It should be noticed, however, that verifiable truths may acquire the potency of herd suggestion, so that the suggestibility of man does not necessarily or always act against the advancement of knowledge. For example, to the student of biology the principles of Darwinism may acquire the force of herd suggestion through being held by the class which he most respects, is most in contact with and the class which has therefore acquired suggestionizing power with him. Propositions consistent with these principles will now necessarily be more acceptable to him, whatever the evidence by which they are supported, than they would be to one who had not been exposed to the same influences. The opinion, in fact, may be hazarded that the acceptance of any proposition is invariably the resultant of suggestive influences, whether the {40} proposition be true or false, and that the balance of suggestion is usually on the side of the false, because, education being what it is, the scientific method—the method, that is to say, of experience—has so little chance of acquiring suggestionizing force.
Thus far sensitiveness to the herd has been discussed in relation to its effect upon intellectual processes. Equally important effects are traceable in feeling.
It is obvious that when free communication is possible by speech, the expressed approval or disapproval of the herd will acquire the qualities of identity or dissociation from the herd respectively. To know that he is doing what would arouse the disapproval of the herd will bring to the individual the same profound sense of discomfort which would accompany actual physical separation, while to know that he is doing what the herd would approve will give him the sense of rightness, of gusto, and of stimulus which would accompany physical presence in the herd and response to its mandates. In both cases it is clear that no actual expression by the herd is necessary to arouse the appropriate feelings, which would come from within and have, in fact, the qualities which are recognized in the dictates of conscience. Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal. A dog and a cat caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that punishment is coming; but the dog, moreover, knows that he has done wrong, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him, while the cat’s sole impulse is to escape. The rational recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally clear to the gregarious and to the solitary animal, but it is the former only who understands {41} that he has committed a crime, who has, in fact, the sense of sin. That this is the origin of what we call conscience is confirmed by the characteristics of the latter which are accessible to observation. Any detailed examination of the phenomena of conscience would lead too far to be admissible here. Two facts, however, should be noticed. First, the judgments of conscience vary in different circles, and are dependent on local environments; secondly, they are not advantageous to the species to the slightest degree beyond the dicta of the morals current in the circle in which they originate. These facts—stated here in an extremely summary way—demonstrate that conscience is an indirect result of the gregarious instinct, and is in no sense derived from a special instinct forcing men to consider the good of the race rather than individual desires. 1908
SOCIOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HERD INSTINCT
It was shown in the previous essay that the gregarious mental character is evident in man’s behaviour, not only in crowds and other circumstances of actual association, but also in his behaviour as an individual, however isolated. The conclusions were arrived at that man’s suggestibility is not the abnormal casual phenomenon it is often supposed to be, but a normal instinct present in every individual, and that the apparent inconstancy of its action is due to the common failure to recognize the extent of the field over which suggestion acts; that the only medium in which man’s mind can function satisfactorily is the herd, which therefore is not only the source of his opinions, his credulities, his disbeliefs, and his weaknesses, but of his altruism, his charity, his enthusiasms, and his power.
The subject of the psychological effects of herd instinct is so wide that the discussion of it in the former essay covered only a comparatively small part of the field, and that in a very cursory way. Such as it was, however, it cannot be further amplified here, where an attempt will rather be made to sketch some of the practical corollaries of such generalizations as were laid down there.
In the first place, it must be stated with emphasis that deductive speculation of this sort finds its principal value in opening up new possibilities for {43} the application of a more exact method. Science is measurement, but the deductive method may indicate those things which can be most profitably measured.
When the overwhelming importance of the suggestibility of man is recognized our first effort should be to obtain exact numerical expressions of it. This is not the place to attempt any exposition of the directions in which experiment should proceed; but it may be stated that what we want to know is, how much suggestion can do in the way of inducing belief, and it may be guessed that we shall ultimately be able to express the force of suggestion in terms of the number of undifferentiated units of the herd it represents. In the work that has already been done, chiefly by Binet and by Sidis, the suggestive force experimented with was relatively feeble, and the effects consequently were rendered liable to great disturbance from the spontaneous action of other forces of suggestion already in the mind. Sidis, for example, found that his subjects often yielded to his suggestions out of “politeness”; this source of difficulty was obviously due to his use of pure individual suggestion, a variety which theory shows to be weak or even directly resisted.
The next feature of practical interest is connected with the hypothesis, which we attempted in the former article to demonstrate, that irrational belief forms a large bulk of the furniture of the mind, and is indistinguishable by the subject from rational verifiable knowledge. It is obviously of cardinal importance to be able to effect this distinction, for it is the failure to do so which, while it is not the cause of the slowness of advance in knowledge, is the mechanism by which this delay is brought about. Is there, then, we may ask, any discoverable touchstone by which non-rational opinion may be distinguished from rational? Non-rational judgments, being the product of suggestion, will have {44} the quality of instinctive opinion, or, as we may call it, of belief in the strict sense. The essence of this quality is obviousness; the truth held in this way is one of James’s “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort”; to question it is to the believer to carry scepticism to an insane degree, and will be met by contempt, disapproval, or condemnation, according to the nature of the belief in question. When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.
Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore, we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favourable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may both show by their attitude that the belief is held {45} instinctively and non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.