The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

In the mental evolution of animals these two factors are not distinguishable. We may say that the main and perhaps the sole condition of their evolution is the selection by the physical environment of spontaneous favourable variations and mutations of innate mental qualities; if we include under the term physical environment of the species all the other animal and vegetable species of its habitat. For it is only by its selective influence upon individual variations that physical environment can determine differentiation of races.

But with man the case is different; spontaneous variation not only provides the new qualities which, by determining the survival of the individual in his struggle for existence with the physical environment, secure their own perpetuation by transmission to the after coming generations. The new qualities determine mental evolution in another manner, by a mode of operation which is almost completely absent in animal evolution; namely, the spontaneous variations create a social environment which profoundly modifies the influence of the physical environment, and itself becomes a principal factor in the determination of the trend of racial evolution.

Man is distinguished from the animals above all things by his power of learning. Whereas the behaviour of animals, even of the higher ones, consists almost entirely of purely instinctive actions, innate modes of response to a limited number of situations; man has an indefinitely great capacity for acquiring new modes of response, and so of adapting himself in new and more complex ways to an almost indefinite variety of situations. And his new mental acquisitions are not made only by the slow process of adaptation in the light of his own individual experience of the consequences of behaviour of this and that kind; as are most of the few acquisitions of the animals. By far the greater part of the mental stock-in-trade by which his behaviour is guided is acquired from his fellow men; it represents the accumulated experience of all the foregoing generations of his race and nation. Man’s life in society, together with the great plasticity of his mind, its great capacity for new adaptations, secures him this enormous advantage; the two things are necessarily correlated. Without the plasticity of mind, his life in society would benefit him relatively little. Many animals that lead a social life in large herds or flocks are not superior, but rather inferior, in mental power to animals that lead a more solitary life; and indeed this seems to be generally true, as we see on comparing generally the herbivorous gregarious animals with the solitary carnivores that prey upon them. The social life of such animals, rendering individual intelligence less necessary for protection and escape from danger, tends actually against mental development.

On the other hand, man’s great plastic brain would be of comparatively little use to him if he lived a solitary unsocial life. His great brain is there to enable him to assimilate and make use of the accumulated experience, the sum of knowledge and morality, which is traditional in the society into which he is born a member; that is to say, the development of social life, which depended so much upon language and for the forwarding of which language came into existence, must have gone hand in hand with the development of the great brain, which enables full advantage to be secured from social co-operation and which, especially, renders possible the accumulation of knowledge, belief, and traditional sentiment.

Now this traditional stock of knowledge and morality has been very slowly accumulated, bit by bit; and every bit, every least new addition to it, has been a difficult acquisition, due in the first instance to some spontaneous variation of some individual’s mental structure from the ancestral type of mental structure. That is to say, throughout the evolution of civilisation, progress of every kind, increase of knowledge or improvement of morality, has been due to the birth of more or less exceptional individuals, individuals varying ever so slightly from the ancestral type and capable, owing to this variation, of making some new and original adaptation of action, or of perceiving some previously undiscovered relation between things.

These new acquisitions, first made by individuals, are, if true or useful, sooner or later imitated or accepted by the society of which the original-minded individual is a member, and then, becoming incorporated in the traditional stock of knowledge and morality, are thereby placed at the service of all members of that society.

Thus favourable spontaneous variations do not, as with the animals, render possible mental evolution merely by conducing to the survival of, and the perpetuation of the qualities of, those individuals in whom the variations occur. They may do this, or they may not; but, in addition and more importantly, they contribute to the stock of traditional knowledge and morality, and so raise the social group as a whole in the scale of civilisation; they render it more capable of successfully contending against other groups and against the adverse influence of the physical environment; and they promote the solidarity of the group by adding to its stock of common tradition; thus the acquisitions of each member benefit the group as a whole and all its members, quite apart from any philanthropic purpose or intention of producing such a result.

The achievement of this unconscious undesigned solidarity of human societies is one of two great steps in the evolution of the human race by which the process is rendered very different from, and is raised to a higher plane than, the mental evolution of the animal world. The second and still more important step is one which is only just beginning to be achieved in the present age; I shall have to touch on it in a later chapter.

The original or primary divergence of mental type between any two peoples must, then, have been due to these fundamental causes—namely, differences of physical environment and spontaneous variations of mental structure, the latter adding to the traditional stock of knowledge and belief, of moral precepts and sentiments.

Intellectual or moral divergence produced by these two primary causes would tend to determine the course of social evolution along different lines and so to produce different types of social organisation. And different social organisations thus produced would then react upon the moral and intellectual life of the people to produce further divergence; for example, one type of social organisation determined by physical environment, say a well developed patriarchal system, may have made for progress of intellect and morals; another, say a matriarchal organisation, or one based on communal marriage, may have tended to produce stagnation.