THE GROUP MIND

A SKETCH OF THE PRINCIPLES OF COLLECTIVE
PSYCHOLOGY WITH SOME ATTEMPT TO APPLY
THEM TO THE INTERPRETATION OF
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER

BY

WILLIAM M^cDOUGALL, F.R.S.

LATE FELLOW OF ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
FELLOW OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE AND WILDE
READER IN MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

“Une nation est une âme, un principe spirituel. Deux choses qui, à vrai dire, n’en font qu’une constituent cette âme, ce principe spirituel. L’une est dans le passé, l’autre dans le présent. L’une est la possession en commun d’un riche legs de souvenirs; l’autre est le consentement actuel, le désir de vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir l’héritage qu’on a reçu indivis.”

Ernest Renan.

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1920

TO

Professor L. T. HOBHOUSE

PREFACE

In this book I have sketched the principles of the mental life of groups and have made a rough attempt to apply these principles to the understanding of the life of nations. I have had the substance of the book in the form of lecture notes for some years, but have long hesitated to publish it. I have been held back, partly by my sense of the magnitude and difficulty of the subject and the inadequacy of my own preparation for dealing with it, partly because I wished to build upon a firm foundation of generally accepted principles of human nature.

Some fifteen years ago I projected a complete treatise on Social Psychology which would have comprised the substance of the present volume. I was prevented from carrying out the ambitious scheme, partly by the difficulty of finding a publisher, partly by my increasing sense of the lack of any generally accepted or acceptable account of the constitution of human nature. I found it necessary to attempt to provide such a foundation, and in 1908 published my Introduction to Social Psychology. That book has enjoyed a certain popular success. But it was more novel, more revolutionary, than I had supposed when writing it; and my hope that it would rapidly be accepted by my colleagues as in the main a true account of the fundamentals of human nature has not been realised.

All this part of psychology labours under the great difficulty that the worker in it cannot, like other men of science, publish his conclusions as discoveries which will necessarily be accepted by any persons competent to judge. He can only state his conclusions and his reasonings and hope that they may gradually gain the general approval of his colleagues. For to the obscure questions of fact with which he deals it is in the nature of things impossible to return answers supported by indisputable experimental proofs. In this field the evidence of an author’s approximation towards truth can consist only in his success in gradually persuading competent opinion of the value of his views. My sketch of the fundamentals of human nature can hardly claim even that degree of success which would be constituted by an active criticism and discussion of it in competent quarters. Yet there are not wanting indications that opinion is turning slowly towards the acceptance of some such doctrine as I then outlined. Especially the development of psycho-pathology, stimulated so greatly by the esoteric dogmas of the Freudian school, points in this direction. The only test and verification to which any scheme of human nature can be submitted is the application of it to practice in the elucidation of the concrete phenomena of human life and in the control and direction of conduct, especially in the two great fields of medicine and education. And I have been much encouraged by finding that some workers in both of these fields have found my scheme of use in their practice and have even, in some few cases, given it a cordial general approval. But group psychology is itself one of the fields in which such testing and verification must be sought. And I have decided to delay no longer in attempting to bring my scheme to this test. I am also impelled to venture on what may appear to be premature publication by the fact that five of the best years of my life have been wholly given up to military service and the practical problems of psycho-therapy, and by the reflection that the years of a man’s life are numbered and that, even though I should delay yet another fifteen years, I might find that I had made but little progress towards securing the firm foundation I desired.

It may seem to some minds astonishing that I should now admit that the substance of this book was committed to writing before the Great War; for that war is supposed by some to have revolutionised all our ideas of human nature and of national life. But the war has given me little reason to add to or to change what I had written. This may be either because I am too old to learn, or because what I had written was in the main true; and I am naturally disposed to accept the second explanation.

I wish to make it clear to any would-be reader of this volume that it is a sequel to my Introduction to Social Psychology, that it builds upon that book and assumes that the reader is acquainted with it. That former volume has been criticised as an attempted outline of Social Psychology. One critic remarks that it may be good psychology, but it is very little social; another wittily says “Mr McDougall, while giving a full account of the genesis of instincts that act in society, hardly shows how they issue into society. He seems to do a great deal of packing in preparation for a journey on which he never starts.” The last sentence exactly describes the book. I found myself, like so many of my predecessors and contemporaries, about to start on a voyage of exploration of societies with an empty trunk, or at least with one very inadequately supplied with the things essential for successful travelling. I decided to avoid the usual practice of starting without impedimenta and of picking up or inventing bits of make-shift equipment as each emergency arose; I would pack my trunk carefully before starting. And now although my fellow travellers have not entirely approved my outfit, I have launched out to put it to the test; and I cannot hope that my readers will follow me if they have not at their command a similar outfit—namely, a similar view of the constitution of human nature.

I would gratefully confess that the resolve to go forward without a further long period of preparation has been made possible for me largely by the encouragement I have had from the recently published work of Dr James Drever, Instinct in Man. For the author of that work has carefully studied the most fundamental part of my Social Psychology, in the light of his wide knowledge of the cognate literature, and has found it to be in the main acceptable.

The title and much of the substance of the present volume might lead a hasty reader to suppose that I am influenced by, or even in sympathy with, the political philosophy associated with German ‘idealism.’ I would, therefore, take this opportunity both to prevent any such erroneous inference and to indicate my attitude towards that system of thought in plainer language than it seemed possible to use before the war. I have argued that we may properly speak of a group mind, and that each of the most developed nations of the present time may be regarded as in process of developing a group mind. This must lay me open to the suspicion of favouring the political philosophy which makes of the state a super-individual and semi-divine person before whom all men must bow down, renouncing their claims to freedom of judgment and action; the political philosophy in short of German ‘idealism,’ which derives in the main from Hegel, which has been so ably represented in this country by Dr Bosanquet, which has exerted so great an influence at Oxford, and which in my opinion is as detrimental to honest and clear thinking as it has proved to be destructive of political morality in its native country. I am relieved of the necessity of attempting to justify these severe strictures by the recent publication of The Metaphysical Theory of the State by Prof. L. T. Hobhouse. In that volume Prof. Hobhouse has subjected the political philosophy of German ‘idealism,’ and especially Dr Bosanquet’s presentation of it, to a criticism which, as it seems to me, should suffice to expose the hollowness of its claims to all men for all time; and I cannot better define my own attitude towards it than by expressing the completeness of my sympathy with the searching criticism of Mr Hobhouse’s essay. In my youth I was misled into supposing that the Germans were the possessors of a peculiar wisdom; and I have spent a large part of my life in discovering, in one field of science after another, that I was mistaken. I can always read the works of some German philosophers, especially those of Hermann Lotze, with admiration and profit; but I have no longer any desire to contend with the great systems of ‘idealism,’ and I think it a cruel waste that the best years of the lives of many young men should be spent struggling with the obscure phrases in which Kant sought to express his profound and subtle thought. My first scientific effort was to find evidence in support of a new hypothesis of muscular contraction; and, in working through the various German theories, I was dismayed by their lack of clear mechanical conceptions. My next venture was in the physiology of vision, a branch of science which had become almost exclusively German. Starting with a prepossession in favour of one of the dominant German theories, I soon reached the conclusion that the two German leaders in this field, Helmholtz and Hering, with their hosts of disciples, had, in spite of much admirable detailed work, added little of value and much confusion to the theory of vision left us by a great Englishman,—namely, Thomas Young; and in a long series of papers I endeavoured to restate and supplement Young’s theory. Advancing into the field of physiological psychology, I attacked the ponderous volumes of Wundt with enthusiasm; only to find that his physiology of the nervous system was a tissue of unacceptable hypotheses and that he failed to connect it in any profitable manner with his questionable psychology. And, finding even less satisfaction in such works as Ziehen’s Physiologische Psychologie, with its crude materialism and associationism, or in the dogmatic speculations of Verworn, I published my own small attempt to bring psychology into fruitful relations with the physiology of the nervous system. This brought me up against the great problem of the relations between mind and body; and, having found that, in this sphere, German ‘idealism’ was pragmatically indistinguishable from thorough-going materialism, and that those Germans who claimed to reconcile the two did not really rise much above the level of Ernst Haeckel’s wild flounderings, I published my History and Defense of Animism. And in this field, though I found much to admire in the writings of Lotze, I derived most encouragement and stimulus from Prof. Bergson. In working at the foundations of human nature, I found little help in German psychology, and more in French books, especially in those of Prof. Ribot. In psycho-pathology I seemed to find that the claims of the German and Austrian schools were far outweighed by those of the French writers, especially of Prof. Janet. So now, in attacking the problems of the mental life of societies, I have found little help from German psychology or sociology, from the elaborations of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie or the ponderosities of Schäffle, and still less from the ‘idealist’ philosophy of politics. In this field also it is French authors from whom I have learnt most and with whom I find myself most in sympathy, especially MM. Fouillée, Boutmy, Tarde, and Demolins; though I would not be thought to hold in low esteem the works of many English and American authors, notably those of Buckle, Bagehot, Maine, Lecky, Lowell, and of many others, to some of which I have made reference in the chapters of this book.

I have striven to make this a strictly scientific work, rather than a philosophical one; that is to say, I have tried to ascertain and state the facts and principles of social life as it is and has been, without expressing my opinion as to what it should be. But, in order further to guard myself against the implications attached by German ‘idealism’ to the notion of a collective mind, I wish to state that politically my sympathies are with individualism and internationalism, although I have, I think, fully recognised the great and necessary part played in human life by the Group Spirit and by that special form of it which we now call ‘Nationalism.’

I know well that those of my readers whose sympathies are with Collectivism, Syndicalism, or Socialism in any of its various forms will detect in this book the cloven foot of individualism and leanings towards the aristocratic principle. I know also that many others will reproach me with giving countenance to communistic and ultra-democratic tendencies. I would, therefore, point out explicitly at the outset that, if this book affords justification for any normative doctrine or ideal, it is for one which would aim at a synthesis of the principles of individualism and communism, of aristocracy and democracy, of self-realization and of service to the community. I can best express this ideal in the wise words of Mr F. H. Bradley, which I extract from his famous essay on ‘My Station and its Duties.’ “The individual’s consciousness of himself is inseparable from the knowing himself as an organ of the whole; ... for his nature now is not distinct from his ‘artificial self.’ He is related to the living moral system not as to a foreign body; his relation to it is ‘too inward even for faith,’ since faith implies a certain separation. It is no other-world that he can not see but must trust to; he feels himself in it, and it in him; ... the belief in this real moral organism is the one solution of ethical problems. It breaks down the antithesis of despotism and individualism; it denies them, while it preserves the truth of both. The truth of individualism is saved, because, unless we have intense life and self-consciousness in the members of the state, the whole state is ossified. The truth of despotism is saved, because, unless the member realizes the whole by and in himself, he fails to reach his own individuality. Considered in the main, the best communities are those which have the best men for their members, and the best men are the members of the best communities.... The two problems of the best man and best state are two sides, two distinguishable aspects of the one problem, how to realize in human nature the perfect unity of homogeneity and specification; and when we see that each of these without the other is unreal, then we see that (speaking in general) the welfare of the state and the welfare of its individuals are questions which it is mistaken and ruinous to separate. Personal morality and political and social institutions can not exist apart, and (in general) the better the one the better the other. The community is moral, because it realizes personal morality; personal morality is moral, because and in so far as it realizes the moral whole.”

Since correcting the proofs of this volume I have become acquainted with two recent books whose teaching is so closely in harmony with my own that I wish to direct my readers’ attention to them. One is Sir Martin Conway’s The Crowd in Peace and War, which contains many valuable illustrations of group life. The other is Miss M. P. Follett’s The New State; Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government, which expounds the principles and advantages of collective deliberation with vigour and insight.

I am under much obligation to the general editor of this series, Prof. G. Dawes Hicks. He has read the proofs of my book, and has helped me greatly with many suggestions; but he has, of course, no responsibility for the views expressed in it.

W. M^cD.

Oxford,
March 1920.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The Province of Collective Psychology

To define exactly the relations of the several special sciences is a task which can never be completely achieved so long as these sciences continue to grow and change. It is a peculiarly difficult task in respect of the biological sciences, because we have not yet reached general agreement as to the fundamental conceptions which these sciences should employ. To illustrate this difficulty I need only refer to a recent symposium of the Aristotelian Society in which a number of distinguished philosophers and biologists discussed the question “Are physical, biological and psychological categories irreducible?” The discussion revealed extreme differences of opinion, and failed to bring the disputants nearer to a common view. The difficulty is still greater in respect of the human sciences—anthropology, psychology, ethics, politics, economics, sociology, and the rest; and it is not to be hoped that any general agreement on this difficult question will be reached in the near future. Yet it seems worth while that each writer who aspires to break new ground in any part of this field of inquiry should endeavour to make clear to himself and others his conception of the relations of that part to the rest of the field. It is, then, in no dogmatic spirit, or with any belief in the finality of the position assigned to my topic, that I venture the following definition of the province of psychology with which this book is concerned.

I have chosen the title, “The Group Mind,” after some hesitation in favour of the alternative, “Collective Psychology.” The latter has the advantage that it has already been used by several continental authors, more especially French and Italian psychologists. But the title I have chosen is, I think, more distinctively English in quality and denotes more clearly the topic that I desire to discuss.

An alternative and not inappropriate title would have been “An Outline of Social Psychology”; but two reasons prevented the adoption of this. First, my Introduction to Social Psychology has become generally known by the abbreviated title Social Psychology. This was an unforeseen result and unfortunate designation; for, as I have explained in the Preface to the present volume, that other work was designed merely as a propaedeutic; it aimed merely at clearing the ground and laying the foundations for Social Psychology, while leaving the topic itself for subsequent treatment. Secondly, I conceive Group Psychology to be a part only, though a very large part, of the total field of Social Psychology; for, while the former has to deal only with the life of groups, the latter has also to describe and account for the influence of the group on the growth and activities of the individual. This is the most concrete part of psychology and naturally comes last in the order of development of the science; for, like other sciences, psychology began with the most abstract notions, the forms of activity of mind in general, and, by the aid of the abstract conceptions achieved by the earlier workers, progresses to the consideration of more concrete problems, the problems presented by actual living persons in all their inexhaustible richness and complexity.

Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psychology continued to concern itself almost exclusively with the mind of man conceived in an abstract fashion, not as the mind of any particular individual, but as the mind of a representative individual considered in abstraction from his social settings as something given to our contemplation fully formed and complete.

Two important changes of modern thought have shown the necessity of a more concrete treatment of psychological problems. The first has been the coming into prominence of the problems of genesis which, although not originated by Darwin, received so great an impetus from his work. The second has been the increasing realisation of the need for a more synthetic treatment of all fields of science, the realisation that analysis alone carries us ever farther away from concrete problems and leads only to a system of abstract conceptions which are very remote from reality, however useful they may prove in the physical sciences. The biological and the human sciences especially have been profoundly affected by these two changes of modern thought. As Theodore Merz has so well shown in the fourth volume of his monumental work[1], the need has been increasingly felt of the vue d’ensemble, of the synthetic mode of regarding organisms, men, and institutions, not as single things, self-contained and complete in themselves, but as merely nodes or meeting points of all the forces of the world acting and reacting in unlimited time and space.

Psychology was, then, until recent years the science of the abstract individual mind. Each worker aimed at rendering by the aid of introspection an analytic description of the stream of his own consciousness, a consistent classification of the elements or features that he seemed to discover therein, and some general laws or rules of the order of succession and conjunction of these features; postulating in addition some one or more explanatory principles or active agencies such as ‘the will’ or the desire of pleasure, the aversion from pain, or ‘the association of ideas,’ to enable him to account for the flow of the distinguishable elements of consciousness. The psychology achieved by these studies, necessary and valuable as they were, was of little help to men who were struggling with the concrete problems of human life and was therefore largely ignored by them. But, as I have pointed out in the Introduction to my Social Psychology, those who approached these problems were generally stimulated to do so by their interest in questions of right and wrong, in questions of norms and standards of conduct, the urgency of which demanded immediate answers for the practical guidance of human life in all its spheres of activity, for the shaping of laws, institutions, governments, and associations of every kind; or, as frequently perhaps, for the justification and defence of standards of conduct, modes of belief, and forms of institution, which men had learnt to esteem as supremely good.

Thus the political science of Hobbes was the expression of his attempt to justify the monarchy established by the Tudors and endangered by the failings of the Stuart kings; while that of Locke was equally the outcome of his desire to justify the revolution of 1668. Hobbes felt it worth while to preface his magnum opus on political philosophy with a fanciful sketch of human nature and of primitive society; yet, as Mr Gooch remarks, “neither Hobbes nor his contemporaries knew anything of the actual life of primitive communities[2].” And it may be added that they knew as little of the foundations of human nature. Again, the social doctrines of Rousseau, with all their false psychology, were formulated in order to stir men to revolt against the conditions of social life then prevalent in Europe. In a similar way, in the development of all that body of social doctrine that went under the name of Utilitarianism and which culminated in the political science and economy of the Manchester School, every step was prompted by the desire to find theoretical guidance or justification for rules governing human activity. And, if we go back to the Politics of Aristotle, we find the normative or regulative aim still more prominent.

Thus, in all the human sciences, we see that the search for what is has been inextricably confused with and hampered by the effort to show what ought to be; and the further back we go in their history, the more does the normative point of view predominate. They all begin in the effort to describe what ought to be; and incidentally give some more or less fallacious or fantastic account of what is, merely in order to support the normative doctrines. And, as we trace their history forward towards the present time, we find the positive element coming more and more to the front, until it tends to preponderate over and even completely to supplant the normative aim. Thus even in Ethics there is now perceptible in some quarters a tendency to repudiate the normative standpoint. All the social sciences have, then, begun their work at what, from the strictly logical point of view, was the wrong end; instead of first securing a basis of positive science and then building up the normative doctrines upon that basis, they have advanced by repeatedly going backwards towards what should have been their foundations. Now the most important part of the positive basis of the social sciences is psychology; we find accordingly the social sciences at first ignoring psychology and then gradually working back to it; they became gradually more psychological and, in proportion as they did so, they became more valuable. Modern writers on these topics fall into two classes; those who have attempted to work upon a psychological foundation, and those who have ignored or denied the need of any such basis. The earlier efforts of the former kind, among which we may reckon those of Adam Smith, Bentham, and the Mills, although they greatly influenced legislation and practice in general, have nevertheless brought the psychological method into some disrepute, because they reasoned from psychological principles which were unduly simplified and in fact misleading, notably the famous principle of psychological hedonism on which they so greatly relied. Their psychology was, in brief, too abstract; it had not achieved the necessary concreteness, which only the introduction of the genetic standpoint and the vue d’ensemble could give it. Other writers on the social sciences were content to ignore the achievements of psychology; but, since they dealt with the activities of human beings and the products of those activities, such as laws, institutions and customs, they could hardly avoid all reference to the human mind and its processes; they then relied upon the crude unanalysed psychological conceptions of popular speech; often they went further and, aspiring to explain the phenomena they described, made vast assumptions about the constitution and working of the human mind. Thus, for example, Renan, when he sought to explain some feature of the history of a nation or society, was in the habit, like many others, of ascribing it to some peculiar instinct which he postulated for this particular purpose, such as a political or a religious instinct or an instinct of subordination or of organisation. Comte made egoism and altruism the two master forces of the mind. Sir Henry Maine asserted that “satisfaction and impatience are the two great sources of political conduct,” and, after asserting that “no force acting on mankind has been less carefully examined than Party, and yet none better deserves examination,” he was content to conclude that “Party is probably nothing more than a survival and a consequence of the primitive combativeness of mankind[3].” More recently Prof. Giddings has discovered the principal force underlying all human associations in Consciousness of Kind. Butler and the intuitive moralists postulated ‘conscience’ or moral sense as something innately present in the souls of men; while the creators of the classical school of political economy were for the most part content to assume that man is a purely rational being who always intelligently pursues his own best interest, a false premise from which they deduced some conclusions that have not withstood the test of time. Similar vague assumptions may be found in almost every work on the social sciences,—all illustrating the need for a psychology more concrete than the older individual psychology, as a basis for these sciences, a positive science, not of some hypothetical Robinson Crusoe, but of the mental life of men as it actually unfolds itself in the families, tribes, nations, societies of all sorts, that make up the human world.

The general growth of interest in genetic problems, stimulated so greatly by the work of Darwin, turned the attention of psychologists to the problem of the genesis of the developed human mind,—the problem of its evolution in the race and its development in the individual. Then it at once became apparent that both these processes are essentially social; that they involve, and at every step are determined by, interactions between the individual and his social environment; that, while the growth of the individual mind is moulded by the mental forces of the society in which it grows up, those forces are in turn the products of the interplay of the minds composing the society; that, therefore, we can only understand the life of individuals and the life of societies, if we consider them always in relation to one another. It was realised that each man is an individual only in an incomplete sense; that he is but a unit in a vast system of vital and spiritual forces which, expressing themselves in the form of human societies, are working towards ends which no man can foresee; a unit whose chief function it is to transmit these forces unimpaired, which can change or add to them only in infinitesimal degree, and which, therefore, has but little significance and cannot be accounted for when considered in abstraction from that system. It became clear that the play of this system of forces at any moment of history is predominantly determined by conditions which are themselves the products of an immensely long course of evolution, conditions which have been produced by the mental activities of countless generations and which are but very little modified by the members of society living at any one time; so that, as has been said, society consists of the dead as well as of the living, and the part of the living in determining its life is but insignificant as compared with the part of the dead.

Any psychology that recognises these facts and attempts to display the reciprocal influences of the individual and the society in which he plays his part may be called Social Psychology. Collective or Group Psychology is, then, a part of this larger field. It has to study the mental life of societies of all kinds; and such understanding of the group life as it can achieve has then to be used by Social Psychology in rendering more concrete and complete our understanding of the individual life.

Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, that which is concerned to discover the most general principles of group life, and that which applies these principles to the study of particular kinds and examples of group life. The former is logically prior to the second; though in practice it is hardly possible to keep them wholly apart. The present volume is concerned chiefly with the former branch. Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fulness.

The nature of Group Psychology may be illustrated by reference to Herbert Spencer’s conception of sociology. Spencer pointed out that, if you set out to build a stable pile of solid bodies of a certain shape, the kind of structure resulting is determined by the shapes and properties of these units, that for example, if the units are spheres, there are only very few stable forms which the pile can assume. The same is true, he said, of such physical processes as crystallisation; the form and properties of the whole or aggregate are determined by the properties of the units. He maintained with less plausibility that the same holds good of animal and vegetable forms and of the elements of which they are composed. And he went on to argue that, in like manner, the structure and properties of a society are determined by the properties of the units, the individual human beings, of which it is composed.

This last proposition is true in a very partial sense only. For the aggregate which is a society has, in virtue of its past history, positive qualities which it does not derive from the units which compose it at any one time; and in virtue of these qualities it acts upon its units in a manner very different from that in which the units as such interact with one another. Further, each unit, when it becomes a member of a group, displays properties or modes of reaction which it does not display, which remain latent or potential only, so long as it remains outside that group. It is possible, therefore, to discover these potentialities of the units only by studying them as elements in the life of the whole. That is to say, the aggregate which is a society has a certain individuality, is a true whole which in great measure determines the nature and the modes of activity of its parts; it is an organic whole. The society has a mental life which is not the mere sum of the mental lives of its units existing as independent units; and a complete knowledge of the units, if and in so far as they could be known as isolated units, would not enable us to deduce the nature of the life of the whole, in the way that is implied by Spencer’s analogies.

Since, then, the social aggregate has a collective mental life, which is not merely the sum of the mental lives of its units, it may be contended that a society not only enjoys a collective mental life but also has a collective mind or, as some prefer to say, a collective soul.

The tasks of Group Psychology are, then, to examine the conception of the collective or group mind, in order to determine whether and in what sense this is a valid conception; to display the general principles of collective mental life which are incapable of being deduced from the laws of the mental life of isolated individuals; to distinguish the principal types of collective mental life or group mind; to describe the peculiarities of those types and as far as possible to account for them. More shortly, Group Psychology has, first, to establish the general principles of group life (this is general collective psychology); secondly, it has to apply these principles in the endeavour to understand particular examples of group life. Group Psychology, thus conceived, meets at the outset a difficulty which stands in the way of every attempt of psychology to leave the narrow field of highly abstract individual psychology. It finds the ground already staked out and occupied by the representatives of another science, who are inclined to resent its intrusion as an encroachment on their rights. The science which claims to have occupied the field of Group Psychology is Sociology; and it is of some importance that the claims of these sciences should be reconciled, so that they may live and work harmoniously together. I have no desire to claim for Group Psychology the whole province of Sociology. As I conceive it, that province is much wider than that of Group Psychology. Sociology is essentially a science which has to take a comprehensive and synthetic view of the life of mankind, and has to accept and make use of the conclusions of many other more special sciences, of which psychology, and especially Group Psychology, is for it perhaps the most important. But other special sciences have very important if less intimate contributions to make to it. Thus, if it be true that great civilisations have decayed owing to changes of climate of their habitats, or owing to the introduction of such diseases as malaria into them, then Climatology and Epidemiology have their contributions to make to Sociology. If peculiarities of diet or the crossing of racial stocks may profoundly affect the vigour of peoples, Physiology must have its say. General biology and the science of Genetics are bringing to light much that must be incorporated in Sociology. Economics, although needing to be treated far more psychologically than it commonly has been, has its special contribution to make. These are only a few illustrations of the fact that the field of Sociology is very much wider and more general than that of Group Psychology, however important to it the conclusions of the narrower science may be.

In this book it will be maintained that the conception of a group mind is useful and therefore valid; and, since this notion has already excited some opposition and criticism and is one that requires very careful definition, some attempt to define and justify it may usefully be made at the outset; though the completer justification is the substance of the whole book. Some writers have assumed the reality of what is called the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society, meaning thereby a unitary consciousness of the society over and above that of the individuals comprised within it. This conception is examined in 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.

PART I

GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER II

THE MENTAL LIFE OF THE CROWD

It is a notorious fact that, when a number of men think and feel and act together, the mental operations and the actions of each member of the group are apt to be very different from those he would achieve if he faced the situation as an isolated individual. Hence, though we may know each member of a group so intimately that we can, with some confidence, foretell his actions under given circumstances, we cannot foretell the behaviour of the group from our knowledge of the individuals alone. If we would understand and be able to predict the behaviour of the group, we must study the way in which the mental processes of its members are modified in virtue of their membership. That is to say, we must study the interactions between the members of the group and also those between the group as a whole and each member. We must examine also the forms of group organisation and their influence upon the life of the group.

Groups differ greatly from one another in respect of the kind and degree of organisation they possess. In the simplest case the group has no organisation. In some cases the relations of the constituent individuals to one another and to the whole group are not in any way determined or fixed by previous events; such a group constitutes merely a mob. In other groups the individuals have certain determinate relations to one another which have arisen in one or more of three ways:

(1) Certain relations may have been established between the individuals, before they came together to form a group; for example, a parish council or a political meeting may be formed by persons belonging to various definitely recognised classes, and their previously recognised relations will continue to play a part in determining the collective deliberations and actions of the group; they will constitute an incipient organisation.

(2) If any group enjoys continuity of existence, certain more or less constant relations, of subordination, deference, leadership and so forth, will inevitably become established between the individuals of which it is composed; and, of course, such relations will usually be deliberately established and maintained by any group that is united by a common purpose, in order that its efficiency may be promoted.

(3) The group may have a continued existence and a more or less elaborate and definite organisation independently of the individuals of which it is composed; in such a case the individuals may change while the formal organisation of the group persists; each person who enters it being received into some more or less well-defined and generally recognised position within the group, which formal position determines in great measure the nature of his relations to other members of the group and to the group as a whole.

We can hardly imagine any concourse of human beings, however fortuitous it may be, utterly devoid of the rudiments of organisation of one or other of these three kinds; nevertheless, in many a fortuitous concourse the influence of such rudimentary organisation is so slight as to be negligible. Such a group is an unorganised crowd or mob. The unorganised crowd presents many of the fundamental phenomena of collective psychology in relative simplicity; whereas the higher the degree of organisation of a group, the more complicated is its psychology. We shall, therefore, study first the mental peculiarities of the unorganised crowd, and shall then go on to consider the modifications resulting from a simple and definite type of organisation.

Not every mass of human beings gathered together in one place within sight and sound of one another constitutes a crowd in the psychological sense of the word. There is a dense gathering of several hundred individuals at the Mansion House Crossing at noon of every week-day; but ordinarily each of them is bent upon his own task, pursues his own ends, paying little or no regard to those about him. But let a fire-engine come galloping through the throng of traffic, or the Lord Mayor’s state coach arrive, and instantly the concourse assumes in some degree the character of a psychological crowd. All eyes are turned upon the fire-engine or coach; the attention of all is directed to the same object; all experience in some degree the same emotion, and the state of mind of each person is in some degree affected by the mental processes of all those about him. Those are the fundamental conditions of collective mental life. In its more developed forms, an awareness of the crowd or group as such in the mind of each member plays an important part; but this is not an essential condition of its simpler manifestations. The essential conditions of collective mental action are, then, a common object of mental activity, a common mode of feeling in regard to it, and some degree of reciprocal influence between the members of the group. It follows that not every aggregation of individuals is capable of becoming a psychological crowd and of enjoying a collective life. For the individuals must be capable of being interested in the same objects and of being affected in a similar way by them; there must be a certain degree of similarity of mental constitution among the individuals, a certain mental homogeneity of the group. Let a man stand on a tub in the midst of a gathering of a hundred Englishmen and proceed to denounce and abuse England; those individuals at once become a crowd. Whereas, if the hundred men were of as many races and nations, their attention would hardly be attracted by the orator; for they would have no common interest in the topic of his discourse. Or let the man on the tub denounce the establishment of the Church of England, and the hundred Englishmen do not become a crowd; for, although all may be interested and attentive, the words of the orator evoke in them very diverse feelings and emotions, the sentiments they entertain for the Church of England being diverse in character.

There must, then, be some degree of similarity of mental constitution, of interest and sentiment, among the persons who form a crowd, a certain degree of mental homogeneity of the group. And the higher the degree of this mental homogeneity of any gathering of men, the more readily do they form a psychological crowd and the more striking and intense are the manifestations of collective life. All gatherings of men that are not purely fortuitous are apt to have a considerable degree of mental homogeneity; thus the members of a political meeting are drawn together by common political opinions and sentiments; the audience in a concert room shares a common love of music or a common admiration for the composer, conductor, or great executant; and a still higher degree of homogeneity prevails when a number of persons of the same religious persuasion are gathered together at a great revival meeting. Consider how under such circumstances a very ordinary joke or point made by a political orator provokes a huge delight; how, at a concert, the admiration of the applauding audience swells to a pitch of frantic enthusiasm; how, at the skilfully conducted and successful revival meeting, the fervour of emotion is apt to rise, until it exceeds all normal modes of expression and men and women give way to loud weeping or even hysterical convulsions.

Such exaltation or intensification of emotion is the most striking result of the formation of a crowd, and is one of the principal sources of the attractiveness of the crowd. By participation in the mental life of a crowd, one’s emotions are stirred to a pitch that they seldom or never attain under other conditions. This is for most men an intensely pleasurable experience; they are, as they say, carried out of themselves, they feel themselves caught up in a great wave of emotion, and cease to be aware of their individuality and all its limitations; that isolation of the individual, which oppresses every one of us, though it may not be explicitly formulated in his consciousness, is for the time being abolished. The repeated enjoyment of effects of this kind tends to generate a craving for them, and also a facility in the spread and intensification of emotion in this way; this is probably the principal cause of the greater excitability of urban populations as compared with dwellers in the country, and of the well-known violence and fickleness of the mobs of great cities.

There is one kind of object in the presence of which no man remains indifferent and which evokes in almost all men the same emotion, namely impending danger; hence the sudden appearance of imminent danger may instantaneously convert any concourse of people into a crowd and produce the characteristic and terrible phenomena of a panic. In each man the instinct of fear is intensely excited; he experiences that horrible emotion in full force and is irresistibly impelled to save himself by flight. The terrible driving power of this impulse, excited to its highest pitch under the favouring conditions, suppresses all other impulses and tendencies, all habits of self-restraint, of courtesy and consideration for others; and we see men, whom we might have supposed incapable of cruel or cowardly behaviour, trampling upon women and children, in their wild efforts to escape from the burning theatre, the sinking ship, or other place of danger.

The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective mental life. Groups of gregarious animals are liable to panic; and the panic of a crowd of human beings seems to be generated by the same simple instinctive reactions as the panic of animals. The essence of the panic is the collective intensification of the instinctive excitement, with its emotion of fear and its impulse to night. The principle of primitive sympathy[15] seems to afford a full and adequate explanation of such collective intensification of instinctive excitement. The principle is that, in man and in the gregarious animals generally, each instinct, with its characteristic primary emotion and specific impulse, is capable of being excited in one individual by the expressions of the same emotion in another, in virtue of a special congenital adaptation of the instinct on its Cognitive or perceptual side. In the crowd, then, the expressions of fear of each individual are perceived by his neighbours; and this perception intensifies the fear directly excited in them by the threatening danger. Each man perceives on every hand the symptoms of fear, the blanched distorted faces, the dilated pupils, the high-pitched trembling voices, and the screams of terror of his fellows; and with each such perception his own impulse and his own emotion rise to a higher pitch of intensity, and their expressions become correspondingly accentuated and more difficult to control. So the expressions of each member of the crowd work upon all other members within sight and hearing of him to intensify their excitement; and the accentuated expressions of the emotion, so intensified, react upon him to raise his own excitement to a still higher pitch; until in all individuals the instinct is excited in the highest possible degree.

This principle of direct induction of emotion by way of the primitive sympathetic response enables us to understand the fact that a concourse of people (or animals) may be quickly turned into a panic-stricken crowd by some threatening object which is perceptible by only a few of the individuals present. A few persons near the stage of a theatre see flames dart out among the wings; then, though the flames may be invisible to the rest of the house, the expressions of the startled few induce fear in their neighbours, and the excitement sweeps over the whole concourse like fire blown across the prairie.

The same principle enables us to understand how a few fearless individuals may arrest the spread of a panic. If they experience no fear, or can completely arrest its expressions, and can in any way make themselves prominent, can draw and hold the attention of their fellows to themselves, then these others, instead of perceiving on every hand only the expressions of fear, perceive these few calm and resolute individuals; the process of reciprocal intensification of the excitement is checked and, if the danger is not too imminent and obvious, the panic may die away, leaving men ashamed and astonished at the intensity of their emotion and the violent irrational character of their behaviour.

Other of the cruder primary emotions may spread through a crowd in very similar fashion, though the process is rarely so rapid and intense as in the case of fear[16]. And in every case the principal cause of the intensification of the emotion is the reciprocal action between the members of the crowd, according to the principle of sympathetic induction of emotion in one individual by its expressions in others.

In panic, the dominance of the one emotion and its impulse is so complete as to allow no scope for any of the subtler modes of collective mental operation. But in other cases other conditions co-operate to determine the character of the emotional response of the crowd. Of these the most important are the awareness of the crowd as a whole in the mind of each member of it and his consciousness of his membership in the whole. When a common emotion pervades the crowd, each member becomes more or less distinctly aware of the fact; and this gives him a sense of sharing in a mighty and irresistible power which renders him reckless of consequences and encourages him to give himself up to the prevailing emotion without restraint. Thus, in the case of an audience swept by an emotion of admiration for a brilliant singer, the thunder of applause, which shows each individual that his emotion is shared by all the rest, intensifies his own emotion, not only by way of sympathetic induction, but also because it frees him from that restraint of emotion which is habitual with most of us in the presence of any critical or adversely disposed spectators, and which the mere thought of such spectators tends to maintain and strengthen. Again, the oratory of a demagogue, if addressed to a large crowd, will raise angry emotion to a pitch of intensity far higher than any it will attain if he is heard by a few persons only; and this is due not only to accentuation of the emotion by sympathetic induction, but also to the fact that, as the symptoms of the emotion begin to be manifested on all sides, each man becomes aware that it pervades the crowd, that the crowd as a whole is swayed by the same emotion and the same impulse as he himself feels, that none remains to criticise the violence of his expressions. To which it must be added that the consciousness of the harmony of one’s feelings with those of a mass of one’s fellows, and the consequent sense of freedom from all restraint, are highly pleasurable to most men; they find a pleasure in letting themselves go, in being swept away in the torrent of collective emotion. This is one of the secrets of the fascination which draws many thousands of spectators to a football match, and brings together the multitudes of base-ball ‘fans’ bubbling over with eager anticipation of an emotional orgy.

The fact that the emotions of crowds are apt to be very violent has long been recognised, and the popular mind, in seeking to account for it, has commonly postulated very special and even supernatural causes. The negro author of a most interesting book[17] has given the following description of the religious frenzy of a crowd of Christian negroes: “An air of intense excitement possessed the mass of black folk. A suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips. The people moaned and fluttered and then a gaunt brown woman suddenly leaped into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, a scene of human passion such as I had never even imagined.” The author goes on to say that this frenzy is attributed by the black folk to the direct influence of the Spirit of the Lord, making mad the worshippers with supernatural joy, and that this belief is one of the leading features of their religion. Similar practices, depending upon the tendency of collective emotion to rise to an extreme intensity, have been common to the peoples of many lands in all ages; and similar supernatural explanations have been commonly devised and accepted. I need only remind the reader of the Dionysiac orgies of ancient Greece.

The facts are so striking that for the popular mind they remain unaccountable, and not to be mentioned without some vague reference to magnetism, electricity, hypnotism, or some mysterious contagion; and even modern scientific writers have been led to adopt somewhat extravagant hypotheses to account for them. Thus Dr Le Bon[18] speaks of “the magnetic influence given out by the crowd” and says that, owing to this influence, “or from some other cause of which we are ignorant, an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.” He goes on to say that in the hypnotised subject the conscious personality disappears and that his actions are the outcome of the unconscious activities of the spinal cord. Now, crowds undoubtedly display great suggestibility, but great suggestibility does not necessarily imply hypnosis; and there is no ground for supposing that the members of a crowd are thrown into any such condition, save possibly in very rare instances.

There are however two hypotheses, sometimes invoked for the explanation of the peculiarities of collective mental life, which demand serious consideration and which we may with advantage consider at this point.

One is the hypothesis of telepathy. A considerable amount of respectable evidence has been brought forward in recent years to prove that one mind may directly influence another by some obscure mode of action that does not involve the known organs of expression and of perception; and much of this evidence seems to show that one mind may directly induce in another a state of consciousness similar to its own. If, then, such direct interaction between two minds can take place in an easily appreciable degree in certain instances, it would seem not improbable that a similar direct interaction, producing a lesser, and therefore less easily appreciable, degree of assimilation of the states of consciousness of the minds concerned, may be constantly and normally at work. If this were the case, such telepathic interaction might well play a very important part in collective mental life, and, where a large number of persons is congregated, it might tend to produce that intensification of emotion which is so characteristic of crowds. In fact, if direct telepathic communication of emotion in however slight a degree is possible and normal, and especially if the influence is one that diminishes with distance, it may be expected to produce its most striking results among the members of a crowd; for the emotion of each member might be expected to be intensified by the telepathic influence radiating from every other member. Some slight presumption in favour of such a mode of explanation is afforded by the fact that the popular use of the word contagion in the present connexion seems to imply, however vaguely, some such direct communication of emotion. But telepathic communication has not hitherto been indisputably established; and the observations that afford so strong a presumption in its favour indicate that, if and in so far as it occurs, it does so sporadically and only between individuals specially attuned to one another or in some abnormal mental state that renders them specially sensitive to the influence[19]. And, while the acceptance of the principle of sympathetic induction of an emotion, as an instinctive perceptual response to the expressions of that emotion, renders unnecessary any further principle of explanation, the consideration of the conditions of the spread of emotion through crowds affords evidence that this mode of interaction of the individuals is all-important and that telepathic communication, if it occurs, is of secondary importance. For the spreading and the great intensification of emotion seem to depend upon its being given expressions that are perceptible by the senses. So long as its expressions are suppressed, the emotion of an assembly does not become excessive. It is only by eliciting and encouraging the expressions of emotions that the revivalist, the political orator, or the comic man on the music-hall stage, achieves his successes. That the expressions of an emotion are far more effective in this way than the emotion itself is recognised by the practice of the claqueurs. When an audience has once been induced to give expression to a common emotion, its members are, as it were, set in tune with one another; each man is aware that he is in harmony with all the rest as regards his feelings and emotions, and, even in the periods during which all expressions are suppressed by the audience, this awareness serves to sustain the mood and to prepare for fresh outbursts. The mere silence of an audience, the absence of coughs, shufflings, and uneasy movements, suffices to make each member aware that all his fellows are attentive and are responding with the appropriate emotion; but it is not until the applause, the indignation, or the laughter, breaks out in free expression that the emotion reaches its highest pitch. And a skilful orator or entertainer, recognising these facts, takes care to afford frequent opportunities for the collective displays of emotion.

We must recognise, then, that, even if telepathic communication be proved to be possible in certain cases, there is not sufficient evidence of its operation in the spread of emotion through crowds, and that the facts are sufficiently explained by another principle of general and indisputable validity, the principle of primitive sympathy.

The second hypothesis to be considered in this connexion is that of the ‘collective consciousness.’ The conception of a collective consciousness has been reached by a large number of authors along several lines of observation and reasoning and is seriously defended at the present time, more especially by several French and German writers. They maintain that, in some sense and manner, the consciousnesses of individuals are not wholly shut off from one another, but may co-operate in the genesis of, or share in the being of, a more comprehensive consciousness that exists beside and in addition to them. The conception varies according to the route by which it is reached and the use that is made of it; but in all its varieties the conception remains extremely obscure; no one has succeeded in making clear how the relation of the individual consciousness to the collective consciousness is to be conceived. In the writings of many metaphysicians, of whom Hegel is the most prominent, ‘the Absolute’ seems to imply such a collective consciousness, an all-inclusive world-consciousness of which the individual consciousness of each man is somehow but a constituent element or fragmentary manifestation. But it would be unprofitable to attempt any discussion of the conception. We are concerned only with the empirical conception of a collective consciousness based on observation and induction.

Such a conception finds its strongest support in the analogy afforded by a widely current view of the nature and conditions of the psychical individuality of men and animals; the view, namely, that the individual consciousness of any man or animal is the collective consciousness of the cells of which his body, or his nervous system, is composed. We know that the nervous system is made up of cells each of which is a vital unit, capable of living, of achieving its essential vital processes, independently of other cells; and we see free living cells that in many respects are comparable with these and to which we seem compelled, according to the principle of continuity, to attribute some germ of psychical life however rudimentary. What is known of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of the multicellular animal seems to justify us in regarding it as essentially an aggregate of such independent vital units, which, being formed by repeated fission from a single cell, adhere together and undergo differentiation and specialisation of functions. If then the parent cell, the germ cell, has a rudimentary psychical life, it is difficult to deny it altogether to the cells formed from it by fission; and it is argued that all these cells continue to enjoy a psychical life and that the consciousness of the individual man or animal is the collective consciousness of some or all of these cells. Now we know that the consciousness of any one of the higher animals has for its physical correlate at any moment processes going on simultaneously in many different parts and elements of the brain. It is argued, then, that we must suppose each cell of the brain to enjoy, whenever it is active, its own psychical life, and at the same time to contribute something towards the unitary ‘collective consciousness’ of the whole organism, which thus exists beside, but not independently of, these rudimentary consciousnesses of the cells. If the view be accepted, it affords a close analogy with the supposed ‘collective consciousness’ of a group of men or a society.

This conception of the collective nature of the consciousness of complex organisms finds strong support in two classes of facts. First, it finds support in the fact that, if individuals of many of the animal species of an intermediate grade of complexity, such as some of the worms and some of the radiate animals, be cut into two or more parts, each part may continue to live and may become a complete organism by reconstitution of the lost parts. Since, then, we can hardly deny some integrated psychical life to such organisms, some rudimentary consciousness, we seem compelled to believe that this consciousness may be divided into two or more consciousnesses, each of them being associated with the vital activities of one of the parts into which the organism is divided by the knife. Division of the organism into two parts is also the normal mode of reproduction in the animal world. Even the coming into existence of every human being seems to be bound up with the separation of a cell from the parent organism; and his existence as a separate psychical individual seems to result from the same process of physical division. And if one cell, when thus separated from the parent organism, can thus prove its possession of a psychical life by developing into a fully conscious organism, it is difficult to deny that all other cells have also their own psychical lives, even though they may be incapable of making it manifest to us by growing up into complex organisms when separated.

The second class of facts that seem to justify this conception of the consciousness of complex organisms are facts which have been studied and discussed widely in recent years under the head of mental dissociation or disintegration of personalities. Such disintegration seems to occur spontaneously as the essential feature of severe hysteria, and to be producible artificially and temporarily in some subjects, when they are thrown into deep hypnosis. In certain of these cases the behaviour of the human being seems to imply that it is the expression of two separate psychical individuals, formed by the splitting of the stream of consciousness and of mental activity of the individual into two streams. The two streams may be of co-ordinate complexity; but more frequently one of them seems to be a mere trickle diverted from the main stream of personal consciousness. Since it is, from the nature of the case, always impossible to obtain any direct and certain proof that any behaviour other than one’s own is the expression of conscious mental processes, it is not possible to prove that such division or disintegration of the personal consciousness actually takes place. But the facts appear to many of the psychologists who have studied them most carefully[20] to demand this interpretation; and this psychical disintegration seems to be accompanied by a functional dissociation of the nervous system into two or more systems each of which functions independently of the others,—that is to say, a division of the nervous system comparable with the division of the nervous system of the worm by the stroke of the knife which seems to split the psychical individual into two.

The facts of both these orders would appear, then, to indicate that the physical organisation of the cells of a complex organism is accompanied by an organisation of their psychical lives to form a ‘collective consciousness,’ which in the human being becomes a personal self-consciousness; and they would seem to show that the unity of personal consciousness has for its main condition the functional continuity of the protoplasm of the cells of the nervous system.

Even before the facts of disintegration of personalities were known, several authors, notably von Hartmann[21] and G. T. Fechner[22], did not hesitate to make this last assumption; and to assert that, if the brain of a man could be divided by a knife into two parts each of which continued to function, his consciousness would thus be divided into two consciousnesses; and conversely, that, if a functional bridge of nervous matter could be established between the brains of two men, their consciousnesses would fuse to a single consciousness. The discovery of these facts has greatly strengthened the case for this view; and it has been accepted by so sound a psychologist and sober a philosopher as Fouillée[23].

It may be claimed that the consideration of the nature and behaviour of animal societies points to a similar conclusion, and supplements in an important manner the argument founded on the divisibility of individual organisms. Such a line of reasoning has been most thoroughly pursued by Espinas in his very interesting book on animal societies[24]. He begins by considering the lower polycellular forms of animal life. Among them, especially among the hydrozoa or polypes, we find compound or colonial animals; such an animal is a single living mass of which all the parts are in substantial and vital connexion with one another, but is yet made up of a number of parts each of which is morphologically a complete or almost complete creature; and these parts, though specialised for the performance of certain functions subserving the economy of the whole animal or coherent group of animals, are yet capable, if separated from the mass (as they sometimes are by a natural process), of continuing to live, of growing, and of multiplying. There are found among such creatures very various degrees of specialisation of parts and of interdependence of parts; and in those cases in which the specialisation and interdependence of parts is great, the whole compound animal exhibits in its reactions so high a degree of integration that we seem justified in supposing that a common or ‘collective consciousness’ is the psychical correlate of these integrated actions of the separable parts. Why then, it is asked, should this ‘collective consciousness’ cease to be, when the substantial continuity of the parts is interrupted?

Espinas then goes on to describe animal societies of many types, and shows how, as we follow up the evolutionary scale, association and intimate interdependence and co-operation of their members tend to replace more and more completely the individualistic antagonism and unmitigated competition of the lowest free-living organisms. He considers first the type of animal society which is essentially a family, a society of individuals all of which are derived from the same parent by fission or by budding. He argues that each such society of blood-relatives is a harmonious whole only because it enjoys a ‘collective consciousness’ over and above the consciousnesses of its constituent members; that, for example, a swarm of bees, which exhibits so great a uniformity of feeling and action and of which all the members come from the body of one parent, is in reality the material basis of a ‘collective consciousness,’ which presides over and is expressed by their collective actions; that the ants of one household have such a collective consciousness, that they “are, in truth, a single thought in action, like the various cellules and fibres of the brain of a mammal.” For, as he maintains, “the consciousness of animals is not an absolute, indivisible thing. It is on the contrary a reality capable of being divided and diffused ... thought in general and the impulses illuminated by it, are, like the forces of nature, susceptible of diffusion, of transmission, of being shared, and can like these lie dormant where they are thinly diffused, or become vivid and intensified by concentration. The beings that have these attributes are no doubt monads; but these monads are open to and communicate with one another.”

Espinas extends the view to other animal societies of which the members are not all derived from one parent, including human societies; and concludes that, except in the case of the Infusoria at the bottom of the scale and of the highly organised societies at the top of it, every individual consciousness is a part of a superior more comprehensive consciousness of an individual of a higher order. He illustrates at length the fact with the consideration and explanation of which this chapter is concerned, the fact namely that, in all social groups, emotions and impulses are communicated and intensified from one individual to another; and he asks—“If the essential elements of consciousness add themselves together and accumulate from one consciousness to another, how should the consciousness itself of the whole not be participated in by each?” He argues that to be real is not to be known to some other consciousness, but is to exist for oneself, to be conscious of oneself; that, in this sense, the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society is the most real of all things; that every society is therefore a living individual; and that, if we deny self-conscious individuality to a society, we must deny it equally to the mass of cells that make up an animal body; that, in short, we can find unity and individuality nowhere.

This doctrine of the ‘collective consciousness’ of societies may seem bizarre to those to whom it is altogether novel; but it is one that cannot be lightly put aside; it demands serious consideration from any one who seeks the general principles of Collective Psychology. We have no certain knowledge from which its impossibility can be deduced; and the new light thrown upon individuality by modern studies in psycho-pathology shows us that the indivisibility and strictly bounded unity of the individual human soul is a postulate that we must not continue to accept without critical examination. Nor is the conception one that figures only in the writings of philosophers and therefore to be regarded with contemptuous indulgence by men of affairs as but one of the strange harmless foibles of such persons. It has a certain vogue in more popular writings; thus Renan wrote—“It has been remarked that in face of a peril a nation or a city shows, like a living creature, a divination of the common danger, a secret sentiment of its own being and the need of its conservation. Such is the obscure impulsion which provokes from time to time the displacement of a whole people or the emigration of masses, the crusades, the religious, political, or social revolutions.” Phrases such as the soul of a people, the genius of a people, have long been current, and in almost every newspaper one may find important events and tendencies ascribed to the instinct of a people. It is probable that these phrases are written in many instances without any explicit intention to imply a ‘collective national consciousness,’ but merely as well-sounding words that cloak our ignorance and give a vague appearance of understanding. Nevertheless, from its application to the life of nations, the doctrine of a collective consciousness mainly derives its importance. It is seriously used by a number of vigorous contemporary writers, of whom Schaeffle[25] is perhaps the most notable, to carry to its extreme the doctrine of Comte and Spencer that Society is an organism. Spencer specifically refused to complete his analogy between society and an animal organism by the acceptance of the hypothesis of a collective consciousness; and he insisted strongly on the importance, for legislation and social effort of every kind, of holding fast to the consciousness of individual men as the final court of appeal, by reference to which the value of every institution and every form of social activity must be judged, the importance of regarding the welfare and happiness of individual men as the supreme end, in relation to which the welfare of the State is but a means. But those who, like Schaeffle, complete the analogy by acceptance of this hypothesis, regard a nation as an organism in the fullest sense of the word, as an organism that has its own pleasure and pain and its own conscious ends and purposes and strivings; as in fact a great individual which is conscious and may be more or less perfectly self-conscious, conscious of itself, its past, its future, its purposes, its joys and its sorrows. And they do not scruple to draw the logical conclusion that the welfare of the individual should be completely subjected to that of the State; just as the welfare of an organ or cell of the human body is rightly held to be of infinitesimal value in comparison with that of the whole individual and to derive its importance only from its share in the constitution of the whole. This conception of the ‘collective consciousness’ has thus been used as one of the supports of ‘Prussianism’ and has played its part in bringing about the Great War with all its immense mass of individual anguish.

We must, then, examine the arguments upon which the doctrine is based, and ask—Do they suffice to render it probable, or to compel our acceptance of it, and to justify the complete subjection of the individual to the State?

We have seen that a strong case is made out for the view that the consciousness of a complex organism is the ‘collective consciousness’ of all its cells, or of the cells of its nervous system; and it must be admitted that, if this view could be definitely established, it would go far to justify the doctrine of the collective consciousness of societies. Yet the view is by no means established; there are great difficulties in the way of its acceptance. There is the difficulty which meets a doctrine of ‘collective consciousness’ in all its forms from that of Haeckel to that of Hegel,—the difficulty that the consciousness of the units is used twice over, once as the individual consciousness, once as an element entering into the collective consciousness; and no one has been able to suggest how this difficulty can be surmounted. It has been argued also, most forcibly perhaps by Lotze[26], that what we know of the structure and functions of the brain compels us to adopt a very different interpretation of the facts. It is said that, since we cannot find any evidence of a unitary brain-process that might be regarded as the immediate physical correlate of the unitary stream of consciousness of the individual, but find rather that the physical correlate of the individual’s consciousness at any moment is a number of discrete processes taking place simultaneously in anatomical elements widely scattered in different parts of the brain, we are compelled to assume that each of these acts upon some unitary substance, some immaterial entity (which may be called the soul) producing a partial affection of its state. According to this view, then, the consciousness of any moment is the unitary resultant of all these influences simultaneously exerted on the soul, the unitary reaction of the soul upon these many influences[27].

But, even if we could accept the view that the consciousness of the complex organism is the ‘collective consciousness’ of its cells, the analogy between an organism and a society, which constitutes the argument for the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society, would remain defective in one very important respect. If we accept that view, we must believe that the essential condition of the fusion of the consciousnesses of the cells is their spatial continuity, no matter how utterly unintelligible this condition may seem; for the apparent disruption of consciousness on the solution of material continuity between the cells is the principal ground on which this view is founded. Now, no such continuity of substance exists between the members of any human group or society, and its absence constitutes a fatal flaw in the analogical argument.

If we pass by these serious difficulties, others arise as soon as we inquire what kinds of human groups have such ‘collective consciousness.’ Does the simple fortuitously gathered crowd possess it? Or is it confined to highly organised groups such as the leading modern nations? If every psychological crowd possesses it and owes its peculiarities of behaviour to it, does it come into being at the moment the individuals have their attention attracted to a common object and begin to be stirred by a common emotion? And does it cease to be as soon as the crowd is resolved into its elements? Or, if it is confined to nations or other highly organised groups, at what stage of their development does it come into being, and what are the limits of the groups of which it is the ‘collective consciousness’? Do the Poles share in the ‘collective consciousness’ of the German nation, or the Bavarians in that of Prussia? Or do the Irish or the Welsh contribute their share to that of the English nation?

Coming now to close quarters with the doctrine, we may ask those who, like Schaeffle and Espinas, regard the ‘collective consciousness’ as a bond which unites the members of a society and makes of them one living individual,—Is this ‘collective consciousness’ merely epiphenomenal in character? Or are we to regard it as reacting upon the consciousnesses or minds of the individuals of the group, and, through such reaction, playing a part in determining the behaviour of the group, or rather of the individuals of which the group is composed? For the actions of the group are merely the sum of the actions of its individuals. If the former alternative be adopted, then we may confidently say that the existence of a ‘collective consciousness’ must from the nature of the case remain a mere speculation, incapable of verification; and that, if it does exist, since it cannot make any difference, cannot in any way affect human life and conduct, it is for us unreal, no matter how real it may be for itself, as Espinas maintains; and we certainly are not called upon to have any regard for it or its happiness, nor can we invoke its aid in attempting to explain the course of history and the phenomena of social life. If, on the other hand, the ‘collective consciousness’ of groups and societies and peoples reacts upon individual minds and so plays a part in shaping the conduct of men and societies, then the conception is a hypothesis which can only be justified by showing that it affords explanations of social phenomena which in its absence remain inexplicable. If it were found that social aggregates of any kind really do exhibit, as has often been maintained, great mass-movements, emigrations, religious or political uprisings, and so forth, for which no adequate explanations can be found in the mental processes of individuals and the mental interactions of individuals by the ordinary means of expression and perception, a resort to some such hypothesis would be permissible; but it is an offence against the principles of scientific method to invoke its aid, before we have exhausted the possibilities of explanation offered by well-known existents and forces. That certainly has not yet been done, and the upholders of the doctrine have hardly made any attempt to justify it in this the only possible manner in which it could be justified. The only evidence of this sort adduced by Espinas is the rapid spread of a common emotion and impulse throughout the members of animal and human groups; and of such phenomenon we have already found a sufficient explanation in those special adaptations of the instincts of all gregarious creatures which are unmistakably implied by the way in which the expression of an emotion directly evokes a display of the same emotion in any onlooking member of the species.

We may, then, set aside the conception of a ‘collective consciousness’ as a hypothesis to be held in reserve until the study of group life reveal phenomena that cannot be explained without its aid. For it may be confidently asserted that up to the present time no such evidence of a ‘collective consciousness’ has been brought forward, and that there is no possibility of any such evidence being obtained before the principles of social psychology have been applied far more thoroughly than has yet been done to the explanation of the course of history. In adopting a so far unsympathetic attitude towards this doctrine, we ought to admit that, if there be any truth in it, the ‘collective consciousness’ of even the most highly organised society may be still in a rudimentary stage, and that it may continue to gain in effectiveness and organisation with the further evolution of the society in question.

After this digression we may return to the consideration of the emotional characteristics of simple crowds. We have to notice not only that the emotions of crowds are apt to be excessively strong, but also that certain types of emotion are more apt than others to spread through a crowd, namely the coarser simpler emotions and those which do not imply the existence of developed and refined sentiments. For many of the individuals of most crowds will be incapable of the more subtle complex emotions and will be devoid of the more refined sentiments; while such sentiments as the individuals possess will be in the main more diverse in proportion to their refinement and special character; hence the chances of any crowd being homogeneous as regards these emotions and sentiments is small. Whereas the primary emotions and the coarser sentiments may be common to all the members of a crowd; any crowd is likely to be homogeneous in respect to them.

On the other hand, a crowd is more apt to be swayed by the more generous of the coarser emotions, impulses, and sentiments than by those of a meaner universally reprobated kind. For each member of the crowd acts in full publicity; and his knowledge of, and regard for, public opinion will to some extent incline him to suppress the manifestation of feelings which he might indulge in private but would be ashamed of in public. Hence a crowd is more readily carried away by admiration for a noble deed, or by moral indignation against an act of cruelty, than by self-pity or jealousy or envy or a meanly vengeful emotion.

At the same time, a crowd is apt to express feelings which imply less consideration and regard for others than the individual, representing the average morality and refinement of its members, would display when not under the influence of the crowd. Thus men, when members of a crowd, will witness with enjoyment scenes of brutality and suffering which, under other circumstances, they would turn away from, or would seek to terminate. To see a man thrown heavily to the ground is not pleasing to most individuals; yet the spectacle provokes roars of delight from the crowd at a football match. How many of the spectators, who, as members of a crowd, hugely enjoy looking on at a prize-fight or a bull-fight, would shrink from witnessing it as isolated individuals! How many boys will join with a crowd of others in cruelly teasing another boy, an animal, an old woman, or a drunken man, who individually are incapable of such ‘thoughtless’ conduct! It may be doubted whether even the depraved population of Imperial Rome could have individually witnessed without aversion the destruction of Christians in the Coliseum.

This character of crowds seems to be due to two peculiarities of the collective mental state. In the first place, the individual, in becoming one of a crowd, loses in some degree his self-consciousness, his awareness of himself as a distinct personality, and with it goes also something of his consciousness of his specifically personal relations; he becomes to a certain extent depersonalised. In the second place, and intimately connected with this last change, is a diminution of the sense of personal responsibility: the individual feels himself enveloped and overshadowed and carried away by forces which he is powerless to control; he therefore does not feel called upon to maintain the attitude of self-criticism and self-restraint which under ordinary circumstances are habitual to him, his more refined ideals of behaviour fail to assert themselves against the overwhelming forces that envelope him.

The Intellectual Processes of Simple Crowds

No fact has been more strongly insisted upon by writers on the psychology of crowds than the low degree of intelligence implied by their collective actions. Not only mobs or simple crowds, but such bodies as juries, committees, corporations of all sorts, which are partially organised groups, are notoriously liable to pass judgments, to form decisions, to enact rules or laws, so obviously erroneous, unwise, or defective that anyone, even the least intelligent member of the group concerned, might have been expected to produce a better result.

The principal ground of the low order of intelligence displayed by simple crowds is that the ideas and reasonings which can be collectively understood and accepted must be such as can be appreciated by the lower order of minds among the crowd. These least intelligent minds bring down the intelligence of the whole to their own level. This is true in some degree even of crowds composed of highly educated persons; for, as in the case of the emotions and sentiments, the higher faculties are always more or less specialised and differentiated in various ways through differences of nurture and training; whereas the simpler intellectual faculties and tendencies are common to all men.

A second condition, which co-operates with the foregoing to keep the intellectual processes of crowds at a low level, is the increased suggestibility of its members. Here is one of the most striking facts of collective mental life. A crowd impresses each of its members with a sense of its power, its unknown capacities, its unlimited and mysterious possibilities; and these, as I have shown in Chapter III of my Social Psychology, are the attributes that excite in us the instinct of subjection and so throw us into the receptive suggestible attitude towards the object that displays them. Mere numbers are capable of exerting this effect upon most of us; but the effect of numbers is greatly increased if all display a common emotion and speak with one voice; the crowd has then, if we are in its presence, a well nigh irresistible prestige. Hence even the highly intelligent and self-reliant member of a crowd is apt to find his critical reserve broken down; and, when an orator makes some proposition which the mass of the crowd applauds but which each more intelligent member would as an individual reject with scorn, it is apt to be uncritically accepted by all alike; because it comes to each, not as the proposition of the orator alone, but as a proposition which voices the mind of the crowd, which comes from the mass of men he sees around him and so comes with the power of a mass-suggestion.

A further ground of the suggestibility of the crowd is that prevalence of emotional excitement which was discussed in the foregoing pages. It is well recognised that almost any emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of the individual, though the explanation of the fact remains obscure. I have suggested that the explanation is to be found in the principle of the vicarious usage of nervous energy, the principle that nervous energy, liberated in any one part of the nervous system, may overflow the channels of the system in which it is liberated and re-enforce processes initiated in other systems. If this be true, we can see how any condition of excitement will favour suggestibility; for it will re-enforce whatever idea or impulse may have been awakened and made dominant by ‘suggestion.’ The principle requires perhaps the following limitation. Emotion which is finding outlet in well-directed action is probably unfavourable to all such ‘suggestions’ as are not congruent with its tendencies. It is vague emotion, or such as finds no appropriate expression in action, that favours suggestibility. The most striking illustrations of the greatly increased suggestibility of crowds are afforded by well-authenticated instances of collective hallucination, instances which, so long as we fail to take into account the abnormal suggestibility of the members of crowds, seem utterly mysterious, incredible, and super-normal.

Again, the capacity of crowds to arrive at correct conclusions by any process of reasoning is apt to be diminished in another way by the exaltation of emotion to which, as we have seen, they are peculiarly liable. It is a familiar fact that correct observation and reasoning are hampered by emotion; for all ideas congruent with the prevailing emotion come far more readily to consciousness and persist more stably than ideas incongruent with it, and conclusions congruent with the prevailing emotion and desire are accepted readily and uncritically; whereas those opposed to them can hardly find acceptance in the minds of most men, no matter how simple and convincing be the reasoning that leads to them.

The diminution or abolition of the sense of personal responsibility, which results from membership in a crowd and which, as we have seen, favours the display of its emotions, tends also to lower the level of its intellectual processes. Wherever men have to come to a collective decision or to undertake collective action of any sort, this effect plays an important part. The weight of responsibility that would be felt by any one man, deciding or acting alone, is apt to be divided among all the members of the group; so that for each man it is diminished in proportion to the number of persons taking part in the affair. Hence the attention and care devoted by each man to the task of deliberation, observation, or execution, are less keen and continuously sustained, and a judgment or decision is more lightly and easily arrived at, grounds which the individual, deliberating alone, would reject or weigh again and again serving to determine an immediate judgment. The principle is well recognised in practical life. We do not set ten men to keep the look-out on ship-board, but only one; though the safety of the ship and of all that it carries depends upon his unremitting alertness. We see the principle recognised in the institution of the jury. But for the weakening of the individual sense of responsibility, juries would seldom be found capable of finding a prisoner guilty of murder and so condemning him to death; while, by the restriction of the jury to a comparatively small number, the worst features of collective mental life are avoided.

We see the working of the principle not only in simple crowds, but also in groups of very considerable degrees of organisation. We see it in the way in which many a man, who would shrink from the responsibility of directing a great and complicated commercial undertaking, will cheerfully join a board of directors each of whom is perhaps no better qualified than himself to conduct the business of the concern. We may recognise its effects also in the cheerful levity, not to say hilarity, that frequently pervades our House of Commons; for most of its well-meaning members would be utterly crushed under the weight of their legislative responsibility, were it not divided in small fractions among them.

But the low sense of responsibility of the crowd is not due to the division of responsibility alone. In the case of the simple crowd, it is due also in large part to the fact that such a crowd has but a very low grade of self-consciousness and no self-regarding sentiment; that is to say, the members of the crowd have but a dim consciousness of the crowd as a whole, but very little knowledge of its tendencies and capacities, and no sentiment of love, respect, or regard of any kind for it and its reputation in the eyes of men. Hence, since the responsibility falls on the whole crowd, and any loss or gain of reputation affects the crowd and hardly at all the individuals who are merged in it, they are not stimulated to exert care and self-restraint and critical deliberation in forming their judgments, in arriving at decisions, or in executing any task collectively undertaken. The results of these two conditions of collective mental life are well summed up in the popular dictum that a corporation has no conscience.

Since all these factors co-operate to keep the intellectual activity of the simple crowd on a low level, it follows that very simple intellectual processes must be relied on by the orator who would sway a crowd; he must rely on abuse and ridicule of opponents, or unmeasured praise of friends; on flattery; on the argumentum ad hominem; on induction by simple enumeration of a few striking instances; on obvious and superficial analogies; on the evocation of vivid representative imagery rather than of abstract ideas; and, above all, on confident assertion and reiteration, and on a display of the coarser emotions.

Since the individuals comprised in a crowd are apt to be influenced in all these ways by the mass of their fellows, it follows that the mental processes, the thoughts and feelings and actions, of each one will be as a rule very different from what they would be if he faced a similar situation as an isolated individual; the mental processes of each one are profoundly modified by his mental interactions with all the other members of the crowd. Therefore the collective actions of a crowd are not simply the resultants of all the tendencies to thought and action of the individuals, as such, but may be very different from any such resultant. And they are not merely the expression of the individual tendencies of the average member, nor yet of the mass of least intelligent and refined members; they may be, and often are, such as no one of the members acting alone would ever display or attempt.

It must be added that all the peculiarities of collective mental process mentioned above express themselves very readily in the actions of simple crowds, because such a crowd is incapable of resolution and volition in the true sense of the words. I have shown[28] that individual resolution and volition are only rendered possible by the possession of a well-developed self-consciousness and self-regarding sentiment. But a simple crowd has at the most only a rudimentary self-consciousness and has no self-regarding sentiment. Hence its actions are the direct issue of the various impulses that are collectively evoked; and, though it may be collectively conscious of the end towards which it is impelled, and though all the individuals may desire to effect or realise this end, and to that extent may be said to be capable of purpose; yet such an impulse or desire cannot be steadied, strengthened, renewed, or supported and maintained, in opposition to any other impulse that may come into play, by an impulse springing from the self-regarding sentiment in the way which constitutes resolution and volition. Just so far as the self-regarding sentiment of individuals comes into play and they exert their individual volitions, they cease to act as members of a crowd. The actions of the simple crowd are thus not the outcome of a general will, nor are they the resultant of the wills of all its members; they are simply not volitional in the true sense, but rather impulsive. They are comparable with the actions of an animal rather than with those of a man. It is the lack of the conditions necessary to collective resolution and volition that renders a crowd so fickle and inconsistent; so capable of passing from one extreme of action to another, of hurrying to death the man whom it glorified at an earlier moment, or of turning from savage butchery to tender and tearful solicitude. Such incapacity of the crowd for resolution and volition, together with the increased suggestibility of its members, accounts for the fact that a crowd may be easily induced to follow as a leader any one who, by means of the elementary reasoning processes suited to its intellectual capacity, can succeed in suggesting to it the desirability of any course of action.

We may sum up the psychological characters of the unorganised or simple crowd by saying that it is excessively emotional, impulsive, violent, fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action, displaying only the coarser emotions and the less refined sentiments; extremely suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty in judgment, incapable of any but the simpler and imperfect forms of reasoning; easily swayed and led, lacking in self-consciousness, devoid of self-respect and of sense of responsibility, and apt to be carried away by the consciousness of its own force, so that it tends to produce all the manifestations we have learnt to expect of any irresponsible and absolute power. Hence its behaviour is like that of an unruly child or an untutored passionate savage in a strange situation, rather than like that of its average member; and in the worst cases it is like that of a wild beast, rather than like that of human beings.

All these characteristics of the crowd were exemplified on a great scale in Paris at the time of the great revolution, when masses of men that were little more than unorganised crowds escaped from all control and exerted supreme power; and writers on the topic have drawn many striking illustrations from the history of the days of the Terror[29]. The understanding of these more elementary facts and principles of group psychology will prevent us falling into such an error as was committed by our greatest political philosopher, Edmund Burke, when he condemned the French people in the most violent terms on account of the terrible events of the Revolution; for he attributed to the inhabitants of France in general, as individuals, the capacities for violence and brutality and the gross defects of intelligence and self-restraint that were displayed by the Parisian crowds of the time; whereas the study of collective psychology has led us to see that the actions of a crowd afford no measure of the moral and intellectual status of the individuals of which it is composed. So, when we hear of minor outrages committed by a crowd of undergraduates or suffragettes, a knowledge of group psychology will save us from the error of attributing to the individuals concerned the low grade of intelligence and decency that might seem to be implied by the deeds performed by them collectively. The same understanding will also resolve for us some seeming paradoxes; for example, the paradox that, while in the year 1906 the newspapers contained many reports of almost incredible brutalities committed by the peasants in many different parts of Russia, an able correspondent, who was studying the peasants at that very time, ascribed to them, as the most striking quality of their characters, an exceptional humaneness and kindliness[30].

It will be maintained on a later page that we may properly speak not only of a collective will, but also of the collective mind of an organised group, for example, of the mind and will of a nation. We must, then, ask at this stage—Can we properly speak of the collective mind of an unorganised crowd? The question is merely one as to the proper use of words and therefore not of the first importance. If we had found reason to accept the hypothesis of a ‘collective consciousness’ of a group, and to believe that the peculiarities of behaviour of a crowd are due to a ‘collective consciousness,’ then we should certainly have to admit the propriety of regarding the crowd as having a collective mind. But we have provisionally rejected that hypothesis, and have maintained that the only consciousness of a crowd or other group is the consciousnesses of its constituent individuals. In the absence of any ‘collective consciousness’ we may still speak of collective minds; for we have defined a mind as an organised system of interacting mental or psychical forces. This definition, while allowing us to speak of the collective mind of such a group as a well-developed nation, hardly allows us to attribute such a mind to a simple crowd: for the interplay of its mental forces is not determined by the existence of an organised system of relations between the elements in which the forces are generated; and such determination is an essential feature of whatever can be called a mind.

CHAPTER III

THE HIGHLY ORGANISED GROUP

The peculiarities of simple crowds tend to appear in all group life; but they are modified in proportion as the group is removed in character from a simple crowd, a fortuitous congregation of men of more or less similar tendencies and sentiments. Many crowds are not fortuitous gatherings, but are brought together by the common interest of their members in some object or topic. These may differ from the simple fortuitous crowd only in being more homogeneous as regards the sentiments and interests of their members; their greater homogeneity does not in itself raise them above the mental level of the fortuitous crowd; it merely intensifies the peculiarities of group life, especially as regards the intensity of the collective emotion.

There is, however, one condition that may raise the behaviour of a temporary and unorganised crowd to a higher plane, namely the presence of a clearly defined common purpose in the minds of all its members. Such a crowd, for example a crowd of white men in one of the Southern States of North America setting out to lynch a negro who is supposed to have committed some flagrant crime, will display most of the characteristics of the common crowd, the violence and brutality of emotion and impulse, the lack of restraint, the diminished sense of responsibility, the increased suggestibility and incapacity for arriving at correct conclusions by deliberation and the weighing of evidence. But it will not exhibit the fickleness of a common crowd, the easy yielding to distracting impressions and to suggestions that are opposed to the common purpose. Such a crowd may seize and execute its victim with inflexible determination, perhaps with a brutality and a ruthless disregard of all deterrent considerations of which no one of its members would be individually capable; and may then at once break up, each man returning quietly and seriously to his home, in a way which has often been described by witnesses astonished at the contrast between the behaviour of the crowd and that of the individuals into which it suddenly resolves itself.

The behaviour of a crowd of this kind raises the problem of the general or collective will. It was said in the foregoing chapter that the actions of a common crowd cannot properly be regarded as volitional, because they are the immediate outcome of the primary impulses. Yet the actions of a crowd of the kind we are now considering are the issue of true resolutions formed by each member of the crowd, and are, therefore, truly volitional. Nevertheless, they are the expression not of a general or collective will, but merely of the wills of all the individuals; and, even if there arise differences between the members and a conflict of wills as to the mode of achieving the common end, and if the issue be determined simply by the stronger party overbearing the weaker and securing their co-operation, that still does not constitute the expression of a general will. For a collective or general will only exists where some idea of the whole group and some sentiment for it as such exists in the minds of the persons composing it. But we may with advantage examine the nature of collective volition on a later page, in relation to the life of a highly organised group, such as an army.

There are five conditions of principal importance in raising collective mental life to a higher level than the unorganised crowd can reach, no matter how homogeneous the crowd may be in ideas and sentiments nor how convergent the desires and volitions of its members. These are the principal conditions which favour and render possible the formation of a group mind, in addition to those more fundamental conditions of collective life which we have noted in the foregoing chapter.

The first of these conditions, which is the basis of all the rest, is some degree of continuity of existence of the group. The continuity may be predominantly material or formal; that is to say, it may consist either in the persistence of the same individuals as an intercommunicating group, or in the persistence of the system of generally recognised positions each of which is occupied by a succession of individuals. Most permanent groups exhibit both forms of continuity in a certain degree; for, the material continuity of a group being given, some degree of formal continuity will commonly be established within it. The most highly organised groups, such as well-developed nations, exhibit both forms in the highest degree.

A second very important condition, essential to any highly developed form of collective life, is that in the minds of the mass of the members of the group there shall be formed some adequate idea of the group, of its nature, composition, functions, and capacities, and of the relations of the individuals to the group. The diffusion of this idea among the members of the group, which constitutes the self-consciousness of the group mind, would be of little effect or importance, if it were not that, as with the idea of the individual self, a sentiment of some kind almost inevitably becomes organised about this idea and is the main condition of its growth in richness of meaning; a sentiment for the group which becomes the source of emotions and of impulses to action having for their objects the group and its relations to other groups.

A third condition very favourable to the development of the collective mind of a group, though not perhaps absolutely essential, is the interaction (especially in the form of conflict and rivalry) of the group with other similar groups animated by different ideals and purposes, and swayed by different traditions and customs. The importance of such interaction of groups lies chiefly in the fact that it greatly promotes the self-knowledge and self-sentiment of each group.

Fourthly, the existence of a body of traditions and customs and habits in the minds of the members of the group determining their relations to one another and to the group as a whole.

Lastly, organisation of the group, consisting in the differentiation and specialisation of the functions of its constituents—the individuals and classes or groups of individuals within the group. This organisation may rest wholly or in part upon the conditions of the fourth class, traditions, customs, and habits. But it may be in part imposed on the group and maintained by the authority of some external power.

The capacity for collective life of an organised group whose organisation is imposed upon it and wholly maintained by an external authority is but little superior to that of a simple crowd. Such a group will differ from the simple crowd chiefly in exhibiting greater control of its impulses and a greater continuity of direction of its activities; but these qualities are due to the external compelling power and are not truly the expression of its collective mental life. An army of slaves or, in a less complete degree, an army of mercenaries is the type of this kind of organised group; and a people ruled by a strong despot relying on a mercenary or foreign army approximates to it. The first aim of the power that would maintain such an organisation must always be to prevent and suppress collective life, by forbidding gatherings and public discussions, by rendering communications between the parts difficult, and by enforcing a rigid discipline. For such an organisation is essentially unstable.

We may illustrate the influence of these five conditions by considering how in a group of relatively simple kind, in which they are all present, they favour collective life and raise it to a higher level of efficiency. Such a group is a patriot army fighting in a cause that elicits the enthusiasm of its members; such were the armies of Japan in the late Russo-Japanese war; they exhibited in a high degree and in relative simplicity the operation of all the conditions we have enumerated.

Such an army exhibits the exaltation of emotion common to all psychological crowds. This intensification of emotion enables men to face danger and certain death with enthusiasm, and on other occasions may, even in the armies of undoubtedly courageous and warlike nations, result in panic and a rout. But in all other respects the characteristics of the simple crowd are profoundly modified. The formal continuity of the existence of the army and of its several units secures for it, even though its personnel be changed at a rapid rate, a past and therefore a tradition, a self-consciousness and a self-regarding sentiment, a pride in its past and a tradition of high conduct and achievement; for past failures are discreetly forgotten and only its past successes and glories are kept in memory. The traditional group consciousness and sentiment are fostered by every wise commander, both in the army as a whole and in each separate department and regiment. Is not the superiority in battle of such bodies as the famous Tenth Legion due as much to such self-conscious tradition and sentiment as to the presence of veterans in its ranks? And is not the same true of such regiments as the Black Watch, the Gordons, the Grenadier Guards, and the other famous regiments of the British army?

The third of the conditions mentioned above is also very obviously present in the case of an army in the field—namely, interaction with a similar group having different purposes, traditions, and sentiments. And in this case the interaction, being of the nature of direct competition and conflict, is of the kind most favourable to the development of the collective mind. It accentuates the self-consciousness of the whole; that is to say, it defines more clearly in the mind of each individual the whole of which he is a part, his position in, his organic connexion with, and his dependence upon, the whole; with each succeeding stage of the conflict he conceives the whole more clearly, obtains a fuller knowledge of the capacities and weaknesses of the whole and its parts. Each soldier learns, too, something of the character of the opposing army; and, in the light of this knowledge, his conception of his own army becomes better defined and richer in meaning. In short, through interaction with the opposing army, the army as a whole becomes more clearly reflected in the mind of each of its members, its self-consciousness is clarified and enriched. In a similar way, intercourse and rivalry between the various regiments greatly promotes the growth of the self-knowledge and self-sentiment of each of these lesser groups. A standing army inevitably possesses a wealth of traditions, habits and customs, over and above its formal organisation, and these play an important part in promoting the smooth working of the whole organism; the lack of these is one of the chief difficulties in the way of the creation of a new army, as was vividly illustrated in the making of the ‘Kitchener army’ during the Great War. The customs of the various officers’ messes were but a small part of this mass of custom which does so much to bind the whole army together.

An army obviously possesses organisation, generally in a very high degree. The formal continuity of its existence enables the organisation impressed upon it by external authority to acquire all the strength that custom alone can give; while its material continuity enables its organisation to generate, in the individual soldiers, habits through which the inferior members are raised, as regards the moral qualities required for efficiency in the field, towards the level of the best.

The organisation of the whole army has two aspects and two main functions; the one is executive, the securing of the co-ordination of action of the parts in the carrying out of the common plan; the other is recipient and deliberative, the co-ordination of the data supplied by the parts through deliberation upon which the choice of means is arrived at. Deliberation and choice of means are carried out by the commander-in-chief and his staff, the persons who have shown themselves best able to execute this part of the army’s task. It is important to note that, in the case of such an army as we are considering, the private soldier in the ranks remains a free agent performing truly volitional actions; that he in no sense becomes a mechanical agent or one acting through enforced or habitual obedience merely. He wills the common end; and, believing that the choice of means to that end is best effected by the appropriate part of the whole organisation, he accepts the means chosen, makes of them his proximate end, and wills them.

This is the essential character of the effective organisation of any human group; it secures that while the common end of collective action is willed by all, the choice of means is left to those best qualified and in the best position for deliberation and choice; and it secures that co-ordination of the voluntary actions of the parts which brings about the common end by the means so chosen. In this way the collective actions of the well-organised group, instead of being, like those of the simple crowd, merely impulsive or instinctive actions, implying a degree of intelligence and of morality far inferior to that of the average individual of the crowd, become truly volitional actions expressive of a degree of intelligence and morality much higher than that of the average member of the group: i.e. the whole is raised above the level of its average member; and even, by reason of exaltation of emotion and organised co-operation in deliberation, above that of its highest members.

Here we must consider a little more fully the nature of the collective or general will, a subject that has figured largely in the discussions of political philosophers on the nature of the State. Rousseau wrote—“There is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter looks only to the common interest; the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a series of individual wills; but take away from these same wills the plus and minus that cancel one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the general will.” “Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will.” By this he seems to mean that a certain number of men will the general good, while many will only their private goods; and that while the latter neutralise one another, as regards their effects on the general interest, the former co-operate and so form an effective force to promote the general good. This doctrine was an approximation towards the truth, though like all Rousseau’s social speculations, his handling of it was vitiated by his false psychology, which set out from the fiction of man as an independent purely self-contained and self-determining absolute individual. Later writers do not seem to have improved upon Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will to any great extent.

The problem of the general will, like all problems of collective psychology, becomes extremely complex when we consider the life of nations; and it is, therefore, important to make ourselves clear as to the nature of collective volition by consideration of the relatively simple case of a patriot army. It is of course impossible to arrive at a clear notion of collective volition, until individual volition has been clearly defined and the nature of the distinction between it, on the one hand, and mere impulsive action, desire, and simple conflict of desires, on the other hand, has been made clear. The lack of such clear notions and adequate definitions has rendered much of the discussion of this topic by political philosophers sterile and obscure. In the light of the conclusions reached in my chapter on individual volition[31], the question of the nature of collective volition presents little difficulty. It was found that volition may be defined and adequately marked off from the simpler modes of conation by saying that it is the reinforcement of any impulse or conation by one excited within the system of the self-regarding sentiment. And in an earlier chapter[32] it was shewn how the self-regarding sentiment may become extended to other objects than the individual self, to all objects with which the self identifies itself, which are regarded as belonging to the self or as part of the wider self. This extension depends largely on the fact that others identify us with such an object, so that we feel ourselves to be an object of all the regards and attitudes and actions of others directed towards that object, and are emotionally affected by them in the same ways that we are affected by similar regards, attitudes, and actions directed towards us individually. It was shewn also that such a sentiment may become wider and emotionally richer than the purely self-regarding sentiment, through fusing with a sentiment of love for the object that has grown up independently. These facts were illustrated by consideration of the parental sentiment for the child, which, it was said, has commonly this twofold character and source, being formed by the compounding of the self-regarding sentiment with the sentiment of love of which the dominant disposition is that of the tender or protective instinct.

In a similar way a similarly complex sentiment may become organised about the idea of one’s family, or of any still larger group having continuity of existence of which one becomes a member. In the case of the patriot’s sentiment for his country or nation, the self-regarding sentiment and the sentiment of love may be from the first combined in the patriotic sentiment; since he knows himself to be a part of the whole from the time that an idea of the whole first takes shape in his mind.

In this respect the case of the soldier in a patriot army is relatively simple. As a boy he may have acquired a sentiment of loving admiration for the army; and, when he becomes a member of it, the dispositions that enter into the constitution of his self-regarding sentiment, become incorporated with this previously existing sentiment, so that the reputation of the army becomes as important to him as his own; praise and approval of it become for him objects of desire and sources of elation; disapproval and blame of it, or the prospect of them, affect him as painfully as if directed to himself individually, fill him with shame and mortification.

A similar complex sentiment, the sentiment of patriotism, becomes organised about the idea of his country as a whole; and, when war breaks out and the army is pitted against that of another nation, while the eyes of the whole world are turned upon it, it becomes the representative of the nation and the special object of the patriotic sentiment, which thus adds its strength to that of the more special sentiment of the soldier for the army[33]. When, then, the patriot army takes the field, it is capable of collective volition in virtue of the existence of this sentiment in the minds of all its members. The soldiers of a purely mercenary army are moved by the desire of individual glory, of increased pay, of loot, by the habit of obedience and collective movement acquired by prolonged drilling, by the pugnacious impulse, by the desire of self-preservation; and they may be led on to greater exertions by the influence of an admired captain. But such an army is incapable of collective volition, because no sentiment for the army as a whole is common to all its members. The soldiers of the patriot army on the other hand may act from all the individual motives enumerated above; but all alike are capable also of being stirred by a common motive, a desire excited within the collective self-regarding sentiment, the common sentiment for the army; and this, adding itself to whatever individual motives are operative, converts their desires into collective resolutions and renders their actions the expressions of a collective volition.

Each soldier of the mercenary army may desire that his side shall win the battle and may resolve that he will do his best to bring victory to his side, and he may perform many truly volitional actions; and, in so far as the actions of the army express these individual volitions towards a common result, they are the expressions of the ‘will of all,’ but not of the collective will; because these volitions, though they are directed to the one common end, spring from diverse motives and are individual volitions.

The essence of collective volition is, then, not merely the direction of the wills of all to the same end, but the motivation of the wills of all members of a group by impulses awakened within the common sentiment for the whole of which they are the parts. It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each member of the group to the group as a whole that binds the group together and renders it a collective individual capable of collective volition.

The facts may be illustrated more concretely by taking a still simpler example of collective volition. Consider the case of a regiment in battle commanded to occupy a certain hill-top in face of fierce opposition. If the regiment is one to which the self-regarding sentiment of each member has become extended, the soldiers may be animated individually by the pugnacious impulse and by the desire of individual glory, but they are moved also by the common desire to show what the regiment can do, to sustain its glorious reputation; they resolve that we, the regiment, will accomplish this feat. As they charge up the hill, the hail of bullets decimates their ranks and they waver, the impulse of fear checking their onward rush; if then their officer appeals to the common sentiment, each man feels the answering impulse; and this is strengthened by the cheer which shows him that the same impulse rises in all his comrades; and so this impulse, awakened within the collective self-regarding sentiment and strengthened by sympathetic induction from all to each, comes to the support of the pugnacious impulse or whatever other motives sustain each man, enables these to triumph over the impulse to flight, and sweeps them all on to gain their object by truly collective volitional effort. If, on the other hand, the men of the regiment have no such common sentiment, then, when the advancing line wavers, the onward impulsion checked by the impulse of retreat, there is no possibility of arousing a collective volition; the regiment, which from the first was a crowd organised only by external authority and the habits created by it, acts as a crowd and yields to the rising impulse of the emotion of fear, which, becoming intensified by induction from man to man, rises to a panic; and the regiment is routed.

We may distinguish, then, five modes of conation which will carry all the members of a group towards a common object, five levels of collective action.

Let the group be a body of men on a road leading across a wilderness to a certain walled city. A sudden threat of danger from a band of robbers or from wild beasts may send them all flying in panic towards the city gate. That is a purely impulsive collective action. It is not merely a sum of individual actions, because the fear and, therefore, the impulse to flight of each man is intensified by the influence of his fellows.

Secondly, let them be a band of pilgrims, fortuitously congregated, each of whom has resolved to reach the city for his own private purposes. The whole body moves on steadily, each perhaps aided in maintaining his resolution in face of difficulties by the presence of the rest and the spectacle of their resolute efforts. Here there is a certain collectivity of action, the individual wills are strengthened by the community of purpose. But the arrival of the band is not due to collective volition; nor can it properly be said to be due to the will of all; for each member cares nothing for the arrival of the band as a whole; he desires and wills only his own arrival.

Thirdly, let each member of the band be aware that, at any point of the road, robbers may oppose the passage of any individual or of any company not sufficiently strong to force its way through. Each member will then desire that the whole band shall cohere and shall reach the city, and the actions of the group will display a higher degree of co-operation and collective efficiency than in the former cases; but the successful passage of the band will be desired by each member simply in order that his own safe arrival may be secured. There is direction of all wills towards the production of the one result, the success of the whole band; but this is not truly collective volition because the motives are private and individual and diverse.

Fourthly, let the band be an army of crusaders, a motley throng of heterogeneous elements of various nationalities, united by one common purpose, the capture of the city, but having no sentiment for the army. In this case all members not only will the same collective action and desire the same end of that action, but they have similar motives arising from their sentiment for the city or that which it contains. Still their combined actions are not the issue of a collective volition in the full and proper sense of the words, but of a coincidental conjunction of individual volitions. They might perhaps be said to be the expression of the general will; and by giving that meaning to the term ‘general will,’ while reserving the expression collective will or volition for the type of case illustrated by our next instance, we may usefully differentiate the two expressions.

Lastly, let the band approaching the city be an army of crusaders of one nationality, and let us suppose that this army has enjoyed a considerable continuity of existence and that in the mind of each member the self-regarding sentiment has become extended to the army as a whole, so that, as we say, each one identifies himself with it and prizes its reputation and desires its success as an end in itself. Such a sentiment would be greatly developed and strengthened by rivalry in deeds of arms with a second crusading army. Each member of this army would have the same motives for capturing the city as those of the army of our last instance; but, in addition to these motives, there would be awakened within the extended self-regarding sentiment of each man an impulse to assert the power, to sustain the glory of the army; and this, adding its force to those other motives, would enable them to triumph over all conflicting tendencies and render the resolution of the army to capture the city a true collective volition; so that the army might properly be said to possess and to exercise a general or collective will.

This distinction between the will of all and the collective will, which we have considered at some length, may seem to be of slight importance in the instances chosen. But it becomes of the greatest importance when we have to consider the life of a nation or other enduring community. The power of truly collective volition is no small advantage to any body of fighting men and receives practical recognition from experienced captains.

The importance of these different types of volition was abundantly illustrated by the incidents of the Boer war and of the Russo-Japanese war. That the success of its undertaking shall be strongly willed by all is perhaps the most important factor contributing to the success of an army; and if also the army exercises a true collective volition, in the sense defined above, it becomes irresistible. Though it is questionable whether the Boer armies can be said to have exercised a collective volition, it is at least certain that individually the Boers strongly willed their common end, the defeat of the British. On the other hand, the British armies were defective in these respects. The motives of those who fought in the British armies against the Boers were very diverse. The pay of the regulars, the five shillings a day of the volunteers, the desire to live for a time an adventurous exciting life, the desire to get home again on the sick-list as soon as possible, the desire for personal distinction; all these and other motives were in many minds mixed in various proportions with the desire to assert the supremacy of the British rule and support the honour of the flag. This difference between the Boer and British armies was undoubtedly a main cause of many of the surprising successes of the former. In the Russo-Japanese war the opposed armies probably differed even more widely in this respect. The Japanese soldiers not only willed intensely the common end, but their armies would appear to have exercised truly collective volition. Many of the several regiments also, being recruited on the territorial system, were animated by collective sentiments rooted in local patriotism. The Russian armies on the other hand were largely composed of peasants drawn from widely separated regions of the Russian empire, knowing little or nothing of the grounds of quarrel or of the ends to be achieved by their efforts, caring nothing individually for those ends, and having but little patriotic sentiment and still less sentiment for the army.

It would, then, be a grave mistake to infer from the course of events in these two wars that the British soldier was individually inferior to the Boer, or the Russian to the Japanese; in both cases the principal psychological condition of successful collective action—namely, a common end intensely desired and strongly willed, individually or collectively—was present in high degree on the one side, because the preservation of the national existence was the end in view; while it was lacking or comparatively deficient on the other side. As Sir Ian Hamilton, a close observer of both these wars, has said—“the army that will not surrender under any circumstances will always vanquish the army whose units are prepared to do so under sufficient pressure.”

The same considerations afford an explanation of a peculiarity of Russian armies which has often been noted in previous wars, and which was very conspicuous in the late wars; namely, their weakness in attack and their great strength when on the defensive. For, in attacking, a Russian army is in the main merely obeying the will of the commander-in-chief in virtue of custom, habit, and a form of strong collective suggestion; but in retreat and on the defensive, each man’s action becomes truly volitional, all are animated by a common purpose, and all will the same end, the safety of the whole with which that of each member is bound up.

The psychology of a patriot army is peculiarly simplified, as compared with that of most other large human groups, by two conditions; on the one hand, the restriction of the intellectual processes, by which the large means for the pursuit of the common end are chosen, to one or a few minds only; on the other hand, the definiteness and singleness of its purpose and the presence of this clear and strong purpose in the minds of all.

Other groups that enjoy in some degree the latter condition of simplicity of collective mental life are associations voluntarily formed and organised for the attainment of some single well-defined end. In them the former condition is generally completely lacking and the deliberative processes, by which their means are chosen, are apt to be very complex and ineffective, owing to lack of customary organisation. Such associations illustrate more clearly than any other groups the part played by the idea of the whole in the minds of the individuals in constituting and maintaining the whole. A desire or purpose being present in many minds, the idea of the association arises in some one or more of them, and, being communicated to others, becomes the immediate instrument through which the association is called into being; and only so long as this idea of the whole as an instrument for attaining the common end persists in the minds of the individuals does the association continue to exist. In this respect such an association is at the opposite end of the scale from the fortuitous crowd, which owes its existence to the accidents of time and place merely. Human groups of other kinds owe their existence in various proportions to these two conditions; such groups, for example, as are constituted by the members of a church, of a university or a school, of a profession or a township. Others, such as nations, owe their inception to the accidents of time and place, to physical boundaries and climatic conditions; and, in the course of their evolution, become more and more dependent for their existence on the idea of the whole and the sentiment organised about it in the minds of their members; and they may, like the Jewish people, arrive in the course of time at complete dependence on the latter condition.

The life of an army illustrates better than that of any other group the influence of leadership. That great strategists and skilful tacticians perform intellectual services of immeasurable importance for the common end of the army goes without saying. But the moral influence of leadership is more subtle in its workings, and is perhaps less generally recognised in all its complexity and scope. It is well known that such commanders as Napoleon inspired unlimited confidence and enthusiasm in the veteran armies that had made many campaigns under their leadership. Yet in the Great War, in which the British armies were, in its later stages, composed so largely of new recruits, the same influence was perceptible. Both the British and the French armies were very fortunate in having in supreme command men in whom the common soldier felt confidence. The solidity, the justice, the calm resolution of Marshal Joffre were felt throughout the French army in the early days of the war to be the one certain and fixed point in a crumbling universe. “Il est solid, le Père Joffre” was repeated by thousands who, remembering the disaster of 1870, were inclined to suspect treachery and weakness on every hand. And the genius of Marshal Foch and of other brilliant generals was a main source of the astonishing dogged resolution with which the French armies, in spite of their terrible losses, sustained the prolonged agony. The British army also was fortunate in having in Field-Marshal Haig a man at its head who was felt to be above all things resolute and calm and just; and, when the British armies in France were placed under the supreme control of Foch, it was generally felt throughout the ranks that this would not only give unity of control and purpose, but also supply that touch of genius which perhaps had been lacking in British strategy.

But it was not only the supreme command that exercised this influence over the minds of all ranks. At every level confidence in the leadership was of supreme importance. The character and talents of each general and colonel, of each captain, lieutenant, sergeant and corporal, made themselves felt by all under their control; felt not only individually but corporately and collectively. The whole area under the command of any particular general might be seen to reflect and to express in some degree his attributes. The reputations of the higher officers filtered down through the ranks in an astonishingly rapid and accurate manner; perhaps owing largely to the fact that these armies, in a degree unknown before, were composed of men accustomed to read and to think and to discuss and criticise the conduct of affairs. If the German higher command had been exercised from the first by a man who inspired the just confidence that was felt in the old Field-Marshal v. Moltke by the Prussian armies of 1870, it is probable that the issue of the Great War would have been fatally different.

The moral effects of good leadership are, perhaps, of more importance to an army than its intellectual qualities, especially in a prolonged struggle; and these work throughout the mass of men by subtle processes of suggestion and emotional contagion rather than by any process of purely intellectual appreciation. And the whole organisation of any wisely directed army is designed to render as effective as possible these processes by which the influence of leaders is diffused through the whole.

CHAPTER IV

THE GROUP SPIRIT

In considering the mental life of a patriot army, as the type of a highly organised group, we saw that group self-consciousness is a factor of very great importance—that it is a principal condition of the elevation of its collective mental life and behaviour above the level of the merely impulsive violence and unreasoning fickleness of the mob.

This self-consciousness of the group is the essential condition of all higher group life; we must therefore study it more nearly as it is manifested in groups of various types. It is unfortunate that our language has no word that accurately translates the French expression ‘esprit de corps’; for this conveys exactly the conception that we are examining. I propose to use the term group spirit as the equivalent of the French expression, the frequent use of which in English speech and writing sufficiently justifies the attempt to specialise this compound word for psychological purposes.

We have seen that, in virtue of the sentiment developed about the idea of the army, all its members exhibit group loyalty; it is only as the sentiment develops about the idea that this idea of the whole, present to the mind of each member, becomes a power which can hold the whole group together, in spite of all physical and moral difficulties. We see this if we reflect how armies of mercenaries, in which this collective sentiment is lacking or rudimentary only, are apt to dissolve and fade away by desertion as soon as serious difficulties are encountered.

The importance of the collective idea and sentiment appears still more clearly, when we reflect on the type of army which has generally proved the most efficient of all—namely, an army of volunteers banded together to achieve some particular end. Such an army (for example the army of Garibaldi) owes its existence to the operation of this idea in the minds of all. The idea of the army is formed in the mind perhaps of one only (Garibaldi); he communicates it to others, who accept it as a means to the end desired by all of them individually. The idea of the whole thus operates to create the group, to bring it into existence; and then, as the idea is realised, it becomes more definite, of richer and more exact meaning; the collective sentiment grows up about it, and habit and formal organisation begin to aid in holding the group together; yet still the idea of the whole remains constitutive of the whole.

Any group that owes its creation and its continued existence to the collective idea may be regarded from the psychological standpoint as of the highest type; while a fortuitously gathered crowd that owes its existence to accidents of time and place and has the barest minimum of group self-consciousness is of the lowest type. Every other form of association or of human group may be regarded as occupying a position in a scale between these extreme types; according to the relative predominance of the mental or the physical conditions of its origin and continuance, that is to say, according to the degree in which its existence is teleologically or mechanically determined.

The group spirit, the idea of the group with the sentiment of devotion to the group developed in the minds of all its members, not only serves as a bond that holds the group together or even creates it, but, as we saw in the case of the patriot army, it renders possible truly collective volition; this in turn renders the actions of the group much more resolute and effective than they could be, so long as its actions proceed merely from the presence of an impulse common to all members, or from the strictly individual volitions of all, even though these be directed to one common end.

Again, the group spirit plays an important part in raising the intellectual level of the group; for it leads each member deliberately to subordinate his own judgment and opinion to that of the whole; and, in any properly organised group, this collective opinion will be superior to that of the average individual, because in its formation the best minds, acting upon the fullest knowledge to the gathering of which all may contribute, will be of predominant influence. Each member, then, willing the common end, accepts the means chosen by the organised collective deliberation, and, in executing the actions prescribed for him, makes them his own immediate ends and truly wills them for the sake of the whole, not executing them in the spirit of merely mechanical unintelligent obedience or even of reluctance.

In a similar way the group spirit aids in raising the moral level of an army. The organised whole embodies certain traditional sentiments, especially sentiments of admiration for certain moral qualities, courage, endurance, trustworthiness, and cheerful obedience; and these sentiments, permeating the whole, are impressed upon every member, especially new members, by way of mass suggestion and sympathetic contagion; every new recruit finds that his comrades accept without question these traditional moral sentiments and confidently express moral judgments upon conduct and character in accordance with them, and that they also display the corresponding emotional reactions towards acts; that is to say, they express in verbal judgments and in emotional reactions their scorn for treachery or cowardice, their admiration for courageous self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. The recruit quickly shares by contagion these moral emotions and soon finds his judgment determined to share these opinions by the weight of mass suggestion; for these moral propositions come to him with all the irresistible force of opinion held by the group and expressed by its unanimous voice; and this force is not merely the force derived from numbers, but is also the force of the prestige accumulated by the whole group, the prestige of old and well-tried tradition, the prestige of age; and the more fully the consciousness of the whole group is present to the mind of each member, the more effectively will the whole impress its moral precepts upon each.

And the organisation of the army renders it possible for the leaders to influence and to mould the form of these moral opinions and sentiments. Thus Lord Kitchener, by issuing his exhortation to the British Army on its departure to France, did undoubtedly exert a considerable influence towards raising the moral level of the whole force, because he strengthened the influence of those who were already of his way of thinking against the influence of those whose sentiments and habits and opinions made in the opposite direction. His great prestige, which was of a double kind, both personal and due to his high office, enabled him to do this. In the same way, every officer in a less degree can do something to raise the moral level of the men under his command. Thus, then, the organisation of the whole group, with its hierarchy of offices which confer prestige, gives those who hold these higher offices the opportunity to raise the moral level of all members.

Of course, if those who occupy these positions of prestige feel no responsibility of this sort and make no effort to exert such influence, but rather aim at striking terror in the foe at all costs, if they countenance acts of savagery such as the destruction of cities, looting, and rapine, if they publicly instruct their soldiers to behave as Huns or savages; then the organisation of the army works in the opposite way—namely, to degrade all members below their normal individual level, rather than to raise them above it; and then we hear of acts of brutality on the part of the rank and file which are almost incredible.

But the main point to be insisted on here is that the raising of the moral level is not effected only by example, suggestion, and emotional contagion, spreading from those in the positions of prestige; that, where the group spirit exists, those enjoying prestige can, if they wish, greatly promote the end of raising the moral tone of the whole by appealing to that group spirit; as when Lord Kitchener asked the men to obey his injunctions for the sake of the honour of the British Army.

And the group spirit not only yields this direct response to moral exhortation; it operates in another no less important manner. Each member of a group pervaded by the collective sentiment, such as a well-organised army of high traditions, becomes in a special sense his brother’s keeper. Each feels an interest in the conduct of every other member, because the conduct of each affects the reputation of the whole; each man, therefore, punishes bad conduct of any fellow soldier by scorn and by withdrawal of sympathy and companionship; and each one rewards with praise and admiration the conduct that conforms to the standards demanded and admired. And so each member acts always under the jealous eyes of all his fellows, under the threat of general disapprobation, contempt, and moral isolation for bad conduct; under the promise of general approval and admiration for any act of special excellence.

The development of the group spirit, with the appropriate sentiment of attachment or devotion to the whole and therefore also to its parts, is the essence of the higher form of military discipline. There is a lower form of discipline which aims only at rendering each man perfectly subservient to his officers and trained to respond promptly and invariably, in precise, semi-mechanical, habitual fashion, to every word of command. But even the drill and the system of penalties and minute supervision, which are the means chosen to bring about this result, cannot fail to achieve certain effects on a higher moral and intellectual level than the mere formation of bodily habits of response. By rendering each soldier apt and exact in his response to commands, they enable each one to foresee the actions of his fellows in all ordinary circumstances, and therefore to rely upon that co-operation towards the common end, be it merely a turning movement on the drill ground or the winning of a battle, which is the essential aim and justification of all group life.

The group spirit, involving knowledge of the group as such, some idea of the group, and some sentiment of devotion or attachment to the group, is then the essential condition of all developed collective life, and of all effective collective action; but it is by no means confined to highly developed human associations of a voluntary kind.

Whether the group spirit is possessed in any degree by animal societies is a very difficult question. We certainly do not need to postulate it in order to account for the existence of more or less enduring associations of animals; just as we do not need to postulate it to account for the coming together of any fortuitous human mob. Even in such animal societies as those of the ants and bees, its presence, though often asserted, seems to be highly questionable. When we observe the division of labour that characterises the hive, how some bees ventilate, some build the comb, some feed the larvae and so on; and especially when we hear that the departure of a swarm from the hive is preceded by the explorations of a small number which seek a suitable place for the new home of the swarm and then guide it to the chosen spot, it seems difficult to deny that some idea of the community and its needs is present to the minds of its members. But we know so little as yet of the limits of purely instinctive behaviour (and by that I mean immediate reactions upon sense-perceptions determined by the innate constitution) that it would be rash to make any such inference. The same may be said of associations of birds or mammals, in which division of labour is frequently displayed; when, for example, it is found that one or more sentinels constantly keep watch while a flock or herd feeds or rests, as is reported of many gregarious species.

But, however it may be with animal societies, we may confidently assert that the group spirit has played an important part in the lives of all enduring human groups, from the most primitive ages onwards.

It has even been maintained with some plausibility that group self-consciousness preceded individual self-consciousness in the course of the evolution of the human mind. That again is, it seems to me, a proposition which cannot be substantiated. But it is, I think, true to say that the two kinds of self-consciousness must have been achieved by parallel processes, which constantly reacted upon one another in reciprocal promotion.

In the lives of the humblest savages the group spirit plays an immensely important part. It is the rule that a savage is born into a small closed community. Such a community generally has its own locality within which it remains, even if nomadic; and, if settled, it wholly lives in a village, widely separated in space from all others. In this small community the child grows up, becoming more or less intimately acquainted with every member of it, and having practically no intercourse with any other persons. Throughout his childhood he learns its laws and traditions, becomes acutely aware of its public opinion, and finds his welfare absolutely bound up with that of the village community. He cannot leave it if he would; the only alternative open to him is to become an outcast, as which he would very soon succumb in the struggle for life. There is nothing comparable with this in our complex civilised societies. The nearest parallel to it is the case of the young child growing up in a peculiarly secluded family isolated in the depths of the country.

This restriction of the intercourse of the young savage to the members of his own small society and his absolute dependence upon it for all that makes his survival possible would in themselves suffice to develop his group consciousness in a high degree. But two other conditions, well-nigh universal in savage life, tend strongly towards the same result.

When the young savage begins to come into contact with persons other than those of his own group, he learns to know them, not as individuals, John Smith or Tom Brown, but as men of such or such a group; and he himself is known to them as a man of his group, as representing his group, his village community, tribe, or what not; and he displays usually some mark or marks of his group, either in dress or ornament or speech.

The other great condition of the development of the group spirit in primitive societies is the general recognition of communal responsibility. This no doubt is largely the result of the two conditions previously mentioned, especially of the recognition of an individual by members of other groups as merely a representative of his group, rather than as an individual, and of the fact that his deeds, or those of any one of his fellows, determine the attitudes of other groups towards his group as a whole. But the influence of the principle of communal responsibility, thus established, becomes immensely strengthened by its recognition in a number of superstitious and religious observances. The savage lives, generally speaking, bound hand and foot by tabus and precise prescriptions of behaviour for all ordinary situations; and the breach of any one of these by any member of the community is held to bring down misfortune or punishment on the whole group; so far is this principle carried, that the breach of custom by some individual is confidently inferred from the incidence of any communal misfortune[34].

The recognition of communal responsibility is the great conservator of savage society and customary law, the very root and stem of all savage morality; it is the effective moral sanction without which the superstitious and religious sanctions would be of little effect. By its means, the idea of the community is constantly obtruded on the consciousness of the individual. Through it he is constantly led, or forced, to control his individualistic impulses and to undertake action with regard to the welfare of the group rather than to his own private interest. Through it the tendency of each to identify himself and each of his fellows with the whole group is constantly fostered; because it identifies their interests.

We may then say that, just as the direct induction of emotion and impulse by sense-perception of their bodily expressions is the cement of animal societies, so group self-consciousness is the cement and harmonising principle of primitive human societies.

And the group spirit is not only highly effective in promoting the life and welfare of the group; it is also the source of peculiar satisfactions. The individual revels in his group-consciousness; hence the principle is apt to run riot in savage societies, and we find that in very many parts of the world a great variety of complex forms of association is maintained, beside the primary and fundamental form of association of the village community or nomadic band (the kinship or subsistence group), apparently for no other reason than the attainment and intensification of the satisfactions of the group spirit. Hence, among peoples so low in the scale of savagery as the Australians, we find a most complex system of grouping cutting across the subsistence grouping; hence totem clans and phratries, exogamous groups, secret societies, initiation ceremonies.

I lay stress on the satisfaction which group self-consciousness brings as a condition or cause of these complexities of savage society, because, I think, it has been unduly neglected as a socialising factor and a determinant of the forms of association. If we ask—What are the sources of this satisfaction?—we may find two answers. First, the consciousness of the group and of oneself as a member of it brings a sense of power and security, an assurance of sympathy and co-operation, a moral and physical support without which man can hardly face the world. In a thousand situations it is a source of settled opinions and of definite guidance of conduct which obviates the most uncomfortable and difficult necessity of exerting independent judgment and making up one’s own mind. And in many such situations, not only does the savage find a definite code prescribed for his guidance, but he shares the collective emotion and feels the collective impulse that carries him on to action without hesitation or timidity.

Secondly, we may, I think, go back to a very fundamental principle of instinctive life, the principle, namely, that, in gregarious animals, the satisfaction of the gregarious impulse is greater or more complete the more nearly alike are the individuals congregated together. This seems to be true of the animals, but it is true in a higher degree of man; and, in proportion as his mind becomes more specialised and refined, the more exacting is he in this respect. To the uncultivated any society is better than none; but in the cultivated classes we become extraordinarily exacting; we find the gregarious satisfaction in our own peculiar set only—a process carried furthest, perhaps, in university circles. In savage life this shows itself in practices which accentuate the likeness of members of a group and mark it off more distinctly from other groups—for example, totems, peculiarities of dress, ornaments and ceremonies; things which are closely paralleled by the clubs, blazers, colours, cries, and so forth of our undergraduate communities.

The life of the savage, then, is in general dominated by that of the group; and this domination is not effected by physical force or compulsion (save in exceptional instances) but by the group spirit which is inevitably developed in the mind of the savage child by the material circumstances of his life and by the traditions, especially the superstitious and religious traditions, of his community. Such group self-consciousness is the principal moralising influence, and to this influence is due in the main the fact that savages conform so strictly to their accepted moral codes.

Group self-consciousness in savage communities brings then, I suggest, two great advantages which account for the spontaneous development and persistence among so many savage peoples of what, from a narrowly utilitarian point of view, might seem to be an excess of group organisation, such as the totemic systems of the Australians and of the American Indians;—namely, firstly, the moralising influences of the group spirit; secondly, the satisfactions or enjoyments immediately accruing to every participant in active group life.

And these two advantages, being in some degree appreciated, lead to a deliberate cultivation of group life for the securing of them in higher measure. The cultivation of group life shows itself in the many varieties of grouping on a purely artificial basis and in the practice of rites and ceremonies, especially dances, often accompanied by song and other music. There is nothing that so intensifies group consciousness, at the cost of consciousness of individuality, as ceremonial dancing and singing; especially when the dance consists of a series of extravagant bizarre movements, executed by every member of the group in unison, the series of movements being at the same time peculiar to the particular group that practises them and symbolical of the peculiar functions or properties claimed by the group. Many savage dances have these characters in perfection; as, for example, those of the Murray islanders of Torres Straits, where, as I have witnessed, the several totemic groups—the dog-men, the pigeon-men, the shark-men, and other such groups—continue, in spite of the partial destruction by missionaries of their totemistic beliefs, to revel in night-long gatherings, at which each group in turn mimics, in fantastic dances and with solemn delight, the movements of its totem animal.

The importance of group consciousness in savage life has been recently much insisted on by some anthropologists, and indeed, in my view, overstated. Cornford[35] writes “When the totem-clan meets to hold its peculiar dance, to work itself up till it feels the pulsing of its common life through all its members, such nascent sense of individuality as a savage may have—it is always very faint—is merged and lost; his consciousness is filled with a sense of sympathetic activity. The group is now feeling and acting as one soul, with a total force much greater than any of its members could exercise in isolation. The individual is lost, ‘beside himself,’ in one of those states of contagious enthusiasm in which it is well known that men become capable of feats which far outrange their normal powers.” And again “Over and above their individual experience, all the members of the group alike partake of what has been called the collective consciousness of the group as a whole. Unlike their private experience, this pervading consciousness is the same in all, consisting in those epidemic or infectious states of feeling above described, which, at times when the common functions are being exercised, invade the whole field of mentality, and submerge the individual areas. To this group-consciousness belong also, from the first moment of their appearance all representations which are collective, a class in which all religious representations are included. These likewise are diffused over the whole mentality of the group, and identical in all its members.... The collective consciousness is thus super-individual. It resides, of course, in the individuals composing the group. There is nowhere else for it to exist, but it resides in all of them together and not completely in any one of them. It is both in myself and yet not myself. It occupies a certain part of my mind and yet it stretches beyond and outside me to the limits of my group. And since I am only a small part of my group, there is much more of it outside me than inside. Its force therefore is much greater than my individual force, and the more primitive I am the greater this preponderance will be. Here, then, there exists in the world a power which is much greater than any individual’s—super-individual, that is to say superhuman.”

“Because this force is continuous with my own consciousness, it is, as it were, a reservoir to which I have access, and from which I can absorb superhuman power to reinforce and enhance my own. This is its positive aspect—in so far as this power is not myself and greater than myself, it is a moral and restraining force, which can and does impose upon the individual the necessity of observing the uniform behaviour of the group.” This writer makes group consciousness the source of both morality and religion. “The collective consciousness is also immanent in the individual himself, forming within him that unreasoning impulse called conscience, which like a traitor within the gates, acknowledges from within the obligation to obey that other and much larger part of the collective consciousness which lies outside. Small wonder that obedience is absolute in primitive man, whose individuality is still restricted to a comparatively small field, while all the higher levels of mentality are occupied by this overpowering force[36].” The first religious idea is that of “this collective consciousness, the only moral power which can come to be felt as imposed from without.” And Cornford goes yet further and makes of the group self-consciousness the source of magic as well as of religion and morality. This primary reservoir of super-individual power splits, he says, into two pools, human and non-human; the former is magic power, the latter is divine power.

On this I would comment as follows. Although Cornford is right in insisting upon the large influence of group consciousness, he is wrong, I think, in underestimating individuality. He does not go so far as some writers who suggest that group self-consciousness actually precedes individual self-consciousness, but he says of individual self-consciousness that it is but very faint in savages. I am more inclined to agree with Lotze, who in a famous passage asserted that even the crushed worm is in an obscure way aware of itself and its pain as set over against the world. Many facts of savage behaviour forbid us to accept the extreme view that denies them individual self-consciousness—individual names, secret names, private property, private rites, religious and magical, individual revenge, jealousy, running amok, leadership, self-assertion, pride, vanity, competition in games of skill and in technical and artistic achievement. The flourishing of these and many other such things in primitive communities reveals clearly enough to the unbiassed observer in the field the effective presence of individual self-consciousness in the savage mind. In this connexion I may refer to two pieces of evidence bearing very directly on the question reported by Dr C. Hose and myself. Among the Sea-Dayaks or Ibans of Borneo we discovered the prevalence of the belief in the ‘nyarong’ or private ‘spirit helper,’ some spiritual or animated individual power which a fortunate individual here and there finds reason to believe is attached to him personally for his guidance and help in all difficult situations. His belief in this personal helper and the rites by aid of which he communicates with it are kept secret from his fellows; so that it was only after long and intimate acquaintance with these people that Dr Hose began to suspect the existence of this peculiarly individualistic belief[37]. In the same volumes we have described the Punans of Borneo, a people whose mode of life is in every respect extremely primitive. In this respect they are perhaps unequalled by any other existing people. Yet no one who is acquainted with these amiable folk could doubt that, although their group consciousness is highly developed, they enjoy also a well developed individual self-consciousness. How otherwise can we interpret the fact that a Punan who suffers malicious injury from a member of another tribe will nurse his vengeful feeling for an indefinite period and, after the lapse of years, will find an opportunity to bring down his enemy secretly with blow-pipe and poisoned dart?

With Mr Cornford’s view of the part played by the group spirit in moralising conduct I agree. I agree also that it is the collective life or mind that develops religion and in part magic; but in my view Cornford attributes to the savage far too much reflective theorising; he represents him as formulating a theory of the collective consciousness which is really almost identical with the interesting speculation of M. Lévy Bruhl presently to be noticed, and he regards his conduct, his religious and magical practices, as guided by these theories. But that is to reverse the true order of things—to make theory precede practice; whereas in reality, especially in religion and magic, practice has everywhere preceded theory, often, as in this case, by thousands of generations[38].

It is true that the savage often behaves as though he held this theory of the collective consciousness as a field of force in which he participates; that his conduct seems to require such a theory for its rational justification. But it by no means follows that he has formulated any theory at all. What the savage is conscious of is, not a collective consciousness as a mysterious superhuman power, but the group itself, the group of concrete embodied fellow men. He behaves and feels as he does, because participation in the life of the group directly modifies his individual tendencies and directly evokes these feelings and actions; he does not discover, or seek, any theory by which to explain them. Still less is it true that he performs these actions because he has formulated a theory of a collective consciousness.

Mr Cornford regards the savage idea of a collective consciousness as the germ of the idea of divine power or of God. Now this is connected with the question of animism, preanimism, and dynanimism. It may be true that the notion of mana is the common prime source of religious and magical ideas, but it does not follow that the idea of God is arrived at by way of a notion of collective mana. No doubt that would be the probable course of events, if the savage had so little sense of his individuality as Cornford supposes; but it seems to me rather that the savage’s strong sense of individuality has led at an early stage to the personalisation, the individuation, of mana, the vaguely conceived spiritual power and influence, and that it was only by a long course of religious and philosophical speculation that men reached the conception of the Absolute or of God as a universal power of which each personal consciousness is a partial manifestation.

It is interesting to note that, if we could accept Cornford’s views, we could now claim to witness the completion of one full cycle of the wheel of speculation, the last step having been made in an article in a recent number of the Hibbert Journal[39]; for it is there suggested that the only God or super-individual power we ought to recognise and revere is, not a collective consciousness conceived as a supra-individual unity of consciousness, but the collective mind of humanity in the sense in which I am using the term, a system of mental forces that slowly progresses towards greater harmony and integration.

M. Lévy Bruhl has written an interesting, though highly speculative, account of savage mental life which he represents as differing profoundly from our own, chiefly in that it is dominated by ‘collective representations[40].’ His view is not unlike that put forward by Cornford.

Collective representations or ideas are rightly said to be the product of the group mind rather than of any individual mind; that is to say, they have been gradually evolved by collective mental life; and they are said to differ from our ideas in being “states more complex in which the emotional and motor elements are integral parts of the ideas.” Thinking by aid of these collective representations is said to have its own laws quite distinct from the laws of logic.

These statements are no doubt correct; but both Lévy Bruhl and Cornford commit the great error of assuming that the mental life of civilised man is conducted by each individual in a purely rational and logical manner; they overlook the fact that we also are largely dominated by collective representations; for these collective representations are nothing but ideas of objects to which traditional sentiments, sentiments of awe, of fear, of respect, of love, of reverence, are attached. Almost the whole of the religion and morality of the average civilised man is based on his acquisition of such collective representations, traditional sentiments grown up about ideas of objects, ideas which he receives ready made and sentiments which are impressed upon him by the community that has evolved them.

It is no doubt true that in the main the field of objects to which collective representations apply is larger in savage life; and these ideas are more uniform and more powerful and unquestioned, because the group is more homogeneous in its sentiments. But it is, fortunately, only a rare individual here and there among us who in considerable degree emancipates himself from the influence of such representations and becomes capable of confronting all objects about him in a perfectly cool, critical, logical attitude—who can “peep and botanise upon his mother’s grave.” Only by strict intellectual discipline do we progress towards strictly logical operations in relation to real life, towards pure judgments of fact as opposed to judgments of value. For our judgments of value are rooted in our sentiments; and whatever is for us an object of a sentiment of love or hate, of attachment or aversion, can only with the greatest difficulty, if at all, be made an object of a pure judgment of fact.

And Cornford and Lévy Bruhl make the same mistake in regard to ‘collective representations’ as in regard to the group self-consciousness—namely, they credit the savage with theories for the explanation of the beliefs implicitly involved in the ‘collective representations,’ for example, the theory of mystic participation, which is said to replace for the savage the civilised man’s theory of mechanical causation. But, when we regard any material object as holy, or sacred, or as of peculiar value, because it was given us by a departed friend, or belonged to and perhaps was once worn by a beloved person, our behaviour towards it is not determined by any theory of participation; if, for example, we touch it tenderly and with reverent care, that is the direct expression of our feeling. We even behave as if we held the theory of participation, to the extent of believing that the dead or distant person will suffer pain if we ill-use or neglect the object which is associated with him in our minds, but without actually holding that belief; and still more without elaborating a theory of the nature of the process by which our action will produce such an effect. It is only a late and highly sophisticated reflection upon behaviour of this kind which leads to theories for the justification of such behaviour. It is not true, then, that we are logical individuals, while savages are wholly prelogical in virtue of the dominance among them of the collective mental life. The truth rather is that, wherever emotion qualifies our intellectual operations, it renders them other than purely and strictly logical; and the savage or the civilised man departs more widely from the strictly logical conduct of his intellect, in proportion as his conceptions of things are absorbed without critical reflection and analysis and are coloured with the traditional sentiments of his community. The average savage, being more deeply immersed in his group, suffers these effects more strongly than the average civilised man. Yet the interval in this respect between the modern man of scientific culture and the average citizen of our modern states is far greater than that between the latter and the savage.

If one had to name the principal difference between the conditions of life of the typical savage and those of the average civilised man, one would, I think, have to point to the lack in civilised life of those conditions which so inevitably develop the group consciousness of the savage. The family circle supplies to the young child something of these conditions, but in a very imperfect degree only. At an early age this influence is much weakened by general intercourse. As the individual approaches maturity, he finds himself at liberty to cut himself off completely from all his natural setting, to transplant himself to any part of the world, and to share in the life of any civilised community. He can earn his livelihood anywhere, and he knows nothing of communal responsibility.

Progressive weakening of the conditions that force the development of group self-consciousness has characterised the whole course of the development of civilisation, and has reached its climax in the conditions of life in our large cities.

In primitive communities the conditions of group self-consciousness are, as we have seen, fourfold; namely kinship, territorial, traditional and occupational association. All these are present in the highest degree in the nomadic group under the typical patriarchal system.

When kinship groups take to agriculture and become permanently settled on one spot, the kinship factor tends to be weakened, through the inclusion of alien elements; and the territorial factor becomes the most important condition. Throughout European history the territorial factor, expressing itself in the form of the village-community, remained of universal importance in this respect; the Roman Empire and the Roman Church weakened it greatly; but everywhere outside those spheres it continued to be of dominant importance until the great social revolution of the modern industrial period.

The village community maintained much of the tradition and custom that tend to develop group self-consciousness with its moralising influence. But at the present time almost the only condition of wide and general influence that continues in times of peace to foster group self-consciousness is occupational association. And so we find men tending more and more to be grouped for all serious collective activities according to their occupations. From the earliest development of European industry this tendency has been strong; it produced the trading and craft guilds which played so great a part in medieval Europe; and, though the monarchical and capitalistic regimes of modern times have done all they can to repress and break up these occupational groups, and have greatly restricted their influence, they have failed to suppress them entirely. The climax of this tendency for the occupational to replace and overshadow all other forms of self-conscious grouping is present-day Syndicalism.

The natural conditions of group self-consciousness, which in primitive societies rendered its development inevitable and spontaneous in every man, have then been in the main destroyed. But man cannot stand alone; men cannot live happily as mere individuals; they desire and crave and seek membership in a group, in whose collective opinions and emotions and self-consciousness and activities they may share, with which they may identify themselves, thereby lessening the burden of individual responsibility, judgment, decision and effort.

Hence in this age the natural groupings and the involuntary developments of group consciousness are largely replaced by an enormous development of artificial voluntary groupings, over and above the natural groupings that are still only in very imperfect measure determined by the weakened force of the natural conditions, namely kinship, neighbourhood and occupation.

In part these artificial groupings are designed to reinforce the natural conditions, as, for example, village festivals. The whole population of a country such as our own is permeated by a vast and complexly interwoven, or rather tangled, skein of the bonds of voluntary associations. Many of these are, of course, formed to undertake some definite work, to achieve some end which can only be achieved by co-operative effort. But in the majority of such cases the satisfactions yielded by group life play a very great part in leading to the formation of and in maintaining the groups, for example, groups of philanthropic workers, the makers of charity bazaars, the salvation army, the churches, the chapels, the sects. Most of such associations that have any success and continuity of existence contain a nucleus of persons who identify themselves in the fullest possible manner with the group, make its interest their leading concern, the desire of its welfare their dominant motive, and find in its service their principal satisfaction and happiness.

And in very many voluntary associations the group-motives, the desire for the satisfactions to be found in group life, are of prime importance, predominating vastly over the desire to achieve any particular end by co-operative action. Such are our countless clubs and societies formed frankly for recreation, or for mutual improvement, and for all kinds of ostensible purposes which serve merely as excuses or reasons for the existence of the club. In the majority of instances these declared purposes really serve merely or chiefly to exert a certain natural selection of persons, to bring together persons of similar tastes as voluntary associates, to enable, in short, birds of a feather to flock together. Even some of our enduring historical institutions owe their continuance chiefly to the advantages and satisfactions that proceed from group consciousness, for example, colleges, school-houses, and political parties, especially perhaps in America. Party feeling, as Sir H. Maine rightly said, is frequently a remedy for the inertia of democracy.

The savage, when he maintains associations other than those determined by natural conditions, intensifies his group consciousness by wearing badges and totem marks, by tatooing and scarring, and by indulging in various rites and ceremonies, about which a certain secrecy and mystery is maintained. And civilised men exhibit just the same tendency and take very similar measures to intensify group consciousness. We have our club colours and ribbons and blazers, our college gowns and colours, our Oxford accent, our badges of membership, and so on. Freemasonry, with its lodges and badges and mysterious rites, seems to be the purest example on a large scale. And, when the group consciousness and the group sentiment have been acquired, we continue to cultivate it purely for its own sake, by holding annual dinners and reunions of old boys, and so forth.

It is of the greatest importance that this tendency to seek and maintain a share in group consciousness, which, as we have seen, manifests itself everywhere even under the most adverse conditions, not merely yields comfort and satisfaction to individuals, but brings about results which are in almost every way extremely advantageous for the higher development of human life in general.

We have seen that, in the well-organised group, collective deliberation, judgment, and action are raised to a higher plane of effectiveness than is possible to the average member of the group. But apart from that, the group spirit continues with us, as with the savage (though in a less effective degree) to be the great socialising agency. In the majority of cases it is the principal, if not the sole, factor which raises a man’s conduct above the plane of pure egoism, leads him to think and care and work for others as well as for himself. Try to imagine any man wholly deprived of his group consciousness and set over against all his fellowmen as an individual unit, and you will see that you could expect but little from him in the way of self-sacrifice or public service—at most a care for his wife and children and sporadic acts of kindliness when direct appeals are made to his pity; but none of that energetic and devoted public service and faithful self-sacrificing co-operation without which the continued welfare of any human society is impossible.

The group spirit destroys the opposition and the conflict between the crudely individualistic and the primitive altruistic tendencies of our nature.

This is the peculiar merit and efficiency of the complex motives that arise from the group spirit; they bring the egoistic self-seeking impulses into the service of society and harmonise them with the altruistic tendencies. The group spirit secures that the egoistic and the altruistic tendencies of each man’s nature, instead of being in perpetual conflict, as they must be in its absence, shall harmoniously co-operate and re-enforce one another throughout a large part of the total field of human activity.

For it is of the essence of the group spirit that the individual identifies himself, as we say, with the group more or less; that is to say, in technical language, his self-regarding sentiment becomes extended to the group more or less completely, so that he is moved to desire and to work for its welfare, its success, its honour and glory, by the same motives which prompt him to desire and to work for his own welfare and success and honour; as in the case of the student working for a scholarship or university prize, or the member of an exploring expedition or fighting group. Further, the motives supplied by the group spirit may be stronger than, and may overpower, the purely individualistic egoistic motives, just because they harmonise with, and are supported by, any altruistic tendency or tendencies comprised in the make up of the individual; which altruistic tendencies will, where the group spirit is lacking, oppose and weaken the effects of purely egoistic motives. To illustrate this principle, let us imagine an Englishman who, in a Congo forest, finds a white man sick or in difficulties. To succour the sick man may be to incur grave risks, and he is tempted to pass on; but the thought comes to him that in so doing he will lower the prestige of the white man in the eyes of the natives; and this idea, evoking the motives of the group spirit which unites all white men in such a land, brings victory to his sense of pity in its struggle with selfish fear.

In this way, that is by extension to the group, the egoistic impulses are transmuted, sublimated, and deprived of their individualistic selfish character and effects and are turned to public service. Hence it is that it is generally so difficult or impossible to analyse the motives of any public service or social activity and to display them as either purely egoistic or altruistic; for they are, as Herbert Spencer called them, ego-altruistic. And hence it comes about that both the cynic and the idealist can make out plausible cases, when they seek to show that either egoism or altruism predominates in human life. Both are right in a partial sense.

Another noteworthy feature of the group spirit renders it extremely effective in promoting social life; namely the fact that, although the group sentiment is apt to determine an attitude of rivalry, competition, and antagonism towards similarly constituted groups, yet a man may share in the self-consciousness of more groups than one, so long as their natures and aims do not necessarily bring them into rivalry. And in our complex modern societies this principle of multiple group consciousness in each man is of extreme importance; for without it, and in the absence or comparative lack of the natural conditions of grouping other than the occupational, the whole population would become divided into occupational groups, each fighting collectively against every other for the largest possible share of the good things of life. A tendency towards this state of things is very perceptible, in spite of the correcting cross-connexions of kinship, of church and political party, and of territorial association.

But another principle of multiple group consciousness is, perhaps, of still greater importance, namely that it allows the formation of a hierarchy of group sentiments for a system of groups in which each larger group includes the lesser; each group being made the object of the extended self-regarding sentiment in a way which includes the sentiment for the lesser group in the sentiment for the larger group in which it is comprised. Thus the family, the village, the county, the country as a whole, form for the normal man the objects of a harmonious hierarchy of sentiments of this sort, each of which strengthens rather than weakens the others, and yields motives for action which on the whole co-operate and harmonise rather than conflict.

Such a hierarchy is seen in savage life. It often happens that a man is called on to join in the defence of some village of the tribe other than his own. In such cases he is moved not only by his tribal sentiment, but also by his sentiments for his village and family. The sentiment for the part supports the sentiment for the whole.

It is of considerable importance also that in general the development of a sentiment of attachment to one group not only does not prevent, but rather facilitates, the development of similar sentiments for other groups. And this is especially true when the groups concerned are related to one another as parts and wholes, that is, when they form a hierarchy of successively more widely inclusive groups. The sentiment for the smaller group (e.g. the family) naturally develops first in the child’s mind; if only for the reason that this is the group of which he can first form a definite idea, and with the whole of which he is in immediate relations. The strong development of this first group sentiment prepares the child’s mind for the development of other and wider group sentiments. For it increases his power of grasping intellectually the group of persons as a complex whole; and it strengthens by exercise those impulses or primary tendencies which must enter into the constitution of any group sentiment; and, thirdly, it prevents the excessive development of the purely individualistic attitude, of the habit of looking at every situation and weighing all values from the strictly individualistic and egoistic standpoint; which attitude, if once it becomes habitual, must form a powerful hindrance to the development of the wider group sentiments, when the child arrives at an age to grasp the idea of the larger group.

The organisation of an army again illustrates these principles in relatively clear and simple fashion. In our own army the regiment is the traditional self-conscious unit about which traditional sentiment and ritual have been carefully fostered, in part through realisation of their practical importance, in part because this unit is of such a size and nature as to be well suited to call out strongly the natural group tendencies of its component individuals. On the whole the military authorities, and especially Lord Haldane in the formation of the territorial army, seem to have wisely recognised the importance of the group spirit of the regiment; although during the Great War it was, under the pressure of other considerations, apparently lost sight of at certain times and places, with, I believe, deplorable consequences.

In modern warfare, and especially in the Great War, the Division has tended to become of predominant importance as the unit of organisation; and accordingly, without destroying or superseding regimental group consciousness, the sentiment for the Division has been in many instances a very strong factor in promoting the spiritual cohesion and efficiency of the army. Certain Divisions, such as the 10th and the 29th, have covered themselves with glory, so that the soldiers have learnt to feel a great pride in and a devotion to the Division.

This larger group, although of comparatively ephemeral existence and therefore devoid of long traditions coming down from the past, is in perfect and obvious harmony, in purpose and spirit and material organisation, with the battalions and other units of which it is composed; and, accordingly, the sentiment for the larger group does not enter into rivalry with that for the battalion, the battery, or other smaller unit; rather it comprises this within its own organisation and derives energy and stability from it.

These psychological principles of group consciousness are, I think, well borne out inductively, by any comparative survey; that is to say, we find that, where family sentiment and the sentiment for the local group are strong, there also the wider group sentiments are strong, and good citizenship, patriotism, and ready devotion to public services of all kinds are the rule. The strongest most stable States have always been those in which family sentiment has been strong, especially those in which it has been strengthened and supported by the custom of ancestor worship, as in Rome, Japan and China. Scotchmen again (Highlanders especially) are noted for clannishness, and Scotch cousins have become a bye-word; a fact which implies the great strength of the family sentiment. The clan sentiment, which is clearly only an extension of the family sentiment, is also notoriously strong. The sentiment for Scotland as a whole is no less strong in the hearts of all her sons. But, and this is the important point, these strong group sentiments are perfectly compatible with and probably conducive to a sentiment for the still wider group, Great Britain or the British Empire; and the public services rendered to these larger groups by men of Scottish birth are equally notorious.

In these considerations we may see, I think, a principal ground of the importance of the institution of the family for the welfare of the state. The importance has often been insisted upon; but too much stress is usually laid upon the material aspects, and not enough upon the mental effects, of family life.

It has been a grave mistake on the part of many collectivists, from Plato onwards, that they have sought to destroy the family and to bring up all children as the children of the state only, in some kind of barrack system. It is not too much to say that, if they could succeed in this (and in this country great strides in this direction are being rapidly made), they would destroy the mental foundations of all possibility of collective life of the higher type.

We touch here upon a question of policy of the highest importance. There are, it seems to me, three distinct policies which may be deliberately pursued, for the securing of the predominance of public or social motives over egoistic motives. First, we may aim at building up group life on the foundation of a system of discipline which will result in more or less complete suppression of the egoistic tendencies of individuals, the building up in them of habits of unquestioning obedience to authority. I imagine that the Jesuit system of education might fairly be taken as the most successful and thorough-going application of this principle. The organisation of an army of unwilling conscripts to fight for a foreign power must rest on the same basis. Some group spirit no doubt will generally grow up. But, though wonderful results have been obtained in this way, the system has two great weaknesses. First, it seeks to repress and destroy more than half of the powerful forces that move men to action—namely, the egoistic motives in general—instead of making use of them, directing them to social ends. Secondly, it necessarily crushes individuality and therefore all capacity of progress and further development in various directions; it results in a rigidly conservative system without possibility of spontaneous development.

The second system is that which aims at developing in all members of the state or inclusive group a sentiment of devotion to the whole, while suppressing the growth of sentiments for any minor groups within the whole. This was the system of Plato’s Republic and is essentially the collectivist ideal. It is the policy of those who would suppress all sentimental groupings, all local loyalties and patriotisms, in favour of the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the cosmopolitan ideal. I have already pointed out one great weakness of this plan,—namely, that this sentiment for the all-inclusive group cannot be effectively developed save by way of development of the minor group sentiments. And, though it may succeed with some persons, there will always be many who cannot grasp the idea of the larger whole sufficiently firmly and intelligently to make it the object of any strong and enlightened sentiment of attachment; such persons will be left on the purely egoistic level, whereas their energies might have been effectively socialised by the development of some less inclusive group consciousness.

Again, the smaller group is apt to call out a man’s energies more effectively, because he can see and foresee more clearly the effects of his own actions on its behalf. Whereas the larger the group, the more are the efforts of individuals and their effects obscured and lost to view in vast movements of the collective life. That is to say, the smaller groups harmonise more effectively than the larger groups the purely egoistic and the altruistic motives (except of course in the case of those few persons who can play leading parts in the life of the larger group). For, though a man may be moved by his devotion to the group to work for its welfare, he will work still more energetically if, at the same time, he is able to achieve personal distinction and acknowledgment, if the purely egoistic motives can also find satisfaction in his activities. Hence this second policy also, no matter how successful, fails to make the most of men, fails to bring to the fullest exercise all their powers in a manner that will promote the welfare of the whole. Thirdly, this system loses the advantages of the healthy rivalry between groups within the whole; which rivalry is a means to a great liberation of human energies. These are the weaknesses of the over-centralised state, such as modern France or the Roman Empire.

Only the third policy can liberate and harmonise the energies of men to the fullest extent; namely, that which aims at developing in each individual a hierarchy of group sentiments in accordance with the natural course of development.

One other virtue of the group spirit must be mentioned. Although it tends to bring similar groups into keen rivalry and even into violent conflict, the antagonism between men who are moved to conflict by the group spirit is less bitter than that between individuals who are brought into conflict by personal motives; for the members of each group or party, though they may wish to frustrate or even to destroy the other party as such, may remain benevolent towards its members individually. And this is rendered easier by the fact that the members of each group, recognising that their antagonists are also moved by the group spirit, by loyalty and devotion to the group, will sympathise with and respect their motives far more readily and fully than they would, if they ascribed to their opponents purely egoistic motives. This recognition, even though it be not clearly formulated, softens the conflict and moderates the hostile feelings that opposition inevitably arouses in men keenly pursuing any end, especially one which they hold to be a public good; in this way it renders possible that continuance of friendly relations between members of bitterly opposed parties which has happily been the rule and at the same time the seeming anomaly of English public life.

In our older educational system, and especially in the ‘public schools’ and older universities, the advantages and the importance of developing the group spirit have long been practically recognised—‘esprit de corps’ has been cultivated by the party system, by rivalry of groups within the group; by forms, school-houses, colleges, clubs, teams, games, and by keeping the honour and glory of the school, college, or other unit, prominently before the minds of the scholars in many effective ways. It is, I think, one of the gravest defects of our primary system of education that it makes so little provision for development of this kind; that, while it weakens the family sentiment, it provides no effective substitute for it. Something has been done in recent years to remedy this defect, notably the fostering of the boy-scout movement; but every opportunity of supplying this need should be seized by those who are responsible for the direction of educational policy.

The importance of the group spirit may be illustrated by pointing to those individuals and classes which are denied its benefits. The tramp, the cosmopolitan globe-trotter, the outcast in general, whether the detachment from group life be due to the disposition or choice of the individual or to unfortunate circumstances, is apt to show, only too clearly, how little man is able, standing alone, to maintain a decent level of conduct and character. On a large scale this is illustrated by the casteless classes in caste communities, and especially by Eurasians of India and by other persons and classes of mixed descent, who fail to identify themselves wholly with either of the groups from which they derive their blood. The moral defects of persons of these classes have often been deplored, and they have usually been attributed to the mixture of widely different hereditary strains. There is probably some truth in the view; but in general the moral shortcomings of persons of these classes are chiefly due to the fact that they do not fully share in the life of any group having old established moral traditions and sentiments.

Summary of Principal Conditions of the Development Of the Group Spirit

We have seen that the group spirit plays a vastly important part in raising men above the purely animal level of conduct, in extending each man’s interests beyond the narrow circle of his own home and family, in inspiring him to efforts for the common good, in stimulating him to postpone his private to public ends, in enabling the common man to rise at times, as shown by a multitude of instances during the Great War, to lofty heights of devotion and self-sacrifice.

The development of the group spirit consists in two essential processes, namely, the acquisition of knowledge of the group and the formation of some sentiment of attachment to the group as such. It is essential that the group shall be apprehended or conceived as such by its members. Therefore the group spirit is favoured by whatever tends to define the group, to mark it off distinctly from other groups; by geographical boundaries; by peculiarities of skin-colour or of physical type, of language, or accent, of dress, custom, or habit, common to the members of the group; that is to say, by homogeneity and distinctiveness of type within the group.

And, though definition of the group as such within the minds of its members is the prime condition of the growth of the group spirit, that spirit will be the more effective the fuller and truer is the knowledge of the group in the minds of its members. Just as individual self-knowledge favours self-direction and wisdom of choice, so group self-knowledge must, if it is to be fully effective, comprise not only the conception of the group as a whole but also the fullest possible knowledge of the component parts and individuals and an understanding of their relations to one another. In this respect smallness and homogeneity of the group are obviously favourable. But knowledge of the group, however exact and widely diffused, is of itself of no effect, if there be not also widely diffused in the members some sentiment of attachment to the group. The prevailing group sentiment is almost inevitably one of attachment. There are exceptional instances in which men are compelled to act as members of a group which they hate or despise, notably in some cases of compulsory military service and in convict gangs; but it must be rare that, even under such conditions, some sense of common interest, some fellow feeling for other members in like distressing circumstances, does not lead to the growth of some group spirit, provided only that the group has some continuity and some homogeneity in essentials.

In all natural and spontaneously formed groups, the extension of the self-regarding sentiment to the group is a normal and inevitable process; and, like the self-regarding sentiment, the sentiment so formed may range from an insane and incorrigible pride (as often in the case of the family sentiment) to a decent self-respect that is perfectly compatible with a modest attitude and with reasonable claims upon and regard for the interests of other groups.

The main difference between the self-regarding sentiment and the developed group sentiment is that the latter commonly involves an element of devotion to the group for its own sake and the sake of one’s fellow members. That is to say, the group sentiment is a synthesis of the self-regarding and the altruistic tendencies in which they are harmonised to mutual support and re-enforcement: the powerful egoistic impulses being sublimated to higher ends than the promotion of the self’s welfare[41].

Further, the group has, or may have, a greater continuity of existence than the individual, both in the past and in the future; and for this reason, and because also it includes the purely altruistic tendency, the group sentiment is capable of idealisation in a high degree and of yielding satisfactions far more enduring and profound than the most refined self-sentiment.

Both knowledge of the group and the growth of the group sentiment are greatly promoted by two processes, in the absence of which the group spirit can attain only a very modest development. These are free intercourse within the group and free intercourse between the group and other groups. We shall have occasion to discuss and illustrate them in later chapters.

CHAPTER V

PECULIARITIES OF GROUPS OF VARIOUS TYPES

We have discussed the psychology of the simple crowd or unorganised group; and taking an army as an extreme and relatively simple type of the highly organised group, we have used it to illustrate the principal ways in which organisation of the group modifies its collective life, raising it in many respects high above that of the crowd.

I propose now to discuss very briefly the peculiarities of groups of several types. Some classification of groups seems desirable as an aid to the discovery of the general principles of collective life and their application to the understanding of social life in general. It seems impossible to discover any single principle of classification. Almost every group that enjoys a greater continuity of existence than the simple crowd partakes in some degree of qualities common to all. But we may distinguish the most important qualities and roughly classify groups according to the degrees in which they exhibit them.

Apart from crowds, which, as we have seen, may be either fortuitously gathered or brought together by some common purpose, there are many simple groups which, though accidental in origin (i.e. not brought together by common purpose or interest) and remaining unorganised, yet present in simple and rudimentary form some of the features of group life.

The persons seated in one compartment of a railway train during a long journey may be entirely strangers to one another at the outset; yet, even in the absence of conversation, they in the course of some hours will begin to manifest some of the peculiarities of the psychological group. To some extent they will have come to a mutual understanding and adjustment; and, when a stranger adds himself to their company, his entrance is felt to some extent as an intrusion which at the least demands readjustments; he is regarded with curious and to some extent hostile glances. If an outsider threatens to encroach on the rights of one of the company, the others will readily combine in defence of their member; and any little incident affecting their one common interest (namely, punctual arrival of the train at its destination) quickly reveals, and in doing so strengthens, the bond of common feeling.

On a sea voyage the group spirit of the passenger ship attains a greater development, by reason of the longer continuance of the group, its more complete detachment and definition, the sense of greater hazard affecting all alike, the sense of dependence on mutual courtesy and good-will and sympathy for the comfort and enjoyment of all. Very soon the experienced traveller, contrasting and comparing this present company with those of previous voyages, sums up its qualities and defects and lays his plans accordingly. And by the time that an intermediate port is reached, where perhaps the most ‘grumpy’ and least entertaining member of the company disembarks, even his departure is felt by the rest as a loss that leaves a gap in the structure of the group.

Such fortuitous and ephemeral groups apart, all others may be classed in the two great divisions of natural and artificial groups.

The natural groups again fall into two main classes which partly coincide,—namely, those rooted in kinship and those determined by geographical conditions. The family is the pure example of the former; the population of a small island, the type of the latter kind. The main difference is that the bonds of the kinship group are purely or predominantly mental and therefore can, and commonly do, remain effective in spite of all spatial separation and of all lack of common purpose or of material benefits accruing from membership in the group.

The artificial groups may be divided into three great classes, the purposive, the customary or traditional, and the mixed; those of the last kind combining the purposive and the traditional characters in various proportions.

The purposive group is brought together and maintained by the existence of a common purpose in the minds of all its members. It is, in respect of efficiency, the highest type; for it is essentially self-conscious, aware of its ends and of its own nature, and it deliberately adopts an organisation suited to the attainment of those ends. The simplest and purest type is the social club, a body of people who meet together to satisfy the promptings of the gregarious instinct and to enjoy the pleasures of group life. In the great majority of instances, the social club adopts some form of recreation—debating, music, chess, whist, football, tennis, cycling—the practice of which gives point and definition to the activities of members and secures secondary advantages. It is noteworthy that on this purely recreational plane, clubs and societies of all sorts seek in almost all cases to enhance the group consciousness and hence the satisfactions of group life by entering into relations, generally relations of friendly rivalry, but sometimes merely of affiliation and formal intercourse, with other like groups. For not only is the group consciousness enriched and strengthened by such intercourse; but, when the rival or communicating groups, becoming aware of one another, become informally or, more generally, formally allied to constitute a larger whole, the consciousness of participation in this larger whole gratifies more fully the gregarious impulse and enhances the sense of power and confidence in each member of each constituent group. This seems to be the main ground of that universal tendency to the formation of ever more inclusive associations of clubs and societies, which, overleaping even national boundaries and geographical and racial divisions, has produced numerous world-wide associations.

Another very numerous class of strictly purposive groups is to be found in the commercial companies. In these the group spirit commonly remains at the lowest level; for the dominant motive is individual financial gain, and the only common bond among the shareholders is their interest in the management of the company so far as it affects the private and individual end of each one. Group self-knowledge, organisation, tradition, and group sentiment are all at a minimum; accordingly the group remains incapable of effective deliberation or action. It operates through its board of directors and officers and, owing to its incapacity for group action, has to rely upon the provisions of the Company Laws for the control of their actions.

A third large class of purposive groups are the associations formed for the furthering of some public end. Many such groups are purely altruistic or philanthropic; but in the majority the members hope to share in some degree in the public benefits for the attainment of which the group is formed. In many such associations, group life hardly rises above the low level of the commercial company; the main difference being that, in virtue of the ‘disinterested’ or public-spirited nature of the dominant purpose, the members regard one another and their executive officers with greater confidence and sympathy; even though remaining personally unacquainted. Notable instances of such associations, achieving great public ends, are ‘The National Trust for the Preservation of Places of Natural Beauty or Historic Interest,’ and ‘The Public Footpaths Association.’ Other associations of this kind have something of the nature of a commercial company: e.g. ‘The First Garden City Company,’ and ‘The Trust Houses Company.’ The peculiarity of these is that the motive of financial gain is subordinated to, while co-operating with, the desire for achievement of a public good, a benefit to the whole community in which the members of the group share in an almost inappreciable degree only. Such associations are very characteristic of the life of this country; and it may be hoped that their multiplication and development will prove to be one of the ameliorating factors of the future, softening the asperities of commercial life, correcting to some degree that narrowing of the sympathies, and preventing that tendency to class antagonisms, which purely commercial associations inevitably produce. The great co-operative societies seem to have something of this character; for, although the dominant motive of membership is probably in most cases private advantage, yet membership brings with it some sense of participation in a great movement for better social organisation, some sense of loyalty to the group, some rudimentary group knowledge and group spirit, some interest in and satisfaction in the prosperity of the group for its own sake, over and above the strictly private interest of each member. The introduction of various forms of profit sharing will give something of this character to commercial companies.

The recent investments in government loans by millions of individuals, acting in part from patriotic motives, must have a similar tendency; and a similar effect on a large scale must be produced by any nationalisation of industries, a fact which is one of the weightiest grounds for desiring such nationalisation; though it remains uncertain whether, when the scale of the association becomes so large as to include the whole nation, the bulk of the citizens will be able effectively to discern the identity of their public and private interests, and whether, therefore, such nationalisation will greatly promote that fusion or co-operation of public and private motives which is the essential function and merit of the group spirit.

The most characteristic British group of the purposive type is the association formed for some public or quasi-public end and operating through a democratically elected committee or committees and sub-committees. Such groups are the cradle of the representative principle and the training ground of the democratic spirit, especially of its deliberative and executive faculties. In them each member, taking part in the election of the committee, delegates to them his share of authority, but continues to exert control over them by his vote upon reports of the committee and in the periodic re-election of its members. On this ground the citizens are trained to understand the working of the representative principle; to yield to the opinion of the majority on the choice of means, without ceasing loyally to co-operate towards the common end; to observe the necessary rules of procedure; to abide by group decisions; to influence group opinion in debate, and in turn to be influenced by it and respect it; to differ without enmity; to keep the common end in view, in spite of the inevitable working of private and personal motives; to understand the necessity for delegation, and to respect the organisation through which alone the group raises itself above the level of the crowd.

Traditional groups of pure or nearly pure character are relatively infrequent. Perhaps the castes of the Hindu world are, of all large groups, those which most nearly approach the pure type. Traditional grouping is characteristic of stagnant old established populations, of which it is the basis of organisation and principal cement. No doubt in almost every case the formation of the traditional group was in some degree purposive; but the original purpose has generally been lost sight of; myths and legends have grown up to explain the origin of and give a fictitious purpose or ‘raison d’être’ to the group. In the absence of any definite practical purpose animating the group and holding it together, its stability is secured and its tradition is re-enforced and given a visible presentation by the development of ritual. Of all the great groups among us the Free Masons perhaps afford the best illustration of this type.

Far more important in the British world are the groups of the mixed type, partly traditional and partly purposive, groups having a long history and origins shrouded in the mists of antiquity, but having some strong and more or less definite common purpose. Of such groups the Christian Church is the greatest example. In the Roman Church, whose history has been so little interrupted, tradition attains its fullest power, and the regard for the past is strengthened and supplemented by the prospect of an indefinitely prolonged future directed towards the same ends. Its organisation has grown gradually under the one continued overshadowing purpose, every addition becoming embodied and established in the great tradition, the strength of which is perpetually maintained by ritual. And this traditional organisation is not only borne in the minds of each generation of members of the Church, but, in an ever increasing degree, has embodied itself in a material system of stone and glass and metal and printed words; these constitute a visible and enduring presentment which, though entirely disconnected and heterogeneous in a merely material sense, yet provides fixed points in the whole organisation, contributing immensely to its stability, and aiding greatly in bringing home to the minds of its members the unity of the whole group in the past, the present, and the future. Many groups or sects having the same essential purpose as the Roman Church have aimed to establish a tradition without the aid of such material embodiments: but their ephemeral histories illustrate the wisdom of the mother Church which, in building up her vast organisation, has recognised the limitations and the frailties of the human mind and has not scorned to adapt herself to them in order to overcome them.

On a smaller scale our ancient universities and their colleges illustrate the same great type of the partly traditional partly purposive group, and the same great principles of collective life,—namely, the stability derived from the continuity of tradition, from its careful culture, and its partial embodiment in ritual and material structure.

An essential weakness of all such groups in a progressive community is that tradition tends to overshadow purpose; hence every such group tends towards the rigidity and relative futility of the purely traditional group. Its organisation tends to set so rigidly that it is incapable of adapting itself to the changing needs of the present and the future; the maintenance of tradition, which is but a means towards the acknowledged end, becomes an end in itself to which the primary purpose of the whole is in danger of being subordinated.

The churches and the universities alike illustrate vividly the principles of a group within a group. Each of the older universities is a microcosm, a small model of the national life, and largely to this fact is due its educational value as a place of residence. Each college evokes a strong group spirit in all its members; and this sentiment for the college, though it may and does in some minor matters conflict with the sentiment for the university, is in the main synthesised within this, and indeed is the chief factor in the strength of that sentiment.

The group spirit of each college owes much of its strength to the carefully fostered, but perfectly friendly, rivalry between the several colleges in sports and studies and other activities. The close companionship and emulation between a number of small communities of similar constitution and purpose, each having a long and distinct tradition as well as a clearly defined material habitat which embodies and symbolises its traditions in a thousand different ways, has raised the self-knowledge and sentiment of the groups to a high level. It is well known that the few years spent in one of the colleges develops in every member (with few exceptions) a sentiment of attachment that persists through life and extends itself in some degree to every other member, past, present and future; so that, in whatever part of the world and under whatever circumstances two such men may meet, the discovery of their common membership of the college at once throws them into a friendly attitude towards each other and prepares each to make disinterested efforts on behalf of the other.

The same is true in a less degree of the universities themselves. Oxford and Cambridge have, partly in consequence of their proximity and close intercourse, developed on closely parallel lines. They are therefore so similar in constitution and aims as to be keen though friendly rivals. This has been of great benefit to both, the self-knowledge and group sentiment of each having been greatly promoted by this close intercourse, rivalry, and reciprocal criticism. And this rivalry has not prevented the growth of some sentiment for the larger group constituted by the members of both universities, each of whom is always ready to defend the common interests of the larger group against the rest of the world.

Again, within each college there are numerous smaller groups, each with its traditions and group spirit; and, so long as these groups do not become too exclusive, do not absorb all the devotion of their members, but leave each one free to join in the life of other minor groups, their influence is good, the group spirit of each such minor group contributing to the strength of the larger group sentiment and enriching the spiritual life of the whole.

In the middle ages occupational groups were of great importance and influence. They were of the mixed type, for most of them, though essentially purposive, developed strong traditions; and in their remote origins many of them were perhaps rather natural than artificial formations. The violent changes of industrial life, the development of the capitalist system and modern industrialism, dislocated and largely destroyed these occupational groups to the great detriment of social well-being. At the present time we see a strong tendency to the growth of occupational groups of the purely purposive type, which, lacking the guidance and conservative power of old traditions, and depending for their strength largely upon the identification of the material interests of each member with those of the group, show a narrowness of outlook, a lack of stability and internal cohesion, and a tendency to ignore the place and function of the group in the whole community. They show, in short, a lack of the enlightened group spirit which only time, with increasing experience and understanding of the nature and functions of group life, can remedy. It may be hoped that with improved internal organisation, with the growth of more insight into the mutual dependence of the various groups on one another and on the whole community, these groups, which at present seem to some observers to threaten to destroy our society and to replace the rivalry of nations by an even more dangerous rivalry of vast occupational groups, may become organised within the structure of the whole and play a part of the greatest value in the national life.

PART II

THE NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER

CHAPTER VI

INTRODUCTORY

What is a Nation?