Part 8

The extent of the psychical accompaniments of instinctive activity in civilized man should not, therefore, be allowed to obscure the fact that the instincts are tendencies deeply ingrained in the very structure of his being. They are as necessarily inherited, as much a part of himself, and as essential a condition for the survival of himself and his race, as are the vital organs of his body. {96} Their persistence in him is established and enforced by the effects of millions of years of selection, so that it can scarcely be supposed that a few thousand years of civilized life which have been accompanied by no steady selection against any single instinct can have had any effect whatever in weakening them. The common expression that such an effect has been produced is doubtless due to the great development in civilized man of the mental accompaniments of instinctive processes. These mental phenomena surround the naked reality of the impulse with a cloud of rationalized comment and illusory explanation. The capacity which man possesses for free and rational thought in matters untainted by instinctive inclination is of course indubitable, but he has not realized that there is no obvious mental character attached to propositions having an instinctive basis which should expose them to suspicion. As a matter of fact, it is just those fundamental propositions which owe their origin to instinct which appear to the subject the most obvious, the most axiomatic, and the least liable to doubt by any one but an eccentric or a madman.

It has been customary with certain authors—perhaps especially such as have interested themselves in sociological subjects—to ascribe quite a large number of man’s activities to separate instincts. Very little consideration of most of these propositions shows that they are based upon too lax a definition or a want of analysis, for most of the activities referred to special instincts prove to be derivatives of the great primal instincts which are common to or very widely distributed over the animal kingdom. Man and a very large number of all animals inherit the capacity to respond to physical need or emergency according to the demands which we classify, as the three primary instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and {97} reproduction. If a series of animals of increasing brain power be examined, it will be found that a growth of intelligence, while it does nothing to enfeeble the instinctive impulse, modifies the appearances of it by increasing the number of modes of reaction it may use. Intelligence, that is to say, leaves its possessor no less impelled by instinct than his simpler ancestor, but endows him with the capacity to respond in a larger variety of ways. The response is now no longer directly and narrowly confined to a single path, but may follow a number of indirect and intricate ways; there is no reason, however, to suppose that the impulse is any the weaker for that. To mistake indirectness of response for enfeeblement of impulse is a fundamental error to which all inquiry into the psychology of instinct is liable.

To man his big brain has given a maximal power of various response which enables him to indulge his instinctive impulses in indirect and symbolic activities to a greater extent than any other animal. It is for this reason that the instincts of man are not always obvious in his conduct and have come to be regarded by some as practically no more than vestigial. Indirect modes of response may indeed become so involved as to assume the appearance of the negation of the very instincts of which they are the expression. Thus it comes to be no paradox to say that monks and nuns, ascetics and martyrs, prove the strength of the great primary instincts their existence seems to deny.

Man and a certain number of other species widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom show, in addition to the instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, specialized inherited modes of response to the needs, not directly of the individual but of the herd to which he belongs. These responses, which are perfectly well marked and characteristic, are those of the herd instinct. It is {98} important to grasp clearly the relation of this instinct to the individual. It must be understood that each separate member of a gregarious species inherits characters deeply rooted in his being which effectually differentiate him from any non-gregarious animal. These characters are such that in presence of certain stimuli they will ensure his responding in a specialized way which will be quite different from the response of a solitary animal. The response when examined will be found not necessarily to favour the survival of the individual as such, but to favour his survival as a member of a herd. A very simple example will make this plain. The dog and the cat are our two most familiar examples of the social and the solitary animal respectively. Their different attitudes towards feeding must have been observed by all. The cat takes her food leisurely, without great appearance of appetite and in small amounts at a time; the dog is voracious and will eat hurriedly as much as he can get, growling anxiously if he is approached. In doing so he is expressing a deeply ingrained characteristic. His attitude towards food was built up when he hunted in packs and to get a share of the common kill had to snatch what came in his way and gulp it down before it could be taken from him. In slang which has a sound biological basis we say he “wolfs” his food. When in domestication his food supply is no longer limited in the primitive way, his instinctive tendency persists; he is typically greedy and will kill himself by overeating if he is allowed to. Here we have a perfect instance of an instinctive response being disadvantageous to the survival of the individual as such, and favouring his survival only as a member of a herd. This example, trivial as it may seem, is worthy of close study. It shows that the individual of the gregarious species, as an individual and in {99} isolation, possesses indelible marks of character which effectually distinguish him from all solitary animals.

The same principle applies with equal force to man. Whether he is alone or in company, a hermit philosopher or a mere unit of a mob, his responses will bear the same stamp of being regulated by the existence and influence of his fellows.

The foregoing considerations, elementary and incomplete as they are, suggest that there is a strong prima facie case for rejecting the common conceptions that man is among animals the least endowed with an inheritance of instinct, and that civilization has produced in him profound modifications in his primitive instinctive impulses. If the conception which I have put forward be correct, namely, that man is not at all less subject to instinctive impulsions than any other animal but disguises the fact from the observer and from himself by the multiplicity of the lines of response his mental capacity enables him to take, it should follow that his conduct is much less truly variable and much more open to generalization than has generally been supposed. Should this be possible, it would enable the biologist to study the actual affairs of mankind in a really practical way, to analyse the tendencies of social development, to discover how deeply or superficially they were based in the necessity of things, and above all, to foretell their course. Thus might be founded a true science of politics which would be of direct service to the statesman.

Many attempts have been made to apply biological principles to the interpretation of history and the guidance of statecraft, especially since the popularization of the principles associated with the name of Darwin. Such attempts have generally been undertaken less in the spirit of the scientific {100} investigator than in that of the politician; the point of departure has been a political conviction and not a biological truth; and as might be expected, when there has been any conflict between political conviction and biological truth it is the latter that has had to give way. Work of this kind has brought the method into deserved contempt by its crudity, its obvious subservience to prejudice, and its pretentious gestures of the doctrinaire. England has not been without her examples of these scientific politicians and historians, but they cannot be said to have flourished here as they have in the more scholastic air of Germany. The names of several such are now notorious in this country and their works are sufficiently familiar for it to be obvious that their claims to scientific value do not admit of discussion. It is not necessary to consider their conclusions, they are condemned by their manner; and however interesting their political vociferation may be to fellow-patriots, it plainly has no meaning whatsoever as science. In face of the spectacle presented by these leather-lunged doctrinaires, it needs some little hardihood to maintain that it is possible profitably to apply biological principle to the consideration of human affairs; nevertheless, that is an essential thesis of this essay.

In attempting to illuminate the records of history by the principles of biology, an essential difficulty is the difference of scale in time upon which these two departments of knowledge work. Historical events are confined within a few thousands of years, the biological record covers many millions; it is scarcely to be expected, therefore, that even a gross movement on the cramped historical scale will be capable of detection in the vast gulf of time the biological series represents. A minor difficulty is the fact that the data of history come to us through a dense and reduplicated veil of human {101} interpretation, whereas the biological facts are comparatively free from this kind of obscuration. The former obstacle is undoubtedly serious. It is to be remarked, however, that there is strong reason to suppose that the process of organic evolution has not been and is not always infinitely slow and gradual. It is more than suspected that, perhaps as the result of slowly accumulated tendency or perhaps as the result of a sudden variation of structure or capacity, there have been periods of rapid change which might have been perceptible to direct observation. The infinitely long road still tending upwards comes to where it branches and meets another path, tending perhaps downwards or even upwards at a different slope. May not the meeting or branching form, as it were, a node in the infinite line, a resting place for the eye, a point in the vast extension capable of recognition by a finite mind and of expression in terms of human affairs? It is the belief of the writer that the human race stands at such a nodal point to-day.

THE BIOLOGY OF GREGARIOUSNESS.

In order to set forth the evidence on which is based the conclusion that the present juncture of affairs is not merely, as it very obviously is, a meeting-place of epochs in the historical series, but also marks a stage in the biological series which will prove to have been a moment of destiny in the evolution of the human species, it will be necessary to inquire somewhat closely into the biological meaning of the social habit in animals. In an earlier essay certain speculations in the same subject were indulged, and a certain amount of repetition will be necessary. The point of view then taken up, however, was different from that from which I shall now attempt to review the facts. Then the main {102} interest lay in an examination of the meaning of gregariousness for the individual mind, and although reasons enough were found for uneasiness at the course of events, and at the instability of civilization which any radical examination displayed, the inquiry was not pursued under any immediate imminence of disaster to the social fabric as it must be now. Naturally, therefore, at the present time certain aspects of the subject which before were of no special relevance become of great importance and demand close examination.

In a general view of the social habit in animals certain outstanding facts are readily to be observed. It is of wide distribution and sporadic occurrence, it varies much in the completeness of its development, and there seems to be an inverse relation between its completeness and the brain power of the animal concerned.

From the wideness of its distribution the social habit may be supposed to represent a forward step in complexity which comes about readily. It has the appearance of being upon a path which species have a natural tendency to follow, a line of evolution which is perhaps rendered possible by constantly occurring small variations common to all animals and taken advantage of only under certain circumstances of pressure or increase. It seems not to depend on any sudden large variation of type, and such is not necessary to account for it. It differs from many other modifications which we know animal life to have undergone in being immediately useful to the species from its very beginning and in its least perfect forms. Once started, however imperfectly, the new habit will have a natural tendency to progress towards fuller forms of sociality by reason of special selective forces which it inevitably sets going. The fact that it is valuable to the species in which it develops even in its most larval forms, {103} combined with its tendency to progress, no doubt accounts for the wonderful series of all degrees of gregariousness which the field of natural history presents.

I have pointed out elsewhere that the fundamental biological meaning of gregariousness is that it allows of an indefinite enlargement of the unit upon which the undifferentiated influence of natural selection is allowed to act, so that the individual merged in the larger unit is shielded from the immediate effects of natural selection and is exposed directly only to the special form of selection which obtains within the new unit.

There seems little doubt that this sheltering of the individual allows him to vary and to undergo modifications with a freedom which would have been dangerous to him as an isolated being, but is safe under the new conditions and valuable to the new unit of which he now is a part.

In essence the significance of the passage from the solitary to the gregarious seems to be closely similar to that of the passage from the unicellular to the multicellular organism—an enlargement of the unit exposed to natural selection, a shielding of the individual cell from that pressure, an endowment of it with freedom to vary and specialize in safety.

Nature has thus made two great experiments of the same type, and if one be reasonably careful to avoid arguing from analogy, it is possible to use one case to illuminate the other by furnishing hints as to what mechanisms may be looked for and in what directions inquiry may profitably be pursued.

The sporadic occurrence of gregariousness at widely separated points of the animal field—in man and sheep, in ant and elephant—inclines one to suppose that multicellularity must have arisen also at multiple points, and that the metazoa did not arise from the protozoa by a single line of descent. It {104} suggests also that there is some inherent property in mobile living organisms that makes combination of individuals into larger units a more or less inevitable course of development under certain circumstances and without any gross variation being necessary to initiate it. The complex evolution which multicellularity made possible, and perhaps enforced, can scarcely fail to make one wonder whether the gregarious animal has not entered upon a path which must of necessity lead to increasing complexity and co-ordination, to a more and more stringent intensity of integration or to extinction.

The varying degrees to which the social habit has developed among different animals provide a very interesting branch of study. The class of insects is remarkable in furnishing an almost inexhaustible variety of stages to which the instinct is developed. Of these that reached by the humble bee, with its small, weak families, is a familiar example of a low grade; that of the wasp, with its colonies large and strong, but unable to survive the winter, is another of more developed type; while that of the honey bee represents a very high grade of development in which the instinct seems to have completed its cycle and yielded to the hive the maximum advantages of which it is capable. In the honey bee, then, the social instinct may be said to be complete.

It is necessary to examine somewhat closely into what is denoted by the completeness or otherwise of the social habit in a given species.

To return for a moment to the case of the change from the unicellular to the multicellular, it is obvious that in the new unit, to get the full advantage of the change there must be specialization involving both loss and gain to the individual cell; one loses power of digestion and gains a special sensitiveness to stimulation, another loses locomotion {105} to gain digestion, and so forth in innumerable series as the new unit becomes more complex. Inherent, however, in the new mechanism is the need for co-ordination if the advantages of specialization are to be obtained. The necessity of a nervous system—if progress is to be maintained—early becomes obvious, and it is equally clear that the primary function of the nervous system is to facilitate co-ordination. Thus it would seem that the individual cell incorporated in a larger unit must possess a capacity for specialization, the ability to originate new methods of activity, and a capacity for response—that is, the ability to limit itself to action co-ordinated suitably to the interests of the new unit rather than to those that would have been its own if it had been a free unit in itself. Specialization and co-ordination will be the two necessary conditions for success of the larger unit, and advance in complexity will be possible as long only as these two are unexhausted. Neither, of course, will be of avail without the other. The richest specialization will be of no good if it cannot be controlled to the uses of the whole organism, and the most perfect control of the individual cells will be incapable of ensuring progress if it has no material of original variation to work on.

The analogy is helpful in the consideration of the mechanisms brought into play by the social habit. The community of the honey bee bears a close resemblance to the body of a complex animal. The capacity for actual structural specialization of the individuals in the interests of the hive has been remarkable and has gone far, while at the same time co-ordination has been stringently enforced, so that each individual is actually absorbed into the community, expends all its activities therein, and when excluded from it is almost as helpless as a part of the naked flesh of an animal {106} detached from its body. The hive may, in fact, without any very undue stretch of fantasy, be described as an animal of which all the individual cells have retained the power of locomotion. When one watches the flight of a swarm of bees its unanimity and directness very easily produce the illusion that one is witnessing the migration of a single animal usually sedentary but at times capable of undertaking journeys with a formidable and successful energy. This new animal differs from the other animals of the metazoa which it has outdistanced in the race of evolution, not merely in its immense power, energy, and flexibility, but also in the almost startling fact that it has recovered the gift of immortality which seemed to have been lost with its protozoal ancestors.

The extent to which the hive makes use of the powers of its individuals is the measure of the completeness with which the social habit is developed in it. The worker bee has practically no activities which are not directly devoted to the hive, and yet she goes about her ceaseless tasks in a way that never fails to impress the observer with its exuberant energy and even its appearance of joyfulness. It is thought that the average worker bee _works herself to death_ in about two months. That is a fact which can scarcely fail to arouse, even in the least imaginative, at any rate a moment of profound contemplation.

If we could suppose her to be conscious in the human sense, we must imagine the bee to be possessed by an enthusiasm for the hive more intense than a mother’s devotion to her son, without personal ambitions, or doubts or fears, and if we are to judge by the imperfect experience man has yet had of the same lofty passion, we must think of her consciousness, insignificant spark as it is, as a little fire ablaze with altruistic feeling. Doubtless, such {107} an attribution of emotion to the bee is a quite unjustified fallacy of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, it is not altogether valueless as a hint of what social unity might effect in an animal of larger mental life. There can be little doubt that the perfection to which the communal life of the bee has attained is dependent on the very smallness of the mental development of which the individuals are capable. Their capacity to assimilate experience is necessarily from their structure, and is known by experience to be, small and their path is marked out so plainly by actual physical modifications that the almost miraculous absorption of the worker in the hive is after all perhaps natural enough. If she were able to assimilate general experience on a larger scale, to react freely and appropriately to stimuli external to the hive, there can be little doubt that the community would show a less concentrated efficiency than it does to-day. The standing miracle of the bee—her sensitiveness to the voice of the hive and her capacity to communicate with her fellows—would undoubtedly be less marvellously perfect if she were not at the same time deaf to all other voices.