We cannot acquire truth by means of the emotions, which can but be the means of informing us of our personal relation towards our environment. They may reveal us to ourselves, or may register the reflection of our environment within us; but the consequences of emotion cannot be regarded as ephemeral, for all emotional excitation must have a permanent residual effect upon the tone of the subjective mind.
(3) Judgment of Ends
Without attempting to catalogue or enumerate the various intellectual and mental processes, consigning them to interminable classes and subdivisions of volitional, cognitive, affective and cogitative states or acts, labelled like so many distinct specimens in a collector's museum, it may yet be possible to detach certain features involved in the process of moral judgment which are distinguishable from the essentially instinctive, emotional and suggested elements we have been considering. The danger involved in reducing psychological processes to their constituent elements and treating of each element as though it were static and dissociated, is that it is apt to obscure a true appreciation of the actual manifestations of personality which result from complex and interactionary elements in continuous motion, forming one integral whole in constant process of influencing and being influenced by its environment. The whole is always more and something different from the sum of its parts. The factors here specially referred to which may determine in greater or lesser degree the nature and direction of moral valuation are deliberative, critical and analytic. These are essentially the intellectual and objective[77] processes exercised to the best advantage when freed to the greatest possible extent from instinctive and emotional complications. Judgments formed under such conditions involve the realization of the ends and effects of conduct, and an assignment of "desirableness" to those ends. It is clear that an intellectual judgment of this nature, assigning value to the ends of conduct, must take into account those inherent characteristics and instincts which underlie all motives and interests. Thus, we recognize the fact of the instinct of self-preservation, and are right in assigning the qualification "good" to life as denoting its desirableness; similarly the instinct of acquisition is general and fundamental in the human species,[78] we accordingly assign the qualification "good" to property and wealth, and to its destruction, "evil"; the abstract value of the end of this instinct is intensified and held in greater respect the more it is realized to have been the means by which the surplus energy of mankind has been utilized to accumulate the capital essential to the development of civilization. The desirableness of both life and wealth is also considerably increased or modified by collateral associations, by the pleasures they enable us to experience.
There is in all judgment of the morality of an action a perception of the end or consequence of that action. The clearness or dimness of the perception will depend upon the habits of thought and the organization of motives—or lack of it—which result from the native tendencies and development of the subjective mind. The norm of valuation which we apply to moral conduct is conditioned by many conscious and unconscious factors which determine our idea of "desirableness," and the standard will approximate to the conventional and common standard of the community in so far as we are influenced by our environment—or in proportion to our amenability to cosmic suggestion. It is on account of the obvious desire for pleasure and for avoidance of pain that Utilitarians are justified in making use of that general fact as a standard of utility. This in no way implies that the motives of all conduct are efforts to obtain pleasurable sensation or to avoid pain. The mistake of this discredited doctrine of psychological hedonism lay in confusing the motive or impulse to action with the valuation of conduct. It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that conduct is least often determined by valuation. Realization or anticipation of the end of action is not the necessary stimulus of action, neither does it conform to volition or striving; but realization of consequences frequently inhibits the fulfilment of volition. Both conduct and volition are determined by the relation of subject to object, and by the constitution of the ego, conditioned, as it is, by the innumerable factors of heredity and environment.
(4) Cosmic Suggestion
Public opinion is often spoken of as something mysterious and powerful, to be recognized and submitted to, but not to be explained. Napoleon is credited with having said: "Public opinion is a power invisible, mysterious, and irresistible." Some writers, failing to appreciate the true significance and nature of this dynamic factor in the formation of public sentiment, are content to fall back on the convenient subterfuge of Divine agency as full and sufficient explanation. Thus they speak of a "common consciousness" which is the arbiter of the morals and faiths of men, a consciousness which is subject to evolutionary progress, and yet owes its existence to Divine revelation.
However inadequately, the attempt has nevertheless been made in these pages to present a wider and, at the same time, a more precise definition of those psychic and vital forces, included in the term environment, which play so great a part in the formation and growth of human beliefs, opinions and sentiments, in binding together nations, communities and groups, and no less a part in setting them against one another. For lack of a better, the designation "cosmic suggestion" has been used as a generic term to describe the force resulting from the accumulative suggestions or impulsions of aggregations of individual agents, between whom and the subjects or recipients a state of rapport is more or less established. It is an aspect, or perhaps more accurately a product, of the vital energy of the cosmos. In a community or a mass of men moved by common emotions and ideas, each individual plays the double rôle of operator and affected object or recipient.
The communication of a proposition by suggestion is distinguished from, though often accompanied by, other means by which ideas are communicated through the senses, involving rational processes which produce conviction. Emotional suggestions are either rejected or accepted unquestioningly in the absence of any logical reason. The supreme importance and general applicability in normal waking life of this wider aspect of hypnotic suggestion is seldom adequately appreciated by students of social development. That the faiths and convictions of men do not depend upon their appeal to "man's reasoning faculties" is, however, usually admitted. Lecky frequently dwells on this fact, as in the following passage: "In most men the love of truth is so languid, and their reluctance to encounter mental prejudices is so great, that they yield their judgments without an effort to the current, withdraw their minds from all opinions or arguments opposed to their own, and thus speedily convince themselves of the truth of what they wish to believe."
Dr. McDougall recognizes, as do most modern psychologists, the great social importance of this "current" of which Lecky speaks; he terms it mass-suggestion. "Children," he says, "largely in virtue of their suggestibility, rapidly absorb the knowledge, beliefs, and especially the sentiments of their social environment. But most adults also remain suggestible, especially towards mass-suggestion, and towards the propositions which they know to be supported by the whole weight of society, or by long tradition."[79] This also he calls prestige suggestion. Individual suggestibility, he considers, is conditioned by native disposition and character, and dependent upon the relative strengths of the two instincts of self-assertion and subjection. He does not, however, appear to assign to this factor of suggestion any conspicuous part in the excitation of such emotions as, for instance, anger, moral indignation, shame and remorse. But the simultaneous excitation of the same emotion in crowds is attributed to the action of the gregarious instinct which is accountable for the sympathetic induction of emotion. The explanation given of the fact that the instinctive behaviour of one animal directly excites similar behaviour on the part of his fellows, consists in the assumption that among gregarious animals each of the principal instincts has a special perceptual inlet that is adapted to receive the sense-impressions made by the expressions of the same instinct in other animals of the same species: thus, for example, the fear instinct, inter alia, has a special perceptual inlet that renders it excitable by the sound of the cry of fear; the instinct of pugnacity is similarly excited through a perceptual inlet by the sound of the roar of anger, and so on. Whatever the value of this assumption it is clear that the emotional excitement of an aggregation of individuals reacts with cumulative intensity upon each member of it. It is sufficient, however, to say that there exists in the human species a fundamental impulse of gregarious attraction, analogous in the physical world to the law of gravitation, which tends to produce aggregations of men and to intensify their suggestibility in relation to sheer weight of numbers and proximity. If we accept the view that the subjective mind is liable to be directly influenced by other subjective minds with which it is en rapport, the hypothesis of special perceptual inlets, designed for each instinct to receive only the corresponding sense-impressions derived from the efferent action of the same instinct in other individuals, becomes of secondary importance. Any cause which simultaneously provokes emotional excitement in a large body of people tends to bring them into rapport, thence onwards a community of feeling has been established, like elements coalesce, foreign elements are dissipated or repulsed, the mass will think, feel and act as a collective whole, the impulse or emotion of one will re-echo in all, as when a certain note is struck all the chords in the instrument which are attuned to it are set vibrating. A skilful orator who can once succeed in evoking strong emotional response in his audience is in the most favourable position for transmitting any proposition by suggestion; any assertion is then likely to be received unquestioningly and with the strength of conviction, any suggestion to be resolved into action.
An orator of the ecstatic and fanatical type will endeavour, by working himself into a frenzy of excitement, to throw himself into the subjective state, for thus he is in closest rapport with his environment. This is the secret of the power of demagogues and of other worthless and otherwise insignificant individuals. It is said to have been the method of one of the most extraordinary characters of modern times—Rasputin, or Grigori Yefimovitsch, a gross, illiterate, debauched and fanatical Siberian monk, who, up to the time of his murder in December 1916, had the reputation of being the most powerful man in Russia. According to the few reliable accounts of him that are obtainable, the influence of this man's personality and the religio-erotic frenzies which characterized his ministrations were such that women of the highest culture and refinement would prostitute themselves, body and soul, in obedience to his suggestion, ministers and high state officials habitually sought his favours, and among the masses he was a constant object of idolatry.