The foregoing considerations, elementary and incomplete as they are, suggest that there is a strong prima facie case for rejecting the common conceptions that man is among animals the least endowed with an inheritance of instinct, and that civilization has produced in him profound modifications in his primitive instinctive impulses. If the conception which I have put forward be correct, namely, that man is not at all less subject to instinctive impulsions than any other animal but disguises the fact from the observer and from himself by the multiplicity of the lines of response his mental capacity enables him to take, it should follow that his conduct is much less truly variable and much more open to generalization than has generally been supposed. Should this be possible, it would enable the biologist to study the actual affairs of mankind in a really practical way, to analyse the tendencies of social development, to discover how deeply or superficially they were based in the necessity of things, and above all, to foretell their course. Thus might be founded a true science of politics which would be of direct service to the statesman.
Many attempts have been made to apply biological principles to the interpretation of history and the guidance of statecraft, especially since the popularization of the principles associated with the name of Darwin. Such attempts have generally been undertaken less in the spirit of the scientific {100} investigator than in that of the politician; the point of departure has been a political conviction and not a biological truth; and as might be expected, when there has been any conflict between political conviction and biological truth it is the latter that has had to give way. Work of this kind has brought the method into deserved contempt by its crudity, its obvious subservience to prejudice, and its pretentious gestures of the doctrinaire. England has not been without her examples of these scientific politicians and historians, but they cannot be said to have flourished here as they have in the more scholastic air of Germany. The names of several such are now notorious in this country and their works are sufficiently familiar for it to be obvious that their claims to scientific value do not admit of discussion. It is not necessary to consider their conclusions, they are condemned by their manner; and however interesting their political vociferation may be to fellow-patriots, it plainly has no meaning whatsoever as science. In face of the spectacle presented by these leather-lunged doctrinaires, it needs some little hardihood to maintain that it is possible profitably to apply biological principle to the consideration of human affairs; nevertheless, that is an essential thesis of this essay.
In attempting to illuminate the records of history by the principles of biology, an essential difficulty is the difference of scale in time upon which these two departments of knowledge work. Historical events are confined within a few thousands of years, the biological record covers many millions; it is scarcely to be expected, therefore, that even a gross movement on the cramped historical scale will be capable of detection in the vast gulf of time the biological series represents. A minor difficulty is the fact that the data of history come to us through a dense and reduplicated veil of human {101} interpretation, whereas the biological facts are comparatively free from this kind of obscuration. The former obstacle is undoubtedly serious. It is to be remarked, however, that there is strong reason to suppose that the process of organic evolution has not been and is not always infinitely slow and gradual. It is more than suspected that, perhaps as the result of slowly accumulated tendency or perhaps as the result of a sudden variation of structure or capacity, there have been periods of rapid change which might have been perceptible to direct observation. The infinitely long road still tending upwards comes to where it branches and meets another path, tending perhaps downwards or even upwards at a different slope. May not the meeting or branching form, as it were, a node in the infinite line, a resting place for the eye, a point in the vast extension capable of recognition by a finite mind and of expression in terms of human affairs? It is the belief of the writer that the human race stands at such a nodal point to-day.
THE BIOLOGY OF GREGARIOUSNESS.
In order to set forth the evidence on which is based the conclusion that the present juncture of affairs is not merely, as it very obviously is, a meeting-place of epochs in the historical series, but also marks a stage in the biological series which will prove to have been a moment of destiny in the evolution of the human species, it will be necessary to inquire somewhat closely into the biological meaning of the social habit in animals. In an earlier essay certain speculations in the same subject were indulged, and a certain amount of repetition will be necessary. The point of view then taken up, however, was different from that from which I shall now attempt to review the facts. Then the main {102} interest lay in an examination of the meaning of gregariousness for the individual mind, and although reasons enough were found for uneasiness at the course of events, and at the instability of civilization which any radical examination displayed, the inquiry was not pursued under any immediate imminence of disaster to the social fabric as it must be now. Naturally, therefore, at the present time certain aspects of the subject which before were of no special relevance become of great importance and demand close examination.
In a general view of the social habit in animals certain outstanding facts are readily to be observed. It is of wide distribution and sporadic occurrence, it varies much in the completeness of its development, and there seems to be an inverse relation between its completeness and the brain power of the animal concerned.
From the wideness of its distribution the social habit may be supposed to represent a forward step in complexity which comes about readily. It has the appearance of being upon a path which species have a natural tendency to follow, a line of evolution which is perhaps rendered possible by constantly occurring small variations common to all animals and taken advantage of only under certain circumstances of pressure or increase. It seems not to depend on any sudden large variation of type, and such is not necessary to account for it. It differs from many other modifications which we know animal life to have undergone in being immediately useful to the species from its very beginning and in its least perfect forms. Once started, however imperfectly, the new habit will have a natural tendency to progress towards fuller forms of sociality by reason of special selective forces which it inevitably sets going. The fact that it is valuable to the species in which it develops even in its most larval forms, {103} combined with its tendency to progress, no doubt accounts for the wonderful series of all degrees of gregariousness which the field of natural history presents.
I have pointed out elsewhere that the fundamental biological meaning of gregariousness is that it allows of an indefinite enlargement of the unit upon which the undifferentiated influence of natural selection is allowed to act, so that the individual merged in the larger unit is shielded from the immediate effects of natural selection and is exposed directly only to the special form of selection which obtains within the new unit.
There seems little doubt that this sheltering of the individual allows him to vary and to undergo modifications with a freedom which would have been dangerous to him as an isolated being, but is safe under the new conditions and valuable to the new unit of which he now is a part.
In essence the significance of the passage from the solitary to the gregarious seems to be closely similar to that of the passage from the unicellular to the multicellular organism—an enlargement of the unit exposed to natural selection, a shielding of the individual cell from that pressure, an endowment of it with freedom to vary and specialize in safety.