Thirdly, the problem may be shirked by the easy mechanism of rationalization. The man may take his forbidden pleasure and endow a chapel, persuading himself that his is a special case, that at any rate he is not as bad as X, or Y, or Z, who {53} committed such and such enormities, that after all there is Divine mercy, and he never beat his wife, and was always regular with his subscriptions to missions and the hospitals. Or, if his difficulty is the ethical one, he will come to see how right the herd view really is; that it is a very narrow mind which cannot see the intrinsic excellence of suffering; that the sheep and cattle we breed for eating, the calf we bleed to death that its meat may be white, the one baby out of four we kill in the first year of life, that cancer, consumption, and insanity and the growing river of blood which bathes the feet of advancing mankind, all have their part in the Increasing Purpose which is leading the race ever upwards and onwards to a Divine consummation of joy. Thus the conflict ceases, and the man is content to watch the blood and the Purpose go on increasing together and to put on flesh unperplexed by the shallow and querulous scruples of his youth.
Of these three solutions that of scepticism is unquestionably the least common, though the impression that this is not the case is created by the frequency of apparent scepticism, which, in fact, merely masks the continuation of conflict in the deeper strata of the mind. A man the subject of such submerged conflict, though he may appear to others, and, of course, to himself, to have reached a secure and uncontested basis of stability, may, after a period of apparently frictionless mental life, betray by unmistakable evidence the fact that conflict has continued disastrously below the surface.
The solutions by indifference and by rationalization or by a mixture of these two processes are characteristic of the great class of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State. In {54} them herd suggestion shows its capacity to triumph over experience, to delay the evolution of altruism, and to obscure the existence and falsify the results of the contest between personal and social desires. That it is able to do so has the advantage of establishing existing society with great firmness, but it has also the consequence of entrusting the conduct of the State and the attitude of it towards life to a class which their very stability shows to possess a certain relative incapacity to take experience seriously, a certain relative insensibility to the value of feeling and to suffering, and a decided preference for herd tradition over all other sources of conduct.
Early in history the bulk of mankind must have been of this type, because experience, being still relatively simple, would have but little suggestive force, and would therefore readily be suppressed by herd suggestion. There would be little or no mental conflict, and such as there was would be readily stilled by comparatively simple rationalizations. The average man would then be happy, active, and possessed of an inexhaustible fund of motive and energy, capable of intense patriotism and even of self-immolation for the herd. The nation consequently, in an appropriate environment, would be an expanding one and rendered ruthless and formidable by an intense, unshakable conviction of its divine mission. Its blindness towards the new in experience would keep its patriots narrow and fierce, its priests bigoted and bloodthirsty, its rulers arrogant, reactionary, and over-confident. Should chance ordain that there arose no great environmental change rendering necessary great modifications, such a nation would have a brilliant career of conquest as has been so often demonstrated by history.
Amongst the first-class Powers to-day the mentally stable are still the directing class, and their {55} characteristic tone is discernible in national attitudes towards experience, in national ideals and religions, and in national morality. It is this possession of the power of directing national opinion by a class which is in essence relatively insensitive towards new combinations of experience; this persistence of a mental type which may have been adequate in the simpler past, into a world where environments are daily becoming more complex—it is this survival, so to say, of the waggoner upon the footplate of the express engine, which has made the modern history of nations a series of such breathless adventures and hairbreadth escapes. To those who are able to view national affairs from an objective standpoint, it is obvious that each of these escapes might very easily have been a disaster, and that sooner or later one of them must be such.
Thus far we have seen that the conflict between herd suggestion and experience is associated with the appearance of the great mental type which is commonly called normal. Whether or not it is in fact to be regarded as such is comparatively unimportant and obviously a question of statistics; what is, however, of an importance impossible to exaggerate is the fact that in this type of mind personal satisfactoriness or adequacy, or, as we may call it, mental comfort, is attained at the cost of an attitude towards experience which greatly affects the value to the species of the activities of minds of this type. This mental stability, then, is to be regarded as, in certain important directions, a loss; and the nature of the loss resides in a limitation of outlook, a relative intolerance of the new in thought, and a consequent narrowing of the range of facts over which satisfactory intellectual activity is possible. We may, therefore, for convenience, refer to this type as the resistive, a name which serves as a reminder of the exceedingly important fact that, {56} however “normal” the type may be, it is one which falls far short of the possibilities of the human mind.
If we now turn to a consideration of the mental characteristics of the constituents of society other than those of the resistive type, we shall find a common quality traceable, and another great type capable of broad definition. We must at once, however, guard ourselves against being misled by the name “normal” as applied to the resistant into the supposition that this type is in a numerical majority in society. Intellectually unquestionably of inferior value, there is good reason to suppose that in mere numbers it has already passed its zenith, as may be gathered from the note of panic which what is called the increase of degeneracy is beginning to excite.
Outside the comfortable and possibly diminishing ranks of the “normal,” society is everywhere penetrated by a steadily increasing degree of what we may call in the broadest possible way mental instability. All observers of society, even the most optimistic, are agreed that the prevalence of this mental quality is increasing, while those who are competent to trace its less obtrusive manifestations find it to be very widespread.
When the twenty years just past come to be looked back upon from the distant future, it is probable that their chief claim to interest will be that they saw the birth of the science of abnormal psychology. That science, inconspicuous as has been its development, has already given us a few generalizations of the first importance. Amongst such, perhaps the most valuable is that which has taught us that certain mental and physical manifestations which have usually been regarded as disease in the ordinary sense are due to the effects upon the mind of the failure to assimilate the {57} experience presented to it into a harmonious unitary personality. We have seen that the stable-minded deal with an unsatisfactory piece of experience by rejecting its significance. In certain minds such successful exclusion does not occur, and the unwelcome experience persists as an irritant, so to say, capable neither of assimilation nor rejection. Abnormal psychology discloses the fact that such minds are apt to develop the supposed diseases we have just referred to, and the fact that these and other manifestations of what we have called mental instability are the consequences of mental conflict.
Now, we have already seen that a gregarious animal, unless his society is perfectly organized, must be subject to lasting and fierce conflict between experience and herd suggestion.[14] It is natural, therefore, to assume that the manifestations of mental instability are not diseases of the individual in the ordinary sense at all, but inevitable consequences of man’s biological history and exact measures of the stage now reached of his assimilation into the gregarious life. The manifestations of mental instability and disintegration were at first supposed to be of comparatively rare occurrence and limited to certain well-known “diseases,” but they are coming to be recognized over a larger and larger field, and in a great variety of phenomena.