Chapter II and provisionally rejected. But it is maintained that a

society, when it enjoys a long life and becomes highly organised, acquires a structure and qualities which are largely independent of the qualities of the individuals who enter into its composition and take part for a brief time in its life. It becomes an organised system of forces which has a life of its own, tendencies of its own, a power of moulding all its component individuals, and a power of perpetuating itself as a self-identical system, subject only to slow and gradual change.

In an earlier work, in which I have sketched in outline the program of psychology[4], I wrote: “When the student of behaviour has learnt from the various departments of psychology ... all that they can teach him of the structure, genesis, and modes of operation of the individual mind, a large field still awaits his exploration. If we put aside as unproven such speculations as that touched on at the end of the foregoing chapter (the view of James that the human mind can enter into an actual union or communion with the divine mind) and refuse to admit any modes of communication or influence between minds other than through the normal channels of sense-perception and bodily movement, we must nevertheless recognise the existence in a certain sense of over-individual or collective minds. We may fairly define a mind as an organised system of mental or purposive forces; and, in the sense so defined, every highly organised human society may properly be said to possess a collective mind. For the collective actions which constitute the history of any such society are conditioned by an organisation which can only be described in terms of mind, and which yet is not comprised within the mind of any individual; the society is rather constituted by the system of relations obtaining between the individual minds which are its units of composition. Under any given circumstances the actions of the society are, or may be, very different from the mere sum of the actions with which its several members would react to the situation in the absence of the system of relations which render them a society; or, in other words, the thinking and acting of each man, in so far as he thinks and acts as a member of a society, are very different from his thinking and acting as an isolated individual.”

This passage has been cited by the author of a notable work on Sociology[5], and made by him the text of a polemic against the conception of the group mind. He writes: “This passage contains two arguments in favour of the hypothesis of super-individual ‘collective’ minds, neither of which can stand examination. The ‘definition’ of a mind as ‘an organised system of mental or purposive forces’ is totally inadequate. When we speak of the mind of an individual we mean something more than this. The mind of each of us has a unity other than that of such a system.” But I doubt whether Mr Maciver could explain exactly what kind of unity it is that he postulates. Is it the unity of soul substance? I have myself contended at some length that this is a necessary postulate or hypothesis[6], but I do not suppose that Maciver accepts or intends to refer to this conception. Is it the unity of consciousness or of self-consciousness? Then the answer is that this unity is by no means a general and established function of the individual mind; modern studies of the disintegration of personality have shown this to be a questionable assumption, undermined by the many facts of normal and abnormal psychology best resumed under Dr Morton Prince’s term ‘co-consciousness.’

The individual mind is a system of purposive forces, but the system is by no means always a harmonious system; it is but too apt to be the scene of fierce conflicts which sometimes (in the graver psychoneuroses) result in the rupture and disintegration of the system. I do not know how otherwise we are to describe the individual mind than as a system of mental forces; and, until Maciver succeeds in showing in what other sense he conceives it to have “a unity other than that of such a system,” his objection cannot be seriously entertained. He asks, of the alleged collective mind: “Does the system so created think and will and feel and act[7]?” My answer, as set out in the following pages, is that it does all of these things. He asks further: “If a number of minds construct by their interactivity an organisation ‘which can only be described in terms of mind,’ must we ascribe to the construction the very nature of the forces which constructed it?” To this I reply—my point is that the individual minds which enter into the structure of the group mind at any moment of its life do not construct it; rather, as they come to reflective self-consciousness, they find themselves already members of the system, moulded by it, sharing in its activities, influenced by it at every moment in every thought and feeling and action in ways which they can neither fully understand nor escape from, struggle as they may to free themselves from its infinitely subtle and multitudinous forces. And this system, as Maciver himself forcibly insists in another connection, does not consist of relations that exist external to and independently of the things related, namely the minds of individuals; it consists of the same stuff as the individual minds, its threads and parts lie within these minds; but the parts in the several individual minds reciprocally imply and complement one another and together make up the system which consists wholly of them; and therefore, as I wrote, they can “only be described in terms of mind.” Any society is literally a more or less organised mental system; the stuff of which it consists is mental stuff; the forces that operate within it are mental forces. Maciver argues further: “Social organisations occur of every kind and every degree of universality. If England has a collective mind, why not Birmingham and why not each of its wards? If a nation has a collective mind, so also have a church and a trade union. And we shall have collective minds that are parts of greater collective minds, and collective minds that intersect other collective minds.” By this my withers are quite unwrung. What degree of organisation is necessary before a society can properly be said to enjoy collective mental life or have a group mind is a question of degree; and the exponent of the group mind is under no obligation to return a precise answer to this question. My contention is that the most highly organised groups display collective mental life in a way which justifies the conception of the group mind, and that we shall be helped to understand collective life in these most complex and difficult forms by studying it in the simpler less elaborated groups where the conception of a group mind is less clearly applicable. As regards the overlapping and intersection of groups and the consequent difficulty of assigning the limits of groups whose unity is implied by the term group mind, I would point out that this difficulty arises only in connexion with the lower forms of group life and that a parallel difficulty is presented by the lower forms of animal life. Is Maciver acquainted with the organisation of a sponge, or of the so-called coral ‘insect,’ or with that of the Portuguese man-o’-war? Would he deny the unity of a human being, or refuse to acknowledge his possession of a mind, because in these lower organisms the limits of the unit are hard or impossible to assign? Maciver goes on: “The second argument is an obvious fallacy. If each man thinks and acts differently as a member of a crowd or association and as an individual standing out of any such immediate relation to his fellows, it is still each who thinks and acts; the new determinations are determinations still of individual minds as they are influenced by aggregation.... But this is merely an extreme instance of the obvious fact that every mind is influenced by every kind of environment. To posit a super-individual mind because individual minds are altered by their relations to one another (as indeed they are altered by their relations to physical conditions) is surely gratuitous[8].” To this I reply—the environment which influences the individual in his life as a member of an organised group is neither the sum of his fellow members as individuals, nor is it something that has other than a mental existence. It is the organised group as such, which exists only or chiefly in the persons of those composing it, but which does not exist in the mind of any one of them, and which operates upon each so powerfully just because it is something indefinitely greater, more powerful, more comprehensive than the mere sum of those individuals. Maciver feels that “it is important to clear out of the way this misleading doctrine of super-individual minds corresponding to social or communal organisations and activities,” and therefore goes on to say that “there is no more a great ‘collective’ mind beyond the individual minds in society than there is a great ‘collective’ tree beyond all the individual trees in nature. A collection of trees is a wood, and that we can study as a unity; so an aggregation of men is a society, a much more determinate unity; but a collection of trees is not a collective tree, and neither is a collection of persons or minds a collective person or mind. We can speak of qualities of tree in abstraction from any particular tree, and we can speak of qualities of mind as such, or of some particular kind of mind in relation to some type of situation. Yet in so doing we are simply considering the characteristic of like elements of individual minds, as we might consider the characteristic or like elements discoverable in individual trees and kinds of trees. To conceive because of these identities, a ‘collective’ mind as existing _beside_ those of individuals or a collective tree beside the variant examples is to run against the wall of the Idea theory.” Now, I am not proposing to commit myself to this last-named theory. It is not because minds have much in common with one another that I speak of the collective mind, but because the group as such is more than the sum of the individuals, has its own life proceeding according to laws of group life, which are not the laws of individual life, and because its peculiar group life reacts upon and profoundly modifies the lives of the individuals. I would not call a forest a collective tree; but I would maintain that in certain respects a forest, a wood, or a copse, has in a rudimentary way a collective life. Thus the forest remains the same forest though, after a hundred or a thousand years, all its constituent trees may be different individuals; and again the forest as a whole may and does modify the life of each tree, as by attracting moisture, protecting from violent and cold winds, harbouring various plants and animals which affect the trees, and so on.

But I will cite an eloquent passage from a recent work on sociology in support of my view. “The bonds of society are in the members of society, and not outside them. It is the memories, traditions, and beliefs of each which make up the social memories, traditions and beliefs. Society like the kingdom of God is within us. Within us, within each of us, and yet greater than the thoughts and understandings of any of us. For the social thoughts and feelings and willings of each, the socialised mind of each, with the complex scheme of his relation to the social world, is no mere reproduction of the social thoughts and feelings and willings of the rest. Unity and difference here too weave their eternal web, the greater social scheme which none of us who are part of it can ever see in its entirety, but whose infinite subtlety and harmony we may more and more comprehend and admire. As a community grows in civilisation and culture, its traditions are no longer clear and definite ways of thinking, its usages are no longer uniform, its spirit is no longer to be summed up in a few phrases. But the spirit and tradition of a people become no less real in becoming more complex. Each member no longer embodies the whole tradition, but it is because each embodies some part of a greater tradition to which the freely-working individuality of each contributes. In this sense the spirit of a people, though existing only in the individual members, more and more surpasses the measure of any individual mind. Again, the social tradition is expressed through institutions and records more permanent than the short-lived members of community. These institutions and records are as it were stored social values (just as, in particular, books may be called stored social knowledge), _in themselves nothing_, no part of the social mind, but the instruments of the communication of traditions from member to member, as also from the dead past to the living present. In this way too, with the increase of these stored values, of which members realise parts but none the whole, the spirit of a people more and more surpasses the measure of any individual mind. It is these social forces within and without, working in the minds of individuals whose own social inheritance is an essential part of their individuality, stored in the institutions which they maintain from the past or establish in the present, that mould the communal spirit of the successive generations. In this sense too a community may be called greater than its members who exist at any one time, since the community itself marches out of the past into the present, and its members at any time are part of a great succession, themselves first moulded by communal forces before they become, so moulded, the active determinants of its future moulding.” An admirable statement! “The greater social scheme which none of us can see in its entirety”—“the spirit of a people” which “more and more surpasses the measure of any individual mind”—“the communal spirit of the successive generations”—“the community” which is “greater than its members who exist at any one time”; all these are alternative designations of that organised system of mental forces which exists over and above, though not independently of, the individuals in each of whom some fragment of it is embodied and which is the group mind. And the writer of this statement is Mr R. M. Maciver; the passage occurs in the section of his book designed to “clear out of the way this misleading doctrine of super-individual minds.” In the same section he goes on to say that “every association, every organised group, may and does have rights and obligations which are not the rights and obligations of any or all of its members taken distributively but only of the association acting as an organised unity.... As a unity the association may become a ‘juristic person,’ a ‘corporation,’ and from the legal standpoint the character of unity so conceived is very important.... The ‘juristic person’ is a real _unity_, and therefore more than a _persona ficta_, but the reality it possesses is of a totally different order of being from that of the persons who establish it.” But, perversely as it seems to me, Maciver adds “the unity of which we are thinking is not mechanic or organic or even psychic.” I cannot but think that, in thus denying the organic and psychic nature of this unity, Maciver is under the influence of that unfortunate and still prevalent way of thinking of the psychic as identical with the conscious which has given endless trouble in psychology; because it has prompted the hopeless attempt, constantly renewed, to describe the structure and organisation of the mind in terms of conscious stuff, ignoring the all-important distinction between mental activity, which is sometimes, though perhaps not always, consciousness, and mental structure which is not. The structure and organisation of the spirit of the community is in every respect as purely mental or psychic as is the structure and organisation of the individual mind.

Maciver very properly goes on to bring his conclusions to the pragmatic test, the test of practical results. He writes: “These false analogies ... are the sources of that most misleading antithesis which we draw between the individual and society, as though society were somehow other than its individuals.... Analyse these misleading analogies, and in the revelation of their falsity there is revealed also the falsity of this essential opposition of individual and society. Properly understood, the interests of ‘the individual’ are the interests of society[9].” But is it true that the interests of the individual are identical with the interests of society? Obviously not. We have only to think of the condemned criminal; of the mentally defective to whom every enlightened society should deny the right of procreation; of the young soldier who sacrifices his health, his limbs, his eyesight, or his life, and perhaps the welfare of his loved ones, in serving his country. It is true that the progress of society is essentially an approximation towards an ideal state in which this identification would be completed; but that is an ideal which can never be absolutely realised. Nor is it even true that the interests of society are identical with the interests of the majority of its members existing at any one time. It is, I think, highly probable that, if any great modern nation should unanimously and wholeheartedly embark upon a thorough-going scheme of state-socialism, the interests of the vast majority of individuals would be greatly promoted; they would be enabled to live more prosperously and comfortably with greater leisure and opportunity for the higher forms of activity. It is, however, equally probable that the higher interests of the nation would be gravely endangered, that it would enter upon a period of increasing stagnation and diminishing vitality and, after a few generations had passed away, would have slipped far down the slope which has led all great societies of the past to destruction.

The question may be considered in relation to the German nation. As will be pointed out in a later chapter, the structure of that nation was, before the Great War, a menace to European civilisation. If the Germans had succeeded in their aims and had conquered Europe or the world, their individual interests would have been vastly promoted; they would have enjoyed immense material prosperity and a proud consciousness of having been chosen by God to rule the rest of mankind for their good. And this would have confirmed the nation in all its vices and would have finally crushed out of it all its potentialities for developing into a well-organised nation of the higher type, fitted to play an honourable part in the future evolution of mankind. The same truth appears if we consider the problem of the responsibility of the German nation for the War. So long as that people might retain its former organisation, which, I repeat, rendered it a menace to the civilisation and culture of the whole world, its antagonists could only treat it as a criminal and an outlaw to be repressed at all costs and punished and kept down with the utmost severity. But, if it should achieve a new organisation, one which will give preponderance to the better and saner elements and traditions still preserved within it, then, although it will consist of the same individuals in the main, it will have become a new or at least a transformed nation, one with which the other nations could enter into normal relations of amity or at least of mutual toleration, one which could be admitted to a place in the greater society which the League of Nations is to become. In other words, the same population would in virtue of a changed organisation, have become a different nation.

Although Maciver, in making his attack upon the conception of the group mind, has done me the honour to choose me as its exponent, I do not stand alone in maintaining it. I am a little shy of citing in its support the philosophers of the school of German ‘idealism,’ because, as I have indicated in the Preface, I have little sympathy with that school. Yet, though one may disapprove of the methods and of most of the conclusions of a school of thought, one may still adduce in support of one’s opinion such of its principles as seem to be well founded. I may, then, remind the reader that the conception of the State as a super-individual, a superhuman quasi-divine personality, is the central conception of the political philosophy of German ‘idealism.’ That conception has, no doubt, played a considerable part in bringing upon Europe its present disaster. It was an instance of one of those philosophical ideas which claim to be the product of pure reason, yet in reality are adopted for the purpose of justifying and furthering some already existing interest or institution. In this case the institution in question was the Prussian state and those, Hegel and the rest, who set up this doctrine were servants of that state. They made of their doctrine an instrument for the suppression of individuality which greatly aided in producing the servile condition of the German people. Yet the distortions and exaggerations of the political philosophy of German ‘idealism’ should not prejudice us against the germ of truth which it contains; and the more enlightened British disciples of this school, from T.H. Green onwards, have sought with much success to winnow the grain from the chaff of the doctrine; and I cannot adduce better support for the conception of the group mind than the sentences in which a recent English writer, a sympathetic student of German ‘idealism,’ sums up the results of this winnowing process[10]. Discussing the deficiencies of the individualist philosophy of the English utilitarian school, he writes: “Not a modification of the old Benthamite premises, but a new philosophy was needed; and that philosophy was provided by the idealist school, of which Green is the greatest representative. That school drew its inspiration immediately from Kant and Hegel, and ultimately from the old Greek philosophy of the city-state. The vital relation between the life of the individual and the life of the community, which alone gives the individual worth and significance, because it alone gives him the power of full moral development; the dependence of the individual, for all his rights and for all his liberty, on his membership of the community; the correlative duty of the community to guarantee to the individual all his rights (in other words, all the conditions necessary for his, and therefore for its own, full moral development)—these were the premisses of the new philosophy. That philosophy could satisfy the new needs of social progress, because it refused to worship a supposed individual liberty which was proving destructive of the real liberty of the vast majority, and preferred to emphasise the moral well-being and betterment of the whole community, and to conceive of each of its members as attaining his own well-being and betterment in and through the community. Herein lay, or seemed to lie, a revolution of ideas. Instead of starting from a central individual, to whom the social system is supposed to be adjusted, the idealist starts from a central social system, in which the individual must find his appointed orbit of duty. But after all the revolution is only a restoration; and what is restored is simply the _Republic_ of Plato[11].” The same writer reminds us that “both Plato and Hegel thus imply the idea of a moral organism”; and he adds, “It is this conception of a moral organism which Bradley urges. It is implied in daily experience, and it is the only explanation of that experience. ‘In fact, what we call an individual man is what he is because of and by virtue of community, and communities are not mere names, but something real.’ Already at birth the child is what he is in virtue of communities: he has something of the family character, something of the national character, something of the civilised character which comes from human society. As he grows, the community in which he lives pours itself into his being in the language he learns and the social atmosphere he breathes, so that the content of his being implies in its every fibre relations of community. He is what he is by including in his essence the relations of the social State.... And regarding the State as a system, in which many spheres (the family, for instance) are subordinated to one sphere, and all the particular actions of individuals are subordinated to their various spheres, we may call it a moral organism, a systematic whole informed by a common purpose or function. As such it has an outer side—a body of institutions; it has an inner side—a soul or spirit which sustains that body. And since it is a moral organism—since, that is to say, its parts are themselves conscious moral agents—that spirit resides in those parts and lives in their consciousness. In such an organism—and this is where it differs from an animal organism, and why we have to use the word moral—the parts are conscious: they know themselves in their position as parts of the whole, and they therefore know the whole of which they are parts. So far as they have such knowledge, and a will based upon it, so far is the moral organism self-conscious and self-willing.... Thus, on the one hand, we must recognise that the State lives; that there is a nation’s soul, self-conscious in its citizens; and that to each citizen this living soul assigns his field of accomplishment[12].” On a later page of the same book we read—“All the institutions of a country, so far as they are effective, are not only products of thought and creations of mind: they _are_ thought, and they _are_ mind. Otherwise we have a building without a tenant, and a body without a mind. An Oxford college is not a group of buildings, though common speech gives that name to such a group: it is a group of men. But it is not a group of men in the sense of a group of bodies in propinquity: it is a group of men in the sense of a group of minds. That group of minds, in virtue of the common substance of an uniting idea, is itself a group-mind. There is no group-mind existing apart from the minds of the members of the group; the group-mind only exists in the minds of its members. But nevertheless it exists. There is a college mind, just as there is a Trade Union mind, or even a ‘public mind’ of the whole community; and we are all conscious of such a mind as something that exists in and along with the separate minds of the members, and over and above any sum of those minds created by mere addition[13].”

The political philosophers of the idealist school have not stood alone in recognising the reality of the group mind. Some of the lawyers, notably Maitland, have arrived at a very similar doctrine; and I cannot better summarise their conclusions than Barker has done in the following passage in the book from which I have already cited so freely. “The new doctrine,” he writes, “runs somewhat as follows. No permanent group, permanently organised for a durable object, can be regarded as a mere sum of persons, whose union, to have any rights or duties, must receive a legal confirmation. Permanent groups are themselves persons, group-persons, with a group-will of their own and a permanent character of their own; and they have become group-persons of themselves, without any creative act of the State. In a word, group-persons are real persons; and just because they are so, and possess such attributes of persons as will and character, they cannot have been made by the State[14].”

I am not alone, then, in postulating the reality of the group mind. And I am glad to be able to cite evidence of this, because I know well that very many readers may at first find themselves repelled by this notion of a group mind, and that some of them will incline to regard it as the fantastic fad of an academic crank.

I would say at once that the crucial point of difference between my own view of the group mind and that of the German ‘idealist’ school (at least in its more extreme representatives) is that I repudiate, provisionally at least, as an unverifiable hypothesis the conception of a collective or super-individual consciousness, somehow comprising the consciousness of the individuals composing the group. I have examined this conception in the following chapter and have stated my grounds for rejecting it. The difference of practical conclusions arising from this difference of theory must obviously be very great.

Several books dealing with collective psychology have been published in recent years. Of these perhaps the most notable are G. le Bon’s _Psychology of the Crowd_, his _Evolution psychologique des peuples_; Sighele’s _La foule criminelle_; the _Psychologie collective_ of Dr A. A. Marie; and Alfred Fouillée’s _La Science sociale contemporaine_. It is noteworthy that, with the exception of the last, all these books deal only with crowds or groups of low organisation; and their authors, like almost all others who have touched on this subject, are concerned chiefly to point out how participation in the group life degrades the individual, how the group feels and thinks and acts on a much lower plane than the average plane of the individuals who compose it.

On the other hand, many writers have insisted on the fact that it is only by participation in the life of society that any man can realise his higher potentialities; that society has ideals and aims and traditions loftier than any principles of conduct the individual can form for himself unaided; and that only by the further evolution of organised society can mankind be raised to higher levels; just as in the past it has been only through the development of organised society that the life of man has ceased to deserve the epithets ‘nasty, brutish and short’ which Hobbes applied to it.

We seem then to stand before a paradox. Participation in group life degrades the individual, assimilating his mental processes to those of the crowd, whose brutality, inconstancy, and unreasoning impulsiveness have been the theme of many writers; yet only by participation in group life does man become fully man, only so does he rise above the level of the savage.

The resolution of this paradox is the essential theme of this book. It examines and fully recognises the mental and moral defects of the crowd and its degrading effects upon all those who are caught up in it and carried away by the contagion of its reckless spirit. It then goes on to show how organisation of the group may, and generally does in large measure, counteract these degrading tendencies; and how the better kinds of organisation render group life the great ennobling influence by aid of which alone man rises a little above the animals and may even aspire to fellowship with the angels.