Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development

HIS INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS

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IN the preceding pages, we have seen reason to believe that the individual has certain propensities toward life with his fellows, and also certain capacities for realizing his social nature by action. It now becomes our task to inquire as to the ways in which he shows the social elements of his character in conduct.

§I. Instinctive and Reflective Emotion

122. The observation that men are emotional animals, and that emotion is a great incentive to action, is a commonplace. We need not stop to define emotion nor trace its genesis in the animal kingdom. On the contrary, we may assume that the reader has a clear enough sense of what emotion is when he feels it. The remark, then, that the social man has emotions and that they influence his conduct is pertinent here only as indicating a further problem: the problem, to wit, as to how the individual manifests his emotions and how these manifestations tell, in his social life, upon him and upon others.

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Psychologists agree that emotion is generally an accompaniment of ideas. An emotion has a distinctive character consonant with the character of the particular idea which it accompanies. A lion arouses fear, a friend affection, an enemy hate, etc. But there is a further fact about the idea or thought which one has in mind when he experiences a lively emotion. This appears in the fact that emotions are usually classified under two great heads : those which attract us to an object thought of, on the one hand, and which are accompanied by pleasure, and those, on the other hand, which repel us from the object and feel painful. The attracting emotions are uniformly pleasurable and the repelling emotions painful experiences. And when we come to inquire into this curious state of things, we find only one way to explain either the one or the other pair of opposing facts —the pair representing attraction and repulsion or the pair representing pleasure and pain. The fact is this: that there is a centre of organic or personal existence — a self of some kind — to the welfare of which the emotion in some way refers. We say ' I am afraid,' or ' I love and hate,' or 'the lion frightens me.' 'When I fly from a fearful thing, I try to remove myself.' And when I embrace a friend, hope for a gift, rejoice in an honour, it is that I myself find advantage in some way in the attraction exerted upon me by the object involved in this case or that. This much we may say, however our opinions may differ as to the best way to explain this reference of emotion to the good or evil involved for the personal self. Certain emotions, usually called reflective emotions, have a distinct reference to our conscious thought of our own welfare, or the opposite. First among these, is, of

(187) course, the class of emotions known as vanity, pride, etc., in which the thought of self is very prominent.

123. Granting so much about emotion, another distinction arises. There are certain emotions whose reference is distinctly physical, organic. In the case of these, the seizure by the emotion does not seem to require that we actually think of ourselves. We may not have time to do this. We often simply find ourselves in or undergoing the emotion, and the discovery that we are in danger or in joy is a later thing. These emotions are said to be instinctive or organic. They seem to belong to the physical organism, and to be so closely knit into the structure of the body by its heredity that they serve to protect us from harm and to secure benefits without assistance from our reflective processes.

124. Now these two references to a self-centre in the emotional seizure —however different the self may be in the two cases—are each of direct social importance. As far as the emotion is a matter of organic reaction merely, its expression is an affair of fixed organic habit. It suggests to us the question whether in these organic exhibitions of race habit there is to be found any evidence that the species to which the individual in question belongs has lived a social life. Of course the forms of reaction show the general character of the environment in which the emotional expressions were learned ; and if we find in them elements which clearly require social environment, then better evidence could not be wished that such ancestral conditions existed. How far, then, do we find in emotional expression evidence of the relations of co-operation which social life requires ?

This question has already been answered in the various

(188) works in which the social instincts have been submitted to more or less adequate examination. As far as man shows the social instincts of the animals, so far we have a right to say that his reactions may be taken to show that the early social habits of man were, in the respects which these reactions indicate, the same in kind as those of the animals. This is true of the family instincts in general: the maternal care, the paternal provision of food and watchfulness in danger, the parental instruction in movement, self-support, etc., the filial response to parental care and instruction, the fraternal attitude of the young to one another in the same family, the play-instinct with its exercises in endurance, defence, and skill. All these things show a common fund of acquisition by man and brute, and point back, I think, to the race conditions which were operative before man appeared upon the earth. As regards man himself, these tendencies are, in the main, hereditary, and the exercise of them in a spontaneous way by the infant gives evidence of the law of 'recapitulation' in its main conception.[1]

In addition to these instinctive reactions of an emotional kind, however, there are certain other expressions found in a marked degree in children, and in animals sometimes, which it is our immediate object to investigate; they form an apparent link in the chain of facts upon which both the biological theory of recapitulation, and also the higher form of the same truth found in the history of human race progress, rest for support. These facts are : the mani-

(189) festations or expressions of certain emotions which have both the organic and later the reflective form as well; such, for instance, as jealousy, fear, anger, and sympathy. These emotional expressions, together with the physical reactions which are shown by young children in what we call bashfulness and in the play-instinct, are, to my mind, of great importance in the mental evolution upon which the social life is founded. This makes it well that we should understand more clearly the issues raised ; and I shall devote a few paragraphs to setting certain distinctions out more fully, before taking up the series of facts which are to be cited in this chapter.

125. It appears that the theory of 'recapitulation' has two great spheres of application. It applies on the animal side, as usually studied by the biologists and comparative psychologists, and it has, besides, a certain application on the human side —this latter having to do with what the writers on anthropology call culture-stages. In biology and comparative psychology the question is whether the human organism and mind go through stages which recapitulate the forms of the animal world; the anthropological question, on the other hand, is whether the human individual goes through the stages of culture which the human race as a species has gone through. In discussing the mental development of the child we have both these problems to solve : the two problems, i.e., whether the child's mental development recapitulates the stages of mental development in the animal world, and second, whether it then goes on to show, or to recapitulate, the stages through which the human mind, after it arose in history, has passed in our race development.[2]

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It is easy to see that the social life is mainly a matter which falls under the second inquiry. Only in so far as the child has the modicum of social tendencies which we also find in the animals—only so far can the question as to whether he is recapitulating animal forms of sociality be put and answered. But inasmuch as the child then goes on to exhibit further reactions of a special kind, or in a special degree, which the animal world does not seem to possess, —especially if these latter seem to be superposed upon the former and to supersede them, —the second question of recapitulation becomes pertinent ; and we then ask: Are these further tendencies of the child toward social life a repetition of the development of man from the conditions of primitive life in which he was nearer to the animal ? The answer to this question supposes some knowledge of the history of culture from prehistoric times : the information which the ethnologist sets himself to discover. Just as the comparative morphologist furnishes his data to the human embryologist and asks him to discover parallels which indicate recapitulation ; so the ethnologist may come with his determinations of the social conditions of primitive man at various epochs, and ask the psychologist to point out parallel stages in the child's progress.

When we come to put together the two spheres of application of the principle of recapitulation, we find that the history of the whole progress of the animal series up into the human epoch, and also the later history of the man's progress in social life, should be given in the child's growth. And we cry, how rich a field of study! But the very fact that the child has to reveal so much, makes it impossible to expect that the record will be complete.

(191) On the organic side, we find a reasonably complete record of animal progress in biological development ; but the very fact that it was only after man had come that the development of the social life began which requires much intelligent co-operation—this tends to obscure the earlier stages of mental development. In order to be reflectively social, the child must be less aggressive, more tolerant, more adaptable, less dominated by inflexible instinct. But in order to this, those stages of the development in the animal mind which require the opposite qualities, such as high instinctive equipment, must be either quickly passed over by the child, or be absent altogether. If this general point be true, then we should expect to find in the mental development of the child only those mental traits of the animals which could exist along with the higher social development which comes to be an essential thing in human life.

126. Such traits, we do find, as a fact, in the child: certain great systems of reactions and their mental accompaniments which bear such a construction. These reactions seem to be original elements in his hereditary equipment. They seem to be well explained by the law of organic recapitulation.

Yet we find that they are also capable of a construction which would have placed them as the results of intelligent adaptation and social co-operation. They can be explained as illustrating the later or anthropological sort of recapitulation. These are the emotional expressions of which I am about to speak.

To cite an instance: the child shows certain native expressions of affection which are common to him and certain animals. These expressions can only be accounted for

(192) as having arisen ancestrally under conditions in which, in certain respects, these animals now are. But after the child grows older, we find that his intelligent expressions of affection take the same channels. If we had not seen them in the child at the earlier period, we should have said, quite possibly, still applying the theory of recapitulation, that they represented the period in the development of the human race when certain ways of intelligent action in a social community were found useful. There are here, therefore, two different assignments of these reactions by the recapitulation theorist. This serves to show how rich a field for interpretation these emotional expressions are. It is interesting to note that Darwin, and the other writers who have studied them, have with rare exceptions, as far as I know, confined the interpretation to the utilities in the animal series, without inquiring into the culture-history side; that is, without inquiring as to the second or intelligent utility which the same reactions subserve in the history of human development, together with the correspondence between the two.

127. As to the relative effects which these two kinds of recapitulation produce in the child's development, certain truths may be made out. We may say (1) in so far as the heredity of the child's animal ancestry tended to come into conflict with the requirements of the social development of the race of mankind, then the former must have been obliterated ; since, as a fact, the child does fulfil the requirements of social development. The self-seeking tendencies of the animal trust give place to co operation and sympathy. And the process of selection, in order to get the human race started on a career of sociability, must have put a premium upon variations which did this. (2) In

(193) so far as the organic reflexes of animal instinct, which had proved useful to the animal, did not hinder the development of the social ways of action thus put at a premium, they would run an equal chance of still surviving for the sake of their older utility. And (3) in so far as the animal modes of action served purposes which were favourable to the growth of social life, or could be pressed into the newer utilities of social life, then these reactions would be confirmed and further developed. The germs of social life found in the gregarious habits of certain animals were available for further development in man.

The first of these three classes of cases we find illustrated, in the human young, in the absence of native instincts impelling to co-ordinated systems of movement apart from certain combinations which are actually necessary to his life. And the reason becomes clearer when we remember what has already been said as to the need of the child's having all his members so plastic and unconstrained as to learn, as fast as possible, the acts of skill which his social environment requires of him. These acts are so varied that the same muscles and members have to be used in the greatest variety of combinations ; a need which could not be fulfilled if these muscles and the brain matter which works them were already tied up in such instincts as those possessed by the animals. Plasticity is the rule of social life, and its requirement ; the opposite is the condition represented by animal instinct.

The second and third cases also have instructive examples. We may ask why the anus are no longer legs, while the legs are still legs. The reason is plain. The purposes of locomotion require legs ; the legs remain legs because to lose all legs would have been to lose life.

(194) These organs are continued because they continue a function which the new dawning social life not only does not antagonize, but actually requires. But the arms cease to be legs because a social function can be found for them without sacrificing any essential animal function. This the organism found a way of effecting as soon as the adaptation which we call upright-walking was reached. So the fore paw, with its flat simplicity of use, became the human hand —that most marvellous implement of human utility. The tongue is a case in which the old and the new functions exist together in the same member: eating and speech.

128. The third of these cases—the ratification and further development for social utilities of the ways of animal action which first rose for organic utilities—this brings us again to the emotional expressions which we set out to examine.

The thing which strikes us at the outset, in taking up the emotional expressions which have social value, is just their double meaning. That they have this double meaning indicates, again, two general things about their conditions of rise and their relation to each other. First, it is evident that, in order to persist in the social development of mankind after serving their utility in the animal series, —while, as we have seen, so many other animal reactions did not persist,—they must have represented adaptations to a pre-social environment which was at least consistent with the social environment, if not actually in a measure social. And, second, it must mean that when taken together all these reactions are to be explained, along with the new social adaptations which have been built up upon them, by one general life-tendency. That is, the

(195) drift of the selective principle must have been to conserve and develop these sorts of reaction. And from these truths the further one seems to be reached: that the principles of selection and survival get a construction which shall secure social progress. [3]

§ 2. Bashfulness and Modesty

129. The more evident physical accompaniments of bashfulness in the child have been well set forth by various writers ; and one at least of the signs of modesty, by far the most striking sign in the youth and adult, blushing, has been discussed in some detail by Darwin.[4] The following description of the phenomena of bashfulness, with hints as to the phylogenetic meaning, may be quoted from my earlier work.[5]

" It [bashfulness] begins to appear generally in the first year, showing itself as an inhibiting influence upon the child's normal activities. Its most evident signs are nervous fingerings of dress, objects, hands, etc., turning away of head and body, bowing of head and hiding of face, awkward movements of trunk and legs, and in extreme cases, reddening of the face, puckering of lips and eye muscles, and finally cries and weeping. An important difference, however, is observable in these exhibitions according as the child is accompanied by a familiar person or not. When the mother or nurse is present, many of the signs seem to be useful in securing concealment from the eye of strangers—behind dress or apron or figure of the familiar person. In the absence, however, of such a refuge, the

(196) child sinks often into a state of general passivity or inhibition of movement, akin to the sort of paralysis usually associated with great fear.

" This analogy with the physical signs of fear, gives a real indication, I think, of the race origin of bashfulness; it is probably a differentiation of fear. This I cannot dwell upon now, but simply suggest that bashfulness arose as a special utility-reaction on occasion of fear of persons, in view of personal qualities possessed by the one who fears. The concealing tendency also shows the parallel development of intimate personal relationships of protection, support, etc., and so gives indications of certain early social conditions.

" My observations of bashfulness —not to dwell upon descriptions which have been made before by others —serve to throw the illustrations of it into certain periods or epochs which may be briefly characterized in order.

" 1. The child is earliest seized with what may be called 'primary' or 'organic' bashfulness, akin to the organic stages in the well-recognized instinctive emotions, such as fear, anger, sympathy, etc. This exhibition occurs in the first year, and marks the attitudes of the infant toward strangers. It is not so much inhibitory of action in this first stage; it rather takes on the positive signs of fear, with protestation, shrinking, crying, etc.

" The duration of this stage depends largely upon the child's social environment. The passage from the attitude of instinctive antipathy toward outsiders, and that of affection equally instinctive toward the members of the household, over into a more reasonable sense of the difference between tried friends and unproved strangers —this depends directly upon the growth of the sense of general

(197) social relationships established by experience. One of the most important elements in the child's progress in this way out of its 'organic' social life, is the degree and variety of its intercourse with other children, and indeed with other adults than those of its own home.

" 2. I find next a period of strong social tendency in the child, of toleration of strangers and liking for persons generally, in great contrast to the attitudes of organic distrust of the earlier period just mentioned. There seems to be in this a reaction against the instinct of social self-preservation characteristic of the earlier stage. It is due in all likelihood to the actual experience of the child in receiving kind treatment from strangers—kinder in the way of indiscriminate indulgence than the more orderly treatment which it gets from its own parents. Everybody comes to be trusted on first acquaintance, by the child, through the teachings of his own experience, just as in the earlier years everybody was treated by him, under the instincts of his inherited nature, as an agent of possible harm.

"3. Finally, I note the return of bashfulness in the child's third year or later. This time it is bashfulness in the proper sense of the term, rid of the element of fear, and rid largely of its compelling organic force and methods of expression. The bashful five-year-old smiles in the midst of his hesitations, draws near to the object of his curiosity, is evidently overwhelmed with the sense of his own presence rather than with that of his new acquaintance, and indulges in actions calculated to keep notice drawn to himself.

"The reality of this group of the child's social attitudes, and the great contrast which they present to those of the organic period, can hardly have too much emphasis. It

(198) is one of the great outstanding facts of his progressive relation to the elements of his social milieu. There is a sort of self-exhibition, almost of coquetry, in the child's behaviour; which shows the most remarkable commingling of native organic elements with the social lessons of personal well- and ill-desert which are now becoming of such importance in his life. All this makes so marked a contrast to the exhibitions of organic bashfulness that it constitutes in my opinion a most important resource for the study of the evolution of the social sense.

"The observation of organic bashfulness tends to confirm our view of the way the child begins to apprehend persons ; and at the same time it enables us to see a little further. For, strange as it may appear, we are here confronted with an element of organic equipment especially fitted to receive and respond to these peculiar objects, persons: 'personal projects.' The child strikes instinctively a particular series of attitudes when persons appear among his objects, attitudes which other objects, qua objects, do not excite. And later in life, in the organic effects indicative of modesty, such as blushing, hesitating, etc., we find familiar signs of a social rapport which has grown into the very fibre of our nerves. We have to say, therefore, that the child is born to be a member of society in the same sense precisely that he is born with eyes and ears to see and hear the movements and sounds of the world, and with touch to feel the things of space."

130. These facts, with the inferences from them, may be taken as sufficient for purposes of description. The two principles which seem to be revealed are: first, that

(199) these reactions, taken as a whole, indicate the existence of social conditions so far back in the organic ancestry of the child that the reactions which show adaptation to such an environment have actually become ingrained in the nervous structure of the child to the extent that the functions are now instinctive. It is impossible to believe that the young chick would heed the warning note of the hen when the hawk flies over, unless his ancestors had experienced similar common dangers ; so it is impossible to believe that the child could show instinctive bashfulness before persons except on the supposition that his ancestors have sustained close relations of some kind to their fellows. Of course, it still remains to ask how far back this condition of social relationship goes in the life-series ; whether they are only present after the human species appears with its tendency to establish intelligent social co-operation. This depends upon the kind of social co-operation which the actual reactions shown by the bashful child would indicate. Upon such an actual examination of the reactions involved depends also the question as to the character of these ancestral social relationships. Apart from the details of fact, however, there is a general hypothesis which seems to be justified by this phenomenon. It is this : that organic bashfulness is, as is indicated in the quotation above, a differentiation of animal fear;[6] and that the more reflective bashfulness which comes only after the child has begun to have a notion of his subjective self, is a reaction of anthropological origin. On this view the organic form of the reaction belongs to the animal phylogeny, and the reflective form is a further

(200) development belonging to the human phylogeny ; so that both sorts of recapitulation cited above are represented in the growth of the child's modesty reactions. The phenomena of blushing, and certain other physiological appearances, belong in both of these.

131. As to further evidence in favour of this position, I may cite: First, the general course of the child's development. Organic bashfulness appears at the remarkably early period when the child has no reflective processes, no emotions due to ideas, except as his suggestions confirm his instinctive reactions. He cannot inhibit his bashfulness, nor much modify it. His mental part is below the development of certain of the animals. Again, the details of the reactions of this first sort of bashfulness are strikingly similar to those of purely instinctive fear, as it is shown by the animals. The profoundly organic elements in these modifications seem to require that their origin be as far back in the life-series as the indications on other grounds will allow us to place them.

Second, these exhibitions of organic bashfulness are modified as soon as the later development of self-consciousness brings in reflective modesty. The characteristics common to this reaction and to fear tend to disappear; and the child's attitudes become mainly a mixture of fear, hesitation, and self-exhibition. This last element, seen in the child's unwillingness to allow himself to be overlooked by strangers, is in striking contrast to the concealing tendencies of the organic period. It can only have arisen, it would seem, after the child had attained some more or less obscure form of self-consciousness. This would bring this form of the modesty reaction down into the human epoch in race-history; since there is no evidence of such a

(201) sense, except in the most rudimentary form,[7] in any of the higher animals. These higher manifestations of modesty get their only explanation as belonging to primitive human society, and as having arisen by the adaptation of the earlier bashful attitudes, which primitive man inherited to the requirements of more complex social life. This agrees with the supposition that the organic form of bashfulness belongs in the animal phylogeny, where it is mainly the reaction of fear.

Third, I think there are signs of organic bashfulness to be found in certain animals. The behaviour of a dog in the presence of strange dogs appears to justify this opinion. When the dog meets an unknown dog, he shows a general disposition to be cautious ; he gets ready for flight, but still does not fly; he shows an incipient fear-anger psychosis by the raising of the hair of his neck, the straightening out of his tail, the setting of his ears forward in an alert way—all attitudes of self-defence.[8] And with it all, there is a set of tentative manoeuvres of exploration,

(202) scenting, advancing and retreating, etc., which are very similar to some of the indications of bashfulness of the child. We cannot say that the dog is waiting to see what the other dog thinks of him; that would be to make of the dog a man; but we can say that his actions may be a sort of race equivalent of just that. And as soon as fair treatment, or a show of respect from the other dog, appears, he grows affectionate and demonstrative. This is also the course of the child. Moreover, the signs of shame which some writers have observed in animals are to be brought under this class of reactions. These signs are those of slinking away, attempting to hide, random movements with a good deal of inhibition, sinking of the body toward the ground, and furtive restlessness of gaze. All these things are present also in the child's early bashfulness, in the period before the dawning of self-consciousness introduces an element of self-exhibition into the phenomenon.

Fourth, there is a class of modesty actions associated with the sexual relation which show a similar likeness to the reactions of the child. It is evident how great a place this kind of social toleration and acquiescence must have had in animal life. The oncoming of adolescence had to be provided for in the hereditary impulse; and among the actions which represent social life in general, we should expect that those which belong to this relation would be prominent. Now the phenomena which various writers have described as characteristic of animals at their mating, will he found, when analyzed, to show remarkable similarities to those shown by the bashful child.[9] What

(203) this means in the development of the child is probably this: that the modesty reactions which he inherits and which he finds himself performing all through his life, are, in a measure, those which the sexual relations of the earlier forms have established, and which his own adolescent period will, at a later time, bring again into activity. That the general phenomena of bashfulness, in all its phases, is pronounced and unmistakable in what we call 'shyness' as the period of adolescence approaches in the youth, is a matter of common knowledge. The force of this consideration would also be in the direction of placing the organic basis of bashfulness and shyness back in the animal epoch of evolution.

These indications seem to me sufficient to lead us to the probability that, in the bashful youth, we have both terms of race-history represented. The further development of the modesty reactions of the individual take us on in the history of social humanity. And at the outset I may say a few words about the course of the child's progress from a bashful babe to a modest man.

132. On the organic side, we find the reactions characteristic of so-called bashfulness giving way to those which go by the name 'shyness,' as the child grows up into the period of youth. Shyness is, however, more particularly applied to mental and social attitudes. The physical signs of shyness are, in the main, a lowering of the eyes, bowing of the head, putting of the hands behind the back, nervous fingering of the clothing or twining of the fingers together, and stammering, with some incoherence of idea as expressed in speech. With these external signs comes on the remarkable adult sign of shyness or modesty,—blushing. These physical manifestations seem to be very largely survivals

(204) from the more overpowering bodily expressions of the young child's bashfulness. They are to a great degree inhibited by the habits which go with adult self-control ; and they are not allowed to come out at the mere trivialities of social intercourse with strangers, as the child's do. But in their character they affect the same members, and the occasion of their display is the same in kind. It is interesting, also, to observe in those whose adult shyness is extreme, as it sometimes is, how really childish the phenomena seem to an on-looker. Some young ladies, in particular, seem to be quite incapable of undergoing an introduction without such evident display of what we call 'self-consciousness ' that the meeting is embarrassing on one side and uncomfortable on the other.

More positively, the appeal may be made to the sort of emotional consciousness which the expressions of social embarrassment carry with them in persons of sensitive social temperament.[10]

To people who are thus constituted, the social relation is, purely from an organic point of view, the most exhausting, nerve-trying relation which one can well imagine. It is quite impossible to keep up even the most trivial social contact, such as travelling with an acquaintance, sitting or walking with a friend, etc., without soon getting in a condition of such nervous strain that, unless one break the relation occasionally to be alone, even the 'yes' and 'no' of conversation becomes a task of tasks. If, however, the relation involve thought of an objective kind which does not bring the social relation itself forward,

(205) such intercourse is most exhilarating and enjoyable. The finer shades of emotional effect are associated with increased rapidity in the heart-beat, some slight setting of the blood to the head, more rapid breathing, a general toning up of the muscular system, and a peculiar static pressing inwards—from the front—of the abdominal muscles. This is accompanied, on the mental side, with what I can describe only as a 'sense of other persons.' This 'sense of other persons' may break up all the mental processes. The present writer cannot think the same thoughts, nor follow the same plan of action, nor control the muscles with the same sufficiency, nor concentrate the attention with the same directness, nor, in fact, do any blessed thing as well, when this sense of the presence of others is upon him. But there are other peculiarly social, i.e., conversational, etc., functions which are then at their best.[11]

133. Apart from these more hidden organic changes, the one general effect due to the presence of other persons

(206) is that of blushing. The extent of the blush is described by Darwin with his usual thoroughness, i.e., the parts of the body to which it extends, and it is an interesting fact that the blush proper is limited, in his opinion, largely to the surfaces which are exposed to the gaze of others, appearing mainly on the face and neck.[12] It begins in early childhood, about the time when we may say with confidence that the sense of self is moderately well developed. I have seen my child H. blush vividly in the sixth year, but it is probably to be observed much earlier. Blushing is a general modesty reaction, since it is not limited to either sex, although it is usually stronger and less controllable in woman than in man (in the case of adults), and it is not due exclusively to any one occasion of modesty. The spheres in which it is most extreme are those which involve what is called shame in all its varieties, such as is caused by the thought of physical immodesty, seen in exposure of the covered parts of the body, by suggestions of personal uncleanness in body or mind, by the most distant allusions to matters of the sexual relation, or even merely to persons of the opposite sex, and by indelicate situations of any kind.

There is also the sphere of moral ill-desert, the suggestion of disapproval or even lack of appreciation, of mistaken inference, or harsh judgments ; all these call out the blush in the party morally judged, provided he know that this opinion is entertained of him. The adverse judgment of others is sufficient in many people to bring

(207) a blush even though there be nothing to justify the opinion; and the calmest sense of being right is often not calm enough to prevent the appearance of guilt conveyed by the blush. This reaction is, however, in great part a transitory one in the development of the individual. The loss of bodily sensitiveness seems, for the most part, to go with the loss of moral sensitiveness. The dulling of the social sense in general, as seen in ethical decay, frequent violations of social requirements, and habitual relaxation of attitude with reference to the claims of either physical or moral propriety, tends to make the reaction of blushing infrequent and unintense. We often hear of persons who have 'forgotten how to blush.' Yet the blush may grow more and more vivid as the social sense grows more and more refined.

Again, it is interesting to note that the organic process of blushing may be brought about simply by the imagination of social condemnation, or by a situation of real demerit in which there is no witness but one's own self. Self-condemnation may bring its own organic result.

134. Coming from so much description of the facts, both physical and mental, of these modesty reactions, we may inquire into their possible construction on the evolution hypothesis. What light do they throw on the conditions of race-history, either in its animal stage or in its human stage ?

As to the meaning of these signs, it seems impossible to think that they could have arisen in the course of the intercourse of man with man, and especially of man with woman, which characterizes peaceful society. The survival of organic effects of this definite and persistent kind must have had some profound justification which the his-

(208) -tory of civilized man's dealings with one another does not disclose.

Assuming the correctness of the position taken above — that bashfulness is a differentiation of fear, the fear of persons present in ruder family or tribal relationships—and that bashfulness also has a strong ingredient of the reactions of mating, we may find in these points suggestions to carry further. I think that the differences between the organic effects of bashfulness and those of the higher modesty reactions are to be accounted for as modifications due to the further social relations which were imposed, in the progress of evolution, upon these constant elements. Man continued to fear when there was occasion for fear, as also does the child. Man of course continued to mate; but certain regulations of his mating were established in his social progress. All these profitable variations became engrained in his nervous constitution, and so tended to modify the simpler characteristic exhibitions. The general meaning of this may now be indicated, as far as we have ground for thinking that we can make it out.

135. Certain general bearings of the facts may be set forth before we attempt to give more detailed inferences.

1. The inclusion of the moral emotions in the class of mental experiences which call out such organic reflexes as blushing,[13] shows that these emotions are of social origin, and have arisen in the same movement with the other factors of this entire group of effects. We have already seen that the ethical sense is a growth. The reconstruction by

(209) the child, in his own experience, of the social relationships through which his sense of self gets its discipline and clarification, makes him ethical. The discovery, therefore, that the organic reactions to ethical relationships are included in those of the social generally, shows that the plan of race acquisition of the ethical sense is recapitulated, in its great outlines, at least, in the child. I find it impossible to see, if we assume the Darwinian theory of the origin of emotional attitudes and expressions, why the class of emotions which we cover by the term 'shame' should be cut in two, and those which are simply social should be said to have grown up in race-history in union with their expression, while the other half, those which are called ethical, although showing the same organic reactions, should be supposed to have acquired their connection with the organism in some extra-evolutionary way. This agreement, in fact, in the expressions of the ethical and social, taken with the social rise of the ethical emotions in the child, furnishes, to my mind, a twofold and irresistible proof of the evolution of the ethical sentiments in race history. No other theory seems to explain the blush of moral shame.

136. 2. These reactions point to conditions of actual and active personal relationship in which they were of utility to the individual or the species. It is evident that they are less useful than damaging in our present society. By the blush the criminal only betrays himself; by agitation the lover makes himself weak. The act of indelicacy thus carries its own condemnation, while the man or woman who is self-possessed escapes suspicion. The utility of these reactions could be established, therefore, only for a society in which the physical was in some way largely the measure of social efficiency, and the rushing of blood

(210) to the head gave a respite or a resource which now we find in the 'soft answer which turneth away wrath,' or in the deed of moral restitution.

We are forced, if this be true, to look for the conditions in which these reactions had active and effective play, backward in the history of man, to the period of primitive culture at which the physical was the main social weapon and law. Indeed, anthropological study enables us, from the object-lessons which we still have from primitive communities, to see to what a degree the meeting of a fellow was loaded with possibilities of danger and need of self-defence. In rude societies, the women are often matters of strife to the men, and the contest is a physical one ;[14] and apart from the distinction of sex, with the causa belli which it affords, the rivalry of clan, the personal glory which accrues to the savage warrior, the element of treachery which makes the lone individual in the woods or at the camp-fire a legitimate victim,—all these things, which are most critical and striking factors in rudimentary social life, make it only natural that the association of man with man and of man with woman should leave certain well-differentiated effects in his organism. Nor is it surprising that these effects should be taken up and perpetuated, in less gross but still unmistakable forms, when the personal relationships are developed in the more subtle modes which we call ethical and social.[15]

137. Allowing these two general statements to stand as sufficiently proved by the fact that these reactions are what they are, I may be allowed to o a little into detail as to the more particular elements which entered into the

(211) social conditions of the environment in which they arose; at the same time saying that these details are matters of my own personal attempts at interpretation, and are in so far more liable to incur criticism. I would not have them endanger the two general statements, however, which are made above, and which I hold are well proved, provided only the postulate of organic evolution be accepted. At the same time the points which follow furnish additional illustration and evidence for these two main conclusions.

1. The most general elements in the organic reactions of modesty, shame, etc., are certain vasomotor changes, with inhibitions and confusions of muscular movement. The vasomotor changes—seen conspicuously in the blush —are analogous to those found in connection with other emotions, notably fear and anger. If we say, therefore, that these changes are rooted in conditions of personal experience which occasioned fear and anger, that may be our starting-point in the reconstruction of the social progress which these reactions stand for. And the conditions of the presence of these vasomotor and muscular changes may be assumed to be those of fear and anger, i.e., the strife which brought on physical struggle, involving excited heart-action and strenuous muscular exertion. Readers of the literature of emotional expression[16] since Darwin will be sufficiently familiar with this hypothesis and the grounds on which it rests. These considerations extend to both the aspects which we have found attach-

(212) -ing to the modesty reactions,—the aspect which implicates the sexual relation, and that which pertains to personal defence ; the former factor being very essentially one of high motor and vasomotor changes.

138. 2. The beginning of differentiation of the reactions of fear and anger in the direction of modesty requires some very striking cause. Fear has, in its higher forms, some ingredient of self-insufficiency, it is true ; after the idea of self and its relation to an alter arises, we have ground for considerate fear; but physical fear has very little reference to self, consisting as it does in an overwhelming sense of the presence of the fearful object. The same is true of anger; so far from involving any hesitation or retreat through considerations of personal lack of power, worth, etc., it tends in quite the opposite direction. Anger means precipitation upon the offending thing. The consistent development of these forms of reaction, therefore, in the progress of the race would have been in the direction of the more formidable equipment of the individual for defence and offence, with the eliminating of the elements which tend to hesitation, embarrassment, and weakness. So we must look for some modifying factors in the environment —some sufficient reason for the development of these reactions in the direction of less personal aggressiveness, and more personal dependence, which we find they have actually taken.

139. 3. This modifying influence is doubtless to be found in the tendency to family life,[17] and in the germinal

(213) beginnings of social and collective action which we see illustrated[18] in some degree in the animal kingdom. The consideration of the animal family is itself sufficient, in my opinion, to show the manner of pro-social development. The qualities seen in the animal member-of-a-family—those which he must possess in order to make the family eligible in the struggle for existence—involve two factors. First, the degree of self-seeking or aggressive tendency which avails to keep selective competition sharp inside and outside the family life; for the family depends, for its food and drink, upon the individual's courage and strength. And second, the development of the co-operative tendency, with the consequent suppression of aggressiveness, as far as this is necessary for the essential family relationships and for united action in the competitions which the family as a whole has to wage. These two opposite tendencies must be reconciled; and the development of further social life depends upon the way in which the organism succeeds in reconciling them. The gregarious instinct must exist outside the family also alongside of sufficient aggressiveness. Now the reactions which we are studying seem to me to be the survival and thus the evidence of this opposition, as I may go on to explain.

140. 4. In the child's bashful period, there are three epochs or stages : first, a purely organic stage ; second, a free-and-easy social stage ; and third, a stage in which a certain 'self-exhibition ' seems to be struggling against the organic inhibitions and restraints. These periods are

(214) not speculative, but real, as the actual study of children discloses. The last-named period is the beginning of real modesty, and involves the subjective sense which we call self-consciousness. The first of these epochs we have already identified with the fear-anger reactions of the animals, together with their sexual commotion ; these two things at least and in the main. The second of the child's periods, I am inclined to think, represents a sort of organic resting-place, with the degree of social co-operation which terminated the extreme strife, struggle, hand-to-hand conflict required by the purely biological operation of natural selection. The child becomes simple in his confidence; he is naive, unsophisticated, credulous to a great extreme. He seems to me then to have his parallel in the rest which man took after his release from the animal; with his dawning sense that he could exist without killing and being killed, with his discovery of the arts of tilling the soil and living, for some of his meals at least, on vegetables. The social tide then sets in. The quiet of domestic union and reciprocal service comes to comfort him, and his nomadic and agricultural habits are formed. He lives longer in one place, begins to have respect for the rights of property, gives and takes with his fellows by the bargain rather than by strife, and so learns to believe, trust, and fulfil the belief and trust. Looked at logically, no less than historically, this is to me quite reasonable. The early ages must have had, sooner or later, a scene like that depicted in the life of the Hebrew patriarchs, when the flocks were the main care, and the wolves were the main enemy; when the hand of some men ceased to be against every man ; when the principle first came to take permanent effect in the consciousness of man that to

(215) co-operate was rational, and to fight continually was not convenient —as slow as this principle was and still is of recognition beyond certain restricted spheres, and as unsupported as it was by any effective sanctions but those of force.

This need of rest from strife, on the part of the race, as an introduction to the occupations of peace, would seem to be testified to in the history of primitive times; and the anthropologist may be counted on to give the assertion some authority.[19] I have already pointed out (Sect. 93) the function of play as aiding such a growing sense of sociality. Of course it is more questionable whether there has ever been any such period over the whole earth at once. It may be in order, however, to say that the supposition is not necessary that such a stage was realized in the entire human race at the same time. The anthropologist is coming to put less and less stress upon the claim that certain stages must be reached by different families or groups in the same degree at the same time. Race peculiarities, as far as they exist and go back into prehistoric times, must have arisen just through the differences which different groups showed in their development under different geographical and historical conditions. This tribe may have been prevented longer than that from turning to the arts of peace, by the aridness of the soil, by the prevalence of wild beasts, by the conditions of the seasons, or by lack of useful inventions. Certain other

(216) groups may have had to come into social co-operation sooner in order to subdue nature and drain the soil ; or to protect themselves from common enemies.[20] All these things, which anthropology is far from understanding in any detail, are yet clear enough to make it necessary that we look for types of human culture realized somewhere rather than for the realization of any type everywhere at once. The cat and the tiger are both felines and both represent types of feline nature, although—for all I know—we may not be able to say that there was a time when either alone existed. The tiger may be alive all the time, and yet the requirement may be real that there should also exist a feline edition so mild in its character as to be capable of domestication.

Saying, then, that there has been such an epoch of transition between the lower man who does not reflect, and the social agent who does, this epoch would seem to be represented well by that period of trustful sociability and unreflecting credulity which lies between the organic fears and tears of the child and his self-conscious shyness and modesty.

141. It may be well at this point to designate the two periods in race progress which we have so far distinguished; and I know of no better designations for them than these: first, the animal period, revealed in the reactions of the child which are mainly organic, we may call, from the social point of view, the period of 'instinctive co-operation.' The second, that which brought in the reign of peaceful pur-

(217) -suits and the beginning of widened communal interests, represented in the child by the frank trustfulness which succeeds organic bashfulness, we may call the period of 'spontaneous co-operation.' The word 'spontaneous' is contrasted both with the term 'instinctive' and also with the term 'reflective' which we will find it well to apply to the period of distinctively intelligent social life which arose later on in the life both of the race and of the child. These terms apply as well to the child ; better, in fact, than any other descriptive terms which I think of. His social attitudes are first instinctive, then spontaneous, and finally reflective.[21]

So we may now turn to the third or 'reflective' period in the development of both child and race, as it is exhibited in the reactions of modesty.

142. 5. The way the child has of coming to be is simply his way of getting his notion of himself ; that is what reflection means, the distinguishing of the object, the alter, the not-self, from the self, and then the bringing of the self up to pass judgment upon the other. I reflect when I, the ego —to the best of my ability to be an ego or self —turn round and examine something in

(218) my consciousness; my plans, my memories, my failures, my hopes, in short anything which I can represent in my consciousness and examine more or less coolly. The progress of my reflection is really the progress of my ability to hold myself together as an independent and critical being that judges.[22]

The child's progress in this has already had detailed attention. We understand that he reaches constantly a self of his own by understanding others better, and then understands others better by reason of his interpretation of them in terms of what he thinks of as himself. These two poles of thought constantly occupy him; and he gets them generalized in some degree in what was called in an earlier place the 'habitual' self, on the one hand, over against the 'imitative' or social self, on the other hand. The habitual self is the reckless, bullying, braggadocio of a self; and the imitative self is the docile, teachable, retiring self. Both grow up together by the very opposition which presupposes them both. So in his inner world he reproduces the actual social world, and fits himself for an active place in it.

Now the indications are that this is the case with the progress of the race. The elements called ego and alter thus present in the child's consciousness are also represented in his organic reactions, in just the two factors which we have already found well to point out: the fear, anger, self-defence and offence, etc., inherited from the instinctive period, and then the other factor due to the peaceful learning of the communal lessons in co-operation which come down from the period of 'spontaneous' social life.

(219) There are the same two factors in the individual's equipment which we find the animal's life to require aggression and co-operation. The social development of the child, therefore, shows both the sorts of recapitulation which we should expect; both phylogenies have the periods which in the growth of the child we have called respectively 'instinctive' and 'spontaneous.' And then, besides, we now find that what the child goes on to be in his 'reflective' period is just the outcome of the tendencies of the other two. Reflection is born of the need of getting a sort of accommodation which will reconcile the personally aggressive or instinctive with the personally imitative or spontaneous ; this the child attains by his development of personality, wherein he has to give, by the very movement of his own growth, due value to the two terms which lead him on,—the ego and the alter. So the race had to reconcile the instinctive tendencies which came down from the animals with the co-operative tendencies which social life prescribed; and it was done by the race in the same way that it is done by the child: the race became reflective, intelligent, and so started on a career of social development in which two fundamental influences were to work together,—the private selfish interest and the public social interest.

This leads to a topic which is of so great importance in the further development of the meaning of social life, as this book conceives it,[23] that I shall now leave its further consideration over until the other elements of equipment which have social expression have also been examined. It is an interesting question to ask whether they—notably sympathy—give any further support to

(220) the conclusions to which the reactions of modesty have led us.

§3. Sympathy

143. The consideration of sympathy is made more easy for us since this emotion has always been considered a critical phenomenon for ethical, psychological, and sociological theory. It has been the central point of some of the most stubborn conflicts in the history of ethics ; conflicts which were sometimes remarkable for the lack of the attitude which the topic discussed would seem to encourage. And when we come really to see how pregnant with meaning sympathy is, we are not at a loss for the explanation of the fact that it should have been used to support this view of man or that, to the neglect of the sympathetic consideration of opposing views.

These discussions of sympathy have given us, indeed, a fairly clear view of the facts, and a generally adopted theory up to a certain point in its interpretation. Psychologists are generally agreed in finding a distinction necessary between 'organic' and 'reflective ' sympathy, similar to the distinction which has been made in considering modesty. The sympathy which the infant shows when its doll bumps its head, or when papa puckers up his face and pretends to cry, is very different from the sympathy which I bestow upon the wretch in the slums, or upon the widow who has lost her only son. The quick appearance of violent organic changes in the child, his unreasoning and indiscriminate expressions of the emotion, the passing of it as soon as the physical expression has to a degree subsided, the lack of any sufficient mental development, at the period when these reactions occur, to support a real sym-

(221) pathy of reflection, —all these indications serve to justify the opinion that we are dealing in the former case with an inherited organic manifestation. This is further made clear by the fact that animals give very remarkable exhibitions of this sort of sympathy. The dog will howl at the calamity of his master, or at the disaster which befalls his fellow-dog before his eyes; indeed, the phenomena are so well known and so much discussed by a humane public, that I need not cite evidence which may be found in any of the books on animal psychology. There is, then, we may safely say, an organic sympathy as well as a reflective sympathy.

144. The physical manifestations of these two forms of sympathy are, however, again, as in the case of the emotions already cited, the same in kind. The expression of sympathy is akin to that of suffering in general. A certain subdued air is assumed throughout the entire muscular system, the corners of the mouth droop even to the extent seen in weeping, —to which, indeed, the sympathetic feeling sometimes actually brings us,—the movements take on a general attitude as of proffering help to the individual toward whom the sympathy is directed, and the voice reveals the peculiar quality characteristic of distress in man and of the cries of suffering in animals. The young child reveals his sympathy by at once falling into tears and vocal cries. The adult either bestirs himself, if on reflection he judges it well or useful to yield to the promptings of sympathy, or sets up counter movements of restlessness and aimless activity in order to relieve the uncomfortable tensions which his sympathies excite in his organic and muscular systems.

145. The meaning of sympathy considered as a race re-

(222) -action is reasonably clear, I think, and it falls in with the inferences which we have already drawn respecting modesty. Organic sympathy, being too early in the child for reflection, and being also present in the animals which give no sign of ability to reflect, must be considered as revealing instinctive reflexes in the child. Falling thus in the period which goes back in its reference to animal ancestry, it gives an instance of recapitulation from the animal series. And the meaning of it in the child, obscured as it is by his quick development in other and characteristic human directions, is the same as in the animals. In the animal family, sympathy is largely a part of the family instinct as such. It represents the extreme of animal blood-relationship; and in some of its manifestations is among the most extraordinary phenomena in the whole range of life. For example, some ferocious animals, which delight in drawing blood, will nevertheless discriminate the blood of members of their own species, and show subdued and sorrowful attitudes.

Carnivorous animals will lick the blood from the wounds of their companions, with every expression of what is to us, in similar circumstances, gentle pity and fellow-suffering ; thus suppressing those more ferocious appetites of their nature which the taste of blood generally excites. And the more remarkable is it since other animals draw no such distinctions, eating their own kind with a good appetite. Indeed, the existence of cannibal tribes among men serves up a comparison which makes it allowable to suggest that, in going back to animals for our origin we reach a nobler lineage possibly, in some respects, than if we had stopped short of it.

The human cannibal, however, is of course the excep-

(223) -tion ; and he may represent a relatively isolated trend of development or of decay; at any rate, his presence in the world does not stand in the way of our learning the lesson of the animal's sympathy. Even the cannibal does not eat his own children, nor members of his own tribe. They are to him as himself just as the whelps of the mother-dog are to her as herself ; and as the human babe is to his parents as themselves. And we must look upon the sympathetic reactions of animals—and by analogy those of primitive human times—as showing the extreme form of the co-operating tendency, before the rise of the reflective faculty.

146. Coming, however, to the reflective form of sympathy which the child so soon begins to show, and which, when once come, is one of the strongest and most saving elements of his human nature, we find a state of things strikingly similar to that depicted in connection with modesty and shame. Indeed, the facts are much clearer here, thanks to the analyses which psychologists and moralists have made. The rise of reflective sympathy is clearly a function of the rise of the notion of self. As we have seen, the thought of the ego, and the thought of the alter, having the same presented content at bottom, excite the same emotion in kind; and so the emotion of suffering, appeal, joy, rebellion, etc., which one feels for himself must be aroused also when the same thought of personality comes up with the different descriptive term 'another' attached to it. The progress of the child in getting the antithesis between ego and alter well fixed, and even bodily separated, does not impair this necessity of his thought. The motor processes which represent the thought of self must be, in the main, the same whether it

(224) be myself or yourself to which a particular experience refers ; so the reactions of relief, weeping, rebellion, subdued collapse, etc., must come to the front in the presence of the fate of others no less than when the victim is oneself. In the latter case, of course, the actual bodily sensations of present surroundings, or the actual requirements of consistency in my thoughts, memories, local escorts, etc., may be amply sufficient to prevent me from making a mistake in my identity, and thinking the suffering is really my own; but even that is liable to be undone in cases of high sympathetic excitement. Sometimes the external, and indeed the internal, boundaries between you and me are swept away, and I feel your calamity really as my own. This tendency is, of course, the source of the emotions of the theatre, where every premium is put on the sort of self-illusion of which I am speaking. And in certain very frequent and persistent cases of such confusion of real suffering and fancied or historical suffering, we have to treat the patient as a victim of an abnormal process which, however, in its root and value, is normal sympathy.

Reflective sympathy, therefore, is distinctly a social outcome. It is the inevitable result of the growth of reflection ; and reflection is just a relation of separateness created between the ego-self and the alter-self. If there were no alter thought, there could be no reflection, and with it no sympathy. In organic sympathy, the relation is a matter of organic reaction due to natural selection, we may suppose;[24] reflective sympathy reaffirms the social value of the reaction, utilizes it, and in discovering the relations of persons for itself, in a reflective and critical way, goes on to refine the reactions and embody them in the institutions

(225) of social life. Reflective sympathy comes to replace much that is, in its earliest foreshadowings, biological and merely adaptive; and through it the laws of organic adaptation get a turn which is characteristic of a rational order.

Under this head, finally, reference may be made to certain other emotional states which have more or less value in the social life as over against sympathy. I refer to the class of emotions covered by the words 'jealousy,' 'pride,' 'vanity,' etc. These easily fall under the general conception of a developing self to which I have referred the sympathies. The emotions of pride attach to the habitual, aggressive, domineering self, and are of importance mainly as illustrating that aspect of self-development. There are, however, certain social facts to be mentioned later, which make it well to refer to them in this place.

In jealousy we seem to have an emotion in which both the resources of explanation are taxed to their full extent. Considering reflective jealousy in man, we should say that it represented a certain second ' intension' of the sense of self, a double reflection. For to be jealous of another it is not alone necessary to think of him as one also thinks of oneself, and thus to be thrown into the attitude which characterizes sympathy; this does not go far enough. There is besides the further consciousness that what he is experiencing is different from what the self is experiencing, and more desirable. This is possible only on the ground of a contrast between the ego and alter thoughts as marked as is the identity on which the sympathetic emotion rests. It may therefore be described as a state of sympathy held in check and overbalanced by the egoistic tendencies aroused by the knowledge of the cause which is contributory to the

(226) other's enjoyment. This on the side of the higher reflective form of jealousy.

We should be led to think, in view of the complexity of this state of mind, that it could hardly be found in the animals ; yet organic jealousy is found in them in a remarkably striking degree. Dogs are proverbially jealous of one another and even of other animals and of man. Yet it is impossible to say that dogs have this double play of attitudes about the thought of self. In fact, the existence of strong jealousy among the brutes avails both to emphasize the two sorts of emotional expression, and also to make it imperative that we recognize the two principles of their origin. In the origin of organic jealousy we have the complex but direct operation of natural selection. When we think of it, we see that such an instinct is of direct utility to the dog ; for it stirs him to throw himself upon his rival, and by overcoming him so to secure the good thing which was his rival's. As a complication of sympathy, also considered as instinctive in the animals, this is what would seem to be a necessary outcome of the law of utility; for the dog whose sympathies for another had no such modification would stand by and perish while others lived whenever the competition for food was sharp. His delight would be to see others eat! The organic emotion of jealousy, therefore, would seem to be a biological outcome, serving in the animal something the place of the reflective egoism seen in the higher jealousy of man.

The general result, therefore, in so far confirms our earlier conclusions. Sympathy reactions run continuously up from animal organic utility adaptations, to the uses of reflective social life; and so furnish additional evidence that the highest sphere of our emotional nature is not

(227) separated by a gap from the more modest social beginnings of lower life-orders. The child passes with no rude shock —indeed, he never knows the transition —from organic to reflective sociality ; and the presence of the former ministers to the latter all the way through, just as the existence of the former at the start makes the later existence of the latter possible. The same appears also in the emotional reactions to which we now turn.

§ 4. Social Emotion as Such: Personal Opposition

147. The place of emotion in the mental life, and the purpose which it serves, would lead us to expect that, after social life has arisen and become fixed, there would be peculiar forms of emotional experience springing up about the relationships and adaptations which thus become so important in the life of man. Emotion is, by common consent, the accompaniment of habitual ways of action on the organic side, so fixed and regular that they have become stereotyped in the nervous system. Given, then, so constant a thing as the social rapport, in all its meaning, in the evolution of humanity, and it would be strange if there did not arise with it a characteristic emotion of society and a correspondingly instinctive way of action. There are two classes of phenomena generally recognized as thus distinctly social, and although, from their very nature, they show peculiarities which make it difficult to classify them under the term 'emotion,' used in a concrete sense, yet the remarks which follow may justify me, I trust, in bringing them forward in this connection. One of them is the class of phenomena which fall under the term 'suggestibility' in current psychology, and the

(228) other class constitutes the sense or emotion of play. These general topics are already in part familiar to us from the earlier descriptions; but there are further considerations to be made out in the present connection.

148. I. In the first place, we may inquire into the facts concerning social 'suggestibility.'

The literature of suggestion, and of the social value of suggestion, is becoming adequate in recent years ; and, indeed, the treatment of this topic has given to social psychology its most respectable showing. The writings of Tarde, Sighele, Guyau, Le Bon, and others, have set forth the truth that society is at certain times largely a mob ruled by suggestion and by suggestion only; and that this case is but an exaggeration of the action of the working of suggestion generally in the social relationships of man. Hypnotic suggestion has furnished important leading-strings of inquiry which have been followed with interesting results ;[25] and finally the conditions of the child's development have been shown to include a large ingredient of incitements of this order.[26] In fact, certain sections of the foregoing chapters of this work show that the influence of suggestion in the individual's progress is sufficiently great. The child's personal growth is not only constantly stimulated by those suggestive influences which we have called by the general term 'tradition'; but his progress is also constantly checked by the same system of influences. To say that he is liable to suggestion is therefore to cover with all-too-weak a word what is indeed the very method of his advancing life. Looking broadly at the child's ways of action, we find that social give-and-take becomes a habit

(229) to him, its indulgence a means of great enjoyment, and the denial of it, through isolation, a source of intolerable discomfort, irritation, and rebellion. The anticipation of it is again a constant element in his thought of the worth of life and its distinction.

The social circle of a man, too, is the part of his environment which arouses in him, even when he does not actively think of it, the most profound responses of his personal nature. And when he does think of it, it appeals to his highest sentiments of self-respect, dignity, and ideal activity, or the reverse. These subjective aspects of the social life have never been named as have the emotions which carry distinct organic reactions with them, for the reasons that they are so varied in their effects in the mental life, and that they have no precise physical accompaniments. The nearest that one may come to a classification of them in psychological language is perhaps to put them under the two headings of 'Imitation' —covering all the phenomena of social contagion and atmosphere, satisfaction with convention, conformity to style, custom, etc., — and 'Opposition,'[27] using this latter word in its widest sense, as covering all tendency to revolution, all resistance to convention, all social obstinacy, love of innovation, etc.

The two opposed aspects thus made out cover the antithesis between the 'conservative' and 'radical' tendencies; and yet, as we shall see, the present distinction is a somewhat different one, since the extreme of social suggestibility extends to novelties as well as to the estab-

(230) -lished usages of society ; and the extreme of opposition, as used in this connection, goes so far as to lead to personal revolt as a habit, no less against what is established than against the newer courses of current suggestion. Both of these aspects represent constant and marked phenomena, which rise to a certain dignity. The former was called plastic imitation' in my other book,[28] —the tendency simply to yield to the impulse or emotion of conformity to social usage,—and it is under that phrase that I shall consider some of its phases after the brief remarks which follow on 'opposition.'

149. The phenomena of opposition show themselves on the side of the individual's independence and self-sufficiency, as the phenomena of mob-action show themselves on the side of his sociality. Yet the former spring out of the same general movement of the personal sense as do the latter. There are certain phases of his growth which appear as more or less striking oppositions; and these I shall point out. They fall, however, under the less important and more incidental items in the inventory of social happenings, as the full consideration of the oppositions which may arise between the individual and society will make more evident in a later chapter.[29]

(1) In the child's 'contrary suggestion' we have a very early exhibition of social opposition. I have elsewhere pointed out that this sort of suggestion arises either through the association of ideas, together with certain

(231) possibilities of muscular antagonism; or through an actual tendency to the emphasis of the personal as such in the mind of the child. As to the first it may be passed over, seeing that it itself 'passes over' very soon in the progress of the child. The latter reason for his contrariness, however, leads us to a second and more important aspect of opposition.

(2) The child's growing sense of self becomes subjective mainly through his experience of agency, volition. This has been fully explained above. It is this sense of growing agency, power to work effects for himself, which urges him on in a career of relatively competent and fruitful invention. Now to the degree in which this is indulged, encouraged, or even, in some children, merely allowed to grow, it leads the little agent into a sturdy independence which shows itself as social opposition. He rejoices in the 'self of aggression ' which legislates for others. In the words of a correspondent,[30] " One of the great psychologically potent purposes of social life is the purpose to find the self different from any other self." This is perhaps rather strong; but that the 'purpose' is a real one there can be no doubt. We see it in the attributes of character so much treasured under the terms 'individuality,' 'personal pride,' 'self-respect,' 'private judgment,' etc.[31]

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(3) There is yet another phase of social opposition which has also had some attention in our earlier pages : it is the sense of social esprit de corps which conies to attach to the circle or group within which one's social consciousness grows up. The common self of my group, one thinks, is the proper common self; and in so far as other societies do not recognize its conventions and regulations, and the more if perchance they violate its essential principles, they are wrong. Their 'socius' is a mistaken one; there must be opposition between them and us. There thus arises a certain rivalry of clan, family, nation, with a vehement emphasis upon the features in which they are not at one.

In all these cases it should be noted, however, that we are dealing with side-events, so to speak, by-products to the main progress, whether of the individual and of the group to whose common life his growth contributes. His imitative growth is the necessary basis of all these oppositions. And in so far as the one is essential—the imitation—the other is non-essential. The main function of such oppositions, in the progress of society as in that of the individual, is that of keeping alive the sense of individuality, of leading to strenuousness of purpose and endeavour on the part of individuals, with a consequent enriching of the store of imitable materials through inven-

(233) -tion. It also leads to experimentation, and to a testing of rival schemes which forwards the growth of the fit.[32]

150. As to the facts of plastic imitation, they are so marked, and so commonly observed, that I shall be content to name certain of the more remarkable instances; and then refer to the writers who have treated them in detail. One great sphere is that of what is called 'style' in matters of dress, methods of domestic usage, arrangements for social functions—such as calling, announcements of engagements, marriage cards, funeral customs, etc., in short all the affairs of our external social lives in which we ask

(234) 'What is the proper thing?' before we take action at all. The man who is in style illustrates plastic imitation. He shows a certain sensitiveness to the more trivial expressions of social judgment which may be passed upon him. All this is a matter of imitation ; for only in the great outlines can these social arrangements be said to be deliberate. For the most part, and in matters of detail, they are conventions which have sprung up by accident or by the suggestion of some social leader, and have been established through the tendency to conformity which characterizes the average social man. The same tendency extends also to the intellectual life. There is in every community and in every age a style of thinking, a general preference for this sort of topic or that, which is a matter largely of social suggestion and imitation. This may extend only to the lighter things of the mind, in which the newspaper press leads the style ; or it may be discerned as a deeper current in the history of literature and of human thought. Great ideas sometimes sweep suddenly over a people; ideas which had lain dormant for long periods, simply because no leader in the intellectual world had taken them up and made them the 'style.' M. Tarde has attempted to state the laws of these movements, and I may refer to his book for many details.[33]

In the emotional life the same sort of thing is seen in what is called the 'contagion' of feeling. An emotion may sweep through a gathering of people with a strength altogether out of proportion to the occasion of it in the individual's ordinary thought or life. Sighele has set this forth with much richness of illustration,[34] and a recent writer has attempted to work out a calculus of the effects upon an

(235) individual in a crowd of all the suggestions which he gets from the emotional and vocal expressions of the other members of the crowd. Le Bon[35] has also recently depicted very vividly the ways of action of mobs under the sort of social suggestion which enchains them to the pursuit of the one ear-catching and impulse-exciting idea.

§ 5. Theory of Mob-Action

151. With such adequate portrayals before us in the literature of the topic, we may go on to find the place of this class of phenomena in the theory of social evolution. In the first place, it may be well to say with some emphasis that the attempt to build a fruitful conception of society upon the actions of the crowd under the influence of these imitative suggestions, seems to be crude and unphilosophical in the extreme. If the reign of style in social custom and in thought and feeling, and the reign of suggestion in the crowd, are to supply the data for the formula on which the movement of society to-day depends, then the past and future movements of social development must also be explained on the same formula. Water cannot rise higher than its source. If mob-action be the level of modern social attainment, then the mob must society always have been and the mob it must remain. The real impelling forces must then be the individuals whose law or caprice rules the mob.

That we may see the place of mob-action in the social movement, it is only necessary to put the emotional experiences which the individual feels when in the presence of strong social suggestion alongside the rest of his mental

(236) life, and ask how far it constitutes a permanent element in his sane activities, or even in the social activities which have become crystallized in the judgments and expectations of his time. When this is done, it is at once seen that these plastic influences are in themselves mere spontaneities, except so far as they get support from the deeper movements of the social environment, or represent the deeper movements of the person's mental life. Then only do they get vitality ; but not because they are matters of suggestion in the crowd. Their value, on the contrary, comes from the fact that they represent forces already operative. I am disposed to say, trying to put the real character of this sort of social suggestion in a single sentence, that the mind of a crowd is essentially a temporary, unorganized, and ineffective thing. And its more particular characters may be cited to show this. It is hardly worth while to go into the matter except that such a social phenomenon ought to be explained, and that the school of writers referred to think that in describing the mob they are solving the problems of social life. With it, we may hope to get light on the subtler phases of social suggestion. The characteristics of the social suggestions upon which the crowd act show them to be strictly suggestions. They are not truths, nor arguments, nor insights, nor inventions. They are fragments hit off, chips, often words and but words. The type of mental process which is required for the reception of these missiles of the mind is also very exactly characterized by the word 'suggestibility.' The suggestible miud has very well known marks. Balzac hit off one of them in Eugénie Grandet in the question : 'Can it be that collectively man has no memory?' We might go through the list of mental functions asking the same

(237) question of them one by one. Has man collectively no thought, no sense of values, no deliberation, no self-control, no responsibility, no conscience, no will, no motive, no purpose ? And the answer to each such question would be the same : no, he has none. The suggestible consciousness is the consciousness that has no past, no future, no height, no depth, no development, no reference to anything; it has only in and out. It takes in and it acts out —that is all there is to it. It is receptivity gone to seed, and action gone mad. The most striking things about it are its utter thoughtlessness and its extraordinarily lively excitement. A meaningless suggestion to a crowd may bring an outburst of emotion and action which sweeps away some of the landmarks of a generation. This, again, has been set forth by recent writers.

The real question is: What inferences are we to draw from facts which show that the most irrational, capricious, impulsive, and excess-loving man—is a collection of men ? Can it be true that these phenomena show either the origin from which society has sprung, as some recent writers claim, —drawing from it a conclusion favourable to individualism, — or the goal to which society is tending, as others pitifully cry, in justification of social pessimism ? Have we here evidence either that the individual is the wisest human resource, seeing the pitiful outcome of collective action of this type ? - or that democracy finds its fulfilment in social confusion, seeing the omnipresence of the mob?

152. Of course not, we reply to the first of these questions. Social suggestibility could not be the original form of man's life, for then there would be an absolute gulf between him and the animal world, in which instinctive

(238) equipment in definite directions is supreme. Moreover, the social organization we already have would have been as impossible from such a beginning as the pessimists fear it will be when such a condition of things returns in the reign of pure democracy. The mob which acts to-day and forgets to-morrow, kills to-day and sighs for life to-morrow, builds to-day and destroys to-morrow, would be a poor stock in trade for the spirit of social ideality to start its career of progress in the world withal. No, therefore, the atavistic theory of social suggestion is not the true one ; the mob is not a reversion to an earlier type of human life.[36]

153. To the other view nowadays sometimes urged, we must also take exception just as decided. The phenomena of social suggestibility are not the key to the understanding of the future, in the sense that the mob is the typical and controlling social force. The progress of society is progress in education, richness of tradition, continuity of growth; these are quite in opposition to the impulsive and casually explosive activity of the crowd. The loss of identity and social continence on the part of the individual, when he is carried away by a popular movement, is well struck off by the common saying that such a man has 'lost his head.' That is true; but then he regains his head and is ashamed that he lost it. His normal place in society is determined by the events of that part of his life in which he keeps his head. And

(239) the same is true of the events in the life of the social group as a whole.

Such theories repose upon superficial views of the agencies at work in the moulding and developing of institutions. It is not the mob—whether the particular mob be a lynching party, a corn-riot, a commune, a Chamber of Deputies, or a Jingo Senate—which starts or directs the fruitful movements of a time; to say that would be to reverse the connection of cause and effect. The real forces at work are heredity, instinct, tradition, intelligence, personal power in particular men, etc. These are the causal agencies which, to be sure, give us also the mob and the set of performances which must undoubtedly be attributed to it. The principle of suggestion, which seems to have application in this field, is itself responsible for so much that is more profound, that to have all that undone at the capricious operation of the same principle in the casual intercourse of crowds, would be to refute our knowledge with our ignorance.

154. With so much attention to the theories which make the extremest form of social suggestion and incontinence massgebend for social theory as such, we may turn to a more positive examination of the place which such phenomena really hold in human life. This place is clearly that of a Nebenconseqnenz, a by-product, an incidental outcome of the general movement which bodies forth the progress of society.

If, as has been said, the kind of temporary suggestive consciousness seen in the mob is not the original form, nor the final form, of social association, then it must lie somewhere between these two extremes and so represent a phase of social development itself. What this phase is,

(240) and how it comes to be, is easily seen. The emotion of sociality, like all other emotions, has its normal kind of excitant; and when this is present in extreme degrees, the emotional movement is itself liable to be extreme. The presence of persons is the normal social excitant, and the extreme degrees of social influence come naturally over a man, when he is surrounded, hedged in, embarrassed in his thinking, by the crowd. A man's normal mental life may be paralyzed by over-stimulation of any kind. Frighten him by an impending physical calamity, and he 'loses his head'; give him too much cause for joy, and he becomes 'mad' with his rejoicing; let an object of envy, jealousy, hate, remorse, repentance, occupy his mind too intensely or too singly, and his deliberative processes, his memory, his resolution, — indeed, all those saner aspects of his mental life which make him a man, —are temporarily impaired. It is simply a case, then, of the exaggeration of the normal. One element in his make-up gets complete control of the man.

The sort of social influence which a crowd exerts upon the single member of it is precisely the same. That ordinary requirement of social life-co-operation, with the suspension of private interest and judgment in some degree in the interest of a broader social point of view—is here enforced; but the demand made is extreme. The suspension of judgment becomes the inhibition of personal thinking ; the co-operation required for social life becomes the frenzy of social crime; the deeds of the individual are no loner his, but the crowd's. So the whole series of facts, which are indeed so remarkable, may be explained on the view which treats them as excesses in processes upon which the very soberness and sanity of social man ulti-

(241) -mately rest. If man were not able to take social suggestions at all, he would live alone in a cave and shoot his fellow-man at sight. But if he come out of this bondage to individualism into the promised land of co-operation through the give-and-take of social influence, then he must be prepared for the waxing growth of the new sense which his social freedom produces. The more social he becomes, and the more valuable the fruitage of his co-operation, as embodied in institutions, the more danger of excess-discharges in the new channel when the conditions of stimulation are artificial, and the more safeguards must he erect around his institutions, to protect them from himself.[37]

The analogy with the individual's own mind is an instructive one. In order to think, one must have a certain impelling emotional trend, a certain sufficient interest, a plan to which he feels himself committed ; but these very things, the emotive aspect of thought itself, it is that on occasion dethrone his reason, lead him to the extreme excesses of passion, or land him in an institution for the insane. So social thinking, the normal engine of progress both in the creative and in the conservative processes of history, must have the sort of emotive impulse which we call social suggestion ; but to it, when it breaks its bounds and becomes a purposeless function, history owes its cataclysms.[38]

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155. With this explanation of those more wild and unbridled exhibitions which men sometimes make of themselves when acting collectively, we may see also the reason for the more partial and semi-reasonable obsessions which afflict society. The social tendency to be undeliberate, enthusiastic, to put up with the novelty which is most insistent in its claim, and most noisy in its self-commendation —this tendency is easily led by the schemer and agitator in our midst, whose only hope of a following is a following en masse, when the force of the example of a few satellites carries the strength of overpowering suggestion to the unthinking crowd. For this reason the practice of demagoguery is much older than the theory of it. And then, besides, there are always lines of social influence running here and there in literature, in social theory itself, and in political party strife, which open a network of suggestions to the popular mind. All these things, to the degree to which they paralyze the individual's judgment, stifle his thought, or appeal to his intellectual inertia, are really hypnotizing suggestions whose effects the general character of social life itself, with its openness to personal influences, sufficiently explains.

156. II. Another ingredient, also, of the social emotion which we are now considering is to be found in the play-instinct. This class of phenomena has been characterized

(243) in an earlier chapter, and their value in the early life of the child pointed out. It is easy to see that by play the child not only gets into the habit of being social in the normal ways and degrees which his after life requires, but he learns also to give himself up to the social spirit. In games there is the exact counterpart oftentimes of the action of the crowd. The imitative impulse is developed under the lead of the example and injunction of the older and more domineering children. The lesson of self-control has its opposite in the lesson of mass-action and spontaneous suggestibility. Any one who watches the games of a set of boys in the school-yard or in the streets will see that it is only a small part of the moves of the game which are provided for with any consistent or well-planned plot or scheme. The game is begun and then becomes, in great measure, the carrying-out of a series of coups et contre-coups on the part of the leaders among the players; the remainder following the dictation and example of the few. When a leader whoops, the crowd also whoop; when he fights, they fight. All this social practice is most valuable as discipline in serious social business; but it is also preparation for the excesses of social emotion. And a good deal might be said, I think, of the tendency of adults to be drawn together and to act together through the incitement of gaming.[39]

157. Two general remarks may bring this topic to a close. The same relation which subsists between lawabiding and socially continent action, on the one hand, and the explosive action of the snob, on the other hand, also

(244) subsists in the impulses of the individual. One may sit in an auditorium, as the present writer has often done, during an exciting political or religious harangue, and endeavour to keep himself quite cool and unresponsive. He will then be convinced that he himself, even when he sets himself to be rational, is still a creature whose social suggestibility goes deeper than his power of self-control. He feels, in spite of himself, and in the face of his great impatience with himself, the tide of social excitement rising within him ; and the swelling of his bosom is evidence to him that there might be an orator altogether too moving for his resistance. He feels that his footing is his only so long as he is enough alone to keep his thinking processes unentangled in the social emotions which are being stirred up around him.

Another consideration, apropos of this general topic, seems of some importance. It is that the relation of the two tendencies thus found in the individual, and in every community, may vary indefinitely toward the excess of the one factor and the deficiency of the other. We can all point to individuals whom we characterize as suggestible and emotional. They are quick to catch a suggestion, a style, an opinion; they go with the crowd; they are under such evident illusion as to the independence of their judgment that we smile behind their backs. Opposed to these we also know individuals who are as contrary as the wayward child: men who will be original, coelum ruat. And it is perhaps as often the occasion of remark that there are analogous differences in social communities springing from these individual characteristics. A society may be volatile, excitable, suggestible; or phlegmatic, stolid, inert. The Latin and the German races are often contrasted on these lines.

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§ 6. Conclusions for Social Theory

158. With so much consideration of the emotions and impulses which urge on the social man, we may now sum up the conclusions, of a general kind, to which we have been led by the consideration of his emotional life. These conclusions may be set forth somewhat as follows

(1) The beginnings of social life are found in the animals. This is proved not only by the emotional life of the animals, but also by the inherited emotional expressions of the child (e.g., bashfulness and sympathy), which point unmistakably to animal ancestry. This may be called 'instinctive' social life.

(2) There is a stage of social life which is, so to speak, 'spontaneous.' It follows simply from the social impulse itself, considered as a tendency to co-operative action, which arises out of earlier social instincts. It marks an early stage in human social culture, when the arts of peace and the rudimentary forms of social convention proved themselves useful and served as a foundation for the larger social development based on reflective intelligence. This period is shown strikingly in certain stages of the child's and youth's modesty reactions. On the anthropological side, it is confirmed by the existence of peace-loving primitive peoples, with the modes of co-operative activity seen in their industrial contrivances and in their rites and sports.

(3) The child's and the adult's emotional expressions point to a further development, which mere C spontaneous sociality is not sufficient to explain. It is marked by the adoption, with modifications, of the emotional reactions of spontaneous and instinctive periods, thus showing unmis-

(246) -takably its origin ; but it serves to introduce a further period, which in the growth of the child has its ground in self-consciousness. Conspicuous among the exhibitions of an emotional kind which characterize this period, are the modified expressions of modesty and sympathy which accompany self-consciousness. This is the 'reflective' period.

(4.) The general impulse of society, which is common to all the manifestations of co-operative life, itself gives an emotion which appears in the phenomenon of 'plastic imitation,' reaching its extreme form in the exhibitions of mob-action. It is an index of the fact of sociality which works by imitation rather than a cause of it, or its main outcome.

Notes

  1. The 'recapitulation' theory (according to which the individual goes through stages in his development which show in order some of the stages which the species has passed through) is discussed with reference to mental traits in my Mental Development, Chap. I, where references to the biological literature are also given.
  2. My earlier discussion, already referred to (.'Mental Development, Chap. L), takes up only the first of these questions.
  3. Cf. Appendix A, Organic Selection and Social Heredity.
  4. See also Mosso, Fear.
  5. Baldwin, Mental Development, Chap. VI., § 6 (as revised in the 4th ed.).
  6. This is confirmed by Mosso's interesting researches on the vasomotor changes in the rabbit's ear during slight fear and excitement : Mosso, Fear.
  7. The evidence of such a sense is usually drawn from just these animal emotions: pride, jealousy, etc. And in estimating it, one is embarrassed by the question as to how much of these may be instinctive. In a paper on ' Intimations of Self-consciousness in Animals,' read in my Seminary, Dr. C. W. Hodge concluded that we must allow dogs (e.g.) an obscure form of self-feeling. That a dog may eject something of his own mental life and act as if he 'put himself in another's shoes,' while still maintaining his own self-sense, appears in the following case, which I have at first hand from Mrs. Baldwin. Her dog Nero was accustomed to escape from the yard by a hole under the fence. On one occasion a strange dog visited him and was shut in the yard by the closing of the gate. Nero, who was outside, helped him to get out by running ahead on the other side of the fence, barking vigorously, and looking back to see that the other dog followed, until he led him to the hole through which he was himself accustomed to escape.
  8. Cf. Darwin's description of these attitudes in the dog. Exp. of the Emotions.
  9. See Groos' detailed descriptions of 'Courting Plays' and the bashfulness (Sprodigkeit) of the female, especially among birds (loc. cit., pp. 243, 288).
  10. The present writer has been himself a victim of a very sensitive social sense in many respects, and the following remarks may be taken as giving in great part his own experience.
  11. At the same time there is an extreme form of this social sentiment, when the mental processes are kept strictly objective, which amounts to a sort of exaltation of all the faculties and a stimulus to success. The only way that I, for one, can undo this distressing outgo of energy, and release these uncomfortable inhibitions, is to expand the abdomen outwards by a strong muscular effort and at the same time breathe-in as deeply as I can. But even the process of doing this is not normal, the very control of these muscles being in some degree under the same social ban. After such a siege of society, one must seek the rest of absolute solitude. The comparative relief found in expanding the abdominal muscles is probably due to the fact that it allows the contents of the body to fall, and so relieves the heart from any artificial pressure which may be upon it from the surrounding organs. Further, the increased heart-action which is itself a part of the reaction of shyness, requires all the space it can get. It is only in self-defence that such a person cultivates social coldness and indifference. Two recent studies of these effects are 'Morbid Shyness,' by H. Campbell, Brit. Med. Journal, Sept. 26, 1896, p. 805, and L. Dugas' ' La Timidité.'
  12. Mosso, however, thinks the blush is more diffused and is only the striking instance of the general vasomotor effect seen (in his experiments on animals) in the skin-vessels generally. Darwin supposes the blush to be due to 'attention to self' (Exp. of Emotion, pp. 331 ff.), and his discussion of the vasomotor effects of the attention is still one of the best.
  13. The sameness of expression of the more refined with the coarser emotions has been noticed before, and it has been discussed from an evolution point of view by Schneider, Thierische Wille, p. 120.
  14. With animals this is true, even to life-and-death struggle between males. Cf. Groos, loc. cit., pp. 130, 144.
  15. See note in Appendix H, III.
  16. Cf., besides Darwin and Spencer, also Mosso (Fear), Mantegazza (Physiognomy and Expression), James (Princ. of Psychology, II., Chap. XXV.), Dewey (Psychol. Review, Nov., 1894, and Jan., 1895), Baldwin (Mental Development, Chap. VIII.).
  17. Cf. Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, Chap. I), who holds that marriage exists among animals as an instinct due to natural selection, its utility being the raising of the family : " Marriage is rooted in family rather than family in marriage " (p. 22).
  18. Topinard (Monist, January, 1897) has recently collected evidence to show that these two tendencies do not always go together; that the most gregarious and instinctively `social' animals are often those of least developed family life, and vice versa.
  19. Of course its confirmation would require much anthropological research which I am not able to bring to it. See the quotations, regarding this well-recognized period, however, in Appendix F. May this declaration of the hypothetical character of this parallel appease thee, learned critic, whose red-rag instinct is keen for theory!
  20. Indeed, the competition of groups of men with one another (called above ' group selection'; Chap. V., § 4) was doubtless the means of the selection of the more socially endowed tribes, as, for example, those which applied the principle of division of labour in their internal economy.
  21. Of these sorts of co-operation, the ' instinctive' belongs to animal ' companies' (Cf. Appendix D.); the 'spontaneous' mainly and the 'reflective' almost exclusively to human 'societies.' See distinction between 'companies' and 'societies' below in Chap. XII. (Sect. 320). I use the word 'co-operation' rather than ' association,' which has some currency, chiefly because of the technical meaning which the latter term has in psychology. 'Association of ideas' is a very important fact in the psychology of 'co-operation' and two distinct terms seem to be requisite for clearness. ' Co-operation ' involves, besides, some degree of active attitude on the part of the individuals in distinction from the ' association' by mere herding, so common in the animal world, which is a very static and unfruitful form of gregariousness, and which in the human mob is actually destructive.
  22. Cf. the exposition of Bradley's description of the self of reflection in Appendix E.
  23. The topic ' Social Progress'; see Chap. XIII., below.
  24. Cf. Appendix D.
  25. Yet both Tarde and Royce make perhaps too much of this.
  26. Baldwin, Mental Development, Chap. VI.
  27. Since the text was written (and too late to be available to me) M. Tarde has published a work on 'Opposition' which deals with facts and laws contrasted with those of 'Imitation.' The term 'opposition' may well be given this technical meaning in social science.
  28. Mental Development, Chap. XII.,§2. Plastic in view of the mobile condition of the crowd under a strong suggestion. No other term has been proposed for it, so far as I know.
  29. On social sanctions (Chap. X.), where intellectual and moral conflicts are dwelt upon.
  30. Professor Royce.
  31. See also remarks made above (Sect. 75). "We find volition brought out on occasion of imitation, a higher kind of imitation called 'persistent,' in which the child does not rest content with the degree of success his old reactions provide, but aims 'to try again' for better things. Now the imitative instinct itself is thus. in this transition, brought to the bar, and violated by its own passage into volition In volition, the agency of the actor comes to instruct him. He learns his power to resist and to conquer, as well as his weakness and subjection to a copy. And the child comes, just in this conflict between imitation, an instinct, and suggestion, an innovation, to break through and make himself an inventor and a free agent. In fact, we have found a type of action realized in the phrase ' contrary' or ' wayward' suggestion, in which just this revolt becomes a way of action. The boy won't imitate. This simply means that he won't imitate what other people ask him to, but prefers to imitate what he asks himself to. He imitates just the same, of course. But the difference is world wide. A ' contrary' boy has learned the lesson of volition, has passed from suggestion to conduct, has mounted from the second to the third level, and is available for genius-material " (Baldwin, Mental Development, pp. 430 f.).
  32. The discussion of Social Progress, in Chap. XIII. below, makes due recognition of this constant inventiveness, and of its necessity for social progress. A view which seems to make much more of opposition of this emotional type than 1 find myself able to do is indicated in the letter of Professor Royce just referred to, which I take pleasure in quoting here : —
    " I think that there is here one very general factor neglected which deserves more study. One great region of social functioning consists in deliberately producing what I have called 'social contrast effects.' Questioning, criticism, social obstinacy, gossip about one's neighbours, opposition, repartee, the social game of the sexes, in all its deliberate forms,—these are functions whose conscious purpose is, not to reduce to unity, not to decrease varieties, but to find, to bring out, and to dwell upon the differences amongst selves. Such functions make up a fair half of social conscious life. They obscure, for most people, the imitative elements actually so universal, so that to most people the discovery of the universality of imitation comes as a surprise, like the surprise of learning that one has always been talking prose. Well, as I notice, a great deal of an individual's inventiveness is a function due to the appearance of social contrast effects. Light up my conscious contents by some new contrast with the ideas of another, and I see, in myself, what I never saw before, and now I have 'a new idea.'

    " One of the great, psychologically potent purposes of social life is the purpose to find the self different from any other self. The purpose is often vain, and its conscious expressions are full of illusions amusing to the on-looker, but of all grades of social organization, from the children in the market place to the nations stubbornly holding aloof from one another prating of glory, and levying tariffs, one could assert with a force almost equal to that of Tarde's definition, that: Society is a mutual display of mental contrasts."
  33. Tarde, Les Lois de l'Imitation.
  34. Sighele, La Foule criminelle.
  35. Le Bon, The Crowd.
  36. It cannot be said to represent what we have called 'spontaneous' social co-operation, Spice being in the higher reflective epoch it has all the resources, especially for destructive action, of established and organized society; and more especially since it has not the sturdy characters which belong to the individuals at that epoch. The tendency to 'contrary' suggestion and individual 'opposition' are quite absent from the mob.
  37. Sighele's explanation of the tendency of the mob to action of a low type, is that a sort of average capacity is struck among all the individuals (La Foule criminelle, p. 63). But if that were true, excess in crime would be as rare as great virtue in the crowd.
  38. Interesting cases from the life of the more social animals might be cited, going to show that with them this mass-action is a departure from their normal life. The following quotation from Hudson apropos of the violent setting of a herd upon its weak members lends itself to our view: —
    "The instinct is, then, not only useless but actually detrimental; and, this being so, the action of the herd in destroying one of its members, is not even to be regarded as an instinct proper, but rather as an aberration of an instinct, a blunder, into which animals sometimes fall when excited to action in unusual circumstances. The first thing that strikes us is that in these wild abnormal movements of social animals, they are acting in violent contradiction to the whole tenor of their lives— and to the whole body of their instincts and habits which have made it possible for them to exist together in communities." (Nat. in La Plata, p. 340 f.)
  39. The social influence of gaming should be brought out by some one writing on human games; I commend it to the distinguished author of the forthcoming work, Die Spiele der Menschen.

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