysts BY GRAHAM WALLAS AUTHOR or "hTTMAN NATUBB nj POLITICS," ETC. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 OOPTBIQHT, 1914, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 19x4. Reprinted October, 1915; August, 1916. Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. PREFACE Dear Walter Lippmann, This book develops the material of that discussion- course ("Government 31") which you joined during my stay at Harvard in the spring of 1910. Now that the book is finished, I can see, more clearly than I could while I was writing it, what it is about; and in particular what its relation is to my Human Nature in Politics (1908). I may, therefore, say briefly that the earlier book was an analysis of representative govermnent, which turned into an argument against nineteenth-century intellectualism; and that this book is an analysis of the general social organisation of a large modern state, which has turned, at times, into an argument against certain forms of twentieth-century anti-intellectualism. I send it to you in the hope that it may be of some help when you write that sequel to your Preface tc Politics for which all your friends are looking. — Sincerely yoiu-s, GRAHAM WALLAS. The London School op Economics AND Political Science, Clabe Market, London, W.C. Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013869593 CONTENTS Stnofsis ix PAET I CHAPTER I FAOB The Great Society 3 CHAPTER II Social Psychology 20 CHAPTER III Instinct and Intelligence 32 CHAPTER IV Disposition and Environment 57 CHAPTER V Habit 69 CHAPTER VI Fbab 84 CHAPTER VII Pleastjee-Pain and Happiness 94 vii viii THE GREAT SOCIETY CHAPTER VIII PAGE The Psychology op the Crowd 115 CHAPTER IX Love and Hatbed 139 CHAPTER X Thought 176 PART II CHAPTER XI The Organisation op Thought 235 CHAPTER XII The Organisation op Will 287 CHAPTER XIII The Organisation op Hapfinesb 320 INDEX 371 SYNOPSIS PART I Chapter I. {The Great Society). — The extension of social scale which created the Great Society was mainly due to certain mechanical inventions. Those who first developed these inventions expected that their results would be entirely good. But we now feel some misgiving when we compare the states of consciousness typical of the Great Society with those typical of more primitive social organisations; or when we estimate the forces making for its coherence or dissolution. This mis- giving leads to an effort to understand the problems of the Great Society as a whole, which runs counter to the intellectual specialisation of the nineteenth century. To that effort the study of psychology has as yet made httle effective contribution. Chapter II. {Social Psychology), page 20. — Social Psychology deals with those more conscious facts of the human type which are relevant to the behaviour of mankind in society. It is convenient to call such inherited type-facts "dispositions," and to leave to philosophy their relation to the genesal problem of free-will and determinism. The type- facts dealt with by Social Psychology may be divided either into elemen- tary or into complex dispositions. The complex dispositions are generally the more important in social analysis; though they are not easily examined by those laboratory methods which have been so suc- cessful in other branches of the science. Chapter III. {Instinct and Intelligence), page 32. — The complex human dispositions may be divided into the Instincts, and Intelligence. All Instincts are to some extent adaptable, and their action may in the higher animals be accompanied by consciousness, and, as life goes on, memory and imagination. Intelligence is not a subordinate "appara- tus" set in action by Instinct; and the tendency so to treat it constitutes a real social danger. Curiosity, Trial and Error, Thought, and Lan- guage are intelligent dispositions acting as "naturally" as any of the Instincts. The whole body of complex dispositions (instinctive and intelligent) forms a series of increasing consciousness and decreasing fixity. Social Psychology is not a safe guide for social action unless it is combined with personal experience, and the study of history, eugenics,, and other human sciences. X THE GREAT SOCIETY Chapter IV. {Disposition and Environment), page 67. — Each human disposition has its appropriate stimuli. An examination of the action of these stimuU reveals a high degree of variation in our dispositions. Stimulation involves a process of recognition of the character of the object acting as stimulus. This process has always been inexact. In the Great Society the original stimuU to which our dispositions were adapted by the course of evolution have largely disappeared, and inap- propriate stimuU have often taken their place. If a disposition, how- ever, remains unstimulated that fact produces the condition of "baulked disposition." The main task of civiUsation is, therefore, to produce a new environment whose stimulation of our existing dispositions shaU tend towards a good life. Chapter V. {Habit), page 69. — Each social psychologist has in the past generally taken one disposition to explain all social phenomena. The Habit-Philosophers are right in emphasising the importance of Habit in a modem community. But Habit is not the only important factor in the problem. Nor is Habit "second nature. " It is unstable, and, unless provided with an intellectual background, dangerously narrow. The process of habituation itself, unless it is adapted to all our nature, is uncertain. In the Great Society the influence of men who can resist habituation, and therefore originate, is of increasing impor- tance. Chapter VI. (Fear), page 84. — Hobbes is the classical Fear-Philos- opher; and he distorted his conception of Fear in making it the uni- versal social motive. Under modern conditions the action of Fear, both in Education and Government, is, in fact, uncertain, and often harmful. Chapter VII. (Pleasure-Pain and Happiness), page 94. — Bentham is the classical Pleasure-Philosopher. His UtiUtarianism failed because of its Intellectualism and Hedonism, and of the inadequate psychology of the Greatest Happiness Principle. In fact. Pain is not the negation of Pleasure; Pleasure and Pain are not the same as Pleasantness and Unpleasantness; and Pleasantness and Unpleasantness are not the same as Happiness and Unhappiness. Bentham's identification of Pleasure with Happiness made his choice of Happiness as the end less defensible than the same choice by Aristotle. After Bentham's death. Utilitarian- ism shared the fate of the phiUstine PoUtical Economy. Chapter VIII. (The Psychology of the Crowd), page 115. — Comte failed to estabUsh a Social Psychology of Love; and, after Darwin, many sociologists resorted to mechanical conceptions of Imitation, Sympathy, or Suggestion, as explaining social action. Modern psychology tends to reject these conceptions and the "Crowd Psychology" based upon SYNOPSIS xi them, and to substitute a more complex conception of the stimulation (conscious and unconscious) of all otir dispositions by ova social environ- ment. Chapter IX. (Love and Hatred), page 139. — Is love of our fellows natural to us? Mother-Love is certainly natural; and so are the weaker forms of Love arising from Fatherhood, Sex, and Fellow-membership of the human species. Philanthropy, however, in order to become the Public Spirit required in the Great Society, must be strengthened by Imagination, Knowledge, Habit, the aesthetic emotion, and other dis- positions. Hatred is as natural as Love, and had its own "survival- value" in the course of evolution. But the biological and psychological arguments advanced against the possibihty of organised peace among the Great Powers seem insufficient. Chapter X. {Thought), page 176. — Is there an art of Thought? Modern Psychology, with its insistence upon the essential identity and subconscious action of Memory, Imagination, and Reasoning, might seem to answer. No. But though we cannot control the moment of Thought, we can control (o) the material circumstances necessary for Thought; (6) the mental attitudes which are favourable or unfavourable to Thought; (c) our relation to the subject-matter of Thought. This last consists of (1) Memory and Record (each of which has its own ad- vantages and dangers); (2) the alterations which we may dehberately produce in oiu- environment, in order more effectively to think about it; and (3) the Logical rules and terms by which we may direct Attention. Modern improvements in Logic are mainly mathematical, and that fact has helped in the reaction towards Intuition (Instinctive Inference) in the moral sciences. But the most effective relation between Thought and Intuition in the work of organising the Great Society will give the pre-eminence to Thought with its appropriate passion. PART II Chapter XI. {The Organisation of Thought), page 235. — The analy- sis of the forms of Organisation in the Great Society may be conveniently based, not upon our structural dispositions, but upon the three forms of consciousness (Cognition, Conation, and Feeling) one of which may be dominant in any Organisation. The simplest form of Thought-Organ- isation is oral group-dialectic, which is now unduly neglected in favour of the impersonal organisation of Thought made possible by the printing press. But the English use the oral discussions of Committees, Coun- cils, and Parliament for most of their pohtical work, though with a certain loss of efficiency due to a neglect of the necessary psychological xii THE GREAT SOCIETY conditions. The Cabinet corresponds more closely to the psychological conditions of eilective discussion, but may be transformed in the future by the increasing pressure of its work. The present organisation of the Civil Service has psychological advantages and disadvantages of its own. The Thought-Organisation of business is often inefficient; and the Organisation, personal or impersonal, of the Thought of the ordinary working citizen is hmited by many incidents of modem industrial hfe, and is only now beginning to be seriously studied. Chapter XII. {The Organisation of Will), page 287. — Organised Will can only exist in a community provided with the necessary social machinery. In the Great Society the need of such machinery is in- creasingly felt. The three chief Will-Organisations now advocated are Property (Individualism), the democratic State (Socialism), and non- local Association (SyndicaHsm). Property is based on a true human instinct. But that instinct was adapted by evolution to an environment now obsolete; and the Property-Instinct is now only an effective direct- ing force when it is supported by other psychological factors. Socialism was an inevitable reaction against niaeteenth-century Individualism; but increasing dissatisfaction with electioneering methods has helped to compel a recognition that it cannot be the sole form of Will-Organisa- tion in the Great Society. Syndicalism has gained by this recognition; but the history of Syndicalism in practice shows that it cannot act alone as a sufficient Will-Organisation. All three elements wiU obviously be required in the future State; but this organisation wiU require invention rather than merely mechanical combination. Similar analysis and in- vention is required for the organisation of an international WUl. Chapter XIII. {The Organisation oj Happiness), page 320. — Happi- ness is often a better basis for social analysis than Wealth, or Thought, or WiU. The men employed in the Great Industry describe themselves as less often happy during the working day than were, apparently, those employed in primitive handicrafts; and the steps now being taken (under the guidance of industrial psychology) to increase industrial out- put may increase the kind of unhappiness of which they complain. Happiness, both during and outside of the working day, is dependent on the size of the social and industrial unit and on the relation between work and oversight. Happiness is more necessary as a basis of social analysis in the case of women than in the case of men; and the results of that analysis are the main factor in the case for women's suffrage. Sialoc analysis on the basis of Happiness is often made easier by the use of the concepts of the Mean (especially in relation to Freedom and Variety) and of Economy. But both the Mean and Economy require to be supplemented, as ideals, by the concept of the Extreme. PART I CHAPTER I THE GREAT SOCIETY "Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another as individuals. . . . To-day the every-day relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organisa- tions, not with other individual men. "Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life." — President Woodeow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1913, pp. 6 and 7. During the last hundred years the external condi- tions of civilised life have been transformed by a series of inventions which have abolished the old limits to the creation of mechanical force, the carriage of men and goods, and communication by written and spoken words. One effect of this transformation is a general change of social scale. Men find themselves working and thinking and feeling in relation to an environment, which, both in its world-wide extension and its inti- mate connection with all sides of human existence, is without precedent in the history of the world. Economists have invented the term The Great In- dustry for the special aspect of this change which is dealt with by their science, and sociologists may con- veniently call the whole result The Great Society. In those countries where the transformation first began a majority of the inhabitants already live either in huge commercial cities, or in closely populated industrial 3 4 THE GREAT SOCIETY districts threaded by systems of mechanical traction and covering hundreds of square miles. Cities and districts are only parts of highly organised national states, each with fifty or a hundred million inhabitants; and these states are themselvfes every year drawn more effectively into a general system of international re- lationships. Every member of the Great Society, whether he be stupid or clever, whether he have the wide curiosity of the bom politician and trader, or the concentration on what he can see and touch of the born craftsman, is affected by this ever-extending and ever-tightening nexus. A sudden decision by some financier whose name he has never heard may, at any moment, close the office or mine or factory in which he is employed, and he may either be left without a livelihood or be forced to move with his family to a new centre. He and his fellows can only maintain their standard wage or any measure of permanency in their employment if the majority of them judge rightly on difficult ques- tions put to them by national political parties and national or international Trade Unions. Even in those English villages into which the Great Industry may seem to have scarcely penetrated the change of scale is already felt. The widow who takes in washing fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing-machine under the influence of half-a-dozen competing world-schemes of advertise- ment. The boys playing football on the village green think of themselves as possible members of a cham- pion English team. The spectacled young school- master who looks on is brooding, with all his future happiness consciously at stake, on his chances of ad- THE GREAT SOCIETY 5 vancement in the Transvaal or West Australia, or on the relation between his own religious opinions and an analysis of Hebrew eschatology by a German professor. The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emi- gration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way successfully among world-wide facts which reach them only through misleading words they will be crushed. They may de- sire to live the old life among familiar sights and sounds and the friends whom they know and trust, but they dare not try to do so. To their children, brought up in the outskirts of Chicago or the mean streets of Tottenham or Middlesbrough, the old life will have ceased to exist, even as an object of desire. Fifty years ago the practical men who were bringing the Great Society into existence thought, when they had time to think at all, that they were thereby offer- ing an enormously better existence to the whole human race. Men were rational beings, and, having obtained limitless power over nature, would certainly use it for their own good. In 1867, for instance, Bernard Cra- croft described the intense optimism of the typical English manufacturer of his time: The mercantile feeling and fever, the ardent faith in pro- gress, the belief ... in a mercantile millennium, to be obtained partly by the boundless development of human energy striving like fire ever upwards, partly by unforeseen but probable discoveries, which at any moment may throw additional millions into the lap of hvunan comfort, and so 6 THE GREAT SOCIETY kt. , raise humanity another stage above the gulf of wretched- ness and want.^ The Great Society, even if it should deprive men of some of the romance and intimacy of life, must, they thought, at least give them such an increase of security as would be far more than an equal return. Famine would be impossible when any labourer could buy flour and bacon from the world-market in his village shop. Wars would be few and short if they meant dis- aster to an international system of credit. Now, however, that the change has come, hardly any one thinks of it with the old undoubting enthu- siasm. Actual famine has, it is true, disappeared from the Great Society, but there remains the constant possi- bility of general and uncontrollable depressions of trade. The intervals between great wars are appar- ently becoming longer, but never has the expenditure on armaments been so great or the fear of war so con- stant. Wars, however, and commercial crises may be thought of as merely accidental interruptions to a social development which steadily advances in spite of them. The deeper anxiety of our time arises from a doubt, more or less clearly realised, whether that development is itself proceeding on right lines. We come back perhaps to London or Leeds after a visit to a place where a simpler form of life is still in some degree possible. We may have been watching a group of Cornish fishermen, who have forgotten the fish-steamer and the London market, and are mend- ing their nets while the children play by the boats; or ^Essays on Rejarm (1867), p. 169. THE GREAT SOCIETY 7 we have been talking day by day with a Yorkshire sheep-farmer whose father and grandfather held the same land as himself. On the morning after our re- turn, we notice from a fresh point of view the men and women who hurry with us out of the trains, or bend over ledgers in banks and ofl&ces, or stand tired and vacant outside factories in the dinner hour. Here and there we see an eager dark-haired boy, who seems to have found the environment that fits him best. He has perhaps been taken on as an assistant porter at King's Cross, and is irradiated, not only with confi- dence in his own future, but with a glorious sense of identity between himself and the Great Northern Rail- way. Such faces are, however, rare exceptions. Of the rest, not many perhaps are consciously unhappy, but there are strangely few signs of that harmony of the whole being which constitutes happiness. In the presence of mere stupid social inequality we feel comparatively hopeful. We can contrive schemes for dealing with the row of broken men waiting for the casual ward to open, or the dull fat women who pass in their uselessly efficient motor cars. But all our schemes involve an increase in the number of clerks and me- chanics and teachers with no essential change in their way of life. Even the parks and picture galleries and libraries and the other mitigations of the new environ- ment, for which during the rest of the year we are working and voting, seem to us, for the moment, to be tragically inadequate. Those who have watched the more rapid change from the old to the new in the East describe themselves as having the same feeling in a sharper form. A Hindoo peasant, who exchanges the penury and uncertainty 8 THE GREAT SOCIETY of village agriculture for the steadier work and better pay of a Bombay cotton factory, never looks, they say, as if he had thereby attained greater satisfaction for the inner needs of his nature. Lafcadio Hearn wrote in 1894, when the resolute determination of the Jap- anese to enter the Great Society was already beginning to take effect, "The new Japan will be richer and stronger and in many things wiser, but it will neither be so happy nor so kindly as the old." ^ Our fathers, under the influence of Herbert Spencer and the popular science of 1850, could trust that, even if the members of a single generation should find it difficult to adapt their nervous structure to the new conditions, yet that adaptation when once it had been achieved by habit would be handed on to succeeding generations by biological inheritance. The biologists of our time have forced us to realise that such "ac- quired characteristics" are not inherited. Each gen- eration, except in so far as we create by selective breeding a somewhat better, or by the sterility of the finer individuals a somewhat worse, human type, will start, we are told, in essentials, not where their fathers left off, but where their fathers began. And we find ourselves sometimes doubting, not only as to the future happiness of individuals in the Great Society, but as to the permanence of the Great Society itself. Why should we expect a social organisation to endure, which has been formed in a moment of time by human beings, whose bodies and minds are the result of age-long selection under far different condi- tions? Social organisation on a large scale is not a wholly 'Quoted in Collier's Weekly, March 7, 1910. THE GREAT SOCIETY 9 new thing. For certain restricted purposes — chiefly the levying of taxes and the gathering of armies — the empires of Assyria, Persia, and Rome organised men on a scale not less than that of a modern state. Any one of those empires, at the moment of its greatest efficiency, must have seemed to the statesmen who were directing it from the centre to fulfil all the con- ditions of permanency. Each of them possessed not only irresistible military power, but a monopoly of all means of rapid communication, and the control of the only important body of accumulated wealth in the world which they knew. Yet the systems which created these powerful cohesive forces created at the same time disruptive forces which proved even more powerful. As the ancient empires became larger they became too distant and too unreal to stimulate the affection or pride of their subjects. The methods of their agents became more mechanical and inhuman, and the passions which grouped themselves round smaller units, local or racial or religious, produced an ever-increasing inner strain. In Hosea, or Daniel, or Revelations, or almost any of the scriptures of that tiny East-Mediterranean people who were incorpor- ated into all the ancient empires in succession, we can feel the tension which ultimately broke up the systems of Nineveh and Rome. And in the colder analysis of Thucydides' Corcyrean chapters we can estimate the passions of class and city which prevented the for- mation, even for a single generation, of a purely Hel- lenic national state. Are there any signs of such an inner strain resulting from the size and impersonal power of the Great So- ciety? Has the invention of representative govern- 10 THE GREAT SOCIETY ment, as its advocates used to argue, prevented the forces of class or race or religion or self from ever again thrusting against the larger cohesion of the State? No one who tries to interpret the obscure feelings of half- articulate men and women will say so. France is a representative republic, and that republic is supported by a stronger feeling of political solidarity than is to be found in any other European nation. But who can be sure that the forces represented by the "sabotage" of the French railway servants or the turbulence of the vine-growers are declining? In America the racial and class feeling of the new immigrants shows itself unex- pectedly resistant to the dissolving force of national consciousness. In England the "particularism" of trades and professions and the racial feeling of Wales or Ulster, of Scotland or Catholic Ireland, seem to be growing stronger and not weaker. More threatening still to the cohesion of the Great Society are the motives openly avowed by some of the American and European masters of concentrated capi- tal, the men who direct enormous social power without attempting to form a social purpose, who smash work- ing-class Unions with no idea of any system which may take their place, who boast that their trade is their politics, and corrupt whole parties merely to increase the personal wealth which they will waste in making or buying things that they hardly desire. The "cash nexus" has no more than the "voting nexus" secured that common membership of the Great Society shall mean a common interest in its solidarity. Even the Churches which claim to be Catholic, and whose for- mulas imply that it is their first duty to see ecumenical society as a whole, too often seem to put up their THE GREAT SOCIETY 11 political and social influence to be sold to the highest bidder, and swing from side to side in the ship of state like a loose gun. And everywhere the preachers of Syndicalism and "direct action/' the editors of clerical- ist newspapers, the owners of "predatory wealth," claim to represent the real and growing social forces as against the phrase-makers, the undenominationalists, the bloodless traitors to class or church, who stand for the community as a whole. If one looks from the forces acting within the sepa- rate states to the forces which bear upon that relation between states without which world-industry and world-commerce cannot exist, one sees there too that the "Realpolitiker," the men who claim to voice in England or in Germany the living human passions, stand not for European unity but for European dis- ruption. When, indeed, one gets behind the mechanical ar- rangements of railways and telegraphs, or of laws and treaties and elections, what are the real forces on which our hopes of national or international solidarity de- pend? One remembers afternoons spent in canvassing along the average streets of a modem city, and the words and looks which showed how weak are the feel- ings which attach the citizen to a society whose power he dimly recognises, but which he often seems to think of merely with distrust and dislike. And if, once more, we turn away from Europe and the United States to the beginnings of the Great So- ciety in South America or China, the question whether the new system is creating sufficient cohesive force to ensure its own permanence becomes even more difficult to answer with confident hope. 12 THE GREAT SOCIETY But, owing to the very complexity of the relations which bind us to the Great Society, we stand to lose much more by any failure in its cohesion than did the subjects of the ancient empires. Up till our own time the vast majority of the inhabitants of the world lived in little, almost self-supporting, villages. If an empire broke up, some of these villages might be wasted by war, but the rest, like the cells of a divided rotifer, grouped themselves easily enough as part of a new body. If, at the capital of the empire, a population had been brought together which depended on a more intricate form of social organisation, that population was destroyed or scattered. Some day the Assyriolo- gists will reconstruct for us the industrial and financial system, which enabled the inhabitants of Nineveh or Babylon to be fed and employed, and we shall then be able to imagine the sufferings which left those cities mere piles of ruins surrounded by a few peasants' huts. When the corn-ships of Egypt and the tribute-money of Gaul and Spain ceased to come to Rome, the popula- tion of the city sank from about a million to perhaps a third of that number. But now, thirty-five out of the forty-five million inhabitants of the United Kingdom depend for their food upon a system of world-relations far more complex than that which was built up by Assyria or Rome for the supply of their capitals. Let a European war break out — the war, perhaps, between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which so many journalists and politicians in England and Ger- many contemplate with criminal levity. If the com- batants prove to be equally balanced, it may, after the first battles, smoulder on for thirty years. What will be the population of London, or Manchester, or Chem- THE GREAT SOCIETY 13 nitz, or Bremen, or Milan, at the end of it? Or what would be the condition of New York if a social war in Nevada between Trade Unionists and mine-owners should slowly spread over the Union and should last for a generation of recurrent fighting? The writers who are most fond of calling attention to the possibility of England becoming a thinly populated agricultural country like Denmark, or of New York being ruined by social unrest, generally do so in order to support some proposal for increased national armaments or for increased internal coercive authority in the hands of an undemocratic executive. England, for instance, is to enact compulsory service, build an ever vaster fleet, and challenge Germany by a more vigorous foreign and im- perial policy. But if the problem is that of increasing the cohesive forces in the vaguely defined economic and political organisation of which both Germany and our- selves are part, we shall not solve it either by piling up armaments or by strengthening our police. World- wide coercion, like Archimedes' lever, requires a ful- crum, and the believers in "strong government" never tell us where that fulcrum is to be found. It is by imagining the effect of an actual dissolution of the Great Society that we can make most clear to ourselves the nature of our fears for its future. But even if the forces of cohesion and dissolution remain as evenly balanced as they are now, our prospects are dark enough. The human material of our social ma- chinery will continue to disintegrate just at the points where strength is most urgently required. Men whom we are compelled to trust will continue to prefer the smaller to the larger good. The director will sacrifice the interest of his shareholders to his own or that of his 14 THE GREAT SOCIETY family, the statesman will sacrifice his country to his party or his constituency or his Church, the Concert of Europe will remain helpless because each of its con- stituent nations refuses to work for the good of the whole. And the results of a system which we are not strong enough either to remodel or to control will con- tinue to be seen in the slum and the sweating shop, the barracks and the base-hospital. Throughout the politics and literature of the twen- tieth century one traces this fear, conscious or half- conscious, lest the civilisation which we have adopted so rapidly and with so little forethought may prove unable to secure either a harmonious life for its mem- bers or even its own stability. The old delight in the "manifest finger of destiny" and "the tide of progress," even the newer belief in the effortless "evolution" of social institutions are gone. We are afraid of the blind forces to which we used so willingly to surrender ourselves. We feel that we must reconsider the basis of our organised life because, without reconsideration, we have no chance of controlling it. And so behind the momentary ingenuities and party phrases of our states- men we can detect the straining effort to comprehend while there is yet time. Our philosophers are toiling to refashion for the purposes of social life the systems which used so confidently to offer guidance for individ- ual conduct. Our poets and playwrights and novelists are revolutionising their art in the attempt to bring the essential facts of the Great Society within its range. All these efforts run counter to the intellectual habits in which our generation was brought up. On its intel- lectual side the Great Society was the work of special- ists. During its formation we and our fathers learnt to THE GREAT SOCIETY 15 admire, without a trace of that scorn which Jesus ben Sirach caught from his Greek masters, the leaders of specialised science — the chemists who are "wakeful to make clean the furnace," and the biologists "whose dis- course is of the stock of bulls." Each of them became "wise in his own work." "Without them," we said, "shall not a city be inhabited, and we shall not sojourn nor walk up and down therein. . . . They will main- tain the fabric of the world ; and in the handy- work of their craft is their prayer." If we added: "They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high," ^ our scorn was meant, not for them, but for the politician and the generaliser. We are forced, however, now to recognise that a so- ciety whose intellectual direction consists only of un- related specialisms must drift, and that we dare not drift any longer. We stand, as the Greek thinkers stood, in a new world. And because that world is new, we feel that neither the sectional observations of the special student, nor the ever-accumulating records of the past, nor the narrow experience of the practical man can suffice us. We must let our minds play freely over all the conditions of life till we can either justify our civilisation or change it. The Greek thinkers, with all their magnificent cour- age and comprehensiveness, failed in the end either to understand or to guide the actual social forces of their time. Our own brains are less acute, our memories less retentive than those of the Greeks, while the body of relevant fact which we must survey has been in- creased ten-thousand-fold. How are we to have any ' Ecolesiasticus, chap, xxxviii. (R.V.). 16 THE GREAT SOCIETY chance of success? I shall discuss in a later chapter the detailed expedients by which the peculiar knowlr edge of each among an organised body of men can be used to control their common action.^ But the ef- ficiency of such expedients is limited. In laboratories and universities and Government offices we can test hypotheses and compare results by means of the sub- divided labour of hundreds of observers to whom each other's knowledge is unknown. But the formation of the original hypothesis, the inventive moment on which successful action depends, must take place in an in- dividual brain. If we wish to estimate the real possi- bility of using the ever-growing mass of recorded fact for the guidance of organised social action, we must think, not of the long rows of tables and microscopes in a scientific laboratory, nor of the numbered stacks of books and maps in the British Museum or the Li- brary of Congress, but of a minister or responsible of- ficial when he has put back his books on their shelves, has said good-bye to his last expert adviser, and sits with shut eyes at his desk, hoping that if he can main- tain long enough the effort of straining expectancy some new idea will come into his mind. Can the con- clusions of the specialist then reach him? In the case of the natural sciences we can see that they do, and we can watch the process by which this has been made possible. Between the original specialist and the man who applies his results to the organised conduct of life there exists a whole hierarchy of intellectual workers, turning out a series of text-books and Encyclopaedia articles, each covering a wider field with less intensive treatment and fitting together isolated fragments of •See Chapter XI. cH. I THE GREAT SOCIETY 17 knowledge into subordinate groups, as children do when they arrange the pieces of a picture puzzle. Their work is put out of date by every advance in the knowledge gained by original research, but while it lasts it makes that knowledge part of the effective intellectual ma- chinery of each generation. A statesman, however ht- tle of a scientific specialist he may be, is not now likely to spend time or energy in speculation about engines driven by perpetual motion, or armies paid with gold produced by the formulas of the alchemists. Nor will he, like Pericles, plan a system of national defence which involves the bringing, year by year, of the population of a whole country-side to spend their sum- mers in an undrained and already crowded city. But in one important field extraordinarily little has been done to make the results of research available for the guidance of social action. During the last twenty years psychology has been applying new and more ex- act methods to the examination of the human mind. Throughout that time there has also been an immense output of books dealing with the general conditions of social organisation, many of them being based upon the opinions of the writers as to psychological facts. Much of the speaking and writing even of practical politicians has taken the form of psychological generali- sations as to "human nature" and the rest. The influ- ence, however, of the professed psychologists upon either the sociological writers or the practical poli- ticians has been curiously small. Colonel A. C. Yate, M.P., for instance, wrote not long ago, from the Athenaeum Club, to the Times, to complain that Mr. Carnegie had called War a degrad- ing evil. "Does Mr. Carnegie," he asked, "really un- 18 THE GREAT SOCIETY derstand human nature and the immutable laws which govern and guide it? Is the grand law of the 'selection of the fittest' to give way to the miserable mediocrity of compromise fostered by charity?" ^ Colonel Yate might perhaps find it more difiicult than he would ex- pect to put his "immutable laws" into explicit language. But if he did so, I am sure that they would not be found in any treatise by a competent psychologist. If he, or any other member of the Athenaeum, had written to the Times to ask whether Mr. Carnegie really understood the immutable laws which govern and guide electric dynamos, either he would have been referring to laws set out in accepted text-books, or, if he claimed to have discovered new laws, he would have set out his claim with a full sense of responsi- bility and have started an immediate and well-in- formed discussion. But though the laws which govern human nature are at least as important as those which govern dynamos, no one wrote to the Times to ask Colonel Yate what they were, and no other member of the Athenaeum Club probably expressed any curiosity about them. Looseness of thought and language on the subject is taken for granted. This book, therefore, like its predecessor,^ is written with the practical purpose of bringing the knowledge which has been accumulated by psychologists into touch with the actual problems of present civilised life. My earlier book dealt in the main with the problem of representative government. This will deal with gen- eral social organisation, considered with special refer- ' Times, December 27, 1910. ''Human Nature in Politics, Constable, 1908. THE GREAT SOCIETY 19 ence to the difficulties created by the formation of what I have called the Great Society. I offer it to my readers in the hope that it may soon be superseded both by the discovery of new psychological facts and by the suggestion of more fertile applications. CHAPTER II SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Before indicating the lines on which the science of social psychology may, in my judgment, be made most useful for the organisation of the Great Society, I shall attempt in the two following chapters to give a rough indication of the subject-matter and termi- nology of the science itself. The human species, like all other species of living things, consists of individuals no one of whom is ex- actly like any other, but all of whom conform more or less nearly to a common type. The science of social psychology aims at discovering and arranging the knowledge which will enable us to forecast, and there- fore to influence, the conduct of large numbers of hu- man beings organised in societies. It is accordingly concerned mainly with the type, and treats individual variations from it rather as instances of a general ten- dency to vary than as isolated facts. Psychology, however, does not deal with all the hu- man type-facts, and the first difficulty, both of general and of social psychology, is to limit in that respect its subject-matter, and to distinguish it from the subject- matter of physiology and anatomy. There is no human type-fact which may not at some time or other influence the history of societies, from the liability of man to sunburn and frost-bite, or his fitness for animal and vegetable food, to his highest intellec- 20 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 21 tual and emotional faculties. A general science of so- cial anthropology might indeed be undertaken which should survey all the facts of human anatomy, physi- ology, and psychology as they bear on social organisa- tion. Social psychology is not, however, that science. It deals, within limits which are felt by all psycholo- gists to exist although there is little agreement on their details, only with the higher and more conscious facts of human behaviour. Social psychology, like all other sciences, attempts to connect the events which it observes with antecedent causes. When these causes are facts of the human type, psychologists now tend to call them by the general term "disposition." When we observe that human be- ings are normally liable to fall in love, or to feel hun- ger or curiosity, we say that man has certain "disposi- tions" which cause these results. It is further con- venient to use the term "human nature" is meaning the sum-total of the human "dispositions." A "disposition" is sometimes obviously connected with a material fact in human anatomy. A visible in- jury, for instance, to a particular region of the brain is found to impair a particular intellectual faculty or to distort the normal action of some instinct. More often no such material relation can be demonstrated, and therefore most psychologists prefer not to dogmatise as to whether an infinitely strong microscope would reveal a material "cause" of all psychological dispositions, or whether indeed, in the ultimate analysis of the uni- verse, there is such a thing as "matter" at all.^ 'Mr. McDougall, in his Social Psychology {e.g. p. 29), in order to emphasise his refusal to dogmatise on the point whether all psy- chological dispositions have a material basis, calls them "psycho- physical dispositions." 22 THE GREAT SOCIETY The next difl&culty is one of terminology. At any given moment every human being has innumerable psychological tendencies. Some of these are inherited and some are acquired ; or, to be more exact, all our in- herited tendencies are modified by acquired experience. Shall the terms "disposition" and "nature" include the acquired as well as the inherited elements? I propose to use them so as to exclude the acquired elements. It follows, of course, that at no period of his life does a man's "nature" (as I shall use the term) actually exist. Inherited psychological dispositions reveal themselves, not all at birth, but gradually during life and growth. The man has already been changed by experience be- fore most of his dispositions appear, and after its ap- pearance each disposition is constantly influenced by further experience. A man's nature, that is to say, or any one of his dispositions, is an imaginary point, from which the effects "of experience are assumed to start. The man, at any given moment, is the result of the ac- tion nf his experience on his nature. This use of words has the advantage of enabling the social psychologist to project, so to speak, all his facts on to one terminological plane. Both the habits of ordinary speech and the traditional presentation of their subject by writers on psychology have made it un- necessarily difficult to combine and compare such facts as that men feel pain, make calculations, and act in obedience to the impulse of anger. Pain is generally examined by close introspective attention to its mo- mentary character, and is therefore generally spoken of as a fact in consciousness. Rational calculation is gen- erally approached by the "logical" method of testing the validity of its various forms. It is therefore spoken SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 23 of as a process. Anger is one of those instincts which have been "explained" during the last fifty years by reference to the course of human evolution. It is therefore spoken of as a fact in human or animal in- herited structure. It is only when we project all three facts on the single plane of structure, and speak of the three dispositions to feel pain, to reason, and to become angry that the combination and comparison of such factors in any given social problem become easy.^ The statement, however, that psychological events are the result of the relation between our experience and our nature raises the metaphysical and ethical ob- jection that those who make it seem to deny free will and therefore to paralyse human energy. An able and temperate writer, for instance, in the Manchester Guardian, when reviewing a treatise on social psychol- ogy, urged : "It is apt to take us perilously near to the sort of determinism which sets out an array of inde- pendent warring motives, each fighting on its own ac- count, with the ego or self keeping the ring and regis- tering the victory of the stronger." ^ And a clerical ^A corresponding difficulty of language caused endless confusion during that "age of faith," between 1820 and 1870, when men really attempted to apply Political Economy to the conduct of social life. Payment for the use of lancf had been habitually considered from the point of view of the landlord, who reckons his possessions in units of area, and was called "rent." Payment for the use of "cap- ital," of a railway, for instance, had been habitually considered from the point of view of the investor, who reckons his savings in units of value, and was called "interest." It was therefore extraordinarily difficult for the practical man, who "believed in political economy," to treat "rent" and "interest" as comparable things, unless he forced himself to realise that the income derived from ownership of a rail- way could be calculated as rent per acre of track, and the income from land as interest per hundred pounds invested. Only within the last few years have American reformers, after wandering for a gen- eration between Henry Georgism and Marxism, begun to use phrases like "the physical valuation of railways," which make it possible to project statements about "land" and "capital" on to one plane. ^Manchester Guardian, Dec. 14, 1908. 24 THE GREAT SOCIETY speaker in the Cambridge Senate House strongly op- posed the establishment of a special examination in Psychology, on the ground that Psychology was "im- moral and mischievous, a blinding of man to the re- sponsibility of his actions." ^ This objection has always been brought against any intrusion of cause and effect into regions hitherto as- signed to the free activity of human or superhuman will. Aristophanes attacked Socrates for impiety and materialism in teaching that the clouds were mechan- ical emanations and not divine persons. Socrates him- self, in Plato's Phcedo, attacks the physiological studies of Anaxagoras on the same ground. He is explaining to his disciples why he refused to take the hint con- veyed to him by the Athenian Government that his es- cape would be connived at. Anaxagoras, he says, would argue . . . that I am sitting here because my body is composed of bones and muscles, and that the bones are hard and separ- ated by joints, while the muscles can be tightened and loosened. . . . But he would quite forget to mention the real cause, which is that, since the Athenians thought it right to condemn me, I have thought it right and just to sit here and to submit to whatever sentence they may think fit to impose. For, by the dog of Egypt, I think that these muscles and bones would long ago have been in Megara or Boeotia, prompted by their opinion of what is best, if I had not thought it better and more honourable to submit to what- ever penalty the State inflicts rather than escape by flight.^ The philosophical answer to this objection may be left to the philosophers, with the proviso that they ' Westminster Gazette, Nov. 3, 1910. "Phcedo (p. 179, Golden Treasury Series). SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 25 shall give us a conception of the relation between freedom and determinism which shall apply to the whole living universe, and that they shall not draw an arbitrary line, as some of them seem inclined to do, dividing certain facts of psychology, which are legiti- mate subjects of scientific enquiry, from others which are not. It may be sufficient here to urge the empirical consideration that, throughout the history of mankind and in every branch of science, those who have really advanced our knowledge of causes and effects have felt their energy, and even their sense of "freedom," to be increased rather than paralysed by what they have learnt. When these philosophical and terminological diffi- culties have been overcome or avoided, we are in a position to consider what should be the actual choice and arrangement of human psychological dispositions in that working "projection" (to use again the map- makers' term) of human nature, which is most con- venient for the special applied science of social psychol- ogy. The facts when chosen will, of course, include only a very small fraction of our recorded knowledge as to the human type. Not only will a vast number of facts be excluded as more appropriate to the sci- ences of anatomy and physiology, but a large propor- tion even of known psychological facts will be left to the general science of psychology. Each social psychol- ogist will, that is to say, place on his working projection only those facts which he believes to be relevant to the social problems of his age, although he will, from time to time, dip, and urge others to dip, into the sea of hitherto irrelevant facts, with the hope of discovering new causal relationships between some of them and the 26 THE GREAT SOCIETY subject-matter of his own work. Speaking generally, he will find that, while certain broad facts of human psychology are relevant to all the applied psychological sciences — pedagogic, or pathological, or social — each of the applied sciences must make its own choice of de- tails. But as soon as he begins his provisional selection of facts, the social psychologist will meet with a further question of arrangement. Shall he separate his psycho- logical facts as far as possible into their ultimate ele- ments, or gather them into the largest groups which can be shown to have a causal connection with each other? If I let a drop of hot sealing-wax fall on my finger, I feel a momentary sensation of touch followed by a prolonged sensation of pain. I jerk my hand off the table, shake it, and put my finger to my mouth. Then I look round the room, with a vague hope of finding something to cure the pain and prevent bad results. I .open perhaps a drawer in which I keep odds and ends. As I do so I remember being told that boracic powder is good for a burn, and that there is some in a room upstairs, to which I accordingly go. Any other normal human being will act more or less in the same way, and the whole process may be con- ceived of as the result of the nearer environmental fact of the hot sealing-wax, and of the more distant envir- onmental facts stored in my memory, acting on the in- herited dispositions which make up my "nature." But it is clear that my "nature" may be divided either into such "elementary" dispositions as those which make me successively feel pain, start, jerk my hand, etc., or into more "complex" dispositions producing connected series of such events. If we confine ourselves, for in- SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 27 stance, to the series of events beginning with the drop- ping of the seaUng-wax and ending with the bringing of the finger to the mouth, they may all be referred to one complex disposition which inclines me to bring any part of my body that feels a burning pain to my mouth. The same is true of my later action. It may be treated either as the result of many elementary dis- positions to perceive, to remember, to decide, etc. ; or as the one result of a single complex disposition to search, with the help both of the senses and of the memory, for means of relieving pain. The series of events chosen might have been even more complex than those which normally follow an ac- cidental bum, and the same statement would have been true. The behaviour of mothers in bringing up children, or of men in the long process of making for- tunes, or of astronomers discovering planets, may be treated as instances either of innumerable elementary dispositions, or of the three complex dispositions of mother-love, acquisitiveness, and curiosity. In dealing with particular problems the social psychologist will of course use whichever method is most convenient for his particular purpose. I shall, for instance, mainly use the complex analysis in the first part of this book, and a particular elementary anal- ysis is in the second part. But for that preliminary view of his subject-matter, which he will carry half- consciously in his mind and use for his wider specula- tions, the social psychologist will, I believe, be wise to explain human conduct rather by the complex dis- positions, which are the Greatest Common Measures 28 THE GREAT SOCIETY of human nature, than by the elementary dispositions, which are its Least Common Measures. With regard, therefore, to our elementary disposi- tions I do not propose to do more here than indicate the character of the most important of them. They are described at length in all the text-books of psychol- ogy, and include the senses, and such measurable facts as memory and association, habit and fatigue. They may be arranged on several schemes of classification, either, for instance, as physiological facts observed from outside, or (in the scheme which I shall use in the second part of this book) as forms of consciousness, such as cognition, conation (or "Will"), and feeling, observed from within. The social psychologist must know about them, but he will often get his knowledge most conveniently from books written without any spe- cial reference to social organisation. For the special needs of his science he will find that the most impor- tant point for him to realise about these elementary dispositions is the quantitative limitations of them all, the fact, for instance, that we cannot see or hear or re- member much more than was required by our earliest human ancestors, or endure much more exertion than was necessary for them in gathering food. The complex dispositions with which the social psychologists have mainly to deal may be roughly grouped as Instinct and Intelligence, and one of the reasons why social psychology has had so little influ- ence on social organisation is that it is extremely difiicult to apply to the study of Instinct and Intelli- gence the exact methods of modern natural science. Certain elementary dispositions — the senses, the re- flexes, memory, and so on — have been examined dur- SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 29 ing the last thirty years by trained experimentalists, using mechanical apparatus in specially equipped lab- oratories. These men have been able to arrange in- numerable tests under identical conditions, and there- fore to compare results with confidence and to compile exact statistical records. Their success has been un- mistakable and progressive. They have made scores of well-established discoveries on such points as the limitations and illusions of sight and hearing and touch, or of those newly observed "ampullar" and "vestibular" senses which guide some of our subconscious move- ments. Elementary mental processes, like association or memory, which we are apt to take for granted, have been also shown to be capable of precise measure- ments.^ The experimentalists have been assisted by the immense progress which has recently taken place in the general physiology of the nervous system, and indeed their greatest successes have been made in the frontier region between physiology and psychology. Many of these discoveries are being applied, or soon will be applied, to practical purposes. The schoolmas- ter is already arranging his lessons with a view to economy of effort, and will soon use immensely more effective means in testing the fitness of each pupil for any particular course.^ The nerve-doctor no longer gives his advice wholly in the dark. It is becoming possible for the men who have to handle machines or choose and employ others to do so — the aviator, the typewriter, the factory manager — to acquire a working knowledge, not only of wheels and bands and valves, 'See, e.g., C. S. Myers, Text-book of Experimental Psychology, and E. B. Titchener, Text-book of Psychology. 'See, e.g., Cyril Burt, "Experimental Tests of General Intelli- gence," British Journal of Psychology, December, 1909. 30 THE GREAT SOCIETY but also of the nervous systems which are to co- operate with them. The advertisement manager is learning how to secure that his placards shall be both noticed and remembered.^ The social psychologist, when he is dealing with those facts in human nature on which the experimen- talists have worked, receives invaluable guidance both from their results and from their method and spirit. He can now use words like pain or pleasure or habit in a clearer sense than that given by the loose associa- tions of ordinary speech. Human instincts have been made much more intelligible by recent experimental work on the instinctive behaviour of other animals. Even when he deals with reason he finds that the still more recent experimental enquiries into the forms of consciousness which accompany thought are rich in both positive and negative suggestions. But the facts of human nature which are of the greatest importance to the social psychologist are just those to which laboratory methods are least applicable. It is almost impossible to arrange a series of identical experiments to illustrate the working of patriotism or ambition or the property instinct or artistic and intel- lectual creativeness. In such matters the social psy- chologist must be content with the instances which arise in ordinary life, and must examine them by the older methods of introspection, personal evidence, and analogy. In so doing he knowingly lays himself open to the contempt of the experimentalist. Professor E. B. Titchener of Cornell, for instance, who is one of the 'See, e.g., many ingenious suggestions for the practical applica- tion of psychology to business in Professor Muensterberg's Ainer- ican Problems and Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 31 most fruitful and devoted of experimental psycholo- gists, says: For the past two thousand years psychology has been resting upon plausibiUties and probabihties. Now that we are beginning to have a psychology of facts, it is both hon- esty and policy to state where the facts end and speculative construction begins.^ Contempt of this kind will do the social psychologist no harm, and may help to guard him against that fa- cility in ad hoc psychological generalisation, of which current sociological literature is full. Much indeed that is now written by sociologists on such psycholog- ical points as "Imitation," or "Sympathy," or "The Psychology of the Crowd," ^ gives Professor Titchener ample justification for the statement that: So far is applied psychology from reliance upon the par- ent discipline, that some of its most widely used and most strongly emphasised ideas contravene established scientific principle.^ But the purpose of social psychology is to guide human action; and human action takes place in a world which pays little attention to the exact degrees of our knowledge and our ignorance. It is clear that we do possess the more complex dispositions, and that they do exercise an important influence on our social con- duct; and important causes will, in every social prob- lem, remain important, however inadequate our means of examining them may be, while unimportant causes will remain unimportant, however accurately we ob- serve and measure them. 'Titchener, Text-book oj Psychology, p. 457. "See injra, Chapter VIII. ^Titchener, "The Past Decade in Experimental Psychology," American Journal oj Psychology, 1910, xxi, pp. 404-421. CHAPTER III INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE In approaching the complex dispositions into which the facts of human nature can be divided for the pur- poses of social psychology, it is convenient to begin with the Instincts. Every treatise on psychology has its list of human instincts, and every list varies some- what from the others. Most of them, however, include hunger, parental affection, play, pugnacity, sex, hunt- ing, curiosity, fear, gregariousness, shyness, cleanliness, acquisitiveness, display, and constructiveness. To such a list each applied psychological science will make its own additions. The future science, for instance, of architectural psychology will add the aesthetic sense of symmetry, and the queer little instinct which makes us desire to sleep with our feet towards the light; while the psychology of baby-minding will emphasise the in- stinct which inclines a baby to put any small newly- observed object into its mouth. Social psychology for its part will add certain instincts which are developed at rather late periods of our growth. Among these, for instance, will be what the Germans call Wander- lust — the desire which comes on the growing boy to leave the family and set up for himself — and the two instincts which Mr. McDougall calls negative and posi- tive "self-feeling," but which I prefer to call the con- 32 CH. Ill INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 33 flicting instincts (both of them being necessary in a gregarious or semi-gregarious society) to "give a lead" to others, and "to take a lead" from others. It will also include a number of extremely intricate facts, which I shall deal with in a later chapter,^ and which are usu- ally ascribed to instincts of "Imitation" and "Sym- pathy." The best definition which I know of the whole class of instincts is that given by Mr. McDougall in his Social Psychology : We may, then, define an instinct as ^n inherited or innate psycho-physical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive and to pay attention to objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least to ex- perience an impulse to such action.^ As this definition indicates, the normal course by which an instinctive disposition reveals itself is the impact on our nervous system of some appropriate external or internal physical occurrence (called the "stimulus") followed, either simultaneously, or in suc- cession to each other, by conscious feeling and muscu- lar movement. A full psychological terminology ought ^Injra, Chapter VIII. ^W. McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 29. There are two dic- tionary meanings of the words "instinct," "instinctive," "instinctive- ly," etc., in both of which they may be correctly used. The first meaning follows from the definition of innate instinct which I have quoted above. The second meaning is "like an innate instinct" (in respect of prerational impulse, etc.), as in the statement, quoted by Mr. McDougall, that a drunkard fed on fruit "becomes instinctively a teetotaler" {Social Psychology, p. 21). The two meanings are, as he points out, often confused; and, therefore, though I think that he is wrong in holding the second to be illegitimate, it is best in psychological writing to confine oneself, as I shall do, strictly to the first. 34 THE GREAT SOCIETY (as Mr. McDougall also points out) to contain, in the case of each instinct, separate names for the disposition itself and for both the feeling and the action which re- sults from its stimulation. Ordinary language, how- ever, is not so exact. We name the Hunger instinct from the feeling, the Play instinct from the action, and Pugnacity or Acquisitiveness from the disposition itself. If we look at the phenomena of Instinct throughout the whole animal world, we find that they fall into two main groups: one group being best illustrated by the behaviour of insects and certain other animals which have their hard tissues on the surface of the body, and the other group apparently diverging at the point in evolution represented by the appearance of an internal skeleton, and best illustrated by the behaviour of man and the other higher mammals.^ A solitary wasp will seize a caterpillar of one particular species, will sting it in a particular way, lay her egg on it, and carry it to her nest to be walled in in a particular manner. She will do this only once, and after her death the wasp hatched from her egg will'go through the same ritual. Her action is not "mechanical" in the ordinary sense of the term, because it is characterised by a rapid and suc- cessful adaptation to such details as the position of the caterpillar, the obstacles to be surmounted, and the '"Zoologists divide the animal kingdom into two great groups, whose lines of descent are distinct as far down as the flat-worms. The one of these leads through the unsegmented and segmented worms to the insects, spiders, and crustaceans; the other leads through various invertebrate forms, largely extinct, to the verte- brates, and so finally to men. Students of animal behaviour also divide the animals into two great groups, those that are markedly plastic in their responses to stimulation, and those that are markedly fixed. The interes*ing point to us is that these groupings coincide" (Titchener, Text-book o} Psychology, 1910, p. 457). CH. Ill INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 35 character of the soil in which the burrow is formed. We have no evidence as to the conscious feeling which may accompany it. It may be one of conscious adapta- tion while acting and of delight in success. But it is difl&cult to believe that the wasp's action, performed as it is once for all by an animal which has never seen it done before, can be accompanied by any conscious ele- ments of memory or association or imaginative fore- casting of the result. Vertebrate animals perform in early youth actions which are analogous to the instinctive performances of the wasp. Chickens, newly hatched from the shell, all peck at seeds in the same way. Children, who have never seen other children crawling, will, at the appro- priate age, begin to crawl by making preordained movements of the legs and arms. Later on, a carefully brought-up child, who has perhaps never been really afraid before, or seen anyone really afraid, wUl in the presence of a runaway horse or of the blood from a wound, perform the purely instinctive acts of running away, screaming, hiding, etc. When such instinctive acts are gone through for the first time by a child (and, if we may argue from analogy, when they are gone through for the first time by any one of the higher vertebrates) the performer is fully aware of what he is doing, and even of his effort to adapt his action to the details of his surroundings, though he has no knowledge of what he will do next. But in the normal course of vertebrate life the chief instinctive actions are performed, not once for all, as in the case of the wasp, but repeatedly. At each repeti- tion, even in the case of birds and non-human mam- mals, memory and acquired habit must enter as forces 36 THE GREAT SOCIETY modifying both the action itself and the forms of con- sciousness which accompany the action. Not long, therefore, after birth, men, and apparently the other higher vertebrates, begin to live in an atmosphere of organised ideas, of memory, that is to say, association and imagination. An Esquimaux or Indian hunter, and, to a less degree, perhaps, an experienced old wolf, follows, it is true, an imperious instinct in seeking game, but he does so with an ever-growing memory of earlier hunts, with an exact conception of what he is going to do next, and with some prevision of the probable result. In the case of man, this irradiation of instinctive ac- tion by intelligence shades into processes in which in- telligence acts as an independent directing force. In- stead, for instance, of a purely instinctive impulse to hunt being made more effective by intelligence, our decision to hunt may itself be due to a preliminary process of reflection upon our future wants and the possible ways of satisfying them. This independent action of Intelligence is, I believe, in its simplest forms as "natural" to us, as much due to inherited disposition, as is the working of any one of the usual list of instincts. The traditional terminol- ogy, however, of the moral sciences makes it extraordi- narily diflficult either to recognise this fact or even to state it clearly. A hundred years ago professors and schoolmasters taught that men were completely "rational," and that the other animals were completely "instinctive." Men, and men alone, were born with the power of learning from experience; and the power of learning from ex- perience was at birth their whole psychological equip- ment. If different men tended to behave in the same CH. zii INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 37 way under the same circumstances, it was not because they were born with the same instincts, but because they had gone through the same experiences, and, through association and inference, had formed the same habits. Animals were as completely instinctive as men were rational. Some theologians and philoso- phers declared that all animals were unconscious au- tomata. Even those who allowed them a degree of con- sciousness were apt to state or imply that their con- duct under any given circumstances was absolutely fixed by instincts on whose perfection and independ- ence of experience the defenders of Final Causes were never tired of dwelling. A boy who had been brought up among dogs and ferrets, or a girl who had helped to manage her baby brothers and sisters, would never have dared to introduce their knowledge either of ani- mal intelligence or of human instincts into an essay on "Instinct and Reason." It did not occur, therefore, to any one except the eccentric Lord Monboddo, or Erasmus Darwin, the precursor of evolution, that a student of human psy- chology could learn anything from the psychology of animals. Jeremy Bentham troubled himself as little about the relation between animal instinct and human intelligence as he did about the relation between eigh- teenth century institutions and medieval history. The word "instinct" does not occur in the enormous index to his collected works. If, however, one translates Ben- tham into the terms of modem psychology, one may say that he divided the whole nature of man into two parts: an irresistible instinctive disposition to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and a passionless faculty of ascertaining through reason the means by which that 38 THE GREAT SOCIETY pt. i disposition can be satisfied. William Godwin, in a passage in his diary, written possibly after he had been reading Bentham, puts this position quite clearly: Reason, accurately speaking, has not the smallest de- gree of power to put any one limb or articulation of our bodies into motion. Its province in a practical view is wholly confined to adjusting the comparison between differ- ent objects of desire, and investigating the most successful mode of attaining those objects. It proceeds upon the as- sumption of their desirableness or the contrary, and neither accelerates nor retards the vehemence of their pursuit, but merely regulates its direction and points the road by which we shall proceed to our goal.^ But Bentham and Godwin, while thus apparently disparaging Reason by denying it any power over hu- man conduct, were really exaggerating its functions. If so general a thing as Happiness is taken as the sole end of action, and if Reason alone chooses the means of reaching that end. Reason becomes all-important. The utilitarians are therefore rightly called "intellec- tualists," and their "intellectualism" was the more mis- leading because they sometimes argued as if Reason always drew conclusions from its premises with me- chanical perfection, and as if those premises as they stood in the mind of any reasoning being were identi- cal with the objective facts in the world outside him. Since Darwin, however, the study of human nature on lines suggested by comparative psychology has shown that we have many different instincts, and that they dispose us not merely to search through reason for the means of satisfying them, but directly to per- form certain appropriate actions. We have learnt that 'Li/e o/ Godwin (C. K. Paul), vol. i, p. 294, under date 1798. CH. Ill INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 39 if we see a man run away or burst into tears, we are not bound to infer that he does so because his reason has selected that action for him as the best way of securing pleasure or avoiding pain. But in criticising the Intellectualism of the Utili- tarians, modern social psychologists are apt to fall into a kind of anti-intellectualism which involves a curi- ously similar fallacy. Mr. McDougall, for instance, in his Social Psychology, gives a list of "the principal human instincts." It consists (pp. 45-89) of Flight, Repulsion, Curiosity, Pugnacity, Self-abasement, Self- assertion, the Parental Instinct, Reproduction, the Gregarious Instinct, Acquisitiveness, Constructiveness. With regard to the whole list he writes, in an elo- quent passage: We may say, then, that, directly or indirectly, the in- stincts are the prime movers of all human activity ; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct) every train of thought, how- ever cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along towards its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the end of all activities, and supply the driving power by which all men- tal activities are sustained ; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means towards these ends, is but the instrument by which those impulses seek their satisfactions, while pleasure and pain do but serve to guide them in their choice of the means. Take away these instinctive dispositions with their pow- erful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind ; it would lie inert and motionless like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam-engine whose fires had been drawn.^ ^Social Psychology, p. 44. 40 THE GREAT SOCIETY pt. i The first defect, as it seems to me, in this statement is that Mr. McDougall does not project his facts as to Reason and Instinct on to one plane. He distinguishes between "instinctive impulses" and "intellectual ap- paratus." Fear, for instance, he would apparently say, is "impulse," and Thought is "apparatus." But Fear and Thought, if we project our dispositions on to the plane of consciousness, are both impulses; and if we project them on to the plane of structure they are both of them "apparatus." Both, that is to say, to quote again Mr. McDougall's own definition of Instinct, are "psychophysical dispositions, which determine their possessors to . . . pay attention to objects of a certain class . . . and to act in regard to them in a particular manner." ^ Mr. McDougall indeed himself includes Curiosity in his list of Instincts, although he would find it difficult to say that the "particular man- ner" in which Curiosity inclines us to "act" does not involve "mental activity" and the use of "intellectual apparatus." But behind this (as it seems to me) for- mal fallacy lies, I believe, a real difference between Mr. McDougall and myself. Mr. McDougall does not hold, as I hold, that we are born with a tendency, un- der appropriate conditions, to think, which is as origi- nal and independent as our tendency, under appro- priate conditions, to run away. The anti-intellectualism of M. Ribot's Psychology of the Emotions does not involve the same formal fal- lacy as that which appears to me to be contained in the passage which I have quoted from Mr. McDougall. He dwells on a true and regrettable fact of human ' Ante, p. 33. CH. Ill INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 41 nature, that the physiological and instinctive dispo- sitions have more compelling force than the intelli- gent dispositions; although he seriously exaggerates its truth. "Who does not know," he says, "that intellec- tual passions are mere phantoms which a real passion sweeps away like a gust of wind?" ^ And again, "What is fundamental in the character is the instincts, ten- dencies, impulses, desires, and feelings, all these and nothing else." ^ But when Mr. Leslie Stephen wrote: "Men are not governed by their abstract principles, but by their passions and emotions," ® one recognises that his dis- trust of rationalism again uses the fallacy of the two planes to give itself an apparent logical cogency, as when a farmer's distrust of book-learning makes him say : "Lads get on in the world not by algebra, but by hard work." ''Psychology of the Emotions (Eng. Trans.), p. 393. 'Ibid., p. 390. ' The English Utilitarians, vol. ii, p. 329. I turned, when writing the passage above, somewhat anxiously to the pages of my Human Nature in Politics, in which I myself attacked the intellectualism of Bentham and his followers, to see whether I there fell into the same kind of anti-iptellectualism which I here criticise. I find there little or nothing which I should like to withdraw. I should, how- ever, for my present purpose, write with a somewhat different em- phasis. And there is one sentence which I should wish to modify, that in which I say: "Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolution- ary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified" (p. 25h This distinction between instinctive "impulse" and intellectual "process" seems to me to be open to the same accusation of projection on two planes which I have made above against Mr. McDougall's state- ment. I should now write it: "Instinctive impulses, it is now agreed, have an evolutionary history of their own earlier than the history of those intellectual impulses by which they are often di- rected and modified." I am the more inclined to make this correc- tion after reading the headlines of a review of my Human Nature in Politics in the New York City Mail, where it is described as a "Startling analysis" of "a field of action into which reason seldom enters." 42 THE GREAT SOCIETY Professor E. Ray Lankester rightly told the Biolo- gical Society of Paris, in 1899, that "the mechanisms of intelligence" are "later in the history of the develop- ment of the brain" than "the mechanisms of instinct," but I know of no evidence to justify his further state- ment that the latter "can only develop in proportion as the former become feeble and defective." ^ All social historians who treat of the nineteenth century are agreed as to the practical evils which re- sulted from the intellectualist bias of utilitarian poli- tics and economics. The horrors of the early factory system were prolonged by the authoritative doctrine that both parties in any industrial contract might be trusted to secure their own "interest" ; while those who "believed in Political Economy" tended to inhibit their own disposition towards pity for the victims of indus- trial processes, because of a confused theory that dis- interested pity either did not exist, or existed without ' Nature, April 26, 1900, pp. 624, 625.— The present position of the controversy as to the relation between Instinct and Reason is admirably illustrated by a symposium held in July, 1910, at a joint meeting of the Aristotelian Society and the British Psychological Association, and reported in the British Journal of Psychology for October, 1910. Professor C. S. Myers, who opened the discussion, took, as I read him, essentially the position which I have adopted in this chapter, i.e., that the various types of "instinctive" and "in- telligent" behaviour all involve a "conscious awareness of end," and all are plastic under the influence of experience and effort, but that "instincts" are relatively more fixed and less conscious, and the in- telligent dispositions relatively more conscious and less fixed. "In what," he sa,ys, "is ordinarily called instinctive behaviour, the innate mechanism is relatively fixed and gi\'en; in what is ordinarily called intelligent behaviour the mechanism is relatively plastic and ac- quired" (p. 270). And again: "Thus the psychology and physiology of instinct are inseparable from the psychology and physiology of intelligence. There is not one nervous apparatus for instinct and another for intelligence. We ought to speak, not of instinct and intelligence, but of instinct-intelligence, treating the two as one indivisible mental function, which, in the course of evolution, has approached now nearer to so-called instinct, now nearer to so-called intelligence" (p. 267). He suggests that the word "Instinct" might CH. .1. INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 43 any scientific right to do so. Electoral systems both in England and America were during the nineteenth century often constructed on the assumption that any voter would certainly choose, among a long and com- plicated list of candidates, or in a chaos of overlapping authorities, the representative who would bring about his greatest happiness — and the slums of London and New York are in part the consequence. One of the reasons of the failure of the revolutionary martyrs of 1848, and of two generations of Russian reformers, was that many of them assumed that, as soon as they issued a proclamation, it would be known, understood, and acted upon by every one concerned. But the loose anti-intellectualism which now threat- ens to take the place of the old intellectualism may prove to be infinitely more dangerous in the twentieth century. An internecine European war is the one enormous disaster which overhangs our time ; and such a war is made more possible whenever thought is rep- resented as the mere servant of the lower passions, and be used, as I use the word "disposition" for the whole Instinct-Intel- ligence series. "In one book," he says (Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals oj Child Study), "I find enumerated the instincts of imitation, curi- osity, and play; the expressive, aesthetic, moral, and religious in- stincts; the parental and social instincts; the collecting, constructive, destructive, and fighting instincts. May we not complete the list by adding the instincts of thought, reason, intelligence?" (p. 215). But he suddenly, and, as it seems to me, quite unnecessarily, falls into what I have called the "two planes fallacy." Having care- fully explained that the difference between the instinctive and in- telligent dispositions is a quantitative one, i.e., consists in the rela- tive importance of certain factors in each, he goes on to say: "These two terms (Instinct and Intelligence) we must recognise as pure abstractions relating to different aspects of the same mental processes, not to different mental processes" {ibid., p. 268) ; and (p. 218), "Instinct regarded from within becomes intelligence; intelli- gence regarded from without becomes instinct." A difference of aspect is for the purpose of his argument no difference at all. 44 THE GREAT SOCIETY a cynical struggle for life as the only condition which answers to the deeper facts of our nature. The French syndicalist writers, as I shall show in a later chapter/ have constructed a whole philosophy of anarchism on an anti-intellectualist basis. In England, perhaps the most obvious effect of the new trend of thought is seen in current ecclesiastical apologetic. An able reviewer, for instance, in the Church Times of September 9, 1910, writes: On the whole, it is true to say that in the great decisions of life, when we have to choose between Christianity and infidelity; between Anglicanism and Romanism; between Conservatism and Socialism — the decision is only made superficially on intellectual grounds, and would be made all the same however much weaker the evidence was. With the increase in our knowledge of psychology, which is to be an- ticipated in the next few years, this will probably become much clearer. 2 Dr. A. W. Robinson spoke even more clearly to the Church Congress in 1909: The function of the intellect is to find reasons for a course of action which, on other than intellectual grounds, we are inclined to desire or approve.^ One is curiously reminded of certain advice which that old fox. King Leopold I. of Belgium, gave to his niece Victoria on her accession to the English throne: A rule which you may thus early impress on your mind is, that people are far from acting generally according to 'Chapter XII. ° Church Times, September 9, 1910. The itahcs are my own ^Ibid., October 8, 1909. CH. in INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 45 the dictation of their interest, but oftener in consequence of their passions. And The Established Church I also recommend strongly. You cannot, without pledging yourself to anything in par- ticular, say too much on the subject. ' The philosophy of syndicalism constitutes, I believe, a very real danger to Trade Unionism in France. An anti-intellectualist apologetic may in the end prove to be an equally real danger to the Church in England. Thought may be late in evolution, it may be deplorably weak in driving power, but without its guidance no man or organisation can find a safe path amid the vast impersonal complexities of the universe as we have learnt to see it. But even if, as I believe. Intelligence is as truly a part of our inherited nature, and as independent a cause of human action as any of the traditional list of instincts, it is not a sufficient analysis of the facts merely to add a single disposition to the rest and call it Intelligence. There are at least two dispositions. Curiosity and "Trial and Error," which sometimes cause action which is rather instinctive than intelli- gent, and sometimes action which is rather intelligent than instinctive. And there are two other dispositions (which I shall call Thought and Language) whose action is normally, if not invariably, intelligent. Curiosity may be placed almost exactly on the doubt- ful line which divides Instinct from Intelligence. In its simplest form this disposition was apparently ' Queen Victoria's Letters, February 3, 1837, and June 23, 1837. 46 THE GREAT SOCIETY evolved as a means of enabling living beings to avoid danger, or gain advantage, from objects which were too unusual to excite, at their first appearance, any one of the more specific instincts, but which might do so on nearer inspection. Under its influence a human being or other higher animal experiences a strong im- pulse to go cautiously up to the unusual object, and to examine it by touch, smell, etc., as well as by the sense (usually sight or hearing) by which it was first observed. During the approach and examination, the larger muscles are tightened, so as to be ready for in- stantaneous reaction when the more specific instinct (fear, for instance, or hunger, or the hunting instinct) shall have been stimulated. In so far as these bodily movements constitute the essence of the process there is nothing to distinguish Curiosity from any one of the ordinary list of instincts. But the behaviour characteristic of Curiosity is nor- mally (and not merely as the result of acquired habit) accompanied by certain activities of our intellectual powers. We are, when curious, conscious of a strong effort of attention, which increases the fertility both of memory and association ; and both in the child and in the adult Curiosity may be stimulated by an idea pre- sented by memory or association as well as by an ex- ternal fact. Sometimes the astronomer who sits at his telescope watching, in a passion of Curiosity, a newly flaming star, finds that all that is left of the impulse towards cautious approach with a view to the stimula- tion of some bodily act, is a quickened pulse or a slight and rather troublesome trembling of his hand. The heightening of attention and memory acting on his organised system of ideas and experience becomes CH. II. INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 47 the essential element of the whole process. If, there- fore, a distinction is to be drawn between Instinct and Intelligence, the disposition of Curiosity may in his case be classed as almost purely intelligent. The disposition again, which students of animal be- haviour call "Trial and Error," provides a process by which an animal can find a means of satisfying some strong instinctive desire, when the bodily acts charac- teristic of the simpler instincts have failed to do so. Under such circumstances the animal begins a succes- sion of random movements, accompanied, apparently, by intense and often distressing nervous excitement. One of these movements may succeed in producing a useful result. If so, and if the same difficulty recurs again, the process will be gone through in a shortened form. Finally, the successful act will be repeated with no preliminary random movements, and a useful habit will have been formed. The Trial and Error process may take place, even among mankind, with little or no accompaniment of intelligence. An absent-minded man, with a new pocket for his railway-ticket, may go through the whole ritual of random search every morning for a fortnight while he is reading his newspaper, and may finally acquire a new and useful habit of which he is completely unconscious. A stupid cook will attack the handles and valves of a new stove with no more intelligence than is used by a goldfish darting about a new tank. But normally the nervous excitement characteristic of Trial and Error brings memory and association into vigorous play, and the bodily acts are accompanied and in part controlled by a stream of 48 THE GREAT SOCIETY more or less conscious recollections and inferences.^ Many uneducated people, indeed, can only do intellec- tual work in the mental attitude of Trial and Error, though the random muscular movements which ac- company their efforts are worse than useless to them. I remember that a railway porter once said to me, "Jim Brown is working to pass his examination as a signalman, and it has got so on his mind that he jumped up in bed last night and blacked his wife's eye." In the case of Thought the essential functions of the disposition are clearly intellectual. The word "thought" is used in many senses. Sometimes, for instance, it means the whole content of consciousness, sometimes the act of logical inference. I mean here by the disposition of Thought our tendency to carry out the process of reflection or "thinking" — the process to which we refer when we say that we stopped what we were doing in order to "think." The chief external sign of Thought in this sense is a bodily inertia, which contrasts sharply with the tight- ened muscles of Curiosity, or the random movements of Trial and Error. The thinker is either perfectly still ^ Comparative psychologists are not agreed as to the extent to which mental association accompanies or controls the "Trial and Error" process among animals. Professor Hobhouse in his Mind and Evolution (1901), chap, vii., explains clearly the difference existing at that time between his own conclusions and those of Pro- fessor Thorndyke. But Thorndyke in his Animal Intelligence (1911), especially in chap, v., seems to come nearer to Hobhouse's position. In any case the experimental evidence shows a marked distinction between the processes of learning in the monkeys and apes and those in other mammals, the primates in that respect approaching very much more closely to the human type. Gregarious hunting animals, as every one knows who has watched a pack of hounds at work, go through a process which may be called Collective Trial and Error. The whole pack are then in the characteristic state of restless excitement, and all follow the lead of any one of them who hits on the scent. CH. II, INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 49 or performs unconsciously some monotonous and in- stinctive movement like walking. Mr. H. P. Robinson describes this characteristic bodily condition in a book written after observing the behaviour of the apes and monkeys in the Zoological Gardens. "What is it that they think about so hard?" he asks. "That their thoughts have no relation to their actions is obvious; for not one of them but will sit for half an hour, graver than Confucius, only to break off suddenly to pick with intensity of concentration a straw to pieces." ^ Here we obviously see a transference from a condition of Thought to the completely different and less purely intellectual condition of Curiosity. Most people who have watched a good sheep-dog on a warm afternoon, as he lies motionless but open-eyed with his nose be- tween his paws, will believe that he too falls from time to time into the state of Thought. In the case of man, where alone we can get evidence by introspection, this bodily condition is strictly sub- ordinate to a mental activity, consisting, in its simplest form, of an automatic succession of ideas and feelings, which, by a process not yet differentiated as memory, or imagination, or reasoning, arrange themselves into organised relations. When once started, the process may sink below the level of consciousness, and may continue during sleep, or when we are engaged on some other occupation, provided that that occupa- tion makes no urgent call on our attention. If that which happens to us during such a state of Thought happens also to the sheep-dog, his memory, when the moment of action comes, will in consequence be better arranged and more available, his. inferences more '0/ Distinguished Animals, H. Perry Robinson (1910), p. 155. 50 THE GREAT SOCIETY rapid, his "wits," as we say, "more about him" than if it had never occurred. Thought is normally accompanied by a general feel- ing of quiet pleasantness, which is also in sharp con- trast to the "excitement" of Curiosity or the "worry" of Trial and Error. Of these three potentially or definitely intellectual dispositions it may have been Thought which was most helpful to primitive man in taking the first steps from a mainly instinctive to a largely intelligent life. Early man must have shared to the full the proverbial Curi- osity of the monkey. His mobile hands and restless nervous system must have made the process of Trial and Error more effective in him than in any other animal. But he may have learnt most when, in periods of waking or dreaming reverie, he wove his random memories and associations into a more or less organ- ised whole. One may suppose that in the higher non-human ani- mals Thought is always a quasi-automatic process. It comes on, that is to say, under favourable circum- stances without an effort, and as long as it lasts is uncontrolled by any conscious purpose. It may be that in man, as far as his purely inherited nature is concerned, the same is true, and that the only con- tinued and independent Thought "natural" to him is the deep, undirected meditation of the shepherd or the fisherman. If so, the essential fact which has made the Great Society possible is the discovery, handed down by tradition and instruction, that Thought can be fed by deliberately collected material, and stimu- lated, sustained, and, to a certain .extent, controlled by an effort of the will. The "natural" boy begins to CH. „. INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 51 turn into the civilised man when the schoolmaster tells him to stop "dreaming" and to "think," though it is often only after a period of painful confusion and mis- understanding that he discovers that the thinking which he is told to attempt is a kind of controlled dreaming.^ Shepherds and fishermen make no such effort, and sometimes acquire thereby a quality of mind which the townsman, with his handier, more controlled and, for most purposes, more effective cleverness, finds himself envying. But man would not have been able to create the enormous intellectual gap between himself and the other animals if he had not also evolved the disposition of Language. By Language I here mean our inherited inclination to express and to receive ideas by symbols, i.e., not only by speech and writing, but also by drawing and significant gestures. It is indeed only the fear of neologism which prevents me from using some more inclusive term such as "symbolism." This disposition is apparently peculiar to man. Other animals, like dogs, wolves, and certain species of birds, communicate to each other by means of sounds and movements, or even by the secretion of strong odours, the fact that their instincts of fear, or hunger, or sex, or hunting have been excited by some appropriate stimulus. But the difference between such a communication of emo- tional states and the communication by man of ideas which may be almost passionless is so great as to be qualitative rather than quantitative. The absence, indeed, of a close analogy in that re- spect between man and any of the other higher ani- mals might create a presumption that Language (like "See later, Chapter X. 52 THE GREAT SOCIETY the use of any one of the languages) is a habit, newly learnt by each generation, rather than a true inherited disposition.^ The evidence, however, in favour of inheritance seems clear. It consists partly in the well- known physiological discovery of definite "speech" and "word-deafness" areas in the normal human brain, and partly in the behaviour of children and savages. No one who has closely watched a child "learning to speak" in his second year will doubt that, while his actual vocabulary is acquired, the inclination to use significant vocables is inherited. Even in drawing there is apparently a greater similarity in the way in which, for instance, children or savages symbolise the human figure than can be explained by the learning of a purely conventional art. But it is worth while noting that the problems raised by the inclusion of Language as a true disposition offer a useful reminder that my distinctions, both between "simple" and "complex" dispositions, and between "in- herited" dispositions and "acquired" powers, are apt, like almost all classifications, to produce conceptions ' Mr. McDougall, e.g., in his Social Psychology, p. 49, lays down the rule that: "If a similar emotion and impulse are clearly dis- played in the instinctive activities of the higher animals, that fact will afford a strong presumption that the emotion and impulse are primary and simple; on the other hand, if no such instinctive activ- ity occurs among the higher animals, we must suspect the affective state in question of being either a complex composite emotion or no true emotion." This rule should not, however, be adhered to as against actual evidence indicating the existence of a disposition in man which has not yet been demonstrated in other animals. Biol- ogists now tell us that anthropoid apes are not very near collateral relations of man. The nearer types have died out. If the anthro- poid apes had themselves died out, man would have had many dis- positions peculiar to himself. Mr. F. E. Beddard tells me, e.g., that experiments at the Zoolog- ical Gardens show that the instinctive fear of reptiles as such is confined to the young of man and of the higher apes, who perhaps shared with early man ancestors that were once nearly exterminated by tree-climbing snakes. CH. n. INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 53 rather more definite than are the facts at the hmits of each class. I might, for instance, have classified Lan- guage as a "simple" disposition, on the ground that the utterance of words is a much less prolonged process than is the behaviour, e.g., characteristic of Mother- Love or Curiosity. And, again, the evolution (whether through Natural Selection or a succession of "sports") of our inherited disposition to use language must have needed (one might almost say, must have been para- sitic upon) the simultaneous existence of a growing body of conventional forms of expression newly "ac- quired" by each generation. We are now in a position to conclude the argument of the last two chapters. Man, I have said, inherits a nature, whether "material" or "vital," or "spiritual," containing many thousands of dispositions which in- cline him to react in various ways to appropriate stim- uli. Many of these dispositions should be left rather to anatomy and physiology than to psychology. The psychological dispositions may be divided roughly into comparatively simple facts like the senses, memory, fa- tigue, etc., and the more complex facts of Instinct and Intelligence. The instinctive and intelligent dispositions do not form a single continuum. Fear is a 'different thing from Curiosity, and Trial and Error from Thought. But they do form a series across which it is very diffi- cult to draw broad lines of demarcation. We may arrange that series in order of apparent evolutionary origin, beginning at the bottom with such facts as hunger and sex, which we share with the whole of the vertebrate, and almost the whole of the animal, king- 54 THE GREAT SOCIETY dom, and ending at the top with those intellectual faculties which are either peculiar to man, or shared, in a more rudimentary form, by only a few of the higher mammals. That series will, if followed from bottom to top, be marked on the whole by increasing consciousness, and by decreasing fixity and driving power, or, what is the same thing, increasing plasticity. Our thinking is more easily modified by our environ- ment than our appetite, just as our appetite is more easily modified than the way in which we walk or breathe. If we look at the Instinctive and Intelligent dispo- sitions as one series, we can also see that the various dispositions do not act in isolation, but that many of them are normally connected with each other. Ob- structed Sex-Love, for instance, normally produces a violent outbreak of Pugnacity, and Fear is still more closely connected with Mother-Love. Sometimes two dispositions like Fear and Curiosity are, so to speak, rivals. They are normally set in action by closely similar stimuli and may be observed to alternate rap- idly. Self-Assertion and Humility (the "Give a Lead" and "Take a Lead" instincts) alternate in the same way. Facts like these may, indeed, indicate that with increased knowledge we may ultimately come to look upon the separate human dispositions less as isolated facts ascertained by empirical observation than as the results of a wider causal relationship. My two chapters, of course, give only the barest outline of the human psychological dispositions. They are rather a diagram than even a sketch. I shall de- scribe in later chapters with more detail certain dis- positions which are of special importance to the social CH. Ill INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE 55 psychologist. But I shall not hope even to indicate all those inherited psychological factors which, with individual variations, go to make up the human moral type, the factors which justify us in saying that a man's "character" is like that of his mother or of his grand- father,^ or that the "psychology" of a novel or play is "all wrong," in that a character who did or said one thing would not have done or said another. Such a diagram, however, while it will not enable any one to dispense with the help of experience and insight, may at least be useful in affording centres of crystallisa- tion for experience, and in warning us of certain gross errors in social calculation. Finally, it must always be remembered that social psychology is a specialised science, dealing only with a special group of the causes of human actions. The statesman who wishes to organise mankind wisely, or even the social psychologist when he takes it upon himself to give direct advice to the statesman, must know or estimate the results of many other sciences. Before we know how any particular body of people will be affected by any particular measure we must know not only their nature but the environment, intellectual and physical, which results from their history and their surroundings. And social psychology can never lead men to wise practical conclusions unless it keeps in view its rela- tion to that science of human breeding which Sir Fran- cis Galton named Eugenics. Every change in social organisation affects not only the harmony between the 'See, for instance, the persistence (greater, apparently, than would be due to family tradition) with which a certain type of dry conservative learning appeared among the nephews and great- nephews of Wordsworth. 56 THE GREAT SOCIETY existing generation and its surroundings, but the con- ditions which affect the physical and mental inheri- tance of succeeding generations. I remember, during a debate at the London County Council Education Committee, hearing it seriously proposed by an ex- perienced representative that we should attempt to prevent more than one child in any family from re- ceiving a scholarship. The proposer of this regulation pointed out that there were certain families in which practically all the children got scholarships and that this was "unfair." It never occurred to him that he was trying to penalise the begetting of children in those few but all-important cases in which general mental ability appears as what the Mendelians call a "pre- potent" biological factor. On the other hand, when Professor Bourne argues that "Hygiene, education, so- cial institutions may improve the lot of the individual, but they cannot produce any permanent effect on the race," ^ one finds oneself wondering whether he seri- ously expects that eugenic science will progress, or eugenic motives and methods be effective in a society unhygienic, uneducated, and unorganised. 'Gilbert C. Bourne, The Herbert Spencer Lecture (1900), p. 36. CHAPTER IV DISPOSITION AND ENVIRONMENT In the last two chapters I have referred only inci- dentally to those facts in our environment which con- stitute the "appropriate stimuli" of our dispositions. I have assumed that not only do we inherit the dis- positions of Love and Fear and Curiosity, but that women and children also exist for men to love, dan- gerous things for men to fear, and unusual things for men to be curious about. In this chapter I shall examine the general relation between our dispositions and the environment which stimulates them. The first point brought out by such an examination is that dispositions which seem, when considered by themselves, to be homogeneous are found, when ex- amined in relation to their stimuli, to consist of many independently varying tendencies. Fear, for instance, if its manifestations in the consciousness and bodily movements of different men are alone thought of, will appear to vary only in the degree of its intensity. But when the external causes which excite fear are examined it will be found that different men are not only afraid in different degrees, but are afraid of dif- ferent things. Some men have an instinctive fear of precipitous heights, others of the sea or of a crowd, 67 58 THE GREAT SOCIETY and a well-known British general is said to have a fear of cats. Nerve-doctors have invented a number of Greek or semi-Greek words such as agoraphobia, och- lophobia, claustrophobia to designate such special fears when they reach a pathological intensity.^ Hunger, again, may be excited (apart from the ef- fects of habit and training) in different men by very different stimuli. The same is true of the intellectual dispositions. In the case of "bom" artists or "born" musicians or scientists, Curiosity and Thought are stimulated in one child by objects which leave another child entirely uninterested. The second point concerns that process of recog- nition (of "perception" — to use the technical psycho- logical term) on which the stimulation of a disposition in any given case depends. We do not desire to eat an apple until we recognise (to use a somewhat intel- lectualist term) it as an apple. But this faculty of recognition is (apart from -experience) to a certain ex- tent elastic. All the apples in the world, or all the snakes, differ in some respects from each other ; so that if a man is born with a taste for "apples," or a fear of "snakes," his taste or fear are stimulated by any one of a number of somewhat different objects. It would be extremely useful if an experimental "psychologist would test this elasticity in the case of a strongly marked human instinct, and would check his results by experiments of the same kind on one of the higher animals. Some one perhaps who is fortunate enough to possess a highly specialised instinct of a kind not 'See the admirable analysis of various types of Fear (based upon thousands of answers to a questionnaire) by Professor G. Stanley Hall in the American Journal oj Psychology (1897). Seo also Note A on p. 68. CH. IV DISPOSITION AND ENVIRONMENT 59 easily modified by experience, might submit himself to such a series of experiments. The test stimuli might, in a case of cat-fear, include a series of feline animals, more or less nearly related to the common cat, an animal which looks like a cat but belongs to a different genus, a recently dead cat, a living cat in a glass box, a stuffed cat unscented, a stuffed cat scented, the same with a mechanical purr, and finally a series of mental images of a cat, which might range from a strong induced belief that a cat was in the room (when, in fact, no cat was there) to the image produced by talk- ing or thinking or dreaming (in a hypnotic trance) about a cat. Corresponding experiments might be made in a case of specialised animal fear, such as that which,horses are said to have for camels. One supposes that the process of recognition in these cases would not be found to be like a gun-lock, which delivers the same blow whether the pull on the trig- ger, provided that it is enough to release the spring, is heavy or light; but that its effect would be stronger or weaker according to the nearness of the particular stimulus to some type which would constitute the apex of a "polygon of variation," of which the ordinate was the degree of fear and the abscissa the degree of varia- tion from that type. In the case of cat-fear, the most intense fear might be found to be created, not by the domestic cat, but by some feline from that part of the Malay Archipelago in which the remains of Pithe- canthropus have been found. The domestic cat might be discovered to produce the same amount of fear (measured by pulse disturbance) as a carefully stuffed and scented specimen of the Malaysian animal. The fact that we in England never see that special kind of 60 THE GREAT SOCIETY cat would not prevent, for hundreds of generations, men being born with that special kind of fear. A Lon- doner may be born with an abnormal fear of snakes, and may die an old man without discovering that fact. The whole human race, indeed, may still inherit a special fear of some extinct species of saurian or woolly elephant.^ But while the strength of the stimulation of any instinct in man or other animals may depend through- out on the degree of the external likeness of the stimu- lus to a mean type, the usefulness of the resulting action depends, not on the degree, but on the charac- ter of that likeness, whether, that is to say, it is rele- vant to the original advantage or danger which the disposition was evolved to secure or avoid. If a gull has a highly specialised instinct which enables it to catch pilchards, and if herrings take the place of pil- chards in the seas to which the gulls of that species resort, the pilchard-instinct will still be useful, al- though it may be somewhat weakened and confused, and although every now and then a bird may choke itself by swallowing too large a fish. But the pilchard- instinct will be worse than useless to the gull if it is stimulated by a fisherman's bait made to look like a pilchard, or by the reflected light from a bit of wet seaweed. Throughout the whole process of evolution there has indeed been a constant and enormous waste of life and effort due to the laying of eggs in the wrong places because they look rather like the right places, and ' A letter to the Times of March 25, 1914, describes a man with a special fear of a certain species of Australian spiders, large enough to be dangerous to a baby monkey. It is interesting that an imita- tion spider (used in a practical joke) did not affect him. CH. ,v DISPOSITION AND ENVIRONMENT 61 the capture of uneatable things because they are of the same' size or colour as some eatable things. The process by which animals recognise harmful or useful objects has always been rough and inaccurate, and the queer ingenuity of natural selection has provided all sorts of means by which one living thing takes advan- tage of the mistakes of another. Flowers are fertilised because they smell like carrion, insects escape because they look like twigs or wasps, and a cruel little South American weasel has become almost exactly like the squirrels on which he preys. But it is in civilised man that the relation between disposition and stimulus is most complex. Man is born with a set of dispositions related, clumsily enough but still intelligibly, to the world of tropical or sub-tropical wood and cave which he inhabited during millions of years of slow evolution, and whose main characteris- tics changed little over vast periods of time. The story of civilisation begins when he was driven by hunger or by insect-borne disease to go North and South into new climates. There his comparatively plastic intelli- gence enabled him to sustain life under new conditions, not in the main by evolving new dispositions, but by acquiring new habits, and by making clothes, houses, and other modifications of his material surroundings. At no period was he, apparently, either in the old environment or the new, very successful in creating a harmony between himself and his world. Students of pre-history tell us, for instance, that the disposition of Fear, which originally gave man and his animal prede- cessors a rather inefficient protection from being killed by carnivorous beasts, tormented him all through the Stone Ages because it was stimulated by dreams and 62 THE GREAT SOCIETY omens and by the belief in malevolent supernatural beings. There is evidence that perversions of the sex instinct by inappropriate stimuli may have begun among our ancestors before they could be called men. In our time the coming of the Great Society has created an environment in which, for most of us, neither our instinctive nor our intelligent dispositions find it easy to discover their most useful stimuli. Any one who desires to appreciate this should visit one of those "casual labour" quarters in London, where mod- ern civilisation has so disastrously failed, and where the facts of life are hidden neither by conventional manners nor by the privacy which is possible in the great half-empty houses of the well-to-do. Stay there, walking and watching, from the afternoon closing of the schools till the return home of the men. Look at the windows of the newsagents and tobacconists, and the frank display in the dingy little chemists' shops. Listen to the women coming out of the "off-licence" grocery, and the girls who are waiting to enter the music-halls and the cinematograph theatres. Notice what part of the evening paper the men are reading. The people round you are of all ages from infancy to dotage; and you can see what it is that here stimu- lates the instincts which one by one appear in the growth of a human being. The babies are tugging at dirty india-rubber teats. The sweet shops are selling hundredweights of bright-coloured stuff, which excites the appetite of the children without nourishing their bodies. That pale-faced boy first knew love, not when he looked at a girl whom later he might marry, but when a dirty picture post-card caught his eye or he watched a suggestive film. His dreams of heroism are CH. IV DISPOSITION AND ENVIRONMENT 63 satisfied by halfpenny romances, half criminal and half absurd. Loyalty and comradeship mean sticking to his street gang ; and the joy of constructive work means the money which he can get for riding behind a van or running messages. The men are never far removed from the two great social forces of gambling and alcohol. If the desire of change, of risk, of achievement comes on, then the bookmaker is always round the comer; and the pub- lican will give at any moment, for a few pence, that dreaming reverie, that sense of the tremendous signifi- cance of the world, which led their ancestors, sitting at the tent door or among the mountain sheep, to the beginnings of philosophy and science. And because the new facts by which our dispositions are now stimu- lated are only inexact substitutes for the old facts by which they were stimulated during the long process of evolution, the stimulation itself is weak and capricious. Even the enthusiasm of the group at the public-house door, who are discussing a glove-fight, seems, as you watch them, to be thin and half-hearted. A little farther on the street widens, because a hun- dred years ago it used to cross a village green. You hear a tired and springless hymn-tune, and stop while a Salvation Army preacher shouts a quotation from St. Paul: If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. He is imploring his scanty following of women and children, and the few inattentive passers-by, to strive and pray till all those instincts which can be put to 64 THE GREAT SOCIETY such evil use have been killed out of their souls. You remember as you listen that in the tall tenement- building behind you, or in the new brick suburb a mile or two away, there are thousands of men and women who are making perhaps the most heroic effort to "mor- tify the deeds of the body" that ever has been at- tempted. They are mainly impelled, not by the theol- ogy of Blood and Fire, but by an intense longing to be "respectable," to have some meaning and dignity in their own lives and those of their children, to be rid of the hopeless yielding to temptation, the weak shame, the squalor and disease of the life from which they have so hardly escaped. Neither father nor mother spend a halfpenny or a half hour without calculation, the children are carefully dressed in clothes which they dare not spoil, and are strictly confined, except for occasional holidays, to house or school. And yet in a poor district the school medical officer may report that the children of the more respectable families are physically and nervously in a worse condition than the rest.^ For we cannot in St. Paul's sense "mortify" our dis- positions. If they are not stimulated, they do not therefore die, nor is the human being what he would be if they had never existed. If we leave unstimu- lated, or, to use a shorter term, if we "baulk" any one ' See, e.g., Dr. Bishop Harman, quoted in the Report of the Med- ical Officer to the London School Board for 1903, p. 14. "The chil- dren are of a respectable class. They are well fed and well clothed, but are altogether a flabby and pappy lot. . . . The children are too respectable to play in the street. They have no near park or fields; their back gardens or house rooms are small, so that they do not compare favourably (save in cleanliness) with children in poorer quarters who play freely in the open air." On the whole question see Miss Jane Addams' admirable book, The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets. OH. IV DISPOSITION AND ENVIRONMENT 65 of our main dispositions, Curiosity, Property, Trial and Error, Sex, and the rest, we produce in ourselves a state of nervous strain. It may be desirable in any par- ticular case of conduct that we should do so, but we ought to know what we are doing. The baulking of each disposition produces its own type of strain; but the distinctions between the tj^pes are, so far, unnamed and unrecognised, and a trained psychologist would do a real service to civilised life if he would carefully observe and describe them. One peculiarity of the state of "baulked disposi- tion" is that it is extremely difl&cult for the sufferer to find his own way out of it. The stimulus must come from outside. When once he is "dull" or "flat" or "sick of things" or whatever the name may be which he gives to his feehngs, he cannot, unless he is a man of quite exceptional resource and nervous elasticity, invent anything to do which will "stimulate" him. Now, for instance, that the European nations keep hun- dreds of thousands of men under arms in time of peace, the colonels of regiments and the captains of war- ships know by experience that their men become "fid- getty" or "fed up" by a life which gives play only to a few dispositions; and when that occurs they pre- scribe in a haphazard way a smoking concert, or a route march, or a football match, or, on board ship, a dance, or clothes-mending, or gun drill, for them all alike. A skilled London hostess is more successful when she goes round a room full of bored celebrities, applying to each an appropriate stimulus: "Miss Jones so wants to know about your last voyage," or, "Here is a friend of Mr. Brown" (a scientific opponent), or, more simply, "I want to introduce you to that girl 66 THE GREAT SOCIETY with the beautiful hair," until each is roused to that "energy of the soul" which is Aristotle's definition of happiness. If one looks at a respectable crowd in a London park on the afternoon of a Bank holiday, one feels an intense longing for the appearance of a thou- sand such hostesses and of a social system which would enable them to get to work.^ This want of harmony, in great things and in small, 'If, however, we are to learn how by deliberate contrivance to relax the nervous strain of "baulked disposition," we must first get an agreed answer to the question whether, or to what degree, the baulking of one disposition can be alleviated by the satisfaction of another. There is, for instance, a traditional body of ethical teach- ing (forming the staple material of religious addresses "to men only") which assumes that the strain of the sex instinct can be re- laxed or abolished by any form of vigorous bodily and mental exer- cise. This assumption is rejected by some psychologists, and is probably not true in the absolute form in which it is often stated. Freud, again, and the other members of the new school of "psycho- analysts" use the term "sublimation" for "the deviation of the sexual motive-powers from sexual laims to new aims" (Freud, Three Contributions to Sexual Theory, translated by J. J. Putnam, p. 39). To this "sublimation" of the sexual motive they ascribe many of the higher activities of civilised man. But Freud himself does not seem to argue that the "sublimated" functions of the sex-instinct serve as a satisfaction of the instinct in its original form. Very Mttle has been written on the question of the vicarious satisfaction of other dispositions than that of sex. William James, however, raises that question in relation to the fighting instinct in the paper on "A Moral Equivalent for War," in his Memories and Studies, 1911. See also Chapter IX., pp. 179-184, of this book. An extraordinarily interesting experimental approach to the physiological side of the whole problem has been made by Professor W. B. Cannon of the Harvard Medical School in two papera on "The Emotional Stimulation of Adrenal Secretion" (American Jour- nal oj Physiology, April, 1911), and "Emotional Glycosuria" (ibid., December 1, 1911), which are to form part of a forthcoming book. His "work suggests to me that some of the obscure conditions of "baulked disposition" (owing, e.g., to the absence of stimulation of such dispositions as anger and fear) may be due physiologically to the non-discharge of its normal secretion by the adrenal or some other gland. If so, a new and more precise meaning will be seen in the celebrated passage (Poetics, vi. 2) in which Aristotle states that tragedy "achieves by pity and terror the purging of the pas- sions of that kind" (rijc rwv roioirav iraSruidTijiv KA.8apo-ip), and the less-known passage (Politics, vii. 6) in which he refers to the psy- chologically "cathartic" effects of certain kinds of music. CH. IV DISPOSITION AND ENVIRONMENT 67 between our race and its environment has been no- ticed ever since men, at the beginning of civiUsation, began consciously to reflect upon their way of living. They dimly felt that their earliest instincts were re- lated to an open-air life in which their ancestors had supported themselves on the gifts of the untilled land. Such a life was "natural," and poets, for thousands of years, have longed to return to it, to recall the "golden age" before the invention of fire, or the Garden of Eden, whose inhabitants knew neither clothing nor agriculture. It was the supreme achievement of the Greek in- tellect to substitute for this vain longing a new con- ception of nature. To Aristotle, as to Hobbes, it was evident that the old life in which man, without the powers which civilisation gave him, faced an untamed world, must have been "poor, nasty, brutish and short." ^ It was true that man's nature and his en- vironment were at war, but the remedy was not to go back to the forests of the past, but to invent the city of the future, the material and social organisation which should contrive a new harmony, higher because it was deliberate. When Aristotle said "Man is an animal adapted for living in a city-state," ^ he meant, not that man was living in such a state when Zeus was born, but that the city-state stimulated his nature to its noblest expression. "For what every being is In its perfect condition, that certainly is the nature of that being." ^ Even for Zeno's less confident philoso- phy "Follow Nature" meant not "Go back to the past" "Hobbes, Leviathan (edition of 1839, p. 112). ' Politics, bk. i. chap. ii. ' Ibid., bk. i. chap. ii. 68 THE GREAT SOCIETY but "Examine the conditions of a good life in the pres- ent." This is the master-task of civilised mankind. They will fail in it again and again, partly for lack of inven- tive power, partly from sheer ignorance of the less obvious facts of their material surroundings and mental structure. But it is hardly possible for any one to endure life who does not believe that they will succeed in producing a harmony between themselves and their environment far deeper and wider than anything which we can see to-day. Note A (see ante, p. 58, «.). — There are two types of special "fears." The first is the inherited instinctive type, which I discuss on pp. 58-60, and which may be illustrated by the special fear of snakes found among human beings and the apes. The second type is the life-long "phobia" which may result from a "forgotten experi- ence" (usually some event in early childhood). See, e.g., the de- scription of a case of acquired cat-fear (due to a forgotten fright at five years of age, afterwards revealed under hypnotism) in Dr. Mor- ton Prince's book on The Unconscious (1914), p. 17. Further en- quiry maj' show the proportion in which the two types occur in actual life. Many of the facts collected by Dr. Prince, by Freud and his followers, and by others, as to "forgotten experiences," "co- consciousness," "dissociated personality," etc., though they have so far only been brought into the service of individual pathological psychology, may be ultimately found to be of importance in the study of social psychology. CHAPTER V HABIT In the last three chapters I have given a rough out- line, from the point of view of sociology, of the main human psychological dispositions, and a general dis- cussion of their relation to those facts of our environ- ment by which they are stimulated into activity. In the next five chapters I shall discuss in greater detail certain dispositions, both "simple" and "com- plex," which are of special sociological importance. Those which I have selected are Habit, Fear, Pleasure- Pain, Thought, and the intricate psychological facts covered by the terms Imitation, Sympathy, and Love and Hatred. Not only are these dispositions important in them- selves, but each of them has been made the founda- tion of a complete sociological scheme by some school of thinkers. Indeed the few great writers who, mainly in England and France, dealt during the last two cen- turies with social psychology advanced in their meth- ods little beyond the point reached by the early Greek natural philosophers. The first Greek thinkers had neither the vocabulary nor the logical nor mathematical apparatus which would have enabled them to treat material events as the resultant of a number of inde- pendently varying causes. Each philosopher there- 69 70 THE GREAT SOCIETY fore ascribed all events to one cause, Water, or Fire, or Number, or Flux. In modern Europe, while the progress of logic and mathematics was transforming the methods of the natural sciences, the classical soci- ologists were still attempting, either by distortion of the evidence, or by a vague and metaphorical use of language, to ascribe all social effects to some one psy- chological cause. Just as Thales took Water as his single all-sufficient cause, and Anaximenes took Air ; so Hobbes took Fear; Bentham, Pleasure-Pain; Comte, Love; and Tarde, Imitation. In order to guard against this traditional tendency it is perhaps worth while to warn my readers, once for all, that I shall be dealing in each of .the following chapters with one only of a number of causes, which, in any practical problem, interact with each other. And in order to avoid the vague use of language which makes that tendency possible, I shall attempt to de- fine each disposition with sufficient strictness to pre- vent its meaning from being pushed beyond its own province. In this chapter I shall deal with Habit. It has not been made the basis of a complete scheme by any among the greater sociologists; but if one examines the arguments of that numerous class of writers who plead for "scientific" government in the monthly and quarterly reviews, one finds that they constantly as- sume its universal efficacy. The "Habit-Philosophers" are generally men who have spent a great part of their life in the exercise of autocratic discipline or the application of fixed rules, soldiers, retired Anglo-Indians, lawyers, or those pro- fessors and school-masters whose pedagogic training HABIT 71 has not involved any acquaintance with modern psy- chological enquiry. Sir Henry Maine was a lawyer, a professor, and an Anglo-Indian, and his work on Popular Government (1885) may be taken as a good example of this point of "view. He says: Obedience is rendered by the great bulk of civilised so- cieties without an effort and quite unconsciously. But that is only because, in the course of countless ages, the stern discharge of their chief duty by States has created habits and sentiments which save the necessity of penal interfer- ence because nearly everybody shares them.^ The reference to "countless ages" indicates that Sir Henry Maine was a Lamarkian, who assumed that acquired characteristics are inherited. But the same position is held by men who would admit that social habits must be reacquired by each generation of man- kind. When the Duke of Wellington, the greatest of Anglo-Indian soldiers, said: "Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature," ^ he was referring to a process requiring not "countless ages" but only the military lifetime of a sepoy. To a consistent "Habit-Philosopher," change, merely because it is change, must necessarily be dangerous. The Duke of Wellington strongly opposed in 1851 the substitution of rifles for smooth-bore muskets in the British Army.^ He would probably have argued that if the habits of the Army had been formed by drill with a rifle, the rifle would have been better than the musket, but that the advantage of the better " H. Maine, Popular Government, p. 63. ^Quoted, W. James, Principles oj Psychology, vol. i. p. 120. ^Biddulph, Lord Cardwell at the War Office, p. 47. 72 THE GREAT SOCIETY weapon was less than the disadvantage of breaking what Walter Bagehot used to call "the cake of cus- tom." ^ Some of the "Die-Hards" in the English con- stitutional struggle of 1910 would have admitted that a second chamber on a non-hereditary basis might have been quite as good as the English House of Lords; but the essence of their case was that the Eng- lish people had formed the habit of obedience to the House of Lords and not to some different chamber. The supreme danger, in the view of this type of thinker, arises when change is brought about, not by the deliberate action of a sovereign body which can in part carry over the habit of obedience in its subjects from the old to the new conditions, but through sporadic breaches of custom by individual citizens. "If a democracy," says Maine, "were to allow a portion of the multitude of which it consists to set some law at defiance which it happens to dislike, it would be guilty of a crime which hardly any other virtue could redeem, and which century upon century might fail to repair." ^ Before discussing to what degree the Habit-Philoso- phers are right, it is necessary to define Habit in terms which would be accepted by those experimental psy- chologists who have done so much to give it precise meaning. Habit, then, is constituted by the fact that if our nervous system is stimulated along certain lines of discharge, leading either to action or feeling or thought, the next stimulus of the same kind finds the nervous system to a certain extent prepared. The resulting act or feeling or thought then follows more certainly and requires a weaker stimulation. Finally '^ Physics and Politics, p. 53. "Popular Government, p. 64. HABIT 73 the habit becomes a definite tendency, which may be started with little or no external stimulus. There is no evidence to show that habits are trans- mitted by biological inheritance, but the disposition of Habit varies enormously in individuals, and such vari- ations may be transmitted. Different individuals may be born with a disposition to form habits in general, or particular habits, easily or with difficulty, and to lose them quickly or slowly. One man, for instance, may be born with, and transmit to his descendants, a marked facility in forming habits in respect of music, and another in respect of language. The power of forming habits varies also greatly with age; children and young people finding it more easy both to form and to drop habits than their elders. It also varies with race. The Greeks, for instance, had little power of habituation, and were surprised to find that the North European people whom they called Kelts reached, when they were trained to fighting or sea-faring, an absolute indifference to danger which seemed to themselves to be a kind of insanity.^ Habit, I have said, may influence our bodily actions, or our feehngs, or our trains of thought. But a habit of feeling or thought does not necessarily produce a habit of action, as moralists from Aristotle to William James have pointed out.^ Habit is perhaps the most important of the psycho- logical causes which have made the organisation of the Great Society possible. The population of London 'Aristotle, Ethics, bk. iii. ch. vii.: "He would be a madman or inaccessible to pain if he feared nothing, neither earthquake nor the billows, as they tell of the Kelts." ^See on this point the beautiful chapter on Habit in James's Principles oj Psychology. 74 THE GREAT SOCIETY would be starved in a week if the flywheel of Habit were removed, if no signalman or clerk or policeman ever did anything which was not suggested by a first- hand impulse, or if no one were more honest or punc- tual or industrious than he was led to be by his con- scious love, on that particular day, for his master or his work, or by his religion, or by a conviction of danger from the criminal law. It is not, therefore, a mere accident that the Great Society has been developed with most success among those North European races whose power of blind habituation excited the contempt of the Greeks. If Aristotle could stand on London Bridge or at Liver- pool Street Station on any week-day at 8.45 a.m., he would think that the "Kelts" were more insane than ever. Mr. McDougall, in accordance with his unwUlLng- ness to admit the independent action of our intellectual dispositions, says, "Habits are formed only in the ser- vice of the instincts." ^ But, as a matter of fact, it is through habit that the influence of intelligence has most control over the lives of the majority of civilised men. Our instincts as compared with those of other animals are weak and plastic. From the beginning of our lives our own intelligence or that of others directs a process of habit-education, by which some instincts are more or less successfully inhibited, and others, like hunting, or music, or curiosity, which, wittiout the aid of deliberate purpose, might have died out in the course of growth, become the master-passions of spe- cialised lives. Why, therefore, should not all those who desire the ' Social Psychology, p. 43. HABIT 75 continued existence of the Great Society become "Habit-Philosophers" of Sir Henry Maine's type? If Habit is truly "second nature," if it "becomes in a manner part of our organisation," ^ so that it is indis- tinguishable from the facts which were there from birth, the adaptation of man's nature to his new environment is easy enough. All we have to do is to discover what is wanting in our inherited dispositions and to supply it by education. Education costs time and effort, and so we should have to economise it, choosing the most necessary habits, and perhaps modi- fying those environmental facts which make an ex- cessive demand on habituation. But complete adapta- tion between man and his environment would, on that assumption, be well within sight. Habit, however, is not second nature. In the first place, the facts in any man's nervous structure which are there by habituation are less stable than those which are there by inheritance. A nervous shock, for instance, or any intense nervous excitement, seems to have the power of abolishing settled habits, while in- herited dispositions remain unchanged. We may be- lieve that the "nature" of a race has been transformed by custom and education. We may point out that the deliberate infliction of torture on human beings has become almost unthinkable to men whose ancestors, ten generations ago, took it as a matter of course. But when civilised American soldiers were submitted to the strain of guerilla warfare in the Philippines, many of them, who had inherited apparently no worse na- tures than their comrades, inflicted day after day the 'Huxley, Elementary Physiology (2nd ed., 1885), p. 286. 76 THE GREAT SOCIETY most abominable tortures on the prisoners.^ In the fury of the Reformation at Muenster, or the Revolu- tion at Paris, the moral habits of whole populations disappeared. Habit, again, lacks that breadth of stimulation which I have noted in the case of the inherited dispositions.^ Fear or Hunger is excited by a large variety of dan- gerous or edible things, but the habit of military obedience may attach itself merely to the sound of a particular word of command, or to the sight of a par- ticular uniform, and the habit of punctuality in busi- ness to the performance of a particular task. The moral catastrophes and confusions indeed, in revolu- tions or among religious converts, are due perhaps even more to the removal of the habitual stimuli of rites and ceremonies, old acquaintances, or the daily sur- roundings of life than to the actual nervous effect of excitement and shock. To an English private soldier who finds himself "East of Suez," says Rudyard Kip- ling, "there ain't no ten commandments." If a habit is to have sufl&cient permanence to re- establish itself after a nervous shock, or sufficient gen- erality to adapt itself to variations in its external stimuli, it must be combined with and supported by some organised body of ideas. On this point, if one turns from the mechanical treatment of Habit by the modern psychologists back to Plato and Aristotle, it is astonishing to see how much more deeply the Greek moralists entered into the real problems which the limitations of Habit present in times of change like our * See documents quoted by Mr. Ralph Norman Angell Lane in his Patriotism under Three Flags, pp. 99-112. "See Chapter IV. pp. 58-61. HABIT 77 own. Men who lived in the city-states of Hellas be- tween 430 and 330 B.C. knew well how urgent was the danger involved in the relation between Habit and motive in a new environment. When Plato wishes to describe the most unfortunate of all human beings, he pictures a man, who, "having spent his former life in a well-disciplined state, had become virtuous by habit without philosophy." ^ and who, in the under-world, was set to choose his own lot for a second life. He chose "the most absolute despotism he could find" and "failed to remark that he was fated therein, among other calamities, to devour his own children." "We can only," says Aristotle, "call a man's actions just or virtuous when the man who does them knows what he is doing ; when he acts with deliberate choice, and his choice is based on the real nature of his action ; and thirdly, when his tendency so to act is steady and not easily changed." ^ The relation between Habit and Thought in conduct could not be better expressed. Virtue, for Aristotle, is not mere Habit, but a "con- dition of settled moral choice," which, while it includes Habit, also includes what Plato calls philosophy. The lines indeed on which the Great Society is now developing make the need of "philosophy" as a sup- port of Habit greater every year. The history of all wars since the introduction of magazine rifles and quick-firing guns shows that, while discipline is still important, "philosophy" has become more important. The soldier in South Africa, or Manchuria, or Tripoli, ' Republic, 619 iy Teraynirg iroXiTelg. ep rf Tpordpif jS/y j3e;8iwK4TO ete dvev ' Ethics, bk. ii. chap. iv. ri, Sk kot4 t&s dperis yivdtieva ovk ihv airi ttus ^XV, SiKalbis ij awpbvui TrpdrTcrai, dXXd Kal iav o TrpirToiv irois exwi" irpiTTji, TtpwTOV fiiv i&v eidtSis, eireiT^ iav irpoai.poip,ei'OS, Kal irpoaipoip,evos SI airi,, rb Si rplrov Kal iav pe^alws Kal &fi£TaKi.viiTWi ^'xwc irpdrTy. 78 THE GREAT SOCIETY or Thrace had to fight, ten feet from his nearest cona- rade, an individual battle, which was part of a vast engagement on a front, perhaps, of a hundred miles. Under these conditions the side which believed itself to represent some moral ideal, of freedom or self- defence, fought incomparably better than the side which carried on, from the habit of obedience, a cam- paign of policy or conquest. Each man of the "philo- sophic" army "knew what he was doing, and acted with a deliberate choice . . . based on the real nature of his action." And the same is true of the recruit who enters the wide complexities of modern industry. A member of the London County Council Education Committee was once explaining to me the truth about the education of the working classes. I said, "You seem to desire that popular education should consist solely of manual training and elementary Bible lessons." "That," I was answered, "is exactly what I do want." A boy equipped with such an education would be as helpless in a modern industrial community as was Plato's un- happy ghost before the heap of untried lots. But there is a further cause which makes it unsafe to treat Habit as second nature or as a self-sufficient basis for social life. Not only are habits when pro- duced more unstable than our inherited dispositions, but the process of producing habits by mere repetition is uncertain in its results. The stimulation of our nervous system along any given line of discharge makes, as I have already said, a further stimulation along the same line more easy. It also "uses up" something in the nervous structure which requires time to repair. Every teacher knows that, if a boy HABIT 79 has to spend two hours in doing a succession of ele- mentary sums of the same kind, he will do them with growing ease qua, habit and growing difficulty qua fatigue.^ After a period of rest the fatigue wears off and the habit remains; so that a boy may then prove to have been making most progress towards accuracy in sum-working when he was too tired to work his sums accurately. This is what James meant when he quoted the saying, "We learn to swim during the win- ter and to skate during the summer." ^ The effects, however, of fatigue are not completely done with when they have, for the moment, been over- come by rest. If an habitual action is often repeated up to the point of fatigue, the nervous system is apt to lose its power of recovery. Just when the violin student or the typist is bringing her technique to absolute completion, violinist's or typist's "cramp" may come on, and the nervous system may refuse to repeat the habitual act. Something of the same kind seems to happen from time to time in the process of forming intellectual or emotional habits. When the monk has, by intense and continued effort, made himself able to realise at will the object of his adoration, something snaps, and he can do so no more. The English "public school" system constitutes one of the most tremendous instruments of habituation that has ever existed; but at the moment when a lad of eighteen seems on the point of becoming a perfect Etonian, he has been ' Cp., e.g., Binet, La Fatigue intellectuelle, pt. ii. ch. vi., where it is shown on experimental evidence that in each successive period of a long morning's work at elementary arithmetic the scholars do more sums, but do them less accurately. 'Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 110. 80 THE GREAT SOCIETY known to turn suddenly and unaccountably into some- thing worse or better. It is this fact, in combination with the nervous strain which inevitably results when important in- stincts are left unstimulated/ that explains why sys- tems of social organisation founded on pure Habit are apt to decay from within, even when they are not overthrown from without. "Drive out Nature with a pitchfork and she will always come back" is a proverb whose truth was learnt by the Spartans in the fourth century B.C., and by the successors of John Knox in Scotland or of Frederick William I. in Prussia more than two thousand years later. The problem, therefore, of the adaptation of our nature to our environment cannot be solved by merely enforcing those habits which are most convenient un- der existing circumstances. A habit can neither be formed without risk of failure in the process, nor per- manently retained, when formed, unless it is adapted, not only to the facts of the outer world, but also to the whole of our inner nature. The teachers of the arts have always, in their own way, known this. The trainer of a racing crew may make mistakes. He may teach his men movements which, when they have ac- quired them, they will find to be "unnatural" and therefore destructive of nervous ease. He may work them for too long hours, or may keep intelligent young men too long in an atmosphere of stupid rowing "shop." But he, like a teacher of painting or music, knows that there are certain bodily and mental habits which give good results because they are "natural," and others, perhaps less difficult to acquire at first, ' Cp. ante, pp. 64, 65. CH. V HABIT 81 which fail because they are "unnatural." And he knows that neither the process of habituation nor the life of formed habit is tolerable unless it is accom- panied by a certain amount of variation. The violin- ist, even when he has acquired the best technique that is possible, must not always play the same piece. The oarsman must not always row over the same course or at the same rate of striking. Habits which are "natural" in themselves and are carried out with a sufficient element of variety are ac- companied by a feeling of energy and freedom. "Un- natural" habits are accompanied, long before the actual breaking-point is reached, by a feeling of unreality and dissatisfaction. It may however take many years in the life of an individual before dissatisfaction even begins; or a habit may only become "unnatural" when some unobserved change in the conditions of its action has taken place. The discipline of the French army in 1814 may have seemed in all externals the same as it was in 1796, the Franciscan Rule at the death of Savonarola may have seemed the same as it was at the death of St. Francis, and yet that free activity, which gave to "custom, law, and statute," in the mind of the young Wordsworth, "the attraction of a country of romance," was present in each case under the earlier, and wanting under the later, conditions. The enlargement of scale, therefore, which makes Habit increasingly necessary in the Great Society, in- creases also the necessity of criticising and, from time to time, abandoning existing habits. Just as modern horticulturalists, who propagate millions of fruit trees or potatoes from cuttings, require the periodical pro- duction of new varieties from actual seeding, so in the 82 THE GREAT SOCIETY modern world of habit and repetition we have learnt to attach a new value to the man who goes back to his first-hand impulses. The controllers of the Great In- dustry are always on the lookout for that type of man whom Americans call "a live wire." For such a man secretaries and typists and foremen carry on all that punctual performance of habitual acts which took up so much of the time and labour of a merchant or manu- facturer even fifty years ago. He is set to form a habit of non-habituation, of picking up and acting on his mental suggestions at the point when they first appear as an uncomfortable and perhaps almost subconscious interference with an easy train of thought. It is this habit of overriding habit which was meant by Oliver Cromwell when he said, "He goes furthest who knows not whither he is going" ; by Napoleon when he raged against those who allowed their minds to form "pic- tures"; even by Mr. Spofforth, the cricketer, when he said, "Show me the man who knows how he is going to play the next ball and I will show you a man whom I can bowl out." As Professor E. A. Ross of Wis- consin says: In a dynamic society so many readjustments are neces- sary, such far-reaching transformations are experienced in half a lifetime, that the past is discredited. One forms a habit of breaking habits.^ In every art the power and responsibility of the man who acquires, and by ever new efforts retains, the habit of origination are now increasing. With eyes tired by thousands of perfect mechanical reproductions, we stand before the pictures of Raphael, and wonder how ^Social Psychology, p. 79. OH.V HABIT 83 our fathers could have been stirred to enthusiasm by the facile habitual lines of that prince among drawing- masters. It is in Rembrandt, with the infinity of sur- prise which vibrates along every scratch of his etching- needle or stroke of his brush, that we find refresh- ment and harmony. In music, in literature, in the conduct of life, our fathers used to build the tombs of the prophets whom their fathers had stoned. Now, even if a stone is picked up, it drops from the half-hearted fingers of the critic, who does not know whether in a few days he will not have become a disciple. The originator is made to feel that for him that crystallisation of past habits and current opinions, which we call duty, does not exist. His business is to be perpetually and ever-freshly himself. But Plato's warning against Habit without philoso- phy has perhaps its deepest meaning when applied to the habit of origination. Napoleon on the Imperial throne, the financial genius when he has overcome his rivals, the leader of young opinion when his books are read and his plays acted in twenty languages, may create nothing but confusion and weakness unless his power is related to some greater purpose, in whose service is liberty. CHAPTER VI FEAR Habit results from repetition, whether of acts or thoughts or feelings. But repetition must have a be- ginning, and the beginning must be due to something else than Habit. If, therefore, the subjects of any state obey a repeated order through Habit, there still re- mains the question why they obeyed the original order. A believer in "scientific government" of the Anglo- Indian type, if he is asked that question, will generally answer that the original obedience was due to Fear. This view is supported by the high authority of Hobbes, the first, the ablest, and the most courageous of the English writers who have attempted to create a theory of society by means of introspective psychol- ogy. "He that is to govern a whole nation," he says, "must read in himself, not this or that particular man, but mankind." ^ His Leviathan was written between 1641 and 1651, while he was a Royalist exile in Paris ; and those who, like Hobbes or Marx, write and think in exile, while they often gain in a fierce concentration of purpose, lose by the absence of those daily and hourly hints of the working of other men's minds, which are neces- sary if analysis of motive is not to become over- ^ Leviathan (edition of 1839), p. xii. 84 CH. V. FEAR 85 simplified and distorted. Though, therefore, the pub- lication both of Marx's Kapital and of Hobbes' Levia- than was an important event in the history of the world, yet each book produced a reaction which made it doubtful whether its main effect was to forward or to hinder the cause which it advocated. The Kapital has gone far to divide modern Germany into two mutu- ally intolerant camps, unable to understand each other's thoughts and even the vocabulary in which those thoughts are expressed; and it is the camp of Bismarck and not that of Marx which has so far gained thereby. The Leviathan encouraged the re- stored Stuarts and their advisers to attempt to found a personal monarchy by military force. That attempt not only brought about the Revolution of 1688, but created the reasoned opposition to sovereign power, either executive or legislative, which was developed by Locke and Montesquieu and helped to give the United States of America a constitution equally difl&- cult to administer and to reform. To this day the eloquence and lucidity of Hobbes — "the old hard- hearted fellow, the father of them all," as Francis Place called him ^ — are a real danger to those few Englishmen who are prepared to follow science in politics. Hobbes seems to make "hardness" a neces- sary condition of accuracy in social thought, and re- quires us to ignore or inhibit those vague feelings of human kindness which do not fit into his system. Huxley, who wrote ,"Read Hobbes if you want to get hard sense in good English," ^ might have founded a modern school of scientific politics, if he had not sub- ^ Letter to James Mill, October 20, 1816. ' Lije, vol. ii. p. 74. 86 THE GREAT SOCIETY mitted himself to a tradition which made the main political forces of his own time unintelligible to him. Hobbes, like his fellow-exiles in Paris, lived among exaggerated rumours of the social confusion which the doctrines of Natural Equality and Natural Benevo- lence had produced in England. The guiding impulse of his life was at that time the hope that Charles the Second might return and reintroduce order by the wholesome discipline of Fear. Again and again he argues that to rely on any other motive is to trust to mere words in a world of hard realities. Men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all;i and No man obeys them whom they think have no power to help or hurt them.^ If it is objected that the existence in other animals of instinctive social affection creates a presumption that such affection will also be found in man, Hobbes replies by denying the analogy, "The agreement of these creatures is natural; that of men is by covenant only, which is artificial." ^ The only natural human affection which he allowed was that which arises from sex-love and parenthood, the family concord which "dependeth on natural lust." * He got over the psychological facts which told against him either by treating them as exceptional, or ^Leviathan (edition of 1839), p. 112. nbid., p. 76. 'Ibid., p. 157. ^Ibid. (edition of 1839), p. 114. CH. VI FEAR 87 by classifying every disposition which can restrain men from unsocial conduct as a form of Fear. "Pity . . . ariseth from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himself," ^ the "fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every man in himself calleth religion, and in them that worship, or fear that power otherwise than they do, superstition." ^ He is the more easily able to do this because he constantly "intellectualises" all the human passions by treating them as the result of a calculation of interest. "Both to love and to fear is to value." ^ But if he bases passion on calculation he also makes calcula- tion passionate. Whenever a man, after thinking out the probable results of any proposed act, decides not to do it, Hobbes assumes that his motive is Fear, and he is helped in this by his own magnificent power of imagining and presenting the case in which Fear does accompany calculation. That man which looks too far before him in the care of future time hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity ; and has no repose, no pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.* Modern social psychologists cannot hope to equal Hobbes' eloquence and force. But they can avoid some of his mistakes by adopting a definition of Fear which will at least distinguish it from other dissuasive motives. Such a definition might describe Fear as an instinct which, when excited by one of its appropriate stimuli, inclines us to experience a nervous shock ex- tending from a slight thrill up to convulsions and in- ^Ibid., p. 47. ' Ibid., p. 93. 'Ibid., p. 77. 'Ibid., p. 95. 88 THE GREAT SOCIETY sensibility. This shock is accompanied or preceded by an impulse either to remain perfectly still or to run away and hide. In its origin Fear tended to preserve life by pre- venting animals from doing certain dangerous things. It varies greatly among individuals and races, but must always have been a rather clumsy instinct. It pro- tected each species against a few of its most frequent dangers and left it unprotected against others. Its symptoms not infrequently are a cause of death, even among the lower animals. Snakes, for instance, exploit the paralysing terror which protects small birds from being seen by hawks. From a very early stage, therefore, in his social de- velopment man has learnt the necessity of recognising and, if possible, controlling Fear. Every savage would understand the point of the story about the officer at Waterloo who said, "Yes, I am afraid, and if you had been half as much afraid as I am, you would have run away an hour ago." In modern civilisation many of the original stimuli of Fear have disappeared ^ or have been so modified that they are no longer dangerous, while we have become intellectually aware of new dangers of which we have no instinctive dread. A man will turn dizzy as he looks down, in perfect safety, from the leaning tower at Pisa, or moves a vote of thanks at a charity dinner; and will find the greatest difficulty in making himself afraid to drink water in his hotel bedroom, which he believes to be very probably infected with typhoid. Indeed, if an intelligent married citizen were now to find himself as completely divested of the dis- ' See ante, p. 59. CH. vi FEAR 89 position of Fear as was the boy who married the princess in Grimm's fairy tale, that fact would in all probability make little change in his way of life. Af- fection for his family, public spirit, religion, and the reasonable expectation of personal happiness would still be sufficient to create and maintain the habit of avoiding unnecessary danger to health and life. But the mere absence of the original stimuli, instead of destroying the disposition of Fear among the seden- tary inhabitants of a commercial city, merely leaves it existing but unstimulated, and so creates a condition of "baulked disposition," ^ in which a limited but not inconsiderable degree of Fear may be desired for its own sake. Small boys in city streets run in front of motor-cars to enjoy the resulting sensation. Hundreds of people may be seen at any great Exhibition, waiting in long lines to be allowed to pay sixpence each for a few moments of Fear on the "wiggle-woggle" or the " aerial-railway" ; and some of the best and ablest individuals among the urban brain-workers of England and Germany take infinite pains year after year to spend weeks or months upon the Alps in pursuits whose most valued product is in their case the sensation of Fear. Perhaps, indeed, it is this desire for Fear rather than the impulse of Curiosity which has been the most important single cause of those dangerous journeys of discovery, by which the whole earth has been mapped out during the last four hundred years. The clumsiness and uncertainty of Fear, its imper- fect adaptation even to the environment of aboriginal life, and its constant irrelevance to the environment of civilisation, make it, of all human dispositions, the ' See ante, p. 64. 90 THE GREAT SOCIETY least suitable as a general basis for modern govern- ment and education. Not many decades ago the school- master who deliberately aimed at producing and main- taining a state of terror among his scholars was still common. But as men began, under the influence of Rousseau and his successors, to think of the psychol- ogy of education, they recognised both that insensitive children were not terrified by their methods, and that terror brought to the point of "breaking the will" had a peculiarly injurious effect upon the brains of sensi- tive children. In the English "public" and "prepara- tory" schools the "bracing" effect of a mild degree of Fear is aimed at in compulsory cricket and football. Certain flogging customs stiU survive, which are only intelligible as relics of a period when education by extreme Fear was attempted in earnest. But there is now a general understanding among masters and boys that Fear is to have no part in that process, and that discipline is to be maintained by a cool calculation of the advantages and disadvantages of disobedience and punishment. If, once in a while, a severe flogging helps to silence for life a lad who might have been a poet, the sufferer and not the system is apt to be blamed. I can remember, when I was seven or eight years old, that a deservedly respected churchwarden joined my father and myself, as we walked by a point in the street which I could still identify, and told, for my benefit, how a friend of his, who had heard his son swear, lit a bundle of matches and put them, as a foretaste of hell-fire, on the boy's tongue. Such actions, as well as books like a certain Persuasives to Early Piety, which aimed at producing the same result upon FEAR 91 me by cold print, must now be rare, and one of the chief reasons for their disuse was practical experience of the extreme uncertainty of their effect both upon conduct and belief. Even in the punishment of criminals we have (if one ignores occasional panics) reached a point where Sir William Dyott's statement from the bench during the era of the Reform Bill that "nothing but the terror of human suffering can avail to prevent crime" ^ sounds old fashioned and ineffective; and to most of us it seemed that the leaders of the militant suffragists in England made a serious mistake in psychological tac- tics when they attempted to substitute real Fear for the advertisement and annoyance which resulted from their earlier methods. The attempt to govern whole populations by the political use of Fear is not yet abandoned. But evi- dence is accumulating that the measures adopted with that purpose, torture, flogging, massacres, pillage, pub- lic executions, blowing from guns, etc., are apt to pro- duce, not only widespread Fear, but dogged obstinacy among some of the older members of the populations concerned, and a positive delight in danger among some of the younger; while the blind panic which prevents efficient action may at any moment strike the ruling minority instead of the subject majority. In the past indeed, the governments which used such means have fallen, or have adopted a new policy either of con- ciliation or of extermination. The tradition of government by Fear still hangs about some of the details of Prussian administration. ' Quoted by J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, p. 201. 92 THE GREAT SOCIETY In Berlin one may hear a policeman addressing a group at a street corner in that "schnarrend" tone which is intended to produce a physical thrill. But the great majority of the Berliners apparently consider the tradition a little absurd, and in the stern calculation of the Social-Democrats as to whether a general strike, or even a civil war, may not some day be worth while, the element of actual Fear seems to have little part. The Turks no longer rule in Europe, though a policy of government by Fear survives, with appropriate re- sults, in Russia. But it is outside Europe, where the representatives of the Great Powers exercise military control over alien races, that government by Fear is habitually defended as a necessary and permanent con- dition. Lieutenant-Colonel G. de S. Barrow, for in- stance, in a lecture reported in the Journal of the United Service Institution of India, says: Fear is an elemental, perhaps the most elemental, of the factors which go to make up our moral nature. ... It is with us now just as strong and ruhng an influence in our lives, whether as individuals or nations, as ever it was in the days of primeval man. . . . The crude desire of fighting for food becomes developed into the virtues of patriotism, love of liberty, and country, but always with the same ori- gin — Fear.^ The form of this may be due to Hobbes' eloquence, filtered through eight generations of smoking-room talk, but the spirit of it, daily repeated in half-a-dozen 'September, 1912. I owe my introduction to this interesting lecture to an article in the Daily News by my friend, Mr. William Archer. It is noteworthy that Colonel Barrow, like Hobbes, com- bines an exaggerated statement of the instinctive nature of fear with "intellcctualism" in his explanation of its working. "Fear," he says, ''springs from the desire of life." CH. V. FEAR 93 languages, runs through many of the reported utter- ances of the representatives of European civilisation in Africa, Persia, and the islands and peninsulas of the East. CHAPTER VII PLEASUKE-PAIN AND HAPPINESS For more than a century after the publication of the Leviathan, the English defenders of constitutional lib- erty opposed Hobbes' psychological plea for absolutism with arguments drawn not from psychology but from the metaphysical conception of Natural Right. By 1776, however— the "Annus Mirabilis" in which Ben- tham's Fragment on Government, Adam Smith's Wealth oj Nations, and the American Declaration of Independence all appeared, — a new psychological theory of society, based, not on Fear, but on the attrac- tive and repulsive influence of Pleasure and Pain, was already becoming influential. The Declaration of Independence includes "the pur- suit of happiness" among the "inalienable rights" of mankind, but Jefferson must have found the chief evidence for the existence of men's metaphysical right to pursue happiness in the psychological fact that they did pursue it. From Bentham's mind the conception of Natural Right had already disappeared. His Intro- duction to the Principles oj Morals and Legislation (1789) opens with the strictly psychological statement, "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure." ^ Two ^Bentham, Works. The sentence, as M. Halevy points out in his masterly treatise, is taken almost unchanged from Helvetius (Halevy, La Formation du Radicalisme Philosophigue, vol. i. p. 298). 94 CH. VII PLEASURE-PAIN AND HAPPINESS 95 years later he tells the revolutionists in France that "Natural Rights is simple nonsense, natural and im- prescriptable Rights rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts." ^ Bentham did not die till 1832, and before he died his doctrines, partly through their direct influence upon the few readers of his manuscripts and printed works, but more generally through their effect on Paley's theology, Whately's ethics and economics, Romilly's legal reforms, and the economic and political theories of Ricardo and James Mill, had attained an authority over English thought which increased during the next thirty years and has not yet quite disappeared. The conscious intellectual life of the average Englishman is still often spent among the ruins of Utilitarianism. His favourite journalists still use phrases like "the laws of political economy," and "the facts of human na- ture," in senses which assume the whole Benthamite psychology; though they do so with that slightly irri- table emphasis which results from a feeling that criti- cism in a slipshod and sentimental age has weakened the authority of principle. Bentham's psychology was based upon three propo- sitions, asserted or implied. The first was the "intel- lectualist" assumption that all human action was the result of a conscious search for the means of attaining some "end" or "good" other than the action itself. The second was "Hedonism" — the proposition that all human goods could be shown to consist of the one good of Pleasure (or Happiness, which was treated as the sum of Pleasures), and the avoidance of Pain. The third was the Greatest Happiness Principle, the ^Bentham, "Anarchical Fallacies'' (1791), Works, vol. ii. p. 501. 96 THE GREAT SOCIETY proposition that the end of all action by men in society was the production of the greatest quantity of Pleas- ure for the greatest number of the members of the society concerned. With Utilitarian Intellectualism I have already dealt. ^ With the difficulties and contradictions of Bentham's Greatest Happiness Principle I shall deal later in this chapter. For the moment I confine my- self to his Hedonism. The Hedonist doctrine itself, as stated or assumed by Bentham, involves three separate propositions : that the only effective human motive is the desire for Pleasure and for the avoidance of Pain ; that Pain and Pleasure are the negative and positive ends of a simple gradation of feeling; and that the state of conscious- ness called Happiness is the same as that called Pleasure.^ On the first of these propositions — that ideas of Pleasure-Pain are the universal and only motive — I shall not spend much time. In order to arrive at it Bentham had to strain the meaning of words almost as seriously as did Hobbes. If Hobbes defined pity as a kind of fear, Bentham declared that men are moved not directly by curiosity, but indirectly by the pleasure of curiosity, not directly by anger but indi- rectly by a calculation as to the means of avoiding the "pains of unsatisfied vindictiveness." ^ Even in the eighteenth century a man of Bentham's genius and ' See ante, p. 38, and my Human Nature in Politics, pt. i. ch. i. ^Bentham, Works, vol. iii. p. 214 ("Pannomian Fragments"). "Happiness is a word employed to denote the sum of the pleasures experienced during that quantity of time which is under considera- tion, deduction made or not made of the quantity of pain experi- enced during the same quantity of time." " Works, vol. i., "Table of the Springs of Action," pp. 197-205. CH. v.. PLEASURE-PAIN AND HAPPINESS 97 sincerity could hardly have adhered to this position if he had not been a shy and sedentary bachelor, liv- ing among ideas of action and ideas of pleasure rather than real acts and real pleasures. The second and third Hedonist propositions — that Pain is the negation of Pleasure, and Happiness the extension of Pleasure in time — the propositions which Bentham summed up in the statement, "What happi- ness is every man knows, because what pleasure is every man knows, and what pain is every man knows," ^ present greater difficulties. Against them I shall argue, firstly that the sensations called Pains are not the mere negation of the sensations called Pleasures, secondly that the "feeling-tones" of Pleas- antness and Unpleasantness are not the same as the sensations called Pains and Pleasures, and thirdly that these feeling-tones of Pleasantness and Unpleasant- ness are not the same as the states of consciousness called Happiness and Unhappiness. There is perhaps no point on which modern experi- mental psychology has been more successful than in the examination of the "Pain" sensations, and the differ- entiation of them from the feeling-tone of Unpleasant- ness. It has been shown that mankind, like many other animals, possess a system of nerves ending in those "pain-spots" which lie scattered, sometimes closely and sometimes widely, among the "cold-spots," "heat-spots," and "touch-spots" on our skin. The stimulation of these nerves produces the "pain" sen- sations of pricking, smarting, burning, and the like. Other nerves situated more deeply in our tissues pro- ^Ibid., vol. ix. p. 123. 98 THE GREAT SOCIETY duce on stimulation the "pain" sensation of aching.^ A doctor may find it advisable to distinguish carefully between the smarting and aching sensations, but a social psychologist may be allowed to speak of both as instances of the one sensation of Pain. The evolutionary origin of both the superficial and the deeper pain-nerves is obviously to be found in the fact that they, by giving rise to their appropriate sensations, inclined animals to avoid certain conditions dangerous to life. In the same way, we and other animals have in certain parts of our bodies other nerves producing "Pleasure" sensations, whose evolutionary origin obvi- ously was the useful fact that those who felt them were inclined to seek for their continuance by per- forming acts likely to preserve the species. These nerves are particularly connected with the functions of nutrition (including tasting and smelling) and sex. A Pain sensation can coexist with a Pleasure sensa- tion, and is obviously not its mere opposite. These special Pain or Pleasure sensations are found by almost all modern psychologists to be difi'erent from the feeling-tones of Pleasantness and Unpleasant- ness. As Professor Titchener (who has done much experimental work on the subject) says: "Pain . . . is a sensation, and it is a sensation which at different times and under different circumstances may be pleas- ant, indifferent, or unpleasant." ^ And in the same "■See, e.g., Myers' Text-Book of Experimental Psychologij, pp. 14-16 (Bibliography, p. 19), and Titchener, Text-Book of Psychology, pp. 152-159 (Bibliography, p. 159), and pp. 183-193 (Bibliography, p. 193). " Text-Book of Psychology, vol. i. p. 227. See Bibliography on pp. 263-264. Max Meyer, Psychological Review (New York), July, 1908, pp. 202-216, gives a long list of psychological opinions on the CH. vii PLEASURE-PAIN AND HAPPINESS 99 way some of the Pleasure sensations may, under cer- tain circumstances, be indifferent or unpleasant in feel- ing-tone. Professor Max Meyer says "Pleasantness and un- pleasantness are the highest product of mental evolu- tion." ^ Feeling-tone, that is to say, is a more highly evolved form of consciousness than mere sensation, and must from its beginning have been a much safer guide than mere sensation to the preservation of life and health. It was, for instance, a useful fact in the psychology of our ape-ancestors that the not incon- siderable amount of pain involved in scratching para- sites off one's skin was pleasant, and that eating the most delicious food to absolute repletion was unpleas- ant. Peeling-tone indicated not the mere stimulation of certain special sensations, but excess or defect in the stimulation, not only of those sensations, but of any of our dispositions.^ The aesthetic feelings of Beauty and Ugliness con- stitute a special case of Pleasant or Unpleasant feeling- tone, due to the fact that the simple intellectual dis- position of Perception (or Recognition) has been stim- ulated normally or abnormally. The whole existence of self-directed living beings depends on their power subject, most of which agree more or less closely with the view taken by me above. By exception, Professors H. R. Marshall and Lagerborg "fail to distinguish between unpleasantness and the sen- sation of pain" (p. 204), and Stumpf "regards pleasantness and un- pleasantness as sensations" (p. 205). '-Psychological Review (New York), July, 1908, p. 320. ^Professor Bawdon, Psychological Review (New York), Septem- ber 1910, p. 337, puts this fact into the very specialised language of technical psychology: "Agreeable emotion is connected with such massing of stimuli as leads to a response within the normal limits of the functional capacity of the organism, while pain accompanies the piling up of stimuli and the subsequent discharge when these exceed the limits of such normal functioning." 100 THE GREAT SOCIETY of recognising objects in the world around them as identical with, or belonging to, the same class as ob- jects seen or heard before; and, in the higher animals. Pleasantness results from the normal and unimpeded performance of that intellectual function. In man Pleasantness increases up to a certain point with the repetition of recognition, provided that that repetition has the slight degree of variation which prevents the fatigue of absolute monotony. A whole audience at a farce will yell with delight when they recognise that a comedian is for the twentieth time, under slightly varied circumstances, saying "Do you know-w?" A dog is apparently affected in the same way by picking up the lost scent of a fox, or by recognising his mas- ter's step. It is not only the prospect of catching the fox or meeting his master, but also the process of recognition itself which seems to delight him. Certain pure colours and harmonious sounds are in nature sometimes precisely reproduced, and therefore can be precisely and without effort recognised. Man, for instance, and some birds have apparently an aesthetic delight in seeing or collecting objects of pure colour,^ or in hearing or producing pure sounds. Form as well as colour and sound may be recog- nised, and man finds a very high degree of pleasant- ness in following, consciously or subconsciously, the rhythm of that unbroken but unmonotonous form- relation which constitutes "pattern." If one offers a child or savage the choice of two necklaces, both composed of shells of various sizes belonging to the same species; and if one necklace is arranged in a ' Cf. the behaviour of the gardener bower-bird (Lloyd Morgan, Animal Behaviour, 1900, p. 273). CH. y.i PLEASURE-PAIN AND HAPPINESS 101 graded pattern of ascending and descending size, and the other consists of shells threaded haphazard, he will always choose the first. The pattern, he will say, is "pretty." And if the pattern is made more complex, so as to involve a double rhythm of form and form, or of colour and form, he will probably find it (provided it is not too elaborate for his recognition) even more pretty. The civilised man, whose power of recognition has been specially trained, experiences a more subtle and more intense delight in the intricate pattern of a chorus of -^schylus, or of an overture of Wagner, or of the nave of a Gothic cathedral, where perspective turns monotony into rhythm. And, by one of the few splendid accidents of evolu- tion, this complex rhythm of unmonotonous repeti- tion corresponds, not only to the specific resemblances among things immediately useful or hurtful to man, but to the ultimate pattern which the finest effort of man's mind is able to detect in the universe as a whole. Kosmos, the name which the early Greek philosophers gave to the universe, means simply "pat- tern," and the intellectual lives of Plato or Dante or Spinoza or Newton were largely guided and sustained by their delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and instance, species and in- dividual, or cause and effect.^ ' I confine myself above to the special aesthetic feeling of "pat- tern'' beauty. There are, of course, other "pleasant" feelings which are closely allied to it, but of different origin. Our delight, for in- stance, in a beautiful woman's form is largely the result of the val- uable evolutionary fact that the instincts of sex are most strongly stimulated by indications of perfect health; though the "pattern" feeling often enters into it as well. A climber's delight, again, at the prospect from a Swiss summit may include very little of the "pattern feeling," and may be caused almost entirely by the sense of achievement and novelty. 102 THE GREAT SOCIETY In the complex and "unnatural" world of modern civilisation a felt contrast between the feeling tone of Pleasantness and Unpleasantness and the Pain and Pleasure sensations is extremely common, especially when the pain-nerves have been for a long time un- stimulated, and the condition of "baulked disposi- tion" has arisen. A man or boy, living a sheltered life, may find a rather high degree of the sensation of pain (as he also may find the sensation of fear) actu- ally pleasant. I can myself remember being one of a group of boys who, one evening, varied the intoler- able monotony of boarding-school "prep" by running needles through the lobes of our ears in order to enjoy the sensation; and most people can understand how monks and nuns come to long for the smart of the scourge. In the civilised world, Feeling-Tone, though it is a better guide than Sensation, may still be mislead- ing. The man who, while resisting the gross tempta- tions of his uncontrolled senses, spends his days in a carefully measured epicureanism, in which art, science, bodily exercise, and social intercourse are all pursued up to and not beyond the point of greatest pleasant- ness, is apt to find, as the years go on, that some of the deeper and more permanent needs of his nature are unsatisfied. And if an epicurean loses to the slightest degree his own nervous health, ex- quisite pleasantness may attach itself to actions and states of mind which are obviously dan- gerous. James, for instance, quotes Saint Pierre, who says: "For myself I find that the feelings of melancholy are the most voluptuous of all sensations," CH. Til PLEASURE-PAIN AND HAPPINESS 103 and Marie Bashkirtseff : "I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair." ^ Now the testimony of language indicates that there are a third pair of states of consciousness, Happiness and Unhappiness, which stand in something Like the. same relation to the Feeling-Tones of Pleasantness and Unpleasantness as those do to the "Pleasure" and "Pain" Sensations. The word for Happiness is differ- ent from that for Pleasantness, or for any pleasure, in Greek and Latin, in the modern European languages, and, I am told, in Sanscrit and Hebrew. Is this indication psychologically sound? I am my- self inclined to answer, Yes. It is very difficult in such matters to be sure that one is not confusing a differ- ence in degree with one of kind, but the difference between Happiness and Pleasantness, and between Unhappiness and Unpleasantness does seem to me to be best described as one of kind. One may illustrate it by the story in Punch (probably a transcript from fact), in which a little boy, listening to a regimental band, says: "Mother, how is it that soldiers' music always makes me feel so much happier than I really am?" 2 Man, from the commencement of fully-conscious childhood, lives not only consciously but subcon- sciously in the past of memory and the future of expectation, as well as in the experience of the present. He can therefore often choose to spend any moment, either in the mere consciousness of that moment, or in the more solid, and, as he feels, more permanent, type of consciousness which represents, as the little boy ^ James, Varieties oj Religious Experience, p. 83 (note). 'Punch, March 24, 1909. 104 THE GREAT SOCIETY said, what he really is. If he chooses always to live in the pleasantness of the moment he will become half aware of the dissatisfaction of his more permanent self. This is a situation with which modern psychological novelists often deal. The heroine of Mrs. Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, and the hero of Turgenev's Spring Floods are aware of the pleasantness of refined luxury and clever talk, and resolutely live in that pleasantness till they can no longer ignore the dis- satisfaction beneath it. If they had been "happy" their consciousness and their subconsciousness, the novelist preaches, would have been at one. "Happiness" in this sense is the subject-matter of Aristotle's Ethics, and the foundation of his whole social philosophy. He believed that it could only be attained by the ever-fresh activity of a wiU trained in the tradition of virtue, and acting in a duly ordered material environment.^ To him therefore Happiness was not only good in itself but an absolutely safe guide for social life. The course of individual conduct, or the form of civic organisation which made Happiness most possible must be the best. If Bentham had drawn this distinction between Pleasantness and Happiness, between the conscious- ness of the moment and the consciousness which, even during the moment, includes the past and the future, not only would Carlyle's criticism of the "pig-philos- ophy" have been turned aside, but the best of Ben- tham's disciples would have been spared much of that bewilderment and disappointment which shows itself in their letters and autobiographies. John Stuart Mill would have had words by which he could have ex- '*uxfls MpycM Kar' iperiiv iv ^lif TeXe/