In this book I have sketched the principles of the mental
life of groups and have made a rough attempt to apply these
principles to the understanding of the life of nations. I have had
the substance of the book in the form of lecture notes for some
years, but have long hesitated to publish it. I have been held
back, partly by my sense of the magnitude and difficulty of the
subject and the inadequacy of my own preparation for dealing with
it, partly because I wished to build upon a firm foundation of
generally accepted principles of human nature.
Some fifteen years ago I projected a complete treatise on
Social Psychology which would have comprised the substance of the
present volume. I was prevented from carrying out the ambitious
scheme, partly by the difficulty of finding a publisher, partly by
my increasing sense of the lack of any generally accepted or
acceptable account of the constitution of human nature. I found it
necessary to attempt to provide such a foundation, and in 1908
published my Introduction to Social
Psychology . That book has enjoyed a certain
popular success. But it was more novel, more revolutionary, than I
had supposed when writing it; and my hope that it would rapidly be
accepted by my colleagues as in the main a true account of the
fundamentals of human nature has not been realised.
All this part of psychology labours under the great
difficulty that the worker in it cannot, like other men of science,
publish his conclusions as discoveries which will necessarily be
accepted by any persons competent to judge. He can only state his
conclusions and his reasonings and hope that they may gradually
gain the general approval of his colleagues. For to the obscure
questions of fact with which he deals it is in the nature of things
impossible to return answers supported by indisputable experimental
proofs. In this field the evidence of an author’s approximation
towards truth can consist only in his success in gradually
persuading competent opinion of the value of his views. My sketch
of the fundamentals of human nature can hardly claim even that
degree of success which would be constituted by an active criticism
and discussion of it in competent quarters. Yet there are not
wanting indications that opinion is turning slowly towards the
acceptance of some such doctrine as I then outlined. Especially the
development of psycho-pathology, stimulated so greatly by the
esoteric dogmas of the Freudian school, points in this direction.
The only test and verification to which any scheme of human nature
can be submitted is the application of it to practice in the
elucidation of the concrete phenomena of human life and in the
control and direction of conduct, especially in the two great
fields of medicine and education. And I have been much encouraged
by finding that some workers in both of these fields have found my
scheme of use in their practice and have even, in some few cases,
given it a cordial general approval. But group psychology is itself
one of the fields in which such testing and verification must be
sought. And I have decided to delay no longer in attempting to
bring my scheme to this test. I am also impelled to venture on what
may appear to be premature publication by the fact that five of the
best years of my life have been wholly given up to military service
and the practical problems of psycho-therapy, and by the reflection
that the years of a man’s life are numbered and that, even though I
should delay yet another fifteen years, I might find that I had
made but little progress towards securing the firm foundation I
desired.
It may seem to some minds astonishing that I should now admit
that the substance of this book was committed to writing before the
Great War; for that war is supposed by some to have revolutionised
all our ideas of human nature and of national life. But the war has
given me little reason to add to or to change what I had written.
This may be either because I am too old to learn, or because what I
had written was in the main true; and I am naturally disposed to
accept the second explanation.
I wish to make it clear to any would-be reader of this volume
that it is a sequel to my Introduction to Social
Psychology , that it builds upon that book and
assumes that the reader is acquainted with it. That former volume
has been criticised as an attempted outline of
Social Psychology . One critic remarks
that it may be good psychology, but it is very little social;
another wittily says “Mr McDougall, while giving a full account of
the genesis of instincts that act in society, hardly shows how they
issue into society. He seems to do a great deal of packing in
preparation for a journey on which he never starts.” The last
sentence exactly describes the book. I found myself, like so many
of my predecessors and contemporaries, about to start on a voyage
of exploration of societies with an empty trunk, or at least with
one very inadequately supplied with the things essential for
successful travelling. I decided to avoid the usual practice of
starting without impedimenta and of picking up or inventing bits of
make-shift equipment as each emergency arose; I would pack my trunk
carefully before starting. And now although my fellow travellers
have not entirely approved my outfit, I have launched out to put it
to the test; and I cannot hope that my readers will follow me if
they have not at their command a similar outfit—namely, a similar
view of the constitution of human nature.
I would gratefully confess that the resolve to go forward
without a further long period of preparation has been made possible
for me largely by the encouragement I have had from the recently
published work of Dr James Drever, Instinct in
Man . For the author of that work has carefully
studied the most fundamental part of my Social
Psychology , in the light of his wide knowledge
of the cognate literature, and has found it to be in the main
acceptable.
The title and much of the substance of the present volume
might lead a hasty reader to suppose that I am influenced by, or
even in sympathy with, the political philosophy associated with
German ‘idealism.’ I would, therefore, take this opportunity both
to prevent any such erroneous inference and to indicate my attitude
towards that system of thought in plainer language than it seemed
possible to use before the war. I have argued that we may properly
speak of a group mind, and that each of the most developed nations
of the present time may be regarded as in process of developing a
group mind. This must lay me open to the suspicion of favouring the
political philosophy which makes of the state a super-individual
and semi-divine person before whom all men must bow down,
renouncing their claims to freedom of judgment and action; the
political philosophy in short of German ‘idealism,’ which derives
in the main from Hegel, which has been so ably represented in this
country by Dr Bosanquet, which has exerted so great an influence at
Oxford, and which in my opinion is as detrimental to honest and
clear thinking as it has proved to be destructive of political
morality in its native country. I am relieved of the necessity of
attempting to justify these severe strictures by the recent
publication of The Metaphysical Theory of the
State by Prof. L. T. Hobhouse. In that volume
Prof. Hobhouse has subjected the political philosophy of German
‘idealism,’ and especially Dr Bosanquet’s presentation of it, to a
criticism which, as it seems to me, should suffice to expose the
hollowness of its claims to all men for all time; and I cannot
better define my own attitude towards it than by expressing the
completeness of my sympathy with the searching criticism of Mr
Hobhouse’s essay. In my youth I was misled into supposing that the
Germans were the possessors of a peculiar wisdom; and I have spent
a large part of my life in discovering, in one field of science
after another, that I was mistaken. I can always read the works of
some German philosophers, especially those of Hermann Lotze, with
admiration and profit; but I have no longer any desire to contend
with the great systems of ‘idealism,’ and I think it a cruel waste
that the best years of the lives of many young men should be spent
struggling with the obscure phrases in which Kant sought to express
his profound and subtle thought. My first scientific effort was to
find evidence in support of a new hypothesis of muscular
contraction; and, in working through the various German theories, I
was dismayed by their lack of clear mechanical conceptions. My next
venture was in the physiology of vision, a branch of science which
had become almost exclusively German. Starting with a prepossession
in favour of one of the dominant German theories, I soon reached
the conclusion that the two German leaders in this field, Helmholtz
and Hering, with their hosts of disciples, had, in spite of much
admirable detailed work, added little of value and much confusion
to the theory of vision left us by a great Englishman,—namely,
Thomas Young; and in a long series of papers I endeavoured to
restate and supplement Young’s theory. Advancing into the field of
physiological psychology, I attacked the ponderous volumes of Wundt
with enthusiasm; only to find that his physiology of the nervous
system was a tissue of unacceptable hypotheses and that he failed
to connect it in any profitable manner with his questionable
psychology. And, finding even less satisfaction in such works as
Ziehen’s Physiologische Psychologie
, with its crude materialism and associationism, or in the
dogmatic speculations of Verworn, I published my own small attempt
to bring psychology into fruitful relations with the physiology of
the nervous system. This brought me up against the great problem of
the relations between mind and body; and, having found that, in
this sphere, German ‘idealism’ was pragmatically indistinguishable
from thorough-going materialism, and that those Germans who claimed
to reconcile the two did not really rise much above the level of
Ernst Haeckel’s wild flounderings, I published my
History and Defense of Animism . And in
this field, though I found much to admire in the writings of Lotze,
I derived most encouragement and stimulus from Prof. Bergson. In
working at the foundations of human nature, I found little help in
German psychology, and more in French books, especially in those of
Prof. Ribot. In psycho-pathology I seemed to find that the claims
of the German and Austrian schools were far outweighed by those of
the French writers, especially of Prof. Janet. So now, in attacking
the problems of the mental life of societies, I have found little
help from German psychology or sociology, from the elaborations of
Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie or the
ponderosities of Schäffle, and still less from the ‘idealist’
philosophy of politics. In this field also it is French authors
from whom I have learnt most and with whom I find myself most in
sympathy, especially MM. Fouillée, Boutmy, Tarde, and Demolins;
though I would not be thought to hold in low esteem the works of
many English and American authors, notably those of Buckle,
Bagehot, Maine, Lecky, Lowell, and of many others, to some of which
I have made reference in the chapters of this book.
I have striven to make this a strictly scientific work,
rather than a philosophical one; that is to say, I have tried to
ascertain and state the facts and principles of social life as it
is and has been, without expressing my opinion as to what it should
be. But, in order further to guard myself against the implications
attached by German ‘idealism’ to the notion of a collective mind, I
wish to state that politically my sympathies are with individualism
and internationalism, although I have, I think, fully recognised
the great and necessary part played in human life by the Group
Spirit and by that special form of it which we now call
‘Nationalism.’
I know well that those of my readers whose sympathies are
with Collectivism, Syndicalism, or Socialism in any of its various
forms will detect in this book the cloven foot of individualism and
leanings towards the aristocratic principle. I know also that many
others will reproach me with giving countenance to communistic and
ultra-democratic tendencies. I would, therefore, point out
explicitly at the outset that, if this book affords justification
for any normative doctrine or ideal, it is for one which would aim
at a synthesis of the principles of individualism and communism, of
aristocracy and democracy, of self-realization and of service to
the community. I can best express this ideal in the wise words of
Mr F. H. Bradley, which I extract from his famous essay on ‘My
Station and its Duties.’ “The individual’s consciousness of himself
is inseparable from the knowing himself as an organ of the whole;
... for his nature now is not distinct from his ‘artificial self.’
He is related to the living moral system not as to a foreign body;
his relation to it is ‘too inward even for faith,’ since faith
implies a certain separation. It is no other-world that he can not
see but must trust to; he feels himself in it, and it in him; ...
the belief in this real moral organism is the one solution of
ethical problems. It breaks down the antithesis of despotism and
individualism; it denies them, while it preserves the truth of
both. The truth of individualism is saved, because, unless we have
intense life and self-consciousness in the members of the state,
the whole state is ossified. The truth of despotism is saved,
because, unless the member realizes the whole by and in himself, he
fails to reach his own individuality. Considered in the main, the
best communities are those which have the best men for their
members, and the best men are the members of the best
communities.... The two problems of the best man and best state are
two sides, two distinguishable aspects of the one problem, how to
realize in human nature the perfect unity of homogeneity and
specification; and when we see that each of these without the other
is unreal, then we see that (speaking in general) the welfare of
the state and the welfare of its individuals are questions which it
is mistaken and ruinous to separate. Personal morality and
political and social institutions can not exist apart, and (in
general) the better the one the better the other. The community is
moral, because it realizes personal morality; personal morality is
moral, because and in so far as it realizes the moral
whole.”
Since correcting the proofs of this volume I have become
acquainted with two recent books whose teaching is so closely in
harmony with my own that I wish to direct my readers’ attention to
them. One is Sir Martin Conway’s The Crowd in
Peace and War , which contains many valuable
illustrations of group life. The other is Miss M. P.
Follett’s The New State; Group Organization the
Solution of Popular Government , which expounds
the principles and advantages of collective deliberation with
vigour and insight.
I am under much obligation to the general editor of this
series, Prof. G. Dawes Hicks. He has read the proofs of my book,
and has helped me greatly with many suggestions; but he has, of
course, no responsibility for the views expressed in
it.
