The facts of both these orders would appear, then, to indicate that the physical organisation of the cells of a complex organism is accompanied by an organisation of their psychical lives to form a ‘collective consciousness,’ which in the human being becomes a personal self-consciousness; and they would seem to show that the unity of personal consciousness has for its main condition the functional continuity of the protoplasm of the cells of the nervous system.
Even before the facts of disintegration of personalities were known, several authors, notably von Hartmann[21] and G. T. Fechner[22], did not hesitate to make this last assumption; and to assert that, if the brain of a man could be divided by a knife into two parts each of which continued to function, his consciousness would thus be divided into two consciousnesses; and conversely, that, if a functional bridge of nervous matter could be established between the brains of two men, their consciousnesses would fuse to a single consciousness. The discovery of these facts has greatly strengthened the case for this view; and it has been accepted by so sound a psychologist and sober a philosopher as Fouillée[23].
It may be claimed that the consideration of the nature and behaviour of animal societies points to a similar conclusion, and supplements in an important manner the argument founded on the divisibility of individual organisms. Such a line of reasoning has been most thoroughly pursued by Espinas in his very interesting book on animal societies[24]. He begins by considering the lower polycellular forms of animal life. Among them, especially among the hydrozoa or polypes, we find compound or colonial animals; such an animal is a single living mass of which all the parts are in substantial and vital connexion with one another, but is yet made up of a number of parts each of which is morphologically a complete or almost complete creature; and these parts, though specialised for the performance of certain functions subserving the economy of the whole animal or coherent group of animals, are yet capable, if separated from the mass (as they sometimes are by a natural process), of continuing to live, of growing, and of multiplying. There are found among such creatures very various degrees of specialisation of parts and of interdependence of parts; and in those cases in which the specialisation and interdependence of parts is great, the whole compound animal exhibits in its reactions so high a degree of integration that we seem justified in supposing that a common or ‘collective consciousness’ is the psychical correlate of these integrated actions of the separable parts. Why then, it is asked, should this ‘collective consciousness’ cease to be, when the substantial continuity of the parts is interrupted?
Espinas then goes on to describe animal societies of many types, and shows how, as we follow up the evolutionary scale, association and intimate interdependence and co-operation of their members tend to replace more and more completely the individualistic antagonism and unmitigated competition of the lowest free-living organisms. He considers first the type of animal society which is essentially a family, a society of individuals all of which are derived from the same parent by fission or by budding. He argues that each such society of blood-relatives is a harmonious whole only because it enjoys a ‘collective consciousness’ over and above the consciousnesses of its constituent members; that, for example, a swarm of bees, which exhibits so great a uniformity of feeling and action and of which all the members come from the body of one parent, is in reality the material basis of a ‘collective consciousness,’ which presides over and is expressed by their collective actions; that the ants of one household have such a collective consciousness, that they “are, in truth, a single thought in action, like the various cellules and fibres of the brain of a mammal.” For, as he maintains, “the consciousness of animals is not an absolute, indivisible thing. It is on the contrary a reality capable of being divided and diffused ... thought in general and the impulses illuminated by it, are, like the forces of nature, susceptible of diffusion, of transmission, of being shared, and can like these lie dormant where they are thinly diffused, or become vivid and intensified by concentration. The beings that have these attributes are no doubt monads; but these monads are open to and communicate with one another.”
Espinas extends the view to other animal societies of which the members are not all derived from one parent, including human societies; and concludes that, except in the case of the Infusoria at the bottom of the scale and of the highly organised societies at the top of it, every individual consciousness is a part of a superior more comprehensive consciousness of an individual of a higher order. He illustrates at length the fact with the consideration and explanation of which this chapter is concerned, the fact namely that, in all social groups, emotions and impulses are communicated and intensified from one individual to another; and he asks—“If the essential elements of consciousness add themselves together and accumulate from one consciousness to another, how should the consciousness itself of the whole not be participated in by each?” He argues that to be real is not to be known to some other consciousness, but is to exist for oneself, to be conscious of oneself; that, in this sense, the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society is the most real of all things; that every society is therefore a living individual; and that, if we deny self-conscious individuality to a society, we must deny it equally to the mass of cells that make up an animal body; that, in short, we can find unity and individuality nowhere.
This doctrine of the ‘collective consciousness’ of societies may seem bizarre to those to whom it is altogether novel; but it is one that cannot be lightly put aside; it demands serious consideration from any one who seeks the general principles of Collective Psychology. We have no certain knowledge from which its impossibility can be deduced; and the new light thrown upon individuality by modern studies in psycho-pathology shows us that the indivisibility and strictly bounded unity of the individual human soul is a postulate that we must not continue to accept without critical examination. Nor is the conception one that figures only in the writings of philosophers and therefore to be regarded with contemptuous indulgence by men of affairs as but one of the strange harmless foibles of such persons. It has a certain vogue in more popular writings; thus Renan wrote—“It has been remarked that in face of a peril a nation or a city shows, like a living creature, a divination of the common danger, a secret sentiment of its own being and the need of its conservation. Such is the obscure impulsion which provokes from time to time the displacement of a whole people or the emigration of masses, the crusades, the religious, political, or social revolutions.” Phrases such as the soul of a people, the genius of a people, have long been current, and in almost every newspaper one may find important events and tendencies ascribed to the instinct of a people. It is probable that these phrases are written in many instances without any explicit intention to imply a ‘collective national consciousness,’ but merely as well-sounding words that cloak our ignorance and give a vague appearance of understanding. Nevertheless, from its application to the life of nations, the doctrine of a collective consciousness mainly derives its importance. It is seriously used by a number of vigorous contemporary writers, of whom Schaeffle[25] is perhaps the most notable, to carry to its extreme the doctrine of Comte and Spencer that Society is an organism. Spencer specifically refused to complete his analogy between society and an animal organism by the acceptance of the hypothesis of a collective consciousness; and he insisted strongly on the importance, for legislation and social effort of every kind, of holding fast to the consciousness of individual men as the final court of appeal, by reference to which the value of every institution and every form of social activity must be judged, the importance of regarding the welfare and happiness of individual men as the supreme end, in relation to which the welfare of the State is but a means. But those who, like Schaeffle, complete the analogy by acceptance of this hypothesis, regard a nation as an organism in the fullest sense of the word, as an organism that has its own pleasure and pain and its own conscious ends and purposes and strivings; as in fact a great individual which is conscious and may be more or less perfectly self-conscious, conscious of itself, its past, its future, its purposes, its joys and its sorrows. And they do not scruple to draw the logical conclusion that the welfare of the individual should be completely subjected to that of the State; just as the welfare of an organ or cell of the human body is rightly held to be of infinitesimal value in comparison with that of the whole individual and to derive its importance only from its share in the constitution of the whole. This conception of the ‘collective consciousness’ has thus been used as one of the supports of ‘Prussianism’ and has played its part in bringing about the Great War with all its immense mass of individual anguish.
We must, then, examine the arguments upon which the doctrine is based, and ask—Do they suffice to render it probable, or to compel our acceptance of it, and to justify the complete subjection of the individual to the State?
We have seen that a strong case is made out for the view that the consciousness of a complex organism is the ‘collective consciousness’ of all its cells, or of the cells of its nervous system; and it must be admitted that, if this view could be definitely established, it would go far to justify the doctrine of the collective consciousness of societies. Yet the view is by no means established; there are great difficulties in the way of its acceptance. There is the difficulty which meets a doctrine of ‘collective consciousness’ in all its forms from that of Haeckel to that of Hegel,—the difficulty that the consciousness of the units is used twice over, once as the individual consciousness, once as an element entering into the collective consciousness; and no one has been able to suggest how this difficulty can be surmounted. It has been argued also, most forcibly perhaps by Lotze[26], that what we know of the structure and functions of the brain compels us to adopt a very different interpretation of the facts. It is said that, since we cannot find any evidence of a unitary brain-process that might be regarded as the immediate physical correlate of the unitary stream of consciousness of the individual, but find rather that the physical correlate of the individual’s consciousness at any moment is a number of discrete processes taking place simultaneously in anatomical elements widely scattered in different parts of the brain, we are compelled to assume that each of these acts upon some unitary substance, some immaterial entity (which may be called the soul) producing a partial affection of its state. According to this view, then, the consciousness of any moment is the unitary resultant of all these influences simultaneously exerted on the soul, the unitary reaction of the soul upon these many influences[27].
But, even if we could accept the view that the consciousness of the complex organism is the ‘collective consciousness’ of its cells, the analogy between an organism and a society, which constitutes the argument for the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society, would remain defective in one very important respect. If we accept that view, we must believe that the essential condition of the fusion of the consciousnesses of the cells is their spatial continuity, no matter how utterly unintelligible this condition may seem; for the apparent disruption of consciousness on the solution of material continuity between the cells is the principal ground on which this view is founded. Now, no such continuity of substance exists between the members of any human group or society, and its absence constitutes a fatal flaw in the analogical argument.