[Footnote 1: R. S. Woodworth: Dynamic Psychology, p. 204.]

The fact is, however, that while social activity is promoted because individuals find in cooeperation the possibility of the satisfaction of their egoistic desires, social activity is primarily brought about through the specifically social tendencies which are part of our native equipment. It is with these natural bases of social activity that we shall in this chapter be particularly concerned. We shall have to take note, in the first place, of a native tendency to be with other people, to feel an unlearned sense of comfort in their presence, and uneasiness if too much separated from them, physically, or in action, feeling, or thought. Human beings tend, furthermore, to reproduce sympathetically the emotions of others, especially those of their own social and economic groups. Thirdly, man's conduct is natively social in that he is by nature specifically sensitive to praise and blame, that he will modify his conduct so as to secure the one and avoid the other. Finally, besides the specific tendencies to respond to the presence, the feelings, the actions, and the thoughts of others, man displays a "capacity for social behavior." And, as is the case with all native capacities, man has, therefore, a native interest in group or social activity for its own sake.

The predominantly social character of human behavior has thus a twofold explanation. It is based, in the first place, on the group of native tendencies of a social character to which we have already referred. It is based, secondly, on the necessity for group activity and cooeperation which the individual experiences in the satisfaction of his egoistic impulses and desires. Man, because of his original tendencies, wants to live, act, think, and feel with others; for the satisfaction of his nonsocial impulses he must live with others. And in civilized society human action from almost earliest childhood is in, and with reference to, a group. Human behavior is thus seen to be that of an essentially social nature acting in an essentially social environment. And, as in the case of other instinctive and habitual activities, human beings experience in social activity an immediate satisfaction apart from any satisfactions toward which it may be the instrument.

GREGARIOUSNESS. The "herd instinct" is manifested by many animals very low in the scale of animal development. McDougall quotes in this connection Francis Galton's classical account of this instinct in its crudest form: "Describing the South African ox in Damaraland, he says he displays no affection for his fellows, and hardly seems to notice their existence, so long as he is among them; but, if he becomes separated from the herd, he displays an extreme distress that will not let him rest until he succeeds in rejoining it, when he hastens to bury himself in the midst of it, seeking the closest possible contact with the bodies of his fellows."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: Social Psychology, p. 84.]

This original tendency exhibits itself among human beings in a variety of ways. The tendency of human beings to herd together, for which there is evidence in the earliest history of the race, may be observed on any crowded thoroughfare, or in any amusement park, or city. That group life has expanded partly through practical necessity, is, of course, true, but groups of humans tend to become, as in our monster cities, larger than they need be, or can be for economic efficiency.

The fascination of city life has not infrequently been set down to the multiplicity of opportunities offered in the way of companions, amusements, and occupations after one's own taste. But the fascination has clearly a more instinctive basis, the desire to be with other people. Many a man, as has been pointed out, lives in a large city as unsociable and secluded a life as if he were surrounded by miles of mountain or prairie, who yet could not be happy elsewhere. Any one who has failed to be amused by a really good comedy when the theater was comparatively empty, or in the presence of thousands of others hugely enjoyed a second-rate baseball game, or gone down to the crowded shopping district to get what he could have purchased on a side-street uptown, can appreciate how instinctive is this undiscriminating desire for companionship.

The native intensity of this desire is what makes rural isolation, on the other hand, so unsatisfactory. The bleakness of New England country life as pictured in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, or in some of Robert Frost's North of Boston, is due more than anything else to this privation from companionship. Perhaps nothing better could be said for the rural telephone, the interurban trolley, and the cheap automobile than that they make possible the fulfillment of this normal human longing to be near and with other people in body and spirit. The horror which makes it practically impossible in civilized countries to legalize punishment by solitary confinement and the nervous collapse which such confinement brings about are indications of how deep-seated is this desire.

The "herd instinct," like all the other of man's original tendencies, is educable. It can be trained to respond to groups of various sizes and kinds. In its simplest manifestation it tends to be aroused by the family, but in the history of civilization the group tends progressively to enlarge. The family, the town, the nation—the gregarious instinct may be educated to respond to these ever-widening groups. The intensity and controlling power of this instinct over our actions seems to vary with the degree of intimacy and intercommunication between the individual and the group. In primitive society it is most intense among the family and clan, and the family still remains in civilized society, certainly in rural districts, a very closely knit primary group. But as intercommunication widens, a sense of attachment to and solidarity with a larger group begins to make itself felt. That intercommunication is largely important in extending the group in response to which the herd instinct may be aroused, is well illustrated by the utter lack of national group feeling exhibited during the Great War by recruits drafted from the backwoods districts where they had been tied by no railroads or newspapers to the national civilization of which they were a part.

The devotion of generous-hearted souls to "lost causes," whether political or religious, of the individual to his family or friends in the face of personal privation, are classic illustrations of the power of men's gregarious instinct even in the face of the dictates of reason. In the perhaps extreme but nevertheless suggestive statement of Mr. Trotter:

He [man] is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage and endurance, and can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his own punishment, and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, pp. 114-15.]

To how large a group the individual can respond with spontaneous and instinctive loyalty is questionable. The small child throws out his arms and exclaims passionately, "I love the whole world." Auguste Comte could be imbued with a fervor for "humanity" in the abstract. The idea of a League of Nations arouses in some minds a passionate devotion to a world order that to those themselves habituated to an intense loyalty to the national group seems incredible. Certainly it is true that we rapidly outgrow that state of mind common to enthusiastic adolescence when we can develop a love for the universe in the abstract. The instinct of gregariousness seems unquestionably to be most intense where there is intimacy and vividness of group association. The primary groups, as Professor Ross calls them, are face-to-face associations, the family, the play group, the neighborhood group. If "world patriotism" is a possibility, it is because rapid communication and the frequency of travel, and the education of the industrial classes to "the international mind" tend to break down barriers and to make distant countries and persons vivid and directly imaginable. But there seems to be no substitute for direct personal contact. Even devotion to a country tends to take the form of phrases, places, persons, and symbols, to which we have been familiarized.

GREGARIOUSNESS IMPORTANT FOR SOCIAL SOLIDARITY. The gregarious instinct, powerful as it is, is of the greatest significance for social solidarity, and, if misdirected, for seriously limiting it. It is, in the first place, the trait without which social solidarity would be almost impossible. "In early times when population was scanty, it must have played an important part in social evolution by keeping men together, and thereby occasioning the need for social laws and institutions."[1] The coherence of national, political, or religious groups depends primarily on the extent to which the gregarious instinct may be aroused. Allegiance to a group may, of course, be secured through participation in common ideals. This is illustrated in the case of the numerous literary and scientific associations that cut across national boundaries and knit into groups similarly interested persons all over the world. Groups may, again, be formed through common economic interests, as in the case of labor unions, or employers' associations. Groups may be knit and strengthened through law and custom. And all these factors play a smaller or larger part in any important grouping of men in contemporary society. But unless there is, on the part of the members of the group, a deep-seated emotional attachment to the group itself, solidarity will be very precarious. The intensity and solidarity, of feeling exhibited so markedly during war-time is made possible by the intense excitability of this instinct when the group is under conditions of stress or danger. Any scheme for enlisting a great number of individuals in modern society in a scheme of social reform or improvement, must and does, when it is successful, arouse in him a heightened sense of loyalty to a group more than reasoned approval of a cause. Effective recruiting posters more often told the passer-by, "Your country needs you," than they attempted to convince him in black-and-white logic of the justice of his country's aims.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: Social Psychology, p. 301.]

GREGARIOUSNESS MAY HINDER THE SOLIDARITY OF LARGE GROUPS. While gregariousness is the foundation of group solidarity, it also interferes with the solidarity of large groups, and not infrequently brings about conflicts between them, and within groups themselves. Within even so small a community as a college class, cliques may form; and so in a country, attachment to the smaller group may inhibit attachment to the larger. An individual may be vaguely patriotic, but instinctively aroused more by his own economic or local or racial group than by the country as a whole. A man may at heart be more devoted to his town or home than to the United States. (Not infrequently his town or home is what the United States means to the citizen.) Even to-day the sectional feeling that exists in many parts of the country cannot be completely explained as occurring through separate economic interests. The division of classes within a country is largely an economic matter, but even in such a situation a loyalty develops to the class as a class or group.

Again, the same instinct to herd with his fellows that makes a man intensely loyal to his own group may operate to make him indifferent to the difficulties or jealous and suspicious of the aims of others Gregariousness is the basis not only of patriotism, but of chauvinism, not only of civic pride, but of provincialism. The narrowness and parochialism of group attachments is most pronounced where groups and communities are rigidly set off one from another. In such circumstances community of feeling and understanding is largely reduced. This may be seen even under contemporary conditions in the comparatively complete inability of different professional, social, and economic groups within the same society to understand each other, and the proverbial ignorance and carelessness of one half of the population as to "how the other half lives." Narrowness of group feeling tends to grow less pronounced under the mobile conditions of modern industry, communication, and education. Trade relations knit the farthest parts of the globe together; this morning's newspaper puts us in touch with the whole of mankind. We have outgrown the days when every stranger was an enemy. But though the barriers between nations are tending to break down, within nations individuals tend, as they grow older, to experience an insulated devotion to their own set or social group, a callous oblivion to the needs and desires of that great majority of mankind with whom they have a less keen sense of "consciousness of kind."

GREGARIOUSNESS IN BELIEF. Man's gregarious character, as already pointed out, is manifested not only in his desire to be physically with his fellows, but to be at one with them in their actions, feelings, and thoughts. Beliefs once established tend to remain established if for no other reason than that they are believed in by the majority. That an opinion gains prestige merely because we know other people believe it, is frequently illustrated by the facility with which rumor travels. At the end of the Great War, it will be recalled, the false news of the armistice report flew from mouth to mouth and was accepted with the most amazing credulity simply because "everybody said so." The spread of superstitions and old wives' tales and their long lingering in the minds even of intelligent people is testimony that men tend mentally as well as physically to herd together.

The tendency to find comfort in the presence of one's fellows and uneasiness if too much separated from them, is as pronounced in the sphere of moral and intellectual relations as it is in the case of merely physical proximity. We like to be one of a crowd in our opinions and beliefs, as well as in our persons. There is hardly anything more painful than the sense of being utterly alone in one's opinions. Even the extreme dissenter from the accustomed ways of thinking and feeling of the majority is associated with or pictures some little group which agrees with him. And, if we cannot find contemporaries to share our extreme opinions, we at least imagine some ideal group now or in posterity to share it with us.

GREGARIOUSNESS IN HABITS OF ACTION. But if men tend to think in groups they tend more emphatically still to act in groups, to be acutely uncomfortable when acting in a fashion different from that customary among the majority of their fellows. Habits of action are more deep-seated physiologically than habits of thought (which is one reason why our theories are so often in advance of our practice). People will accede intellectually to new ideas which they would not and could not practice, the mind being, as it were, more convertible than the emotions. Even in minor matters, in dress, speech, and manners, we like to do the accustomed thing. It is more painful for most people to use the wrong fork at dinner, or to be dressed in a business suit where everyone else is in evening clothes, than to commit a fallacy, or to act upon prejudices rather than upon logical conclusions.

The individual's instinctive desire to be identical in action with other members of his group, from the collars and clothes he wears to the way he brings up his children, is greatly reinforced by the punishment meted out to those who differ from the majority. This may vary from ridicule, as in the case of the laughter that greets the poet's proverbial long hair and flowing tie, the foreigner's accent, or a straw hat in April, to the confinement and privation that are the penalties for any marked infringement of the accepted modes of life. Even when the punishments are slight, they are effective. A man who has no moral or religious scruples with reference to gambling on any day of the week will, to avoid the social ostracism of his neighbors, refrain from playing cards on his front porch on Sunday. For no other reason than to avoid being consciously different, many a man will not wear cool white clothes on a hot day in his office who will wear them on a cool evening at the seashore.

THE EFFECT OF GREGARIOUSNESS ON INNOVATION. A strong instinctive tendency to community of action and thought is in large part responsible for the comparative absence of innovation in either of these fields. A premium is put upon the conventional, the customary, the common, both in the instinctive satisfaction they give the individual, and in the high value set upon them by society. In advanced societies, however, the habit of inquiry and originality may itself come to be endorsed by the majority, as it is among scientists and artists. The herd instinct need not always act on the side of unreason. Among the intellectual classes, it is already enlisted on the side of free inquiry, which among scholars is the fundamental common habit.

If rationality were once to become really respectable, if we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned into advantages.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter; loc. cit., p. 45.]

SYMPATHY (A SPECIALIZATION OF GREGARIOUSNESS). Sympathy, in the strict psychological sense of the term, means a "suffering with, the experiencing of any feeling or emotion when and because we observe in other persons or creatures the expression of that feeling of emotion."[2] The behavior of animals exhibits the external features of sympathetic action very clearly. "Two dogs begin to growl or fight, and at once all the dogs within sound and sight stiffen themselves, and show every symptom of anger. Or one beast in a herd stands arrested, gazing in curiosity on some unfamiliar object, and presently his fellows also, to whom the object may be invisible, display curiosity and come up to join in the examination of the object."[1]

[Footnote 2: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 92.]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 93.]

Human beings tend not only sympathetically to reproduce the instinctive actions of others,[2] but they tend, despite themselves, to experience directly and immediately, often involuntarily, the emotions experienced and outwardly manifested by others. Almost everyone has had his mood heightened to at least kindly joy by the presence in a crowded street car of a young child whose inquiring prattle and light-hearted laughter were subdued by the gray restraints and responsibilities of maturity. One melancholy face can crush the joy of a boisterous and cheerful party;[3] the eagerness and enthusiasm of an orator can, irrespective of the merits of the cause he is defending, provoke eagerness and enthusiasm for the same cause among an audience that does not in the least understand what the orator is talking about.

[Footnote 2: "In man infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements of a ropewalker, while watching him, feeling a shock in one's legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of this kind are cases of physiological sympathy." Ribot: Psychology of the Emotions, p. 232.

Reproduction of the actions of others has by a certain school of philosophers and psychologists, notably Tarde, Le Bon, and Baldwin, been ascribed to imitation. But no experimental researches have revealed any such specific instinct to imitate (see Thorndike, p. 73 ff.), and "imitations" of acts can generally be traced to sympathy, or suggestion—which is sympathy on an intellectual plane.]

[Footnote 3: Such expressions as "kill joy," "wet blanket," "life of the party" are instances of the popular appreciation of the fact of social contagion.]

One brand of cigarettes was recently advertised by the face of a young soldier, roguishly irresponsible, palpably and completely given over to joy. One found one's self transported into something of this same mood before one had a chance to speculate at all as to whether there was any causal relation between the specific quality of tobacco the youngster was smoking, and that contagious, undeniable delight. What is called personal magnetism is perhaps more than anything else the ability to provoke in others sympathetic experiences of pleasant and exhilarating emotions.

Sensibility to the emotions of others, though possessed by almost all individuals, varies in degree. The complete absence of it marks a man out as "stolid," "cold," "callous," "brutal." Such a type of personality may be efficient and successful in pursuits requiring nothing besides a direct analysis of facts, uncolored by any irrelevant access of feeling, as in the case of mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual analysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy of feeling is illustrated in the case of John Stuart Mill, who writes in his Autobiography:

Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. They are, therefore, I thought, favorable to prudence and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and above all fearfully undermine all desires and ... all except the purely physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had.... All those to whom I looked up were of the opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: Autobiography (Holt edition), p. 138.]

A generous degree of susceptibility to the emotions of others makes a man what is variously called "mellow," "humane," "large-hearted," "generous-souled." The possession of such susceptibility is an asset, first, in that it enriches life for its possessor. It gives him a warm insight into the feelings, emotions, desires, habits of mind and action of other people, and gives to his experiences with them a vivid and personal significance not attainable by any hollow intellectual analysis. It is an asset, moreover, in the purely utilitarian business of dealing with men. The statesman or executive who deals with men as so many animate machines, may achieve certain mechanical and arbitrary successes. But he will be missing half the data on which his decisions must be based if he does not have a live and sensitive appreciation of how men feel when placed in given situations. The placing of women in positions of labor management where women chiefly are to be dealt with is an illustration of the recognition of the importance of sympathy, fellow-feeling in the management of human affairs. One of the reasons why many university scholars make poor teachers is because they cannot place themselves back at the point where a subject was as live and fresh and virgin to them as it is to their students.

An extraordinary degree or a decided hypertrophy of emotional susceptibility is as dangerous a trait as its possession in a reasonable degree is a utility and an enrichment of life. It results in the hysteria or sentimentalism which adds to the real evils and difficulties of life fancied grievances and disasters. Such temperaments when confronted with any good or beautiful action dissolve into ecstasy, and when faced with a problem or a difficulty dissolve into tears. Doctors will not treat their own children because the overplus of sympathy is a hindrance to action. Sentimental ladies are not the most efficient charity workers or prisoner reformers.

While there is a general tendency to experience sympathetically the feelings of others, this becomes specialized in most people, and one tends to experience most immediately and intensely the emotions of one's own kind, physically, socially, and intellectually. Sympathy is a specialization of man's general gregariousness, and becomes more specialized as one becomes habituated exclusively to a small group. Within this small group, individuals not only experience the emotions of others, but like to share and communicate their own emotions.

The nearer people are to us in mode of life, social status, and intellectual interests, the closer is community of feeling and "consciousness of kind." Two Americans meeting in a foreign country have a quick and sympathetic understanding of each other. Two alumni of the same college meeting in a distant city have a common basis of interest and feeling.

This easy give-and-take of feeling and emotion makes the deep attractiveness of intimate companionship. Our companion has but to mention a name or a place, and we experience the same associations, the pleasures, or antipathies which he does. A gesture, a curious glance of the eye, a pause, we understand as quickly as if he had spoken a sentence. But not only do we understand his feelings; he (or she) understands ours. And for most people, all their interests and enjoyments are heightened by the presence of an intimately known companion.

Many children manifest very clearly this tendency of active sympathy; they demand that their every emotion shall be shared at once. "Oh, come and look!" is their constant cry when out for a walk, and every object that excites their curiosity or admiration is brought at once, or pointed out, to their companion.... On the other hand, another child, brought up, perhaps, under identical conditions, but in whom this impulse is relatively weak, will explore a garden, interested and excited for hours together, without once feeling the need for sympathy, without once calling on others to share his emotions.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 172.]

In adult life, few people care to go to theater or concert alone, and a man at a club will wander half through the dining-room until he will find some one with whom he will feel like sitting through a dinner conversation.

The fact that emotions exhibited in one individual are readily aroused in another makes art possible and makes it interesting. A poet by a phrase, a musician by a chord or melody, can suddenly reproduce in us his own feeling of gayety or exaltation. A painter by disposition of line and color can suggest the majesty of mountains, or the sadness of a sunset as he himself has experienced it. In novels and dramas we can relive the feelings that the writer imagines to have been experienced by others. It is testimony to the easy excitability of sympathy as well as to an artist's skill that this can sometimes be done in a few lines or paragraphs. Witness the famous opening of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

To Aristotle tragedy seemed to afford a cleansing or "katharsis of the soul" through the sympathetic experience of pity or fear. To Schopenhauer music was the greatest of the arts because it made us at one with the sorrows and the strivings of the world. All the representative arts are vivid ways of making us feel with the passions or emotions that stir mankind. And those men are poets, painters, or musicians who, besides having a unique gift of expression, whether in word, tone, or color, have themselves an unusually high sensitivity to the moods of other men and to the imagined moods of the natural scenes among which they move.[1]

[Footnote 1: Poets generally are so susceptible to emotional shades and nuances that they read them into situations where they are not present, and then reproduce them sympathetically in their works. The so-called "pathetic fallacy" is an excellent illustration of this. Poets sympathize with the emotions of a landscape, emotions which were in the first place, their own.]

In experience, the presence or absence of genuine sympathy with the emotions of others determines to no small extent the character of our dealings with them. Even courts of justice take motives into account and juries have been known to ask for clemency for a murderer because of their keen realization of the provocation which he had undergone. Fellow-feeling with others may again warp our judgments or soften them; in our judgment of the work of our friends, it is difficult altogether to discount our personal interest and affection. On the other hand, we may have the most sincere admiration and respect for a man, and yet be seriously hampered in our dealings with him, socially or professionally, by a total lack of sympathy with his motives and desires.

PRAISE AND BLAME. An important part of man's social equipment is his susceptibility to the praise and blame of his fellows. That is, among the things which instinctively satisfy men are objective marks of praise or approval on the part of other people; among the things which annoy them, sometimes to the point of acute distress, are marks of disapproval, scorn, or blame. This is illustrated most simply and directly in the satisfaction felt at "intimate approval as by smiles, pats," kindly words, or epithets applied by other people to one's own actions or ideas, and the discomfort, amounting sometimes to pain, that is felt at frowns, hoots, sneers, and epithets of scorn or derision. One student of this subject notes "as early as the fourth month a 'hurt' way of crying which seemed to indicate a sense of personal slight. It was quite different from the cry of pain or that of anger, but seemed about the same as the cry of fright. The slightest tone of reproof would produce it. On the other hand, if people took notice and laughed and encouraged, she was hilarious."[1]

[Footnote 1: Cooley: Human Nature and the Social Order, p. 166.]

Man's sensitiveness to praise and blame is paralleled by his instinctive tendency to express them.

Smiles, respectful stares, and encouraging shouts occur, I think, as instinctive responses to relief from hunger, rescue from fear, gorgeous display, instinctive acts of strength and daring, victory, and other impressive instinctive behavior that is harmless to the onlooker. Similarly, frowns, hoots, and sneers seem bound as original responses to the observation of empty-handedness, deformity, physical meanness, pusillanimity, and defect. As in the case of all original tendencies, such behavior is early complicated and in the end much distorted, by training; but the resulting total cannot be explained by nurture alone.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, pp. 32-33.]

Man's instinctive tendency to respond to praise and blame and to exhibit them is, next to gregariousness—through which men in the first place are able to live together—the individual human trait most significant for social life. For while the desire for praise, the avoidance of blame, and the expression of both are instinctive, the occasions on which they are called forth depend on the traditions and group habits to which the individual has been exposed. He soon learns that in the society in which he is living, certain acts will bring him the praise of others; certain other acts will bring him their disapproval. The whole scope of his activity may thus be profoundly modified by the penalties and prizes in the way of praise and blame which society attaches to different modes of action. And the more explicit and outward signs there are of the approval or scorn of others, the more will individual action be subject to social control.

As Plato said so long ago and said so well:

Whenever they [the public] crowd to the popular assembly, the law courts, the theaters, the camp, or any public gathering of large bodies, and there sit in a dense and uproarious mass to censure some of the things said or done, and applaud others, always in excess; shouting and clapping, until, in addition to their own noise, the rocks and the places wherein they are echo back redoubled the uproar of their censure and applause. At such a moment, how is a young man, think you, to retain his self-possession? Can any private education that he has received hold out against such a torrent of censure and applause, and avoid being swept away down the stream, wherever it may lead, until he is brought to adopt the language of these men as to what is honorable and dishonorable, and to imitate all their practices, and to become their very counterpart?[1]

[Footnote 1: Plato: Republic (Davies and Vaughn translation), p. 208.]

We have already had occasion to point out that education is the method by which society inculcates in its younger members habits which are regarded as socially beneficial. In its broadest sense the whole social environment is an individual's education. And it is an education chiefly through experience with other people, discovering what they will and will not tolerate, what they will cherish and what they will condemn.

The elaborate paraphernalia and rites of fashion in clothes exist chiefly by virtue of their value as means of securing diffuse notice and approval. The primitive sex display is now a minor cause: women obviously dress for other women's eyes. Much the same is true of subservience to fashions in furniture, food, manners, morals, and religion. The institution of tipping, which began, perhaps, in kindliness and was fostered by economic self-interest, is now well-nigh impregnable because no man is brave enough to withstand the scorn of a line of lackeys whom he heartily despises, or of a few onlookers whom he will never see again.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thorndike: loc. cit., p. 32.]

One of the things we mean when we say a man is worldly-wise, shrewd, knows human nature, is that he knows what will win people's admiration, and knows, moreover, to distinguish between that which they publicly condemn and secretly approve, and vice versa. In the passage quoted above Plato was trying to show how the young Athenian acquired not wisdom itself, but "worldly wisdom," the ability to get along in affairs. This he learned not from the professional teachers, but from the Athenian public, with whose approvals and disapprovals he came in daily contact.

PRAISE AND BLAME MODIFY HABIT. In order to avoid censure and gain the expressed approval of others, people learn, either, as we say, through bitter experience, or deliberately, to modify their actions. The well-brought-up child, even when its mother is not about and its appetite unsatisfied, may be ashamed to say "Yes" to a second offering of ice cream. The ten-year-old who likes to be coddled by his mother in private would be acutely embarrassed to be "babied" in the presence of other people. Among adults, likewise, actions are checked, prompted, or modified by the praise and blame that have become habitually associated with them. Men like to appear virtuous, even if they do not like to practice virtue. It is not only the professional politician who does generous acts for public approval, nor is even the most disinterested and conscientious work altogether free from being affected by the expressed attitudes of approval or disapproval of other people. Even transportation companies have found that they can increase the efficiency of their employees by expressing in some form the approval of their employees' courtesy and loyalty.[1] "A man, again, ... may fail to see any 'reason' why an elementary-school teacher or a second-division clerk cannot do his work properly after he has been 'put in his place' by some official who happens to combine personal callousness with social superiority. But no statesman who did so could create an effective educational or clerical service."[2]

[Footnote 1: Many transportation companies maintain a merit system. Sometimes they award special insignia, as the green flag to the New York bus-drivers who save gasoline.]

[Footnote 2: Wallas: Great Society, p. 197.]

To say that we are moved to action by praise and blame is not to indicate that actions thus motivated are done in a spirit of hypocrisy or charlatanism. Even the most sincere acts are prompted or sustained, especially where their performance involves serious personal privation or sacrifice, by the imagined or actual approval of those whom we love, admire, or respect. Whose praise and blame individuals will care about depends on their education and temperamental differences. That there will be some group, however small, is almost sure to be the case. The poet who curls his lip at popular taste cherishes the more keenly the applause of those whom he regards as competent judges. The martyr will be unmoved by the curses, the jeers, and the hoots of the contemporary multitude so long as he has the trust of his small band of comrades or faith that the Lord approves his ways. A man who is utterly alone in the approval of his actions is regarded as crazy or is driven so by the perpetual disesteem in which he is held. There have been cases in literature and life of accused criminals who could bear up against the belief of the whole world in their guilt so long as one friend or kinsman had faith in them. That faith gone, they completely collapsed.

DESIRE FOR PRAISE MAY LEAD TO THE PROFESSION RATHER THAN THE PRACTICE OF VIRTUE. While the desire for social approval is strong in most men, so are other desires. It happens, moreover, that the actions to which men's instincts prompt them are not always such as would be approved by others.[1] In order, therefore, to have their cake and eat it, to do what they please and yet seem to please others, men often conceal the discrepancy between what they profess and what they practice. One of the least agreeable features of civilized society is the extent to which the codes which men and groups profess differ from those by which they live. Men who have ostensibly Christian codes of honor, and, indeed, practice them in their private lives, will have an actual "ethics" for business that they could not possibly sanction in their dealings as trustees of a church. There are practices within trades and professions, the familiar "trade" practices, and "ethics" of the profession, which, for social as well as for professional reasons, their practitioners would not want known. "Company" manners are a trivial illustration of this, but there are more serious instances. One has but to recall the sensation created a few years ago when a minister of a fashionable congregation called upon his congregation to practice Christianity, or, on a superb scale, Tolstoy's leaving the estates and mode of life of a rich Russian noble, in order to live the simple life he regarded as prescribed by the Christian teaching.[2]

[Footnote 1: At least not publicly approved. There is, however, admiration, often unconcealed, for the man who does even an unusual act conspicuously well. One need only mention a Raffles or a Captain Kidd.]

[Footnote 2: See Tolstoy's Diary and Confessions.]

Psychologically, therefore, the cause of the discrepancy between the codes which men preach and profess and those which they practice, is thus seen to be a desire to secure illicit (that is, socially unsanctioned) satisfactions without incurring the penalty of social disapproval. Part of this discrepancy is not to be set down to the evils men actually do so much as the irrationality and fanaticism of the codes which they have been taught to profess. This is the case, for example, where excessive Puritanism or fanaticism, not possible for most men, is imposed upon them by an arbitrary and fanatical teaching. They will then pretend to types of action socially regarded as virtues in order to avoid the penalties incurred by not practicing them. The desire for "respectability" is responsible for no small amount of pretension, illustrated pathetically in cases where individuals, to satisfy the standards of their associates, live beyond their means physically, socially, or intellectually.[1]

[Footnote 1: "Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier men and women to-day if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance." James: Psychology, vol. I, p. 311.]

Again, codes of action remain formally accepted long after they have ceased to be taken seriously. In States that went "dry" where there was no majority public sentiment in their favor, "bootlegging," the illicit making and selling of whiskey, was practiced freely, because not many people regarded prohibition as a serious matter, or its infringement as a serious crime. Legal codes remain not infrequently a generation behind public opinion, and many ideas are verbally professed that nobody takes quite seriously.

THE SOCIAL EFFECTIVENESS OF PRAISE AND BLAME. How far the social estimates of approval and disapproval affect the conduct of the individual depends on the degree to which, through education, public opinion, and law, he is made part of the group. In primitive society, even the slightest details of conduct were regulated by the group, through an elaborate system of punishments for slight infringements. In civilized society, the development of a sense of personal selfhood and social recognition of its importance has to a degree freed individual action from complete domination by the group. This has in part been compensated by the education of the contemporary citizen to national interests, and social sympathy, which render him susceptible to the praise and blame of public opinion.

The effectiveness of praise and blame in determining action depends also on the explicitness with which they are expressed. In contemporary life the control of public opinion is made precarious because there is so rarely complete or palpable unanimity on any subject among the variety of groups that constitute a modern society. In a large city there are so many groups, so many sets of opinion, that an individual may not feel any great pressure of praise and blame except from the small circle of people with whom he is associated. In small communities action is restrained by the fear of ostracism or contempt of the whole group among whom one is living. But in large cities, where one may not be known by one's next-door neighbor, this restraint is much reduced. The temptations of a metropolis, so often referred to in the lurid literature of the day, consist not in temptations more numerous than or different from those in smaller places, but in the marked absence of social control as compared with small villages where every one knows everyone else's business.

The influence of the social estimate on individual conduct depends finally on individual differences in suggestibility. In normal individuals susceptibility to the praise and blame of others is very high, especially among the close circle of friends, professional and business associates among whom one moves. This susceptibility is heightened when the praise or blame comes from persons superior in social status, though here the element of fear of the consequences of displeasing is perhaps more important than the responsiveness to the praise and blame itself. To the praise and blame of close associates most men are also highly suggestible, not less so when there is equality in social status. "Birds of a feather flock together," but humans tend to become similar because they flock together. There are few men who can withstand the pressure of doing what their group approves, and refraining from doing what it disapproves.

In some men susceptibility to the attitudes of others is extremely low, and of such are both criminals and martyrs made. In the prisons of this country there are a large number of men absolutely indifferent to the usual social standards, completely undeterred by the codes of conduct by which other people cannot help but be governed. Such absolute callousness to the feelings which govern the majority of mankind as we read of every now and then in the trial of some desperate criminal, is not infrequently associated with abnormally low intelligence, the sodden stolidity of the traditional criminal type. Where it appears, as it sometimes does, in criminals of high intelligence, it is regarded by psychiatrists as a specific abnormality, comparable to color-blindness or a physical deformity.

There are, on the other hand, individuals whose apparent low suggestibility is of the highest social value. There are striking instances, throughout the long struggle toward human liberty, of persons who could withstand the public opinion of their own day in the light of some ideal which they cherished, of men who needed no other approval than their consciences, their better selves, or their god. Socrates drinking the fatal hemlock, Christ upon the cross, the Christian saints, Joan of Arc, the extreme dissenters of every generation, are instances of men and women seemingly unmoved by the praise and blame of their contemporaries. Sustained by their deep inner conviction of the justice and significance of their mission, they have been content to suffer scorn, ridicule, and martyrdom at the hands of their own generation in a persistent devotion to what in their eyes constituted the highest good of mankind.

SOCIAL ESTIMATES AND STANDARDS OF CONDUCT. Individuals are early habituated to the customs of the society in which they live, and come to approve, as might be expected from the power of men's habits and from their instinctive gregariousness, those things which they or their companions have always done. That "people don't do such things," or that "everybody does them," is a frequently assigned reason for the approval or condemnation of an act. Social approvals thus become affixed to acts which are regularly done by the majority, and divergences are subjected to varying degrees of censure. In civilized societies variations from customs that are not legally enforced are punished mainly by social ostracism. There is no law against walking down a crowded city street in Elizabethan costume, yet few would indulge their taste for beautiful but archaic dress in the face of all the ridicule they would incur. The whole system of etiquette, of the standard of living of respectable society, is maintained in large part because of the approvals and outward marks of admiration that go to some types of life and the contempt in which others are held. Much of the economic activity of the leisure class, as Professor Veblen has so well pointed out, is devoted to wasting time and spending money conspicuously as outward indications that the individual is living up to established and approved standards.[1]

[Footnote 1: Veblen: Theory of the Leisure Class.]

The more significant folkways, standards of importance and unimportance, of the admirable and the despicable, the noble and the base, are determined by approvals and disapprovals that have become socially habitual. When we speak of a country being imperialistic or materialistic, we mean that most individuals in it, or at least those who are articulate or influential, perform or approve of actions leading to national or individual aggrandizement. The amount of money, time, and energy that is spent on amusement, public works, education, the army and navy is a fairly accurate gauge of the relative group approvals they have respectively secured. In the same way the professions and occupations in which men engage are determined by the social prestige attaching to them no less than by economic considerations. The pay of stenographers is no less than that of primary-school teachers; it is often much more; yet many a girl remains a teacher for the gentility which is traditionally associated with the profession. In the same way many girls, in spite of the fact that they are economically and physically better off in domestic service than in factory work, still prefer the latter because of the social inferiority which is associated with the servant's position.

Approvals and disapprovals become fixed to acts, in the first place, because of some supposed danger or utility they possess. But whether the acts are really socially useful or not, approvals and censures once fixed tend to remain habitual, even though the conditions which first called them forth are utterly changed. We are to-day still more shocked by errors in etiquette than in logic; we are still horrified by the infringement of a law which, if we stopped to consider it, is not now, if it ever was, of any genuine service to mankind.

In advanced societies approvals are not always reserved for the habitual. Certainly in science original research and discovery are generally welcomed. In art originality is cherished, at least by the discriminating.[1] Variation in action is for reasons discussed in other connections less generally welcomed. But in advanced societies, criticism and reflection upon social institutions and habits may themselves come to be sanctioned and encouraged. Already we are beginning to endow the scientific study of government and industrial relations, and regarding with favor genuine inquiry into the possibilities of progress.

[Footnote 1: Even in art most people's approvals and disapprovals are fixed by what is called "good taste," which consists not infrequently in approving what other people approve. AEsthetic approval thus becomes approval of the customarily recognized. It took a Ruskin to make the neglected genius of Turner fashionable. Keats and Byron were bitterly attacked by the orthodox critics of their generation.]

IMPORTANCE OF RELATING PRAISE AND BLAME TO SOCIALLY IMPORTANT CONDUCT. What people approve and disapprove, if their approval becomes sufficiently emphatic, is fixed by law. Law is the official and permanent preservation and enforcement of public approval and condemnation. When certain acts are regarded as of crucial importance, the group does not depend on the precarious effectiveness of public opinion, but deliberately attaches punishments to the performance of undesired acts, and, more infrequently, rewards to the practices of others. Most of our laws are enforcement of social condemnations, for the performance or the non-performance of specific acts, rather than direct encouragements of action. But which laws will be passed depends in the first place on social approval or public opinion. And if, as happens in our complicated political machinery, laws are passed which have not the sanction of widespread public approval, they remain "dead letters."

Outside the field of legal control, individual action is controlled primarily by public opinion. There are many practices, strictly speaking "within the law," that an increasingly enlightened public opinion will not sanction; there are many practices encouraged by an enlightened public which no law compels. There is no law forcing business establishments to close every Saturday during the summer, yet many now do. There are many courtesies practiced by them which are not ordained by law. That adverse public opinion may have economic consequences if disregarded is evidenced by the powerful instrument the Consumers' League found in advertising against firms that maintained particularly unsanitary and morally degrading working conditions for their employees, or the dread that hotels and department stores have for adverse publicity. The phenomenal development of modern advertising is an instance of the direct economic values that have been found in winning public approval. There is more than metaphor in the statement made during the war that Lord Northcliffe, as owner of a chain of English newspapers with an immense circulation, was a "cabinet minister without portfolio."

The growth of humanitarian sentiment has frequently enforced the improvement of labor and social conditions before improvements were made compulsory by law. And in that field of personal relations, which constitute so large a part of our daily life, our conduct is controlled almost entirely by the force of the public opinion with which we come in contact. There is much more courtesy and kindliness and cooeperation manifested in the ordinary contacts of life of a modern city than is required, or ever could be secured by statute.

EDUCATION AS THE AGENCY OF SOCIAL CONTROL. There is enormous power in the habits of approval or disapproval to which we have, in our early days, been subjected by our parents, teachers, and companions. It is through education, in the broadest sense, that the young come to learn, and hence to practice, those actions which are socially approved, and by the same token to avoid those acts which are socially condemned. Through formal education the adult members of a society impress upon the plastic minds of the immature those habits of thought and action which are currently recognized as desirable. Education thus becomes the crucial instrument by which social standards are established and transmitted.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. The transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling, from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, society could not survive.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey; Democracy and Education, pp. 3-4.]

Society survives through education. Just as truly might it be said that the kind of society, art, culture, industry, religion, science that does survive depends on the kind of likes and dislikes that are through education made habitual in the young.

Education, however, may not only transmit existing standards, but can be used to inculcate newer and better expectations and ideals. In the adult, habits are already set physiologically, and kept rigid by the demands of economic life. In the young there is a "fairer and freer" field. Through education the immature may be taught to approve ways of action more desirable than those which have become habitual with their adult contemporaries. The children of to-day may acquire habits of action, feeling, and thought that will be their enlightened practice as the adults of to-morrow. All great social reformers, from Plato to our own contemporaries like Bertrand Russell, have seen in education, therefore, the chief instrument, as it is the chief problem, of social betterment. We may train the maturing generation to approve modes of behavior which the best minds of our time may have found reason to think desirable, but which could not be substituted immediately for the fixed habits of the already adult generation.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY, AND THE SOCIAL MOTIVE. In our analysis of the social nature of man we have, thus far, been dealing with his specific social tendencies. But apart from these, or rather as an outgrowth of these, men exhibit what Professor Woodworth has well described as a gift for "learning" social behavior.

Possessing, as he eminently does, the capacity for group activity, man is interested in such activity. He needs no ulterior motive to attract him to it. It is play for him.... The social interest is part and parcel of the general objective interest of man.[1]

[Footnote 1: Woodworth: Dynamic Psychology, pp. 202, 203.]

In other words, the activity of man as an individual is not simply deflected a little by man's native gregariousness, sympathy, and susceptibility to praise and blame. Rather, group activity becomes to the gregarious human, born into an environment where he must act with and among other human beings, an interesting and exciting activity in and for itself. Men enjoy working in a group or a society for joint and common objects just as they enjoy food or musical composition or golf.

The social motive is of the same order as the musical or mathematical motive. Just as one who has the musical gift takes to music naturally and finds it interesting for its own sake, so the socially gifted individual understands other people, sees the possibilities of collective activity, and the ways of cooerdinating it, and enters into such doings with gusto.... The social gift is a capacity for learning social behavior. Individuals differ in degree in the social gift, as in other capacities; some are capable of becoming creative artists or inventors along social lines.[1]

[Footnote 1: Woodworth: Dynamic Psychology, p. 203.]

The social behavior of man is thus seen to be no curious anomaly and contradiction in the life of an otherwise thoroughly egoistic individual. Man is instinctively social; he finds social activity useful in the satisfaction of his own desires, and he comes from his native tendencies and acquired habits of social behavior to enjoy and take part in social activities for their own sake. The individual does not have to be coerced into social activity; he finds in such behavior the same pleasure that attends the fulfillment of any of his native or acquired reactions. Society has been variously pictured as a force holding the individual in check, as an organism of which he is a part, as a machine of which he is a cog. Society consists rather as the collective name for the cooeperative and associated activities of human beings who find such activity, by nature and by habit, interesting for its own sake.



CHAPTER VI

CRUCIAL TRAITS IN SOCIAL LIFE

THE INTERPENETRATION OF HUMAN TRAITS. This chapter is devoted to a consideration of a number of individual human traits—curiosity, pugnacity, leadership, fear, love, hate, etc., and some of their more important social consequences. These are seldom present in isolation. A man is not, under normal circumstances, simply and solely pugnacious, curious, tired, submissive, or acquisitive. One's desire to own a particular house at a particular location may be complicated by the presence of several of these traits at once. The house may be wanted simply as a possession, a crude satisfaction of our native acquisitiveness. It may be sought further as a mode of self-display, an indication of how one has risen in the world. Its attractiveness may be heightened by the fact that it is situated next door to the house of a rather particularly companionable old friend. It may be peculiarly indispensable to one's satisfaction because it is also being sought by a detested rival. Moreover, as we shall see in the discussion of the Self, these traits are interwoven with each other and attain varying degrees of power as motive forces in an individual's character.

But while these distinctive human traits are seldom apparent in isolation, it is worth while to consider them separately, not only because the elements of human behavior will thus stand out more clearly, but because in certain individuals one or another of these-traits may be natively of especial strength. And further, in differing social situations, the possession or the cultivation of one or another of these native endowments may be of particular social value or danger. And in any given situation, one or another of them may be predominant, as when a man is intensely angry, or curious, or tired. Thus an individual may have a marked capacity for leadership, or an extraordinarily tireless curiosity, or an abnormally developed pugnacity or acquisitiveness. The capacity for leadership, as will later be discussed in some detail, will be of particular social value in large enterprises; patient and persistent inquiry may produce science; pugnacity when freely expressed may provoke quarrels, bickerings, and war. In the following discussion, the continual interpenetration and qualification of these traits by one another in a complex situation must be recognized. Else it may appear in the discussion of any single trait, as if by means of it all human action were being explained. Rather the aim is to trace them as one might the elements in the pattern of a tapestry, or the recurrent themes in the development of a symphony. But as the symphony is more than a single melody, the tapestry more than one element of line or color, so is human life more than any single trait.[1]

[Footnote 1: Philosophers and others have time and again made the mistake of simplifying human life to a single motive or driving power. Hobbes rested his case on fear; Bain and Sutherland on sympathy; Tarde on imitation; Adam Smith and Bentham on enlightened self-interest. In our own day the Freudians interpret everything as being sexual in its motive. And most recently has come an interpretation of life, as in Bertrand Russell and Helen Marot, in terms of the "creative impulse."]

THE FIGHTING INSTINCT. Almost all men exhibit in varying degrees the "fighting instinct"; that is, the tendency, when interfered with in the performance of any action prompted by any other instinct, to threaten, attack, and not infrequently, if successful in attack, to punish and bully the individual interfering.

The most mean-spirited cur will angrily resent any attempt to take away its bone, if it is hungry; a healthy infant very early displays anger if its meal is interrupted, and all through life most men find it difficult to suppress irritation on similar occasions. In the animal world the most furious excitement of this instinct is provoked in the male of many species by any interference with the satisfaction of the sexual impulse.[2]

[Footnote 2: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 60.]

This original tendency to fight is very persistent in human beings, but is susceptible of direction, and is not, in civilized life, frequently revealed in its crude and direct form, save among children and among adults under intense provocation and excitement. Occasionally, however, pugnacity is displayed in its simple animal form. "Man shares with many of the animals the tendency to frighten his opponent by loud roars or bellowings.... Many a little boy has, without example or suggestion, suddenly taken to running with open mouth to bite the person who has angered him, much to the distress of his parents."[1] As the individual grows older, he learns to control the outward and immediate expression of this powerful and persistent human trait. He learns in his dealings with other people not to give way, when frustrated in some action or ambition, to mere animal rage. The customs and manners to which a child is early subjected in civilized intercourse are effective hindrances to uncontrolled display of anger and pugnacity; superior intelligence and education find more refined ways than kicking, pummeling, and scratching of overcoming the interferences of others. But even in gentle and cultured persons, an insult, a disappointment, a blow will provoke the tell-tale signs of pugnacity and anger, the flushing of the cheeks, the flash of the eye, the incipient clenching of the fists, the compressing of the teeth and lips, and the trembling of the voice. We substitute sarcasm for punching, and find subtly civilized, and, in the long run, more terrible, ways than bruises of punishing those who oppose us in our play, our passions, our professions. But our ancestors were beasts of prey, and there is still "fighting in our blood."

[Footnote 1: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 61.]

The fighting instinct is aroused by both personal and impersonal situations, and is occasioned even by very slight interferences, and even when the author of the interference is neither human nor animate. Quite intelligent men have been known to kick angrily at a door as if from pure malice it refused to open. Irate commuters have glared vindictively at trains they have just missed. The glint of anger is roused in our eye by an insolent stare, an ironic comment, or an impertinent retort. The "boiling point" varies in different individuals and races, and pugnacity is generally more readily roused in men than in women. There are some persons, like the proverbial Irishman, who, seeing the slightest opportunity for a fight, "want to know whether it is private, or whether anybody can get in." In most men pugnacity is more intense when it is provoked by persons; except for a moment, one does not try to fight a chair struck in the dark.

Under the conditions of civilized life the primitive expression of pugnacity in physical combat has been outlawed and made unnecessary by law and custom. Individuals are prevented by the fear of punishment, besides their early training and habits, from settling disputes by physical force. But as the instinct itself remains strong, it must find some other outlet. This it secures in more refined forms of rivalry, in business and sport, or, all through human history, in fighting between groups, from the squabbling and perpetual raids and killings, and the extermination of whole villages and tribes in Central Borneo, to the wars between nations throughout European history.

PUGNACITY A MENACE WHEN UNCONTROLLED. The strength and persistency of this human tendency, when uncontrolled or when fostered between groups, make it a very serious menace. Like all the other instincts, and more than most, it is frustrated and continually checked in the normal peace-time pursuits of contemporary civilization. Participation, imaginative at least, in a great collective combat undoubtedly holds some fascination for the citizens of modern industrial society, despite the large-scale horror which war is in itself, and the desolation it leaves in its wake. During peace the fighting instinct for most men receives satisfaction on a small scale, sometimes in nothing more important than small bickerings and peevishness, or in seeing at first hand or on the ticker a championship prize-fight. The pessimism which many writers have expressed at the possibility of perpetual peace rests in part on their perception of the easy excitability and deep persistence of this impulse, especially among the vigorous and young.

Not only may the fighting instinct be aroused by the possibility of international wars, but it may be used by fomenters and agitators to add a sense of intense pugnacity and violent anger to the genuine friction that does exist between conflicting interests in the same society. The theory of a "class war" possibly finds its appeal for many minds as much in its picturesque stimulation of their instincts of pugnacity as in the logic of its economics.

PUGNACITY AS A BENEFICENT SOCIAL FORCE. While the power of pugnacity and its easy stimulation makes this instinct a peculiarly inflammable and dangerous motive force in civilized society, it is, on the other hand, an indispensable source of social progress. Many psychologists and sociologists, such as McDougall, Bagehot, and Lang, attribute the superiority in culture and social organization of the European races over, say, the Chinese and East Indians, to the fighting instinct. In the long series of wars that for centuries constituted much of the history of Europe, those nations which survived, as in earlier times those tribes which survived combat, were those which displayed marked qualities of superiority in allegiance, fidelity, and social cooeperation. The intensity and effectiveness of social cooeperation in our own country was never so well illustrated as during the Great War. In combat between groups those groups survive which do stand out in these respects.

William James in a famous essay[1] recognizes clearly the enormous value of the fighting instinct in stimulating action to an intense effectiveness exhibited under no other circumstances, and proposes a "moral equivalent for war"—an army devoted to constructive enterprises, reclaiming the waste places of the land, warring against poverty and disease and the like. Certainly every great reform movement has been intensely stimulated and has gathered about it the energies of men when it has become a "crusade for righteousness." Part of Theodore Roosevelt's power was in his picturesque phrasing of political issues as if they were great moral struggles. No one could forget, or fail to have his heart beat a trifle faster at Roosevelt's trumpet call in the 1912 campaign: "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." His "Big Stick" became a potent political symbol. Astute political leaders have not failed to capitalize the fighting instinct, and any social project will enlist the wider enthusiasm and the more energetic support if it is hailed as a battle or fight against somebody or something.

[Footnote 1: "A Moral Equivalent of War," in Memories and Studies.]

In personal life also the instinct of pugnacity and the feeling of anger that goes with it seem to set loose immense floods of reserve energy. McDougall exaggerates but a trifle when he says it supplies the zest and determines the forms of all our games and recreations, and nine tenths of the world's work is done by it. "Our educational system is founded upon it; it is the social force underlying an immense amount of strenuous exertion; to it we owe in a great measure even our science, our literature, and our art; for it is a strong, perhaps an essential, element of ambition, that last infirmity of noble minds."[1] In the overcoming of obstacles, whether in the work itself, or in the difficulties that a surgeon or a scholar meets with, or in frustrations deliberately put in our way by other people, pugnacity is an invaluable stimulant and sustainer of action. Every great personality of strong convictions and dominant energy has possessed it to some extent; in characters of great moral energy it sometimes takes the form of a volcanic and virtuous wrath, as in the case of the Prophets of the Old Testament, or of later religious and social reformers who brought an earnest and bitter anger against the wrongs they saw and literally fought to overcome.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 294.]

THE "SUBMISSIVE INSTINCT." Of great importance in the social relations of men is their original tendency to find satisfaction in following, partly submitting to, or completely surrendering to a person or cause more dominating than the individual. Thorndike describes this instinct in its simplest form:

There is an original tendency to respond to the situation, "the presence of a human being larger than one's self, of angry or mastering aspect," and to blows and restraint by submissive behavior. When weak from wounds, sickness, or fatigue, the tendency is stronger. The man who is bigger, who can outyell and outstare us, who can hit us without our hitting him, and who can keep us from moving, does originally extort a crestfallen, abashed physique and mind. Women in general are thus by original nature submissive to men in general. Every human being thus tends by original nature to arrive at a status of mastery or submission toward every other human being, and even under the more intelligent customs of civilized life somewhat of the tendency persists in many men.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: Educational Psychology, briefer course, p. 34.]

The impulse to follow and submit to something not ourselves and more dominating than ourselves is very strong in most men, and is called out by stimuli much less violent than those physical manifestations of power mentioned in the above quotation. Men instinctively long to be led, especially if, as happens in the case of most individuals, there is in them a marked absence of definite interest, conviction, or skill. This instinct is aroused by any sign of exceptional power, or, more generally still, by any exceptional conspicuousness, whether socially useful or not. Men follow leaders partly because men live in groups with common interests and in any large-scale organization leadership is necessary. But the power of demagogues, the faithfulness with which men will follow a bad leader as well as a good, are evidence that men find an instinctive satisfaction in submission. Self-dependence stands out as a virtue or an accomplishment precisely because most men feel so utterly at sea without any loyalty, allegiance, or devotion. Any one who has spent a summer at a boy's camp will recall the helplessness of youngsters to mark out a program for themselves and to keep themselves happy on the one afternoon when there was no official program of play. Half the mischief performed on such occasions is initiated by some boy with just a little more independence and persuasiveness than the others. And it is not only among children that there is evinced an almost pathetic bewilderment and unrest in the absence of a leader. There is an equally pathetic and sometimes dangerous attachment among adults to the first sign of leadership that makes its appearance. The demoralizing authority of the ward heeler is sometimes dependent on no more trustworthy an index of real power than a booming voice, a rough camaraderie, and a physically "big" personality. And there are, on the other hand, instances where lack of leadership seemed to be the chief reason why certain classes of labor were unable to make their demands effective at a much earlier date than they did. In the first really big strike in the telephone industry in Boston during the autumn of 1918 success seems to have been chiefly due to the remarkable leadership of one of the young women operators, a type of leadership which seems to have appeared nowhere else in the telephone industry.[1]

[Footnote 1: See the article by Wm. Hard in the New Republic, May 3, 1919.]

The instinct of submissiveness, as has been pointed out in connection with the discussion of all the other of man's original tendencies, is not only strong, but may find its outlets in attachment, both to desirable and to undesirable persons or objects. Once aroused, attachment and submission may become as stanch as they are blind. The signs which arouse our loyalty may be and most frequently are glaring rather than important. As Trotter phrases it:

The rational basis of the relation [following a leader] is, however, seen to be at any rate open to discussion when we consider the qualities in a leader upon which his authority so often rests, for there can be little doubt that their appeal is more generally to instinct than to reason. In ordinary politics it must be admitted that the gift of public speaking is of more decisive value than anything else. If a man is fluent, dextrous, and ready on the platform, he possesses the one indispensable requisite for statesmanship; if in addition he has the gift of moving deeply the emotions of his hearers, his capacity for guiding the infinite complexities of national life becomes undeniable. Experience has shown that no exceptional degree of any other capacity is necessary to make a successful leader. There need be no specially arduous training, no great weight of knowledge, either of affairs or the human heart, no receptiveness to new ideas, no outlook into reality.[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter, p. 116.]

Though these be picturesquely exaggerated statements, they do indicate the fact that the outward signs of leadership, of a conspicuously emotional sort, may be more significant in determining the attachments and loyalties of human beings, than are genuine marks of capacity in the direction of political and social affairs.

This pronounced tendency on the part of human beings to follow a lead, and anybody's lead, as it were, has the most serious dangers. It means that a man with qualities that sway men's emotions and stir their imaginations can attach to himself the profoundest loyalties for personal or class ends. The gifts of personal magnetism, of a kindly voice, an air of confidence and calmness, exuberant vitality, and a sensitivity to other people's feelings, along with some of the genuine qualities of effective and expert control of men and affairs, may be used by a demagogue as well as by a really devoted servant of the popular good, by an Alcibiades as well as by a Garibaldi, by a conquering Napoleon as well as by a Lincoln.

Our instincts of following and submission, apart from education, are as easily aroused by specious signs of social power and conspicuousness as by signs of mental effectiveness and genuine altruistic interest. The exploitation of these tendencies by selfish leaders is therefore particularly easy. The large circulation of the "yellow press," the power in politics of the unscrupulous, the selfish, and the second-rate, are symptoms of how men's natural tendency to follow has been played upon in support of plans and ambitions which would not be sanctioned by their reason. The genius for leadership has been exhibited in criminal gangs, in conquests and in fanaticism, as well as in the promotion of good government, of better labor conditions and better education.

But progress in these last-named is dependent on the utilization of men's submissiveness by leaders interested in the promotion of desirable social enterprises. While men may be so easily led, they are responsive to leadership in good directions as well as bad. No great social movements, the freeing of slaves, the gaining of universal suffrage, the bettering of factory conditions, freedom of thought and action, could have gained headway if men had been born unwilling to follow. There are (see chapter IX) ineradicable differences in capacity between men, and if the uninformed and the socially helpless could not be aroused to follow those great both in mind and magnanimity, it is difficult to see how the lot of mankind ever could have, or ever can improve. A good leader may make men support, out of instinctive loyalty, purposes and plans which, if they completely understood them, they would support out of reason. Up to the present most people have been, and will probably remain for a long time to come, too ill-educated or too poorly endowed by nature to understand the bearings of the great social movements in which they are involved. In consequence, it is a matter of congratulation that their instinct of submission can be utilized in the interests of their welfare which they frequently not only do not know how to obtain, but do not understand. The Roman populace, enchanted by Augustus, follow him to greatness, without comprehending the imperial destiny which they are helping to build. The barbarian hordes affectionately following the lead of Charlemagne incidentally help to build the whole edifice of European civilization.

MEN DISPLAY QUALITIES OF LEADERSHIP. The obverse of man's tendency to follow a lead is, of course, his tendency to take it. Individuals tend to display persistently and conspicuously just those qualities which will win them the allegiance of others.

The instinct of self-display is manifested by many of the higher social or gregarious animals.... Perhaps among mammals the horse displays it most clearly. The muscles of all parts are strongly innervated, the creature holds himself erect, his neck is arched, his tail lifted, his motions become superfluously vigorous and extensive, he lifts his hoofs high in air as he parades before the eyes of his fellows.... Many children clearly exhibit this instinct of self-display; before they can walk or talk the impulse finds its satisfaction in the admiring gaze or plaudits of the family circle as each new acquirement is practiced; a little later it is still more clearly expressed by the frequently repeated command, "See me do this," or "See how well I can do so and so"; and for many a child more than half the delight of riding on a pony, of wearing a new coat, consists in the satisfaction of this instinct, and vanishes if there be no spectators.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall; loc. cit., pp. 62-64.]

Individuals thus instinctively love to stand out from their fellows, to outdistance and outclass them. And the qualities of leadership are not infrequently stimulated by this competition with others, for place, power, distinction. To win the allegiance and loyal affection of men means that one's own personality is enhanced; one stands out as a man of affairs, a social or political leader, a guide to others in action or thought. As has already been pointed out, the qualities that will win the submission and loyalty of others vary widely. In the case of one man it may be a charming smile and a gift of saying striking and stirring rather than significant things. In the case of another it may be his air of immense confidence, restraint, and reserve. It may be brute force or a terrible earnestness; it may even be, as in the case of certain religious reformers, extraordinary gentleness. Garibaldi "inspired among men of the most various temperaments love that nothing could shake, and devotion that fell little short of idolatry." "He enjoyed the worship and cast the spell of a legendary hero." Alcibiades charmed, despite the patent evil he wrought, by his magical personal beauty and grace. Vandamme said of Napoleon: "That devil of a man exercises on me a fascination that I cannot explain to myself, and in such a degree that, though I fear neither God nor devil, when I am in his presence I am ready to tremble like a child, and he could make me go through the eye of a needle to throw myself into the fire." Augereau is stupefied at their first meeting, and confesses afterwards that "this little devil of a general" has inspired him with awe.[1]

[Footnote 1: See chapter XXI on "Personality" in Ross's Social Control.]

Men's qualities of leadership depend, however, not only on their personal charm, but on certain seeming or genuine symptoms of effectiveness. Evidences of strong determination, of a sweeping imagination, of calm, of confidence, of enthusiasm, of qualities possessed by the vast majority only in minor degrees, win men's admiration and devotion because they are associated with the ability to accomplish great ends, to do the unusual, to succeed where most people fail. Most men are so conscious of their limitations and the difficulties of any enterprise which they undertake that at any sign of exceptional talent, whether real or apparent, they will commit their respect, their energies, and sometimes, as in the case of a religious crusade, their lives.

For good or evil, the possession, the cultivation, and the exhibition of the qualities of leadership give men enormous power. There was in the nineteenth century a historical fashion, brilliantly exemplified by Carlyle, to assume that history was made by great men. Latterly, there has been wide dissent from this simplification of the processes of history, but it is clear that innovations must be started by individuals, and that a powerful leader is a matchless instrument for initiating, and getting wide and enthusiastic support for changes, whether good or bad. To quote Carlyle's eloquent exaggeration:

For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at the bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, ... the creators of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, was the history of these.... Could we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history.[1]