Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War quotes

Hence it has come about that they have been taken for the most part as constituting the whole of man’s gregarious inheritance, while the possibility that that inheritance might have {29} equally important consequences for the individual has been relatively neglected.

The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity.

It is clear that the great advantage of the social habit is to enable large numbers to act as one, whereby in the case of the hunting gregarious animal strength in pursuit and attack is at once increased to beyond that of the creatures preyed …

In interpreting into mental terms the consequences of gregariousness, we may conveniently begin with the simplest. The conscious individual will feel an unanalysable primary sense of comfort in the actual presence of his fellows, and a similar sense of discomfort in their absence.

It will be obvious truth to him that it is not good for the man to be alone. Loneliness will be a real terror, insurmountable by reason.

Again, certain conditions will become secondarily associated with presence with, or absence from, the herd. For example, take the sensations of heat and cold. The latter is prevented in gregarious animals by close crowding, and experienced in the reverse condition;

To believe must be an ineradicable natural bias of man, or in other words an affirmation, positive or negative, is more readily accepted than rejected, unless its source is definitely dissociated from the herd.

Man is not, therefore, suggestible by fits and starts, not merely in panics and in mobs, under hypnosis, and so forth, but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances.

The capricious way in which man reacts to different suggestions has been attributed to variations in his suggestibility.

In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin.

He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know.

So that we see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, then sociology—but always the new field was grudged to the new method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of science.

In both cases it is clear that no actual expression by the herd is necessary to arouse the appropriate feelings, which would come from within and have, in fact, the qualities which are recognized in the dictates of conscience.

Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal.

A dog and a cat caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that punishment is coming;

This is an interesting rationalization of the facts because in the sense in which “pay” is meant it is so obviously false.

Altruism does not at present, and cannot, pay the individual in anything but feeling, as theory declares it must.

It is clear, of course, that as long as altruism is regarded as in the nature of a judgment, the fact is overlooked that necessarily its only reward can be in feeling.

It is clear, of course, that as long as altruism is regarded as in the nature of a judgment, the fact is overlooked that necessarily its only reward can be in feeling.

Man is altruistic because he must be, not because reason recommends it, for herd suggestion opposes any advance in altruism, and when it can the herd executes the altruist, not of course as such but as an innovator.

This is a remarkable instance of the protean character of the gregarious instinct and the complexity it introduces into human affairs, for we see one instinct producing manifestations directly hostile to each other—prompting to ever advancing developments of altruism, while it necessarily leads to any …

Instinctive acts are still done because they are based on “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort,” but they are no longer necessarily pleasant.

Duty has first appeared in the world, and with it the age-long conflict

which is described in the memorable words of Paul: “I delight in the law of God after the inward man;

There can be no doubt as to the value to the State of such sensitiveness were it developed in a congruous environment.

The “degeneracy,” therefore, which we see developed as a secondary quality in these sensitive minds is no evidence against the degenerate, but an indictment of the disorderly environment which has ruined them

, just as the catchword associating insanity and genius tells us nothing about genius but a great deal about the situation into which it has had the misfortune to be born.

That this is an impression which I have not been able altogether to escape I record with a good deal of hesitation and diffidence and without any wish to lay stress upon it.

Psycho-analytic psychology has grown up under conditions which may very well have encouraged the persistence of the human point of view.

Originally its whole activity was concentrated upon the investigation and treatment of disease.

If once the statistically {79} normal mind is accepted as being synonymous with the psychologically healthy mind (that is, the mind in which the full capacities are available for use), a standard is set up which has a most fallacious appearance of objectivity.

The statistically normal mind can be regarded only as a mind which has responded in the usual way to the moulding and deforming influence of its environment

—that is, to human standards of discipline, taste, and morality.

… according to the doctrines of Freud, the developing mind passes are not less repulsive when judged from the purely human point of view than are the phases of the body, which betray its cousinship with the fish and the frog, the lemur and the ape.

The works of Nature give no support to the social convention that to be truly respectable one must always have been respectable.

All her most elaborate creations have “risen in the world” and are descended in the direct line from creatures of the mud and dust. It is characteristic of her method to work with the humblest materials and to patch and compromise at every step.

The works of Nature give no support to the social convention that to be truly respectable one must always have been respectable.

All her most elaborate creations have “risen in the world” and are descended in the direct line from creatures of the mud and dust.

It is characteristic of her method to work with the humblest materials and to patch and compromise at every step.

… his own rationalizations and suppressions, may suppose himself to be a fully rational being in undisputed possession of free will and the mastery of his fate at the very moment when he is showing himself to be a mere puppet dancing to the strings which

Nature, unimpressed by his valiant airs, relentlessly and impassively pulls.

The extent of the psychical accompaniments of instinctive activity in civilized man should not, therefore, be allowed to obscure the fact that the instincts are tendencies deeply ingrained in the very structure of his being.

The response is now no longer directly and narrowly confined to a single path, but may follow a number of indirect and intricate ways; there is no reason, however, to suppose that the impulse is any the weaker for that.

To mistake indirectness of response for enfeeblement of impulse is a fundamental error to which all inquiry into the psychology of instinct is liable.

To man his big brain has given a maximal power of various response which enables him to indulge his instinctive impulses in indirect and symbolic activities to a greater extent than any other animal.

Indirect modes of response may indeed become so involved as to assume the appearance of the negation of the very instincts of which they are the expression.

Thus it comes to be no paradox to say that monks and nuns, ascetics and martyrs, prove the strength of the great primary instincts their existence seems to deny.

Man and a certain number of other species widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom show, in addition to the instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, specialized inherited modes of response to the needs, not directly of the individual but of the herd to which he …

His attitude towards food was built up when he hunted in packs and to get a share of the common kill had to snatch what came in his way and gulp it down before it could be taken from him.

In slang which has a sound biological basis we say he “wolfs” his food.

When in domestication his food supply is no longer limited in the primitive way, his instinctive tendency persists; he is typically greedy and will kill himself by overeating if he is allowed to.

The worker bee has practically no activities which are not directly devoted to the hive, and yet she goes about her ceaseless tasks in a way that never fails to impress the observer with its exuberant energy and even its appearance of joyfulness.

It is thought that the average worker bee works herself to death in about two months. That is a fact which can scarcely fail to arouse, even in the least imaginative, at any rate a moment of profound contemplation.

If we could suppose her to be conscious in the human sense, we must imagine the bee to be possessed by an enthusiasm for the hive more intense than a mother’s devotion to her son, without personal ambitions, or doubts or fears, and if we …

If she were able to assimilate general experience on a larger scale, to react freely and appropriately to stimuli external to the hive, there can be little doubt that the community would show a less concentrated efficiency than it does to-day.

The standing miracle of the bee—her sensitiveness to the voice of the hive and her capacity to communicate with her fellows—would undoubtedly be less marvellously perfect if she were not at the same time deaf to all other voices.

When we come to consider animals in which the anatomist can recognize a brain and the psychologist an individual mind, the types of gregariousness we meet with are found to have lost the magnificent intensity of the bee.

It seems to be in this way that the paralysing emotion of fear is held back from the individual, while its effect can reach him only as the active and formidable passion of panic.

The gregarious herbivora are in fact timid but not fearful animals.

All the various mechanisms in which the social habit shows itself apparently have as their general function a maximal sensitiveness to danger of the herd as a whole, combined with maintaining with as little interruption as possible an atmosphere of calm within the herd, so …

Indeed, the mere absence of such seems to be an advantage; for originality is apt to appear to the people as flightiness, scepticism as feebleness, caution as doubt of the great political principles that may happen at the moment to be immutable.

The successful shepherd thinks like his sheep, and can lead his flock only if he keeps no more than the shortest distance in advance.

He must remain, in fact, recognizable as one of the flock, magnified no doubt, louder, coarser, above all with more urgent wants and ways of expression than the common sheep, but in essence to their feeling of the same flesh with them.

It is this process which has enabled primitive psychology so largely to ignore the fact that man still is, as much as ever, endowed with a heritage of instinct and incessantly subject to its influence.

Man’s mental capacity, again, has enabled him as a species to flourish enormously

, and thereby to increase to a prodigious extent the size of the unit in which the individual is merged.

The essential principle, however, is that the degree of sympathy with a given individual varies directly with the amount of intercommunication with him.

The capacity to assimilate the interests of another individual with one’s own, to allow him, as it were, to partake in one’s own personality, is what is called altruism, and might equally well perhaps be called expansive egoism.

It is a characteristic of the gregarious animal, and is a perfectly normal and necessary development in him of his instinctive inheritance.

This is normal and does not in the least affect the value of the truth it contains.

Legal and religious torture were doubtless first attacked by cranks; slavery was abolished by them.

Advocacy by such types does not therefore constitute an argument of any weight against their doctrines, which can adequately be judged only by some purely objective standard.

Rising to a more complex level, we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily.

The best way to get our work done is to get the worker to want to do it.

The most urgent and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the man’s soul.

All these would be tasks for the individual {154} to carry out for himself alone; there would be no campaign-making, no direct exhortation, no appeals.

Towards the Army and the Navy the central fact of each man’s attitude would be the question, “Am I worth dying for?” and his strongest effort would be the attempt to make himself so.

That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard more often during the war as a text of the Church.

It is conceivable that those who provided Germany with her new ideals thought themselves to be exercising a free choice. The choice, however, was forced upon them by Nature.

They wanted some of the characters of the wolf; they got them all.

One may imagine that those who have so industriously inculcated the national gospel have wondered at times that while it has been easy to implant certain of the desired ideals, it has not been possible to prevent the appearance of others which, though not so …

Between the path England finds herself in and that which Germany has chosen there is a divergence which almost amounts to a specific difference in the biological scale. In this, perhaps, lies the cause of the desperate and unparalleled ferocity of this war.

It is a war not so much of contending nations as of contending species.

We are not taking part in a mere war, but in one of Nature’s august experiments. It is as if she had {175} set herself to try out in her workshop the strength of the socialized and the aggressive types.

It is perhaps natural that units within which {190} ferocity and hardness are tolerated and encouraged should depend on a correspondingly savage method of enforcing their will.

The flock of sheep has its shepherd, but the pack of hounds has its Whips.

In human societies of the same type we should expect to find, therefore, a general acquiescence in the value of discipline, and a toleration of its enforcement, because, rather than in spite of, its being harsh.

This opinion affects to be based on a knowledge of human nature, but its pretensions are not very well founded.

The passion of revenge is habitually over-estimated as a motive—possibly through the influence of the novelists and playwrights to whom it is so useful.

When we examine man’s behaviour objectively we find that revenge, however deathless a passion it is vowed to be at emotional moments, is in actual life constantly having to give way to more urgent and more recent needs and feelings.

finally the head of the State, combining the most drastic methods of the sergeant, the professor, and the official, wins not merely a slavish respect, but a veritable apotheosis.

Germany has shown unmistakably the way to her heart; it is for Europe to take it.

The selectness of a minority in no way guarantees it against the fallacies of the mob.

A minority sufficiently unpopular is, in a sense, a mob in which smallness is compensated for by density.

The moral vigour and fortitude which unpopular minorities enjoy are evidences of herd instinct in vigorous action; the less admirable liability to prejudice being a part of the same instinctive process is a necessary accompaniment.

Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides.

The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency

, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice.

Such a task is far beyond the powers of the most fully instructed mind, and is not likely to be undertaken except by those who have least chance of success.

Prejudice, in fact, is for the individual like the ether of the physicist, infinitely pervasive and potent, but insusceptible of direct detection

; its presence is to be assumed as general, but it escapes before immediate search by introspection as the ether eludes the balance and the test-tube.

… to deal usefully with matters in which strong feeling is inevitable will do well, however thoroughly he may try to guard himself from the effects of prejudice, to bring his speculative conclusions into such form that they are automatically tested by the progress of events.

Symmetry and internal consistency are unfortunately but too often accepted as evidences of objective validity.

That the items of a series of conclusions fit into one another neatly and compose a system logically sound and attractive to the intellect gives us practically no information of their truth.

The history of England seems to show with remarkable constancy that the national consciousness has been in its most effective action limited to those elementary conceptions which have been simple and broad enough to manifest themselves in a common purpose of great strength and tenacity.

England has, in fact, been made by her enemies.

Rightly or wrongly, Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Germany, impressed themselves on the elementary consciousness of England as enemies, and excited in response a unity of purpose that was characteristically as immune from the effects of discouragement, disaster and fatigue as it was independent …

But it is to assert that it was a regression, a choice of the easy path, a surrender to the tamer platitudes of {234} the spirit that no aggressive vigour could altogether mask.

To live dangerously was supposed to be its ideal, but dread was the very atmosphere it breathed.

Its armies could be thrown into hysterical convulsions by the thought of the franc-tireur, and the flesh of its leaders made to creep by such naïve and transpontine machinations as its enemies ambitiously called propaganda.