And these two advantages, being in some degree appreciated, lead to a deliberate cultivation of group life for the securing of them in higher measure. The cultivation of group life shows itself in the many varieties of grouping on a purely artificial basis and in the practice of rites and ceremonies, especially dances, often accompanied by song and other music. There is nothing that so intensifies group consciousness, at the cost of consciousness of individuality, as ceremonial dancing and singing; especially when the dance consists of a series of extravagant bizarre movements, executed by every member of the group in unison, the series of movements being at the same time peculiar to the particular group that practises them and symbolical of the peculiar functions or properties claimed by the group. Many savage dances have these characters in perfection; as, for example, those of the Murray islanders of Torres Straits, where, as I have witnessed, the several totemic groups—the dog-men, the pigeon-men, the shark-men, and other such groups—continue, in spite of the partial destruction by missionaries of their totemistic beliefs, to revel in night-long gatherings, at which each group in turn mimics, in fantastic dances and with solemn delight, the movements of its totem animal.
The importance of group consciousness in savage life has been recently much insisted on by some anthropologists, and indeed, in my view, overstated. Cornford[35] writes “When the totem-clan meets to hold its peculiar dance, to work itself up till it feels the pulsing of its common life through all its members, such nascent sense of individuality as a savage may have—it is always very faint—is merged and lost; his consciousness is filled with a sense of sympathetic activity. The group is now feeling and acting as one soul, with a total force much greater than any of its members could exercise in isolation. The individual is lost, ‘beside himself,’ in one of those states of contagious enthusiasm in which it is well known that men become capable of feats which far outrange their normal powers.” And again “Over and above their individual experience, all the members of the group alike partake of what has been called the collective consciousness of the group as a whole. Unlike their private experience, this pervading consciousness is the same in all, consisting in those epidemic or infectious states of feeling above described, which, at times when the common functions are being exercised, invade the whole field of mentality, and submerge the individual areas. To this group-consciousness belong also, from the first moment of their appearance all representations which are collective, a class in which all religious representations are included. These likewise are diffused over the whole mentality of the group, and identical in all its members.... The collective consciousness is thus super-individual. It resides, of course, in the individuals composing the group. There is nowhere else for it to exist, but it resides in all of them together and not completely in any one of them. It is both in myself and yet not myself. It occupies a certain part of my mind and yet it stretches beyond and outside me to the limits of my group. And since I am only a small part of my group, there is much more of it outside me than inside. Its force therefore is much greater than my individual force, and the more primitive I am the greater this preponderance will be. Here, then, there exists in the world a power which is much greater than any individual’s—super-individual, that is to say superhuman.”
“Because this force is continuous with my own consciousness, it is, as it were, a reservoir to which I have access, and from which I can absorb superhuman power to reinforce and enhance my own. This is its positive aspect—in so far as this power is not myself and greater than myself, it is a moral and restraining force, which can and does impose upon the individual the necessity of observing the uniform behaviour of the group.” This writer makes group consciousness the source of both morality and religion. “The collective consciousness is also immanent in the individual himself, forming within him that unreasoning impulse called conscience, which like a traitor within the gates, acknowledges from within the obligation to obey that other and much larger part of the collective consciousness which lies outside. Small wonder that obedience is absolute in primitive man, whose individuality is still restricted to a comparatively small field, while all the higher levels of mentality are occupied by this overpowering force[36].” The first religious idea is that of “this collective consciousness, the only moral power which can come to be felt as imposed from without.” And Cornford goes yet further and makes of the group self-consciousness the source of magic as well as of religion and morality. This primary reservoir of super-individual power splits, he says, into two pools, human and non-human; the former is magic power, the latter is divine power.
On this I would comment as follows. Although Cornford is right in insisting upon the large influence of group consciousness, he is wrong, I think, in underestimating individuality. He does not go so far as some writers who suggest that group self-consciousness actually precedes individual self-consciousness, but he says of individual self-consciousness that it is but very faint in savages. I am more inclined to agree with Lotze, who in a famous passage asserted that even the crushed worm is in an obscure way aware of itself and its pain as set over against the world. Many facts of savage behaviour forbid us to accept the extreme view that denies them individual self-consciousness—individual names, secret names, private property, private rites, religious and magical, individual revenge, jealousy, running amok, leadership, self-assertion, pride, vanity, competition in games of skill and in technical and artistic achievement. The flourishing of these and many other such things in primitive communities reveals clearly enough to the unbiassed observer in the field the effective presence of individual self-consciousness in the savage mind. In this connexion I may refer to two pieces of evidence bearing very directly on the question reported by Dr C. Hose and myself. Among the Sea-Dayaks or Ibans of Borneo we discovered the prevalence of the belief in the ‘nyarong’ or private ‘spirit helper,’ some spiritual or animated individual power which a fortunate individual here and there finds reason to believe is attached to him personally for his guidance and help in all difficult situations. His belief in this personal helper and the rites by aid of which he communicates with it are kept secret from his fellows; so that it was only after long and intimate acquaintance with these people that Dr Hose began to suspect the existence of this peculiarly individualistic belief[37]. In the same volumes we have described the Punans of Borneo, a people whose mode of life is in every respect extremely primitive. In this respect they are perhaps unequalled by any other existing people. Yet no one who is acquainted with these amiable folk could doubt that, although their group consciousness is highly developed, they enjoy also a well developed individual self-consciousness. How otherwise can we interpret the fact that a Punan who suffers malicious injury from a member of another tribe will nurse his vengeful feeling for an indefinite period and, after the lapse of years, will find an opportunity to bring down his enemy secretly with blow-pipe and poisoned dart?
With Mr Cornford’s view of the part played by the group spirit in moralising conduct I agree. I agree also that it is the collective life or mind that develops religion and in part magic; but in my view Cornford attributes to the savage far too much reflective theorising; he represents him as formulating a theory of the collective consciousness which is really almost identical with the interesting speculation of M. Lévy Bruhl presently to be noticed, and he regards his conduct, his religious and magical practices, as guided by these theories. But that is to reverse the true order of things—to make theory precede practice; whereas in reality, especially in religion and magic, practice has everywhere preceded theory, often, as in this case, by thousands of generations[38].
It is true that the savage often behaves as though he held this theory of the collective consciousness as a field of force in which he participates; that his conduct seems to require such a theory for its rational justification. But it by no means follows that he has formulated any theory at all. What the savage is conscious of is, not a collective consciousness as a mysterious superhuman power, but the group itself, the group of concrete embodied fellow men. He behaves and feels as he does, because participation in the life of the group directly modifies his individual tendencies and directly evokes these feelings and actions; he does not discover, or seek, any theory by which to explain them. Still less is it true that he performs these actions because he has formulated a theory of a collective consciousness.
Mr Cornford regards the savage idea of a collective consciousness as the germ of the idea of divine power or of God. Now this is connected with the question of animism, preanimism, and dynanimism. It may be true that the notion of mana is the common prime source of religious and magical ideas, but it does not follow that the idea of God is arrived at by way of a notion of collective mana. No doubt that would be the probable course of events, if the savage had so little sense of his individuality as Cornford supposes; but it seems to me rather that the savage’s strong sense of individuality has led at an early stage to the personalisation, the individuation, of mana, the vaguely conceived spiritual power and influence, and that it was only by a long course of religious and philosophical speculation that men reached the conception of the Absolute or of God as a universal power of which each personal consciousness is a partial manifestation.
It is interesting to note that, if we could accept Cornford’s views, we could now claim to witness the completion of one full cycle of the wheel of speculation, the last step having been made in an article in a recent number of the Hibbert Journal[39]; for it is there suggested that the only God or super-individual power we ought to recognise and revere is, not a collective consciousness conceived as a supra-individual unity of consciousness, but the collective mind of humanity in the sense in which I am using the term, a system of mental forces that slowly progresses towards greater harmony and integration.
M. Lévy Bruhl has written an interesting, though highly speculative, account of savage mental life which he represents as differing profoundly from our own, chiefly in that it is dominated by ‘collective representations[40].’ His view is not unlike that put forward by Cornford.