Part 5

Few examples could be found to illustrate better such conditions than alcoholism. Almost universally regarded as either, on the one hand, a sin or vice, or on the other hand, as a disease, there can be little doubt that in fact it is essentially a response to a psychological necessity. In the tragic conflict between what he has been taught to desire and what he is allowed to get, man has found in alcohol, as he has found in certain other drugs, a sinister but effective peacemaker, a means of securing, for however short a time, some way out of the prison house of reality back to the Golden Age. There can be equally little doubt that it is but a comparatively small proportion of the victims of conflict who find a solace in alcohol, and the prevalence of alcoholism and the punishments entailed by the use of that dreadful remedy cannot fail to impress upon us how great must be the number of those whose need was just as great, but who were too ignorant, too cowardly, or perhaps too brave to find a release there.

We have seen that mental instability must be regarded as a condition extremely common, and produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other. It remains for us to estimate in some rough way the characteristics of the unstable, in order that we may be able to judge of their value or otherwise to the State and the species. Such an estimate must necessarily be exaggerated, over-sharp in its outlines, omitting {59} much, and therefore in many respects false. The most prominent characteristic in which the mentally unstable contrast with the “normal” is what we may vaguely call motive. They tend to be weak in energy, and especially in persistence of energy. Such weakness may translate itself into a vague scepticism as to the value of things in general, or into a definite defect of what is popularly called will power, or into many other forms, but it is always of the same fundamental significance, for it is always the result of the thwarting of the primary impulses to action resident in herd suggestion by the influence of an experience which cannot be disregarded. Such minds cannot be stimulated for long by objects adequate to normal ambition; they are apt to be sceptical in such matters as patriotism, religion, politics, social success, but the scepticism is incomplete, so that they are readily won to new causes, new religions, new quacks, and as readily fall away therefrom.

We saw that the resistive gain in motive what they lose in adaptability; we may add that in a sense the unstable gain in adaptability what they lose in motive. Thus we see society cleft by the instinctive qualities of its members into two great classes, each to a great extent possessing what the other lacks, and each falling below the possibilities of human personality. The effect of the gradual increase of the unstable in society can be seen to a certain extent in history. We can watch it through the careers of the Jews and of the Romans. At first, when the bulk of the citizens were of the stable type, the nation was enterprising, energetic, indomitable, but hard, inelastic, and fanatically convinced of its Divine mission. The inevitable effect of the expansion of experience which followed success was that development of the unstable and sceptical which ultimately allowed the nation, no longer {60} believing in itself or its gods, to become the almost passive prey of more stable peoples.

In regard to the question of the fundamental significance of the two great mental types found in society, a tempting field for speculation at once opens up, and many questions immediately arise for discussion. Is, for example, the stable normal type naturally in some special degree insensitive to experience, and if so, is such a quality inborn or acquired? Again, may the characteristics of the members of this class be the result of an experience relatively easily dealt with by rationalization and exclusion? Then again, are the unstable naturally hypersensitive to experience, or have they met with an experience relatively difficult to assimilate? Into the discussion of such questions we shall here make no attempt to enter, but shall limit ourselves to reiterating that these two types divide society between them, that they both must be regarded as seriously defective and as evidence that civilization has not yet provided a medium in which the average human mind can grow undeformed and to its full stature.

GREGARIOUSNESS AND THE FUTURE OF MAN.

Thus far we have attempted to apply biological conceptions to man and society as they actually exist at present. We may now, very shortly, inquire whether or not the same method can yield some hint as to the course which human development will take in the future.

As we have already seen reason to believe, in the course of organic development when the limits of size and efficiency in the unicellular organism were reached, the only possible access of advantage to the competing organism was gained by the appearance of combination. In the scale of the metazoa {61} we see the advantages of combination and division of labour being more and more made use of, until the individual cells lose completely the power of separate existence, and their functions come to be useful only in the most indirect way and through the organisms of which the cells are constituents. This complete submergence of the cell in the organism indicates the attainment of the maximum advantages to be obtained from this particular access in complexity, and it indicates to us the direction in which development must proceed within the limits which are produced by that other access of complexity—gregariousness.

The success and extent of such development clearly depend on the relation of two series of activities in the individual which may in the most general way be described as the capacity for varied reaction and the capacity for communication. The process going on in the satisfactorily developing gregarious animal is the moulding of the varied reactions of the individual into functions beneficial to him only indirectly through the welfare of the new unit—the herd. This moulding process is a consequence of the power of intercommunication amongst the individual constituents of the new unit. Intercommunication is thus seen to be of cardinal importance to the gregarious, just as was the nervous system to the multicellular.

Moreover, in a given gregarious species the existence of a highly developed power of reaction in the individual with a proportionately less developed capacity for communication will mean that the species is not deriving the advantages it might from the possession of gregariousness, while the full advantages of the type will be attained only when the two sets of activities are correspondingly strong.

Here we may see perhaps the explanation of the astounding success and completeness of {62} gregariousness in bees and ants. Their cycle of development was early complete because the possibilities of reaction of the individual were so small, and consequently the capacity for intercommunication of the individual was relatively soon able to attain a corresponding grade. The individual has become as completely merged in the hive as the single cell in the multicellular animal, and consequently the whole of her activities is available for the uses of the State. It is interesting to notice that, considered from this aspect, the wonderful society of the bee, with its perfect organization and its wonderful adaptability and elasticity, owes its early attainment of success to the smallness of the brain power of the individual.

For the mammals with their greater powers of varied reaction the path to the consummation of their possibilities must be longer, more painful, and more dangerous, and this applies in an altogether special degree to man.

The enormous power of varied reaction possessed by man must render necessary for his attainment of the full advantages of the gregarious habit a power of intercommunication of absolutely unprecedented fineness. It is clear that scarcely a hint of such power has yet appeared, and it is equally obvious that it is this defect which gives to society the characteristics which are the contempt of the man of science and the disgust of the humanitarian.

We are now in a position to understand how momentous is the question as to what society does with the raw material of its minds to encourage in them the potential capacity for intercommunication which they undoubtedly by nature possess. To that question there is but one answer. By providing its members with a herd tradition which is constantly at war with feeling and with experience, {63} society, drives them inevitably into resistiveness on the one hand, or into mental instability on the other, conditions which have this in common, that they tend to exaggerate that isolation of the individual which is shown us by the intellect to be unnatural and by the heart to be cruel.

Another urgent question for the future is provided by the steady increase, relative and absolute, of the mentally unstable. The danger to the State constituted by a large unstable class is already generally recognized, but unfortunately realization has so far only instigated a yet heavier blow at the species. It is assumed that instability is a primary quality, and therefore only to be dealt with by breeding it out. With that indifference to the mental side of life which is characteristic of the mentally resistant class, the question as to the real meaning of instability has been begged by the invention of the disastrous word “degenerate.” The simplicity of the idea has charmed modern speculation, and the only difficulty in the whole problem has come to be the decision as to the most expeditious way of getting rid of this troublesome flaw in an otherwise satisfactory world.

The conception that the natural environment of man must be modified if the body is to survive has long been recognized, but the fact that the mind is incomparably more delicate than the body has scarcely been noticed at all. We assume that the disorderly environment with which we surround the mind has no effect, and are ingenuously surprised when mental instability arises apparently from nowhere; but although we know nothing of its origin our temerity in applying the cure is in no sense daunted.

It has already been pointed out how dangerous it would be to breed man for reason—that is, against suggestibility. The idea is a fit companion for the {64} device of breeding against “degeneracy.” The “degenerate”—that is, the mentally unstable—have demonstrated by the mere fact of instability that they possess the quality of sensitiveness to feeling and to experience, for it is this which has prevented them from applying the remedy of rationalization or exclusion when they have met with experience conflicting with herd suggestion. There can be no doubt as to the value to the State of such sensitiveness were it developed in a congruous environment. The “degeneracy,” therefore, which we see developed as a secondary quality in these sensitive minds is no evidence against the degenerate, but an indictment of the disorderly environment which has ruined them, just as the catchword associating insanity and genius tells us nothing about genius but a great deal about the situation into which it has had the misfortune to be born.

Sensitiveness to feeling and experience is undoubtedly the necessary antecedent of any high grade of that power of intercommunication which we have seen to be necessary to the satisfactory development of man. Such sensitiveness, however, in society as it now is, inevitably leads merely to mental instability. That such sensitiveness increases with civilization is shown by the close association between civilization and mental instability. There is no lack, therefore, of the mental quality of all others most necessary to the gregarious animal. The pressing problem which in fact faces man in the immediate future is how to readjust the mental environment in such a way that sensitiveness may develop and confer on man the enormous advantages which it holds for him, without being transformed from a blessing into the curse and menace of instability. To the biologist it is quite clear that this can be effected only by an extension of the rational method to the whole field of experience, a {65} process of the greatest difficulty, but one which must be the next great variation in man’s development if that development is to continue to be an evolution.

Outside this possibility the imagination can see nothing but grounds for pessimism. It needs but little effort of foresight to realize that without some totally revolutionary change in man’s attitude towards the mind, even his very tenure of the earth may come to be threatened. Recent developments in the study of disease have shown us how blind and fumbling have been our efforts against the attacks of our immemorial enemies the unicellular organisms. When we remember their capacities for variation and our fixity, we can see that for the race effectually and permanently to guard itself against even this one danger are necessary that fineness and complexity of organization, that rendering available of the utmost capacity of its members, against which the face of society seems at present to be so steadily set. We see man to-day, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief no less firm that his traditions and laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. Living as he does in a world where outside his race no allowances are made for infirmity, and where figments however beautiful never become facts, it needs but little imagination to see how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures, ignominously to be swept from her work-table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity and patience.

1909.

{66} SPECULATIONS UPON THE HUMAN MIND IN 1915

MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE AND NATURE’S PLACE IN MAN

As the nineteenth century draws away into the past and it is possible to get a comprehensive view of the intellectual legacies it has left to its successor, certain of its ideas stand out from the general mass by reason of the greatness of their scale and scope. Ideas of the first order of magnitude are from their very greatness capable of full appreciation only in a comparatively distant view. However much they have been admired and studied by contemporary thought, it is with the passage of time only that all their proportions come gradually into focus. The readjustments of thought as to what used to be called man’s place in nature, which were so characteristic a work of the latter half of the nineteenth century, embodied an idea of this imperial type which, fruitful as it has proved, has even now yielded far less than its full harvest of truth.

The conception of man as an animal, at first entertained only in a narrow zoological sense, has gradually extended in significance, and is now beginning to be understood as a guiding principle in the study of all the activities of the individual and the species. In the early days such a conception was regarded by non-scientific thought as degrading to man, and as denying to him the possibility of moral progress {67} and the reality of his higher æsthetic and emotional capabilities; at the same time, men of science found themselves compelled, however unwillingly, to deny that the moral activities of man could be made consistent with his status as an animal. It may still be remembered how even the evolutionary enthusiasm of Huxley was baffled by the incompatibility he found to subsist between what he called the ethical and the cosmical processes, and how he stood bewildered by the sight of moral beauty blossoming incorrigibly amidst the cruelty, lust, and bloodshed of the world.

The passage of time has tended more and more to clear up these lingering confusions of an anthropocentric biology, and thought is gradually gaining courage to explore, not merely the body of man but his mind and his moral capacities, in the knowledge that these are not meaningless intrusions into an otherwise orderly world, but are partakers in him and his history just as are his vermiform appendix and his stomach, and are elements in the complex structure of the universe as respectably established there, and as racy of that soil as the oldest saurian or the newest gas.

Man is thus not merely, as it were, rescued from the inhuman loneliness which he had been taught was his destiny and persuaded was his pride, but he is relieved from perplexities and temptations which had so long proved obstacles to his finding himself and setting out valiantly on an upward path. Cut off from his history and regarded as an exile into a lower world, he can scarcely fail to be appalled and crushed by the discrepancy between his lofty pretensions and his lowly acts. If he but recognize that he himself and his virtues and aspirations are integral strands in the fabric of life, he will learn that the great tissue of reality loses none of its splendour by the fact that near by where the pattern {68} glows with his courage and his pride it burns with the radiance of the tiger, and over against his intellect and his genius it mocks in the grotesques of the ape.

The development of an objective attitude towards the status of man has had, perhaps, its most significant effect in the influence it has exercised upon the study of the human mind.

The desire to understand the modes of action of the mind, and to formulate about them generalizations which shall be of practical value, has led to inquiries being pursued along three distinct paths. These several methods may be conveniently distinguished as the primitive, the human, and the comparative.

What I have called the primitive method of psychological inquiry is also the obvious and natural one. It takes man as it finds him, accepts his mind for what it professes to be, and examines into its processes by introspection of a direct and simple kind. It is necessarily subject to the conditions that the object of study is also the medium through which the observations are made, and that there is no objective standard by which the accuracy of transmission through this medium can be estimated and corrected. In the result the materials collected are subjected to a very special and very stringent kind of censorship. If an observation is acceptable and satisfactory to the mind itself, it is reported as true; if it contains material which is unwelcome to the mind, it is reported as false; and in both cases the failure is in no sense due to any conscious dishonesty in the observing mind, but is a fallacy necessarily inherent in the method. A fairly characteristic product of inquiries of this type is the conception, which seems so obvious to common sense, that introspection does give access to all mental processes, so that a conscious motive must be discoverable for all the acts of the subject. Experience {69} with more objective methods has shown that when no motive is found for a given act or no motive consistent with the mind’s pretensions as to itself, there will always be a risk of a presentable one being extemporized.

Psychology of this primitive type—the naïve psychology of common sense—is always necessarily tainted with what may be called in a special sense anthropomorphism; it tells us, that is to say, not what man is but what he thinks and feels himself to be. Judged by its fruits in enabling us to foretell or to influence conduct, it is worthless. It has been studied for thousands of years and infinite ingenuities have been expended on it, and yet at its best it can only tell us how the average man thinks his mind works—a body of information not sensibly superior in reality to the instructions of a constitutional monarch addressed to an unruly parliament. It has distracted thought with innumerable falsifications, but in all its secular cultivation has produced no body of generalizations of value in the practical conduct of life.

COMMENTS ON AN OBJECTIVE SYSTEM OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

I

Until comparatively recent years the fact that what was called psychology did not even pretend to be of any practical value in affairs was tolerated by its professors and regarded as more or less in the nature of things. The science, therefore, outside a small class of specialists was in very dismal reputation. It had come to comprise two divergent schools, one which busied itself with the apparatus of the experimental physiologist and frankly studied the physiology of the nervous system, the other {70} which occupied itself with the faded abstractions of logic and metaphysics, while both agreed in ignoring the study of the mind. This comparative sterility may in a broad way be traced back to the one fundamental defect from which the science suffered—the absence of an objective standard by which the value of mental observations could be estimated. Failing such a standard, any given mental phenomenon might be as much a product of the observing mind as of the mind observed, or the varying degrees in which both of these factors contributed might be inextricably mixed. Of late years the much-needed objective standard has been sought and to some extent found in two directions. What I have called “human” psychology has found it in the study of diseases of the mind. In states of disease mental processes and mechanisms which had eluded observation in the normal appear in an exaggerated form which renders recognition less difficult. The enlightenment coming from the understanding of such pathological material has made it possible to argue back to the less obtrusive or more effectively concealed phenomena of the normal and more or less to exclude the fallacies of the observing mind, and, at any rate in part, to dissipate the obscurity which for so long had successfully hidden the actual mental phenomena themselves.