The third method by which it has been attempted to attack the problems of psychology is that which I have called the comparative. Its characteristic note is a distrust of that attitude towards phenomena which I have called the human point of view. Man’s description and interpretation of his own mental experience being so liable to distortion by prejudice, by self-esteem, by his views as to his own nature and powers, as well as so incomplete by reason of his incapacity to reach by ordinary introspection the deeper strata of his mind, it becomes necessary to make action as far as possible the subject of observation rather than speech, and to regard it as a touchstone of motive more important than the actor’s own views. The principle {92} may be exemplified in a simple and concrete form. If a given piece of human behaviour bears the closest resemblance to behaviour which is characteristic of the ape, the sheep, or the wolf, the biologist in attempting to arrive at the actual cause will ascribe an importance to this resemblance at least no less than that he will give to any explanation of the action as rational and deliberate which may be furnished by the actor or by his own intelligence.

A second principle of the method will be by a study of the whole range of animal life, and especially of forms whose conduct presents obvious resemblances to that of man, to discover what instinctive impulses may be expected to operate in him.

A third principle will be to search for criteria, whereby instinctive impulses or their derivatives arising in the mind can be distinguished from rational motives, or at any rate motives in which the instinctive factor is minimal. Thus will be furnished for the method the objective standard for the judgment of mental observations which is the one indispensable requirement in all psychological inquiries.

When it is known what types of instinctive mechanisms are to be expected, and under what aspects they will appear in the mind, it is possible to press inquiry into many of the obscurer regions of human behaviour and thought, and to arrive at conclusions which, while they are in harmony with the general body of biological science, have the additional value of being immediately useful in the conduct of affairs.

At the very outset of such researches we are met by an objection which illustrates how different the biological conception of the mind is from that current amongst those whose training has been {93} literary and philosophic. The objection I am thinking of is that of the ordinary intellectualist view of man. According to this we must regard him as essentially a rational creature, subject, it is true, to certain feeble relics of instinctive impulsion, but able to control such without any great expense of will power, irrational at times in an amiable and rather “nice” way, but fundamentally always independent, responsible, and captain of his soul. Most holders of this opinion will of course admit that in a distant and vague enough past man must have been much more definitely an instinctive being, but they regard attempts to trace in modern man any considerable residue of instinctive activities as a tissue of fallacious and superficial analogies, based upon a shallow materialism and an ignorance of the great principles of philosophy or a crudeness which cannot assimilate them.

This objection is an expression of the very characteristic way in which mankind over-estimates the practical functioning of reason in his mind and the influence of civilization on his development. In an earlier essay I have tried to show to how great an extent the average educated man is willing to pronounce decided judgments, all of which he believes himself to have arrived at by the exercise of pure reason, upon the innumerable complex questions of the day. Almost all of them concern highly technical matters upon none of which has he the slightest qualification to pronounce. This characteristic, always obvious enough, has naturally during the war shown the exaggeration so apt to occur in all non-rational processes at a time of general stress. It is not necessary to catalogue the various public functions in regard to which the common citizen finds himself in these days moved to advise and exhort. They are numerous, and for the most part highly technical. Generally the {94} more technical a given matter is, the more vehement and dogmatic is the counsel of the utterly uninstructed counsellor. Even when the questions involved are not especially such as can be dealt with only by the expert, the fact that the essential data are withheld from the public by the authorities renders all this amateur statecraft and generalship more than usually ridiculous. Nevertheless, those who find the materials insufficient for dogmatism and feel compelled to a suspense of judgment are apt to fall under suspicion of the crime of failing to “realize” the seriousness of the war. When it is remembered that the duty of the civilian is in no way concerned with these matters of high technique, while he has very important functions to carry out in maintaining the nation’s strength if he could be brought to take an interest in them, it seems scarcely possible to argue that such conduct is that of a very highly rational being. In reality the objective examination of man’s behaviour, if attention is directed to the facts and not to what the actors think of them, yields at once in every field example after example of similar irrational features.

When the influence of civilization is looked upon as having rendered man’s instincts of altogether secondary importance in modern life, it is plain that such a conclusion involves a misconception of the nature of instinct. This well-worn term has come to have so vague a connotation that some definition of it is necessary. The word “instinct” is used here to denote inherited modes of reaction to bodily need or external stimulus. It is difficult to draw a sharp distinction between instinct and mere reflex action, and an attempt to do so with exact precision is of no particular value. In general we may say that the reactions which should be classed under the head of instinct are delayed (that is, not necessarily carried out with fatal promptitude {95} immediately upon the stimulus), complex (that is, consist of acts rather than mere movements), and may be accompanied by quite elaborate mental processes. In a broad way also it may be said that the mental accompaniments of an instinctive process are for the most part matters of feeling. During the growth of the need or stimulus there will be a desire or inclination which may be quite intense, and yet not definitely focused on any object that is consciously realized; the act itself will be distinguished to the actor by its rightness, obviousness, necessity, or inevitableness, and the sequel of the act will be satisfaction. This mere hint of the psychical manifestations of instinctive activity leaves quite out of account the complex effects which may ensue when two instinctive impulses that have come to be antagonistic reach the mind at the same time. The actual amount of mental activity which accompanies an instinctive process is very variable; it may be quite small, and then the subject of it is reduced to a mere automaton, possessed, as we say, by an ungovernable passion such as panic, lust, or rage; it may be quite large, and sometimes the subject, deceived by his own rationalizations and suppressions, may suppose himself to be a fully rational being in undisputed possession of free will and the mastery of his fate at the very moment when he is showing himself to be a mere puppet dancing to the strings which Nature, unimpressed by his valiant airs, relentlessly and impassively pulls.

The extent of the psychical accompaniments of instinctive activity in civilized man should not, therefore, be allowed to obscure the fact that the instincts are tendencies deeply ingrained in the very structure of his being. They are as necessarily inherited, as much a part of himself, and as essential a condition for the survival of himself and his race, as are the vital organs of his body. {96} Their persistence in him is established and enforced by the effects of millions of years of selection, so that it can scarcely be supposed that a few thousand years of civilized life which have been accompanied by no steady selection against any single instinct can have had any effect whatever in weakening them. The common expression that such an effect has been produced is doubtless due to the great development in civilized man of the mental accompaniments of instinctive processes. These mental phenomena surround the naked reality of the impulse with a cloud of rationalized comment and illusory explanation. The capacity which man possesses for free and rational thought in matters untainted by instinctive inclination is of course indubitable, but he has not realized that there is no obvious mental character attached to propositions having an instinctive basis which should expose them to suspicion. As a matter of fact, it is just those fundamental propositions which owe their origin to instinct which appear to the subject the most obvious, the most axiomatic, and the least liable to doubt by any one but an eccentric or a madman.

It has been customary with certain authors—perhaps especially such as have interested themselves in sociological subjects—to ascribe quite a large number of man’s activities to separate instincts. Very little consideration of most of these propositions shows that they are based upon too lax a definition or a want of analysis, for most of the activities referred to special instincts prove to be derivatives of the great primal instincts which are common to or very widely distributed over the animal kingdom. Man and a very large number of all animals inherit the capacity to respond to physical need or emergency according to the demands which we classify, as the three primary instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and {97} reproduction. If a series of animals of increasing brain power be examined, it will be found that a growth of intelligence, while it does nothing to enfeeble the instinctive impulse, modifies the appearances of it by increasing the number of modes of reaction it may use. Intelligence, that is to say, leaves its possessor no less impelled by instinct than his simpler ancestor, but endows him with the capacity to respond in a larger variety of ways. The response is now no longer directly and narrowly confined to a single path, but may follow a number of indirect and intricate ways; there is no reason, however, to suppose that the impulse is any the weaker for that. To mistake indirectness of response for enfeeblement of impulse is a fundamental error to which all inquiry into the psychology of instinct is liable.

To man his big brain has given a maximal power of various response which enables him to indulge his instinctive impulses in indirect and symbolic activities to a greater extent than any other animal. It is for this reason that the instincts of man are not always obvious in his conduct and have come to be regarded by some as practically no more than vestigial. Indirect modes of response may indeed become so involved as to assume the appearance of the negation of the very instincts of which they are the expression. Thus it comes to be no paradox to say that monks and nuns, ascetics and martyrs, prove the strength of the great primary instincts their existence seems to deny.

Man and a certain number of other species widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom show, in addition to the instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, specialized inherited modes of response to the needs, not directly of the individual but of the herd to which he belongs. These responses, which are perfectly well marked and characteristic, are those of the herd instinct. It is {98} important to grasp clearly the relation of this instinct to the individual. It must be understood that each separate member of a gregarious species inherits characters deeply rooted in his being which effectually differentiate him from any non-gregarious animal. These characters are such that in presence of certain stimuli they will ensure his responding in a specialized way which will be quite different from the response of a solitary animal. The response when examined will be found not necessarily to favour the survival of the individual as such, but to favour his survival as a member of a herd. A very simple example will make this plain. The dog and the cat are our two most familiar examples of the social and the solitary animal respectively. Their different attitudes towards feeding must have been observed by all. The cat takes her food leisurely, without great appearance of appetite and in small amounts at a time; the dog is voracious and will eat hurriedly as much as he can get, growling anxiously if he is approached. In doing so he is expressing a deeply ingrained characteristic. His attitude towards food was built up when he hunted in packs and to get a share of the common kill had to snatch what came in his way and gulp it down before it could be taken from him. In slang which has a sound biological basis we say he “wolfs” his food. When in domestication his food supply is no longer limited in the primitive way, his instinctive tendency persists; he is typically greedy and will kill himself by overeating if he is allowed to. Here we have a perfect instance of an instinctive response being disadvantageous to the survival of the individual as such, and favouring his survival only as a member of a herd. This example, trivial as it may seem, is worthy of close study. It shows that the individual of the gregarious species, as an individual and in {99} isolation, possesses indelible marks of character which effectually distinguish him from all solitary animals.

The same principle applies with equal force to man. Whether he is alone or in company, a hermit philosopher or a mere unit of a mob, his responses will bear the same stamp of being regulated by the existence and influence of his fellows.

The foregoing considerations, elementary and incomplete as they are, suggest that there is a strong prima facie case for rejecting the common conceptions that man is among animals the least endowed with an inheritance of instinct, and that civilization has produced in him profound modifications in his primitive instinctive impulses. If the conception which I have put forward be correct, namely, that man is not at all less subject to instinctive impulsions than any other animal but disguises the fact from the observer and from himself by the multiplicity of the lines of response his mental capacity enables him to take, it should follow that his conduct is much less truly variable and much more open to generalization than has generally been supposed. Should this be possible, it would enable the biologist to study the actual affairs of mankind in a really practical way, to analyse the tendencies of social development, to discover how deeply or superficially they were based in the necessity of things, and above all, to foretell their course. Thus might be founded a true science of politics which would be of direct service to the statesman.

Many attempts have been made to apply biological principles to the interpretation of history and the guidance of statecraft, especially since the popularization of the principles associated with the name of Darwin. Such attempts have generally been undertaken less in the spirit of the scientific {100} investigator than in that of the politician; the point of departure has been a political conviction and not a biological truth; and as might be expected, when there has been any conflict between political conviction and biological truth it is the latter that has had to give way. Work of this kind has brought the method into deserved contempt by its crudity, its obvious subservience to prejudice, and its pretentious gestures of the doctrinaire. England has not been without her examples of these scientific politicians and historians, but they cannot be said to have flourished here as they have in the more scholastic air of Germany. The names of several such are now notorious in this country and their works are sufficiently familiar for it to be obvious that their claims to scientific value do not admit of discussion. It is not necessary to consider their conclusions, they are condemned by their manner; and however interesting their political vociferation may be to fellow-patriots, it plainly has no meaning whatsoever as science. In face of the spectacle presented by these leather-lunged doctrinaires, it needs some little hardihood to maintain that it is possible profitably to apply biological principle to the consideration of human affairs; nevertheless, that is an essential thesis of this essay.

In attempting to illuminate the records of history by the principles of biology, an essential difficulty is the difference of scale in time upon which these two departments of knowledge work. Historical events are confined within a few thousands of years, the biological record covers many millions; it is scarcely to be expected, therefore, that even a gross movement on the cramped historical scale will be capable of detection in the vast gulf of time the biological series represents. A minor difficulty is the fact that the data of history come to us through a dense and reduplicated veil of human {101} interpretation, whereas the biological facts are comparatively free from this kind of obscuration. The former obstacle is undoubtedly serious. It is to be remarked, however, that there is strong reason to suppose that the process of organic evolution has not been and is not always infinitely slow and gradual. It is more than suspected that, perhaps as the result of slowly accumulated tendency or perhaps as the result of a sudden variation of structure or capacity, there have been periods of rapid change which might have been perceptible to direct observation. The infinitely long road still tending upwards comes to where it branches and meets another path, tending perhaps downwards or even upwards at a different slope. May not the meeting or branching form, as it were, a node in the infinite line, a resting place for the eye, a point in the vast extension capable of recognition by a finite mind and of expression in terms of human affairs? It is the belief of the writer that the human race stands at such a nodal point to-day.