The study of man as a gregarious animal has not been pursued with the thoroughness and objectivity it deserves and must receive if it is to yield its full value in illuminating his status and in the management of society. The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gre­gar­i­ous­ness is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance, but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activities. We have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as imperative and just as {133} char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly social as those of any other gregarious animal. A further argument that he is to-day as actively and essentially a social animal as ever is furnished by the fact that he suffers from the disadvantages of such an animal to a more marked degree perhaps than any other. In physical matters he owes to his gre­gar­i­ous­ness and its uncontrolled tendency to the formation of crowded communities with enclosed dwellings, the seriousness of many of his worst diseases, such as tuberculosis, typhus, and plague; there is no evidence that these diseases effect anything but an absolutely indiscriminate destruction, killing the strong and the weakly, the socially useful and the socially useless, with equal readiness, so that they cannot be regarded as even of the least selective value to man. The only other animal which is well known to suffer seriously from disease as a direct consequence of its social habit is the honey bee—as has been demonstrated by recent epidemics of exterminating severity.

In mental affairs, as I have tried to show, man owes to the social habit his inveterate resistiveness to new ideas, his submission to tradition and precedent, and the very serious fact that governing power in his communities tends to pass into the hands of what I have called the stable-minded—a class the members of which are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly insensitive to experience, closed to the entry of new ideas, and obsessed with the satisfactoriness of things as they are. At the time when this corollary of gre­gar­i­ous­ness was first pointed out—some ten years ago—it was noted as a serious flaw in the stability of civilization. The suggestion was made that as long as the great expert tasks of government necessarily gravitated into the hands of a class which char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly lacked the greater developments of mental capacity and efficiency, the course of {134} civilization must continue to be at the mercy of accident and disaster. The present European war—doubtless in the actual state of affairs a remedy no less necessary because of its dreadfulness—is an example on the greatest possible scale of the kind of price the race has to pay for the way in which minds and temperaments are selected by its society.

When we see the great and serious drawbacks which gre­gar­i­ous­ness has entailed on man, it cannot but be supposed that that course of evolution has been imposed upon him by a real and deep-seated peculiarity of his nature—a fatal inheritance which it is impossible for him to repudiate.

When we inquire why it is that the manifestations of gre­gar­i­ous­ness in man are so ambiguous that their biological significance has been to a great extent overlooked, the answer seems to be furnished by that capacity for various reaction which is the result of his general mental development, and which has tended almost equally to obscure his other instinctive activities. It may be repeated once more that in a creature such as the bee the narrow mental capacity of the individual limits reaction to a few and relatively simple courses, so that the dominance of instinct in the species can to the attentive observer never be long in doubt. In man the equal dominance of instinct is obscured by the kaleidoscopic variety of the reactions by which it is more or less effectually satisfied.

While to a superficial examination of society the evidences of man’s gregarious inheritance are ambiguous and trivial, to the closer scrutiny of the biologist it soon becomes obvious that in society as constituted to-day the advantageous mechanisms rendered available by that inheritance are not being made use of to anything approaching their full possibilities. To such an extent is this the case {135} that the situation of man as a species even is probably a good deal more precarious than has usually been supposed by those who have come to be in charge of its destinies. The species is irrevocably committed to a certain evolutionary path by the inheritance of instinct it possesses. This course brings with it inevitable and serious disadvantages as well as enormously greater potential advantages. As long as the spirit of the race is content to be submissive to the former and indifferent to the discovery and development of the latter, it can scarcely have a bare certainty of survival and much less of progressive enlargement of its powers.

In the society of the bee two leading char­ac­ter­is­tics are evident—an elaborate and exact specialization of the individual, and a perfect absorption of the interests of the individual in those of the hive; these qualities seem to be the source of the unique energy and power of the whole unit and of the remarkable superiority of intelligence it possesses over the individual member. It is a commonplace of human affairs that combined action is almost invariably less intelligent than individual action, a fact which shows how very little the members of the species are yet capable of combination and co-ordination and how far inferior—on account, no doubt, of his greater mental capacity—man is in this respect to the bee.

This combination of specialization and moral homogeneity should be evident in human society if it is taking advantage of its biological resources. Both are, in fact, rather conspicuously absent.

There is abundant specialization of a sort; but it is inexact, lax, wasteful of energy, and often quite useless through being on the one hand superfluous or on the other incomplete. We have large numbers of experts in the various branches of science {136} and the arts, but we insist upon their adding to the practice of their specialisms the difficult task of earning their living in an open competitive market. The result is that we tend to get at the summit of our professions only those rare geniuses who combine real specialist capacity with the arts of the bagman. An enormous proportion of our experts have to earn their living by teaching—an exhausting and exacting art for which they are not at all necessarily qualified, and one which demands a great amount of time for the earning of a very exiguous pittance.

The teaching of our best schools, a task so important that it should be entrusted to none but those highly qualified by nature and instruction in the art, is almost entirely in the hands of athletes and grammarians of dead languages. We choose as our governors amateurs of whom we demand fluency, invincible prejudice, and a resolute blindness to dissentient opinion. In commerce we allow ourselves to be overrun by a multitude of small and mostly inefficient traders struggling to make a living by the supply of goods from the narrow and ageing stocks which are all they can afford to keep. We allow the supply of our foodstuffs to be largely in the hands of those who cannot afford to be clean, and submit out of mere indifference to being fed on meat, bread, vegetables which have been for an indefinite period at the mercy of dirty middlemen, the dust and mud and flies of the street, and the light-hearted thumbing errand-boy. We allow a large proportion of our skilled workers to waste skill and energy on the manufacture of things which are neither useful nor beautiful, on elaborate specialist valeting, cooking, gardening for those who are their inferiors in social activity and value.

The moral homogeneity so plainly visible in the {137} society of the bee is replaced in man by a segregation into classes which tends always to obscure the unity of the nation and often is directly antagonistic to it. The readiness with which such segregation occurs seems to be due to the invincible strength of the gregarious impulse in the individual man and to the immense size and strength of the modern major unit of the species. It would appear that in order that a given unit should develop the highest degree of homogeneity within itself it must be subject to direct pressure from without. A great abundance of food supply and consequent relaxed external pressure may in the bee lead to indiscriminate swarming, while in man the size and security of the modern State lead to a relaxation of the closer grades of national unity—in the absence of deliberate encouragement of it or of the stimulus of war. The need of the individual for homogeneity is none the less present, and the result is segregation into classes which form, as it were, minor herds in which homogeneity is maintained by the external pressure of competition, of political or religious differences and so forth. Naturally enough such segregations have come to correspond in a rough way with the various types of imperfect specialization which exist. This tendency is clearly of unfavourable effect on national unity, since it tends to obscure the national value of specialization and to give it a merely local and class significance. Segregation in itself is always dangerous in that it provides the individual with a substitute for the true major unit—the nation—and in times when there is an urgent need for national homogeneity may prove to be a hostile force.

It has been characteristic of the governing classes to acquiesce in the fullest developments of segregation and even to defend them by force and to fail to realize in times of emergency that national {138} homogeneity must always be a partial and weakly passion as long as segregation actively persists.

Class segregation has thus come to be regarded as a necessary and inevitable part of the structure of society. Telling as it does much more in the favour of certain classes than others, it has come to be defended by a whole series of legal and moral principles invented for the purpose, and by arguments that to objective examination are no more than rationalized prejudice. The maintenance of the social system—that is, of the segregation of power and prestige, of ease and leisure, and the corresponding segregations of labour, privation, and poverty—depends upon an enormously elaborate system of rationalization, tradition, and morals, and upon almost innumerable indirect mechanisms ranging from the drugging of society with alcohol to the distortion of religious principle in the interests of the established order. To the biologist the whole immensely intricate system is a means for combating the slow, almost imperceptible, pressure of Nature in the direction of a true national homogeneity. That this must be attained if human progress is to continue is, and has long been, obvious. The further fact that it can be attained only by a radical change in the whole human attitude towards society is but barely emerging from obscurity.

The fact that even the immense external stimulus of a great war now fails to overcome the embattled forces of social segregation, and can bring about only a very partial kind of national homogeneity in a society where segregation is deeply ingrained, seems to show that simple gre­gar­i­ous­ness has run its course in man and has been defeated of its full maturity by the disruptive power of man’s capacity for varied reaction. No state of equilibrium can be reached in a gregarious society short of complete {139} homogeneity, so that, failing the emergence of some new resource of Nature, it might be suspected that man, as a species, has already begun to decline from his meridian. Such a new principle is the conscious direction of society by man, the refusal by him to submit indefinitely to the dissipation of his energies and the disappointment of his ideals in inco-ordination and confusion. Thus would appear a function for that individual mental capacity of man which has so far, when limited to local and personal ends, tended but to increase the social confusion.

A step of evolution such as this would have consequences as momentous as the first appearance of the multicellular or of the gregarious animal. Man, conscious as a species of his true status and destiny, realizing the direction of the path to which he is irrevocably committed by Nature, with a moral code based on the unshakable natural foundation of altruism, could begin to draw on those stores of power which will be opened to him by a true combination, and the rendering available in co-ordinated action of the maximal energy of each individual.