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
[Pg 22]
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
[Pg 23]
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,
[Pg 24]
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
[Pg 25]
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
[Pg 26]
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
[Pg 27]
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
[Pg 28]
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
[Pg 29]
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
[Pg 30]
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
[Pg 31]
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;
[Pg 32]
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;
[Pg 33]
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
[Pg 35]
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
[Pg 36]
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
[Pg 37]
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
[Pg 38]
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
[Pg 39]
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
[Pg 40]
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
[Pg 42]
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
[Pg 43]
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
[Pg 44]
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
[Pg 45]
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
[Pg 46]
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
[Pg 47]
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
[Pg 49]
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
[Pg 50]
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
[Pg 51]
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
[Pg 52]
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
[Pg 53]
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
[Pg 54]
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
[Pg 55]
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
[Pg 56]
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.
[Pg 58]
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
[Pg 59]
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
[Pg 60]
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
[Pg 61]
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
[Pg 63]
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
[Pg 64]
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
[Pg 65]
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
[Pg 67]
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
[Pg 68]
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
[Pg 69]
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
[Pg 71]
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
[Pg 72]
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
[Pg 73]
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
[Pg 74]
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
[Pg 75]
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
[Pg 76]
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
[Pg 77]
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
[Pg 78]
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
[Pg 79]
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
[Pg 80]
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
[Pg 82]
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
[Pg 83]
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
[Pg 84]
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
[Pg 85]
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
[Pg 86]
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
[Pg 87]
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
[Pg 89]
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
[Pg 90]
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
[Pg 91]
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
[Pg 92]
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
[Pg 93]
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
[Pg 94]
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
[Pg 95]
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.
Enjoying this classic?
Get physical books that build on these ideas — delivered to your door across Cameroon.