CHAPTER I
IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS
Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on a re-examination of the working of human nature, must begin by trying to overcome his own tendency to exaggerate the intellectuality of mankind.
We are apt to assume that every human action is the result of an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained. An investor, for instance, desires good security combined with five per cent interest. He spends an hour in studying with an open mind the price-list of stocks, and finally infers that the purchase of Brewery Debentures will enable him most completely to realise his desire. Given the original desire for good security, his act in purchasing the Debentures appears to be the inevitable result of his inference. The desire for good security itself may further appear to be merely an intellectual inference as to the means of satisfying some more general desire, shared by all mankind, for 'happiness,' our own 'interest,' or the like. The satisfaction of this general desire can then be treated as the supreme 'end' of life, from which all our acts and impulses, great and small, are derived by the same intellectual process as that by which the conclusion is derived from the premises of an argument.
This way of thinking is sometimes called 'common sense.' A good example of its application to politics may be found in a sentence from Macaulay's celebrated attack on the Utilitarian followers of Bentham in the Edinburgh Review of March 1829. This extreme instance of the foundation of politics upon dogmatic psychology is, curiously enough, part of an argument intended to show that 'it is utterly impossible to deduce the science of government from the principles of human nature.' 'What proposition,' Macaulay asks, 'is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one: and that is not only true, but identical; that men always act from self-interest.... When we see the actions of a man, we know with certainty what he thinks his interest to be.'[[3]] Macaulay believes himself to be opposing Benthamism root and branch, but is unconsciously adopting and exaggerating the assumption which Bentham shared with most of the other eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophers—that all motives result from the idea of some preconceived end.
If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably have admitted that there are cases in which human acts and impulses to act occur independently of any idea of an end to be gained by them. If I have a piece of grit in my eye and ask some one to take it out with the corner of his handkerchief, I generally close the eye as soon as the handkerchief comes near, and always feel a strong impulse to do so. Nobody supposes that I close my eye because, after due consideration, I think it my interest to do so. Nor do most men choose to run away in battle, to fall in love, or to talk about the weather in order to satisfy their desire for a preconceived end. If, indeed, a man were followed through one ordinary day, without his knowing it, by a cinematographic camera and a phonograph, and if all his acts and sayings were reproduced before him next day, he would be astonished to find how few of them were the result of a deliberate search for the means of attaining ends. He would, of course, see that much of his activity consisted in the half-conscious repetition, under the influence of habit, of movements which were originally more fully conscious. But even if all cases of habit were excluded he would find that only a small proportion of the residue could be explained as being directly produced by an intellectual calculation. If a record were also kept of those of his impulses and emotions which did not result in action, it would be seen that they were of the same kind as those which did, and that very few of them were preceded by that process which Macaulay takes for granted.
If Macaulay had been pressed still further, he would probably have admitted that even when an act is preceded by a calculation of ends and means, it is not the inevitable result of that calculation. Even when we know what a man thinks it his interest to do, we do not know for certain what he will do. The man who studies the Stock Exchange list does not buy his Debentures, unless, apart from his intellectual inference on the subject, he has an impulse to write to his stockbroker sufficiently strong to overcome another impulse to put the whole thing off till the next day.
Macaulay might even further have admitted that the mental act of calculation itself results from, or is accompanied by, an impulse to calculate, which impulse may have nothing to do with any anterior consideration of means and ends, and may vary from the half-conscious yielding to a train of reverie up to the obstinate driving of a tired brain onto the difficult task of exact thought.
The text-books of psychology now warn every student against the 'intellectualist' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified. Our inherited organisation inclines us to re-act in certain ways to certain stimuli because such reactions have been useful in the past in preserving our species. Some of the reactions are what we call specifically 'instincts,' that is to say, impulses towards definite acts or series of acts, independent of any conscious anticipation of their probable effects.[[4]] Those instincts are sometimes unconscious and involuntary; and sometimes, in the case of ourselves and apparently of other higher animals, they are conscious and voluntary. But the connection between means and ends which they exhibit is the result not of any contrivance by the actor, but of the survival, in the past, of the 'fittest' of many varying tendencies to act. Indeed the instinct persists when it is obviously useless, as in the case of a dog who turns round to flatten the grass before lying down on a carpet; and even when it is known to be dangerous, as when a man recovering from typhoid hungers for solid food.