The element of conflict in the normal life of all inhabitants of a civilized state is so familiar that no formal demonstration of its existence is necessary. In childhood the process has begun. The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight. And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold upon this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares to be the certainty of future bliss. To the child, of course, experience has but little suggestive force, and he is easily consoled by the perfunctory rationalizations offered him as explanations by his elders. Yet who of us is there who cannot remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, the obscure and elusive sense of something being wrong, which is left by these and similar conflicts?
When the world begins to open out before us and experience to flow in with rapidly increasing volume, the state of affairs necessarily becomes more obvious. The mental unrest which we, with a certain cynicism, regard as normal to adolescence is evidence of the heavy handicap we lay upon the developing mind in forcing it to attempt to assimilate with {50} experience the dicta of herd suggestion. Moreover, let us remember, to the adolescent experience is no longer the shadowy and easily manipulable series of dreams which it usually is to the child. It has become touched with the warmth and reality of instinctive feeling. The primitive instincts are now fully developed and finding themselves balked at every turn by herd suggestion; indeed, even products of the latter are in conflict among themselves. Not only sex, self-preservation, and nutrition are at war with the pronouncements of the herd, but altruism, the ideal of rationality, the desire for power, the yearning for protection, and other feelings which have acquired instinctive force from group suggestion.
The sufferings entailed by this condition are commonplace knowledge, and there is scarcely a novelist who has not dealt with them. It is around matters of sex and of religion that the conflict is most severe, and while it is no part of our purpose to make any detailed survey of the condition, it may be of interest to point out some of the more obvious significances of this localization.
Religion has always been to man an intensely serious matter, and when we realize its biological significance we can see that this is due to a deeply ingrained need of his mind. The individual of a gregarious species can never be truly independent and self-sufficient. Natural selection has ensured that as an individual he must have an abiding sense of incompleteness, which, as thought develops in complexity, will come to be more and more abstractly expressed. This is the psychological germ which expresses itself in the religious feelings, in the desire for completion, for mystical union, for incorporation with the infinite, which are all provided for in Christianity and in all the successful sub-varieties of Christianity which modern times have {51} seen develop. This need seems with the increasing complexity of society to become more and more imperious, or rather to be satisfiable only by more and more elaborately rationalized expressions. The following is a representative passage from a recent very popular book of mystical religion: “The great central fact in human life, in your life and in mine, is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow.” It is very interestingly shown here to what lengths of rationalization may be forced the consequences of that yearning in us which is identical with the mechanism that binds the wolf to the pack, the sheep to the flock, and to the dog makes the company of his master like walking with God in the cool of the evening.
Did an opportunity offer, it would be interesting to inquire into the relation of the same instinctive impulse to the genesis of philosophy. Such an attempt would, however, involve too great a digression from the argument of this essay.
That sex should be a chief field for the conflicts we are discussing is comprehensible not only from the immense strength of the impulse and the fact that it is a mode of man’s activity which herd suggestion has always tried to regulate, but also because there is reason to believe that the sex impulse becomes secondarily associated with another instinctive feeling of great strength, namely, altruism. We have seen already that altruism is largely antagonized by herd tradition, and it is plausible to suppose that the overwhelming rush of this feeling which is usually associated with sex feelings is not altogether sexual in quality, but secondarily associated therewith as being the only outlet through which it is allowed by the herd to indulge manifestations of really passionate intensity. {52} If this were so it would clearly be of great practical importance should the rational method ever come to be applied to the solution of the problems for the sociologist and statesman which surround the relations of the sexes.
The conflicts which we are discussing are of course by no means limited to the periods of childhood and adolescence, but are frequently carried over into adult life. To understand how the apparent calm of normal adult life is attained, it is necessary to consider the effects upon the mind of these processes of contention.
Let us consider the case of a person caught in one of those dilemmas which society presents so abundantly to its members—a man seized with a passion for some individual forbidden to him by the herd, or a man whose eyes have been opened to the vision of the cruelty which everywhere lies close below the surface of life, and yet has deeply ingrained in him the doctrine of the herd that things, on the whole, are fundamentally right, that the universe is congruous with his moral feelings, that the seeming cruelty is mercy and the apparent indifference long-suffering. Now, what are the possible developments in such a tormented soul?
The conflict may end through the subsidence of either antagonist. Years, other instincts, or grosser passions may moderate the intensity of ungratified love or take away the sharpness from the sight of incomprehensible pain.
Again, scepticism may detect the nature of the herd suggestion and deprive it of its compelling force.