Again, in the individual mind, adaptation of conduct to novel circumstances, or to secure improved action in familiar circumstances, requires the direction of the attention, that is the concentration of the whole energy of the mind, upon the task; whereas, when the new mode of behaviour is often repeated, it becomes more and more automatic; for, owing to the formation of new nervous organisation, the attention is set free for other tasks of adaptation. Just in the same way new modes of national behaviour are only effected when the attention of the nation’s mind is turned upon the situation; whereas, with recurrence of the need for any such novel mode of action, there is formed some special executive organisation, say a Colonial Office, or an Unemployed Central Committee, or an Imperial Conference, which deals with it in a more or less routine fashion, and which, as it becomes perfected, needs less and less to be controlled and guided by national attention and therefore operates in the margin of the field of consciousness of the national mind, while public attention is set free to turn itself to other tasks of national adaptation.
We may also regard the customs of a nation as analogous with the habits of the individual, if (for the sake of the analogy) we accept the view that instincts are habits that have become hereditary; for custom is an informal mode in which routine behaviour is determined, and it tends to lead on to, and to become embodied in, formal institutions; it is like habit, a transition stage between new adaptation and perfected organisation. Individual adaptation, habit and instinct are parallel to national adaptation, custom and legal institution.
At the risk of wearying the reader, I will refer to one last point of the analogy. Individual minds become more completely integrated in proportion as they achieve a full self-consciousness, in proportion as the idea of the self becomes rich in content and the nucleus of a strong sentiment generating impulses that control and override impulses of all other sources. In a similar way, the national mind becomes more completely integrated in proportion as it achieves full self-consciousness, that is, in proportion as the idea of the nation becomes widely diffused among the individual minds, becomes rich in content and the nucleus of a strong sentiment that supplies motives capable of overriding and controlling all other motives.
Consider now in the light of this analogy the principal types of national organisation. The organisation of some peoples is wholly the product of the conflicts of blind impulses and purely individual volitions working through long ages. This is true of many peoples that have not arrived at a national self-consciousness or, as the French say, a social consciousness, and are not held in servitude by a despotic power. It is a natural stage of evolution which corresponds to the stage of the higher mammals in the scale of evolution of the individual mind. A nation of this sort has no capacity for collective deliberation and volitional action. What collective mental life it has is on the plane of impulse and unregulated desire. Such ideas as are widely accepted may determine collective action; but such action is not the result of the weighing of ideas in the light of self-consciousness; hence they are little adapted to promote the welfare of the nation, and, because there is no organisation adapted for their expression, they can be but imperfectly realised.
We may perhaps take China (as she was until recently) as the highest type of a nation of this sort. Hers was a complex and vast organisation consisting of very ancient institutions and customs, slowly evolved by the conflict of impulses and in part imposed by despotic power and individual wills; not formed by a national will under the guidance of national self-consciousness[80]. Hence China was incapable of vigorous national thought or volition, and its nearest approach to collective action was expressed in such blind impulsive actions as the Taeping Rebellion or the Boxer Rising. This last seems to have been prompted by a dawning national self-consciousness which had not, however, so moulded the national organisation as to make it an efficient instrument of its will.
Of other nations the organisation is, in part only, a natural growth, having been, in large part, impressed upon it by an external power. Such is the case in all those many instances in which a foreign power of higher social organisation has conquered and successfully governed for a long period a people of lower civilisation. We may see a parallel to this type in the mind of an individual whose behaviour is in the main the expression of a number of habits engendered by a severe discipline which has continued from his earliest years, and which has never permitted the free development of his natural tendencies and character. Such was England under the feudal system imposed upon her by her Norman conquerors. Such also France under Louis XIV. Such was Russia when the Varegs, the conquering Northmen, imposed on the almost unorganised mass of Slavs their rule and a national organisation; and such it remained up to the outbreak of the Great War, a mass of men in whom the national consciousness was only just beginning to glimmer here and there, crudely organised by the bureaucratic power of a few. Even in the minds of these few the national consciousness and purpose was but little developed. Individual purposes and individual self-consciousness predominated. Hence Russia had no capacity for national thought and action; and when, as recently, ideas stirred the masses to action, their actions were those of unorganised crowds, impulsive and ineffective; the ends were but vaguely conceived, the means were not deliberately chosen, or, if so chosen, found no executive organisation for the effective expression of the collective purpose.
In such nations the organisation, which has been in the main created by a small governing class, is adapted only for the execution of its purposes, and not at all for the formation of a national mind and the expression of the collective will. The organisation consists primarily in a system for the collecting of taxes and the compulsory service of a large army. The revenue is raised for two primary purposes—the support of the governing class or caste in luxury and the support of the army; and the end for which the army is maintained is primarily the gathering of the taxes, and the further extension of the tax-collecting system over larger areas and populations—a vicious circle. On the other hand, the conditions which tend to the formation of national mind and character (which would have quite other ends than these) are naturally suppressed as completely as possible by the governing few.
Russian history in modern times exemplifies these principles in the clearest and most complete manner. The effects of this sort of organisation were very clearly illustrated by Count Tolstoi’s articles in the Fortnightly Review[81], in which he expressed as his social creed and ideal a complete anarchy to be achieved by passive resistance; denied that nations have or can have any existence; and asserted that the idea of a nation is as fictitious as it is pernicious. He had in mind only this type of organisation of a people, which hardly entitles it to be called a nation. And the same considerations explain the wide prevalence of philosophic anarchy in Russia.
Another type of national organisation results when the natural evolution of the national mind and character has been artificially and unhealthily forced by the pressure of the external environment of a people, when the need of national self-preservation and self-assertion compels the mass of the people to submit to an organisation which is neither the product of a natural evolution through the conflict of individual wills, nor the expression of the general mind and will, nor is altogether imposed upon it for the individual purposes of the few, but is a system planned by the few for the good of the whole, and by them imposed upon the whole. This is the kind of organisation of which a modern army stands as the extreme type and which is best represented among modern nations by Germany as she was before the War.
Under such a system there appears inevitably a tendency rigorously to subordinate the welfare of individuals to that of the nation as a whole. And that was just the state of affairs in Germany. German political philosophy showed the opposite extreme from Tolstoi’s; the individual existed for the nation only. Hence we find this condition of affairs justified by such writers as Blüntschli[82], Treitschke and Bernhardi, who represent the State as having an existence and a system of rights superior to that of all individuals; and we see attempts to justify the subordination of individual interests by means of the doctrine of the ‘collective consciousness[83].’