Beginning, as before, with the connection between {160} persons, we may illustrate the difference by the comparison between a crowd and an army. The mind of a crowd has indeed been taken as the type of a true social mind. But it is really something quite different. It is merely the superficial connection between unit and unit on an extended and intensified scale. As unit joins unit in the street, each determines his immediate neighbours, and is determined by them through the contagion of excitement, and with reference to the most passing ideas and emotions. What acts upon them in common is necessarily what there is in common between persons meeting, as it were, for no reason, and not knowing what they share beyond what they immediately see and feel. The crowd may indeed “act as one man”; but if it does so, its level of intelligence and responsibility will, as a rule, be extraordinarily low. It has nothing in common beyond what unit can infect unit with in a moment. Concerted action, much more reasoning and criticism, are out of the question. The doing or thinking of a different thing by each unit with reference to a single end is impossible. The crowd moves as a mere mass, because its parts are connected merely as unit with unit. Any form of connection which could effect an organisation in the whole would make a demand on the nature of every unit, which, where their conjunction is merely casual, could not possibly be met.
An army, [1] no less than a crowd, consists of a multitude of men, who are associated, unit to unit. Influences must pass and repass between every one {161} of the men and those men with whom he is standing in the ranks, or with whom he passes his leisure time. We may note, by the way, that these influences are themselves of a more permanent nature than those which pass between members of a crowd, and that they must necessarily be modified by that other connection of which we are about to speak. For the links of “association” between man and man are not the determining force in the operations of the army as such. The army is a machine, or an organisation, which is bound together by operative ideas embodied on the one hand in the officers, and on the other hand in the habit of obedience and the trained capacity which make every unit willing and able to be determined not by the impulse of his neighbours, but by the orders of his officers. What the army does is determined by the general’s plan, and not by influences communicating themselves from man to man, as in a crowd. In other words, every unit moves with reference to the movements of a great whole, with most parts of which he is not in direct touch at all. He is not determined by simple reference to the movements of his immediate neighbours. The army, that is, is a system or organised group, the nature of which, or the predominant idea embodied in its structure, determines the movements and relations of its parts or members. The difference of the two modes of determination is plainly visible on a review day, if we first watch the compact regiments marching off the ground, and then the crowd streaming away irregularly in search of rest or refreshment. By organisation then, as opposed to association, we mean determination of {162} particulars by the scheme or general nature of a systematic group to which they belong, as opposed to their determination by immediate links uniting them with what, relatively speaking, are other particulars in casual juxtaposition with them. [2]
[1] The illustration was suggested to me by a passage in Mr. Stout’s Analytic Psychology.
[2] Ultimately, of course, the distinction is one of degree. What operates is always a general connection between members of a whole; the only question is what kind of whole, and, therefore, what kind of connection.
In the working and composition of mind the same difference is observable between association and organisation. Mere association means that any perception or idea may suggest absolutely any mental element whatever with which it has developed a connection by entering into the same mental whole. A study of the purely associative mind is sometimes said to be found in the character of Miss Bates in “Emma.” Perhaps, as really uncontrolled association can hardly be found in a sane intellect, we may say that the character in question is something more subtle and more true to nature; and that is, a study of the tendency to pure association continually breaking out, and as continually repressed, or “herded back” to the main subject, to use the expression which Walter Scott applies to the way in which just such an associative talker [1] is brought back to his point by his hearer.
[1] Claude Halcro in the Pirate.
In mind, as in the external world, the higher stage of association is organisation. The characteristic of organisation is control by a general scheme [1] as opposed to influence by juxtaposition {163} of units. The zigzag course of thought which is represented in such a character as Miss Bates is due to the absence of control by any general scheme. Every idea—every significant word—has practically innumerable connections in the mind. If the course of thought has no general direction impressed upon it, no selective control operative within it, it may change its line altogether at every principal word. [2] The possibilities of the ideas at our command make them like a complex of railways, wholly consisting of turn-tables, so that, on any one of these component parts, the train may swing round and go off in a wholly new direction. This is notably illustrated by the sense of context in interpretation. For anyone who has no such sense, possible errors are endless, beyond the hope of correction.
[1] For the psychological theory of such control see Stout, Analytic Psych. ii. 3.
[2] If it has not enough control to complete a significant sentence, of course there is insanity or idiocy.
The opposite of such a zigzag course is a train of thought such as an argument. In a train of thought, one general idea prescribes the direction, or forms the “subject,” or limits what has been called the universe of discourse. Attention is wholly guided by the general idea, and refuses to be distracted by any interest or suggestion which does not bear upon it. Let the general idea be, for example, the relation of wealth to the best life. Experience shows that it is most difficult to resist the varied interests and distractions which present themselves in the attempt to keep this relation in view. Easy and attractive modes of acquisition, easy and attractive modes of expenditure, force themselves upon the mind as isolated {164} suggestions, and divert it from the question: “Shall I, or will any one else, be the better for it, as I understand better?” The effort of control, needed to keep in view the general nature of our conception of what is best in life, and to attend to suggestions which offer themselves as to acquisition and expenditure, only in so far as they seem likely to promote that conception, means the predominance of a scheme or general idea through all the varied circumstances of economic possibility. It makes no difference whether we are speaking of reasoning or of practice. The nature of the control which insists on relevancy, and of the intellectual system in which it exhibits itself, is the same in both cases. Every mind, in fact, is more or less organised under the control of dominant ideas, which belong to its habitual preoccupations and determine the constant bias of its thoughts. There is a well-known story how a traveller in a railway carriage undertook to detect the vocation of each of his fellow travellers from their respective answers to a single question. The question was: “What is that which destroys what it has itself produced?” and a naturalist, so the story runs, revealed himself by the answer, “vital force,” a soldier replied “war,” a scholar “Kronos,” a journalist “revolution,” and a farmer “a boar.” [1] Each answer was determined by the dominant bias or idea which selected out of the possible answers to the riddle that which would harmonise with the general mental system under its control. Selection, it must be remembered, is at the same time creation. In every situation, {165} theoretical or practical, the surroundings as a whole are new, and the rule or scheme has to assert itself in conditions which are not precisely repeated from any former case. In so asserting itself it does not simply reproduce something old, any more than a batsman recalls a former movement when he plays a ball, but it produces that thought or deed which expresses its nature with reference to the new surroundings in which it has to act. [2] For it is a universal tendency, a scheme partly defined, and in process of further defining itself by moulding the material presented to it.