In order that the individual shall be sensitive in a special degree to the voice of the herd, he must have developed in him an infallible capacity for recognizing his fellow-members. In the lower mammalia this seems almost exclusively a function of the sense of smell, as is natural enough since that sense is as a general rule highly developed in them. The domestic dog shows admirably the importance of the function of recognition in his species. Comparatively few recognize even their masters at any distance by sight or sound, while obviously with their fellows they are practically dependent on smell. The extent to which the ceremonial of recognition has developed in the dog is, of course, very familiar to every one. It shows unmistakable evidence of the rudiments of social organization, and is not the less illuminating to the student of human society for having a bodily orientation and technique which at first sight obscures its resemblance to similar, and it is supposed more dignified, mechanisms in man.
Specialization fitting the animal for social life is obviously in certain directions restrictive; that is, it denies him certain capacities and immunities which the solitary animal possesses; equally obviously is it in certain directions expansive and does it confer qualities on the social which the solitary does not possess. Among qualities of restrictive specialization are inability to live satisfactorily apart from the herd or some substitute for it, the liability to loneliness, a dependence on leadership, custom, and tradition, a {110} credulity towards the dogmas of the herd and an unbelief towards external experience, a standard of conduct no longer determined by personal needs but influenced by a power outside the ego—a conscience, in fact, and a sense of sin—a weakness of personal initiative and a distrust of its promptings. Expansive specialization, on the other hand, gives the gregarious animal the sense of power and security in the herd, the capacity to respond to the call of the herd with a maximum output of energy and endurance, a deep-seated mental satisfaction in unity with the herd, and a solution in it of personal doubts and fears.
All these characters can be traced in an animal such as the dog. The mere statement of them, necessarily in mental terms, involves the liability to a certain inexactitude if it is not recognized that no hypothesis as to the consciousness of the dog is assumed but that the description in mental terms is given because of its convenient brevity. An objective description of the actual conduct on which such summarized statements are founded would be impossibly voluminous.
The advantage the new unit obtains by aggressive gregariousness is chiefly its immense accession of strength as a hunting and fighting organism. Protective gregariousness confers on the flock or herd advantages perhaps less obvious but certainly not less important. A very valuable gain is the increased efficiency of vigilance which is possible. Such efficiency depends on the available number of actual watchers and the exquisite sensitiveness of the herd and all its members to the signals of such sentries. No one can have watched a herd of sheep for long without being impressed with the delicacy with which a supposed danger is detected, transmitted throughout the herd, and met {111} by an appropriate movement. Another advantage enjoyed by the new unit is a practical solution of the difficulties incident upon the emotion of fear. Fear is essentially an enfeebling passion, yet in the sheep and such animals it is necessarily developed to a high degree in the interests of safety. The danger of this specialization is neutralized by the implication of so large a part of the individual’s personality in the herd and outside of himself. Alarm becomes a passion, as it were, of the herd rather than of the individual, and the appropriate response by the individual is to an impulse received from the herd and not directly from the actual object of alarm. It seems to be in this way that the paralysing emotion of fear is held back from the individual, while its effect can reach him only as the active and formidable passion of panic. The gregarious herbivora are in fact timid but not fearful animals. All the various mechanisms in which the social habit shows itself apparently have as their general function a maximal sensitiveness to danger of the herd as a whole, combined with maintaining with as little interruption as possible an atmosphere of calm within the herd, so that the individual members can occupy themselves in the serious business of grazing. It must be doubted whether a truly herbivorous animal of a solitary habit could ever flourish when we remember how incessant must be his industry in feeding if he is to be properly nourished, and how much such an occupation will be interfered with by the constant alarms he must be subject to if he is to escape the attacks of carnivorous enemies. The evidence suggests that protective gregariousness is a more elaborate manifestation of the social habit than the aggressive form. It is clear that the security of the higher herbivora, such as the ox and especially the horse and their allies, is considerable in relation to the carnivora. One may {112} permissibly perhaps indulge the speculation that in the absence of man the horse possibly might have developed a greater complexity of organization than it has actually been able to attain; that the facts should seem to contain this hint is a curious testimony to the wonderful constructive imagination of Swift.
Setting aside such guesses and confining ourselves to the facts, we may say in summary that we find the infrahuman mammalia to present two distinctly separable strains of the social habit. Both are of great value to the species in which they appear, and both are associated with certain fundamentally similar types of reactive capacity which give a general resemblance of character to all gregarious animals. Of the two forms the protective is perhaps capable of absorbing more fully the personality of the individual than is the aggressive, but both seem to have reached the limit of their intensification at a grade far lower than that which has been attained in the insects.
CHARACTERS OF THE GREGARIOUS ANIMAL DISPLAYED BY MAN.
When we come to consider man we find ourselves faced at once by some of the most interesting problems in the biology of the social habit. It is probably not necessary now to labour the proof of the fact that man is a gregarious animal in literal fact, that he is as essentially gregarious as the bee and the ant, the sheep, the ox, and the horse. The tissue of characteristically gregarious reactions which his conduct presents furnishes incontestable proof of this thesis, which is thus an indispensable clue to an inquiry into the intricate problems of human society.
It is desirable perhaps to enumerate in a summary {113} way the more obvious gregarious characters which man displays.
1. He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental. This intolerance is the cause of the mental fixity and intellectual incuriousness which, to a remarkable degree for an animal with so capacious a brain, he constantly displays. As is well known, the resistance to a new idea is always primarily a matter of prejudice, the development of intellectual objections, just or otherwise, being a secondary process in spite of the common delusion to the contrary. This intimate dependence on the herd is traceable not merely in matters physical and intellectual, but also betrays itself in the deepest recesses of personality as a sense of incompleteness which compels the individual to reach out towards some larger existence than his own, some encompassing being in whom his perplexities may find a solution and his longings peace. Physical loneliness and intellectual isolation are effectually solaced by the nearness and agreement of the herd. The deeper personal necessities cannot be met—at any rate, in such society as has so far been evolved—by so superficial a union; the capacity for intercommunication is still too feebly developed to bring the individual into complete and soul-satisfying harmony with his fellows, to convey from one to another
Thoughts hardly to be packed