Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral Values

by George Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers

Value implies a valuer; however universal or established a value may be, the term is meaningless unless it bears relation to people who value. No definition of value is possible, or at any rate satisfactory, that does not imply the judgment, choice, or assertion of a valuer in the act of valuing. The universality of a value does not make it objective or independent of valuers, but merely widens the applicability of that value with regard to any imaginable valuer. If this can be admitted, it follows that value cannot be made independent of the factors that determine or have determined the mental attitude of the valuer. For this reason I will attempt to give an account of some of the factors which bear directly upon man, the valuer, and less directly upon values in general and moral values in particular. The discussion will be under four headings: (1) Instinct and Heredity; (2) Emotion; (3) Judgment of Ends; (4) Environment and Cosmic Suggestion.

(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.