Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral Values

by George Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers

(1) Instinct and Heredity

We have already alluded to the part played by instinct in determining the initial character of the ego. Instincts are here distinguished from the emotions to which they give rise. Without unduly stretching the meaning of the word "suggestion," in the sense of a prompting to action not specifically in hypnotism, instinct may perhaps be looked upon as the innate suggestion of heredity. The two primary factors held to be fundamental in shaping and influencing the character of the individual are environment and heredity. The question of the predominance of the one influence or the other is the subject of keen controversy, and coincides with the contingent problem of the relative importance of inherent and acquired characters.

It is now becoming increasingly evident that the problem of heredity is nearer a solution if viewed rather from the psychical than from the purely biological or material aspect. So we seek the solution of the secret in psychology. The vital factor in organism is psychic from protozoan to man, whether we identify it with "psychoplasm," soul, ego, or "subjective mind."

Those who put forward memory as the basis of heredity show that evolution implies the retention by organisms of their experiences in accommodating themselves to their gradually changing environment. Constant and reiterated striving in certain directions in this process of accommodation, until actions become automatic—free of effort—produces habit. In the words of Professor Ward: "This law of habit we may reasonably regard as exemplified in the life of every individual in the long line of genealogical ascent that connects us with our humblest ancestors, in so far as every permanent advance in the scale of life implies a basis of habit embodied in a structure which has been perfected by practice."[64] Laborious observations have been recorded of minute unicellular creatures to show that they "succeed as we do, only by way of trial and error." Thus we are led to the conclusion that the acquisition of habits by the individual during his efforts to adapt himself to his environment, and transmitted down a long line of genealogical descent, is the method of heredity; and further, that man, in common with other animals, inherits all these racial and individual acquirements from his parents. Instinct, we have said, may be termed the "Suggestion of Heredity," which again is "race memory," or the evolutionary product of habits acquired during the process of man's adaptability to his environment. This, then, is the primary and fundamental determinant of the character and quality of personality. It is the quality which is inherent in a man from the moment he begins his individual existence, that is, from the moment the sexual cells of both parents coalesce in the process of conception and form a new stem-cell. Haeckel divides the instincts into two chief classes: the primary, which can be traced to the commencement of organic life—the common lower impulses inherent in the psychoplasm. The chief are impulses to self-preservation (by defence and maintenance) and the preservation of the species (by generation and the care of the young). These two, hunger and reproduction, are universally recognized as fundamental. The secondary were due to intelligent adaption; translated into habit, they gradually become automatic and "innate" in subsequent generations. The earlier these habits are acquired and ingrained in the life history of the race, the more invariable and immutable will be their transmission; the habits of a few generations are easily modified or effaced by conflicting tendencies or conditions. The life history of every new individual, in its initial stages, is a (more or less complete[65]) recapitulation of the life history of the race. The earlier ancestral acquisitions have been transformed into habit and have become secondarily automatic, the less are they liable to variation, and the more inexorable and unfailing will be their transmission. Thus Darwin showed the greater immutability of generic characters over later acquired specific characters. This applies to psychic as well as to physical characters. In the same way the earlier, during the course of his life, a man assimilates a strong suggestion, the greater will be its effect and the longer its influence will last.

Let us now consider instinct in relation to moral conceptions. Dr. McDougall gives prominence in his "Social Psychology" to the following instincts, which, together with the emotional excitements which accompany them, play the foremost part in the evolution of moral ideas: (1) The reproductive, parental and erotic instincts, responsible for the earliest form of social feeling; (2) the instinct of pugnacity, with which are connected the emotions of resentment and revenge, which give rise, when complicated with other instincts, to indignation at anti-social conduct; (3) the gregarious instinct, which inclines animals to gather together in aggregations of their own species—this impulse has an important bearing upon the sympathetic emotions and is at the root of tribal loyalty; (4) the instincts of acquisition and construction, which have been developed with the idea of property, and the moral judgments connected therewith; (5) the instincts of self-abasement (or subjection) and of self-assertion (or self-display), with which are connected the emotions of "depression" and "elation"—the former instinct gives rise to feelings of respect towards superiors, divine or human, and the latter is the basis of self-respect.[66]

Other writers lay greater emphasis on a distinct instinct of Imitation. It is undoubted that imitation, both when it is spontaneous and when it is deliberate—the distinction between the two forms should be carefully observed—plays a great part in the formation of moral judgments. Theological and ethical writers are fond of saying that the sense of moral obligation arises from the consciousness of approval, and consequent imitation, of an ideal or a standard which is submitted to our judgment; this implies deliberate imitation. The imitative tendency (purely spontaneous) is strongly marked in every child in its first efforts at vocalization, which are pure "Echolalia," i.e. incessant repetition of the sounds it hears; in fact, imitation marks every step of a child's growing consciousness. Practically all phenomena, however, attributed to the imitative instinct is in reality a manifestation of response to extrinsic suggestion. James speaks of "the imitative tendency which shows itself in large masses of men, and produces panics, and orgies and frenzies of violence, and which only the rarest individuals can actively withstand.... Certain mesmerized subjects must automatically imitate whatever motion their operator makes before their eyes."[67]

To ascribe this tendency to a special instinct would be to disclose a faulty appreciation of mob psychology and the Laws of Suggestion. These panics, orgies and frenzies of violence, and similar vindictive or enthusiastic mob tendencies, are simply the natural response to mass or cosmic suggestion, as we shall see later.

The final and precipitate cause of these outbreaks is frequently the personal magnetism, or more correctly the suggestion, of one man. The qualities necessary for the exercise of this power—the secret of successful demagogy—are not, as might be supposed, the possession of a dominant will and a constructive, purposive or tenacious intellect. It may be, indeed, that a great man of action, a Napoleon or Cæsar, arises, and by these sterling qualities dominates the masses and their attendant sycophants and demagogues; but more usually the essentials are a gift for facile and frenzied oratory and the power of evoking emotional presentations, qualities possessed, par excellence, by madmen and fanatics, the Kerenskys, Lenins and visionaries of all times. Their powers are the more irresistible, it is true, if combined with a shrewd knowledge of correct methods of propaganda and lavish adulation, for the obvious reason that, as we have seen, the strongest suggestion is the one that is most acceptable to the subject and most in accord with his predilections. Nothing would be truer than to say that only the rarest individuals can actively withstand the onslaught of cosmic suggestion. It is significant that the greatest human type, the true genius, who appears most often in the great philosopher, less often in the great artist, and who possesses a superabundance of dominant will-power and constructiveness, is far less powerful than the great conqueror or politician; for he commands intellect rather than emotion, and the world is governed by emotion.

It is not sufficiently realized that many so-called geniuses, imaginative, histrionic and poetical, can never deserve the highest place, for they are the sounding-boards of the world; their superlative quality is receptivity; they are instruments, not players; they voice the great masses, and they share with publicists and politicians a desire to be incriminated in the movement of their surroundings. Wieninger, in his "Sex and Character," emphasizes the dependence of publicists and tribunes of the people upon the masses they would lead. The politician, like the prostitute, has to court the populace; she is a woman of the streets—he is a man of the streets. For this reason he denies to the great politician and the man of action the quality of true greatness. "The man of action shares with the epileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around him, to make them appanages of his petty self. The great man feels himself defined and separate from the world, a nomad amongst nomads, and as a true microcosm he feels the world already within him."

The really great men, the Kants, the Descartes, Leibnizs or Spencers, and the greatest artists are wholly creative, purposive, dynamic; they owe no allegiance to the masses, for they are greater than the masses; they realize all without reflecting all; they seek nourishment where they will, and they spew out what they will; this perfect freedom is necessary for the attainment of truth. Truthfulness is a necessary attribute of genius, but not of statecraft or government, or of poetical effusions of the imagination.

While we are dealing with the subject of instincts it may not seem out of place to refer to the widely held belief that maternal impressions during pregnancy have a direct influence on the temperament of the child, and are often responsible for inducing definite tendencies of aversion and attraction and even physical resemblances. Although such acquired tendencies, admitting their existence, cannot strictly be classed with the instincts or tendencies inherited from former generations, since they are acquired after the inception of, and by, the new individual; yet they have a resemblance in that they are both pre-natal acquirements, and are manifested in the same way. Writers on heredity and biology are apt to dismiss the subject as unworthy of serious consideration, and to account for any instances of the sort attributed to this cause as based on pure coincidence. It is, however, significant that the great majority of mothers who have given the matter any thought are, as a rule, firmly convinced of the reality of pre-natal influences. When the principles of suggestion are applied to the case, it will be seen that the conditions of pre-natal existence are favourable for the reception by an unborn child of strong telepathic suggestions from its mother. The embryo mind is entirely receptive; any violent psychic disturbance in the mother must react upon the child. Most people know of some instance which points to the "impression" theory, and which it would be impossible to account for in any other way.

There appear to be no reasonable grounds for denying that maternal impressions may sometimes be held accountable for temperamental tendencies, not easily attributable to heredity, although it would, of course, be absurd to attempt to account for all abnormalities in the same way. The naturally greater receptivity and suggestibility of women, shown by their quick response to emotional suggestion, their credulousness, and the fact that women are the best mediums,[68] becomes very much more marked during pregnancy. At such times some women, normally distinguished by their vigour and initiative, become conspicuously impressionable; they become, in fact, ready "conductors" of suggestion. It follows that the influences that bear strongest upon them also bear upon the child.

Greater importance should not be attached to the psychic environment of a child than to its inherent hereditary qualities, which irrevocably determine its native tendencies and the limits of its ultimate possibilities. Environment may modify or enhance a child's inherent characteristics in an infinite variety of ways, but cannot nullify them or transcend by one iota the limit of its potential development.

In a previous chapter we discussed the view of those who regard moral judgment as an emotion or intuition of the "good" and the "right," and who find justification for our rules of conduct by referring them to the Divine Will, which is supposed to inspire them by means of the "moral organ" or conscience. We believe that a correct appreciation of psychology makes it abundantly clear that although there are many impulsive, instinctive and emotional factors totally unconnected with any rational or intellectual process which do, indeed, affect our moral judgments and give rise to ethical conventions, these factors can give no validity to moral codes; and that, stripped of the sentiments and emotions with which they are obscured, moral systems must be judged by principles of utility, while they are enforceable according to the universality with which they are desired. It is, moreover, equally absurd to look upon moral values as ultimate and irreducible categories of good and evil, irrevocably codified by an omniscient Deity for the conduct of humanity for all time, and supposedly accessible to the intelligence of all who consult their conscience. This latter position, which is maintained by Theistic "Rationalists," leads to precisely the same "conclusion" as the arguments of the "Intuitionalists," the only difference between them being that the conscience of the "Rationalists" is a thinking and intellectual organ, while the conscience of the Intuitionalists is an emotional and instinctive organ. But this amicable convergence is not accidental but a sine qua non, since in either case the object aimed at is identically the same, that object being the establishment of conscience, dependent on morality, on a pinnacle of ethical omniscience and infallibility, where its authority shall be unquestionable and absolute. They may well be left to their quarrel, which in reality amounts to little more than verbal quibbling.

Instinct, as we have seen, must inevitably play a very large part in the evolution of public morality and the moral impulse of every individual. Careful statistics have shown that criminal tendencies make their appearance with unfailing persistency in selected degenerate families. The genealogical record of one family may show a murderer in every generation; pauperism, prostitution and drunkenness are characteristics of another, and so on. Heredity will primarily determine a man's inherent characteristics—his instincts, temperament, disposition and, eo facto, his "conscience." Other factors, above all his immediate psychic environment, may, indeed, modify these tendencies for better or worse, but under the most favourable conditions Cosmic Suggestion, in its aspect of "public conscience," can never altogether supplant strong inherent tendencies. Those who believe in the conscience myth sometimes object that the voice of conscience always calls in the right direction, but that a man may, throughout a long life of crime, stifle and inhibit that "still small voice," yet in the end (perhaps when faced with the extreme penalty of the law) the wretched sinner will exhibit the symptoms of the most genuine and heartfelt remorse and express the greatest horror of his evil deeds. This type of explanation shows a total failure to interpret psychological processes. It may, indeed, be a common occurrence for a condemned criminal, brought suddenly face to face with the prospect of plenary punishment, to experience real sorrow and shame at his conduct. The emotion will probably be perfectly genuine. The prisoner, with little hope of enjoying the fruits of his felony and removed from the direct counter-influence of a criminal environment, will be in the best possible frame of mind to respond to the right cosmic suggestion—universal horror and detestation of his deed. Such a suggestion, reacting upon the instinct of self-preservation, will readily kindle emotions of remorse, self-horror and sorrow. Penitence need have nothing to do with any true ethical appreciation of the action of which it is supposed to be the object. Many cases have been recorded of miserable old women accused of witchcraft, who, learning for the first time at their trial of the crimes they were supposed to have committed, have become convinced of their guilt, and suffering the keenest pangs of remorse have died with penitence and resignation.

Fear is the chief element of remorse: fear of our fellow-men, vague fears for the future, or in the most literal sense the fear of Divine retribution or God. Racine dramatizes this emotion in the famous confession of Athalie: filled with dread at the words of warning uttered by the ghost of her mother Jezebel, she recalls her vision:

Tremble, m'a-t-elle dit,

fille digne de moi;

Le cruel Dieu des Juifs

l'emporte aussi sur toi.

Je te plains de tomber

dans ses mains redoutables,

Ma fille.