Instincts and Instinctive Processes: A Psychological Analysis, Study notes of Psychology

Download Instincts and Instinctive Processes: A Psychological Analysis and more Study notes Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! An Introduction to Social Psychology William McDougall, D.Sc., F.R.S. Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford Fourteenth Edition with Three Supplementary Chapters Batoche Books Kitchener 2001 William McDougall (1871–1938) Originally published by Methuen & Co. Ltd. London, 1919. This edition published by Batoche Books 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario. N2G 3L1 Canada email: batoche@gto.net Preface to the Fourteenth Edition In this little book I have attempted to deal with a difficult branch of psychology in a way that shall make it intelligible and interesting to any cultivated reader, and that shall imply no previous familiarity with psy- chological treatises on his part; for I hope that the book may be of ser- vice to students of all the social sciences, by providing them with the minimum of psychological doctrine that is an indispensable part of the equipment for work in any of these sciences. I have not thought it neces- sary to enter into a discussion of the exact scope of social psychology and of its delimitation from sociology or the special social sciences; for I believe that such questions may be left to solve themselves in the course of time with the advance of the various branches of science concerned. I would only say that I believe social psychology to offer for research a vast and fertile field, which has been but little worked hitherto, and that in this book I have attempted to deal only with its most fundamental problems, those the solution of which is a presupposition of all profit- able work in the various branches of the science. If I have severely criticised some of the views from which I dissent, and have connected these views with the names of writers who have maintained them, it is because I believe such criticism to be a great aid to clearness of exposition and also to be much needed in the present state of psychology; the names thus made use of were chosen because the bearers of them are authors well known for their valuable contribu- tions to mental science. I hope that this brief acknowledgment may serve as an apology to any of them under whose eyes my criticisms may fall. I owe also some apology to my fellow-workers for the somewhat dog- matic tone I have adopted. I would not be taken to believe that my utter- ances upon any of the questions dealt with are infallible or incapable of 6/William McDougall being improved upon; but repeated expressions of deference and of the sense of my own uncertainty would be out of place in a semi-popular work of this character and would obscure the course of my exposition. Although I have tried to make this book intelligible and useful to those who are not professed students of psychology, it is by no means a mere dishing up of current doctrines for popular consumption; and it may add to its usefulness in the hands of professional psychologists if I indicate here the principal points which, to the best of my belief, are original contributions to psychological doctrine. In Chapter II I have tried to render fuller and clearer the concep- tions of instinct and of instinctive process, from both the psychical and the nervous sides. In Chapter III. I have elaborated a principle, briefly enunciated in a previous work, which is, I believe, of the first importance for the under- standing of the life of emotion and action—the principle, namely, that all emotion is the affective aspect of instinctive process. The adoption of this principle leads me to define emotion more strictly and narrowly than has been done by other writers; and I have used it as a guide in attempting to distinguish the more important of the primary emotions. In Chapter IV. I have combated the current view that imitation is to be ascribed to an instinct of imitation; and I have attempted to give greater precision to the conception of suggestion, and to define the prin- cipal conditions of suggestibility. I have adopted a view of the most simple and primitive form of sympathy that has been previously enunci- ated by Herbert Spencer and others, and have proposed what seems to be the only possible theory of the way in which sympathetic induction of emotion takes place. I have then suggested a modification of Professor Groos’s theory of play, and in this connection have indulged in a specu- lation as to the peculiar nature and origin of the emulative impulse. In Chapter V. I have elaborated the conception of a “sentiment” which is a relatively novel one. Since this is the key to all the construc- tive, as contrasted with the more purely analytical, part of the book, I desire to state as clearly as possible its relations to kindred conceptions of other authors. In the preface to the first edition of this book I attrib- uted the conception of the sentiments which was expounded in the text to Mr. A. F. Shand. But on the publication of his important work on “The Foundations of Character” in the year 1914, I found that the con- ception I had developed differed very importantly from his as expounded at length in that work. I had to some extent misinterpreted the very brief An Introduction to Social Psychology/7 statements: of his earlier publications, and had read into them my own meaning. Although I still recognise that Mr. Shand has the merit of having first clearly shown the need of psychology for some such con- ception, I must in the interests of truth point out that my conception of the sentiment and its relation to the emotion is so different from his as to be in reality a rival doctrine rather than a development of it. Looking back, I can now see that the germ of my conception was contained in and derived by me from Professor Stout’s chapter on “Emotions” in his “Manual of Psychology.” At the time of writing the book I was not acquainted with the work of Freud and Jung and the other psycho-ana- lysts. And I have been gratified to find that the workers of this important school, approaching psychological problems from the point of view of mental pathology, have independently arrived at a conception which is almost identical with my notion of the sentiment. This is the conception of the “complex” which now occupies a position of great importance in psycho-analytic literature. Arrived at and still used mainly in the at- tempt to understand the processes at work in the minds of neurotic pa- tients, it has been recognised by some recent writers on mental pathol- ogy (notably Dr. Bernard Hart) that the “complex,” or something very like it, is not a feature of mental structure confined to the minds of neurotic patients, and they are beginning to use the term in this wider sense as denoting those structural features of the normal mind which I have called sentiments. It would, I venture to suggest, contribute to the development of our psychological terminology, if it could be agreed to restrict the term “complex” to those pathological or morbid sentiments in connexion with which it was first used, and to use “sentiment” as the wider more general term to denote all those acquired conjunctions of ideas with emotional-conative tendencies or dispositions the acquisition and operating of which play so great a part both in normal and morbid mental development. In Chapter V. I have analysed the principal complex emotions in the light of the conception of the sentiment and of the principle laid down in Chapter II, respecting the relation of emotion to instinct. The analyses reached are in many respects novel; and I venture to think that, though they may need much correction in detail, they have the merit of having been achieved by a method very much superior to the one commonly pursued, the latter being that of introspective analysis unaided by any previous determination of the primary emotions by the comparative method. 10/William McDougall given us a careful historical survey of this question, and, after critically considering the various views that have been put forward, comes to the conclusion that the one set out in this book is the most acceptable. He is not content with it in certain particulars; for example, he would prefer to class as appetites certain of the tendencies which I have classed with the instincts, such as the sex and the food-seeking tendencies; but I am not convinced that it is possible to draw any clear line of separation, and I would prefer to continue to regard instinct as the comprehensive class or genus, of which the appetites are one species. The distinction that Dr. Drever would have us sharply draw may seem to be fairly clear in the human species; but it seems to me to break down when we attempt to apply it at all rigidly to animal life. What shall we say, for example, of the nest-building, the brooding, and the migratory tendencies of birds? Are these instincts or appetites? I am glad to note that Dr. Drever agrees with me also in respect of the other most fundamental feature of this book, namely, he approves and accepts the conception of the sentiment that I have attempted to develop. He, however, makes in this connexion a suggestion which I am unable to accept. I have proposed as the essential distinction between an instinct and a sentiment the view that in the instinct the connexion between the cognitive and the conative dispositions is innate, while in the sentiment this connexion is acquired through individual experience. Dr. Drever proposes to substitute for this the distinction that “the instinct ‘disposition’ is perceptual, that is, involves only perceptual con- sciousness, while the sentiment ‘ disposition ‘ is ideational, and is a sentiment because it is ideational.” I cannot accept this for two good reasons. First, I believe and have argued elsewhere that some instincts (for example, some of the complex nest-building instincts of birds) are ideational. Secondly, some animals which seem to be incapable of ide- ation or representation seem nevertheless capable of acquiring through experience connexions between particular perceptions and certain con- ative-affective dispositions, as when they acquire a lasting fear of an object towards which they are natively indifferent. Such an acquired tendency is essentially of the nature of a sentiment, and I cannot see why we should refuse to class it as a very simple perceptual sentiment. Yet another of Dr. Drever’s suggestions I am unable to accept, namely, that “the instinct- emotion is not an invariable accompaniment of instinctive activity, but that the instinct interest is; that the instinct- emotion is due to what we previously called ‘tension,’ that is, in the An Introduction to Social Psychology/11 ordinary case, to arrest of the impulse, to the denying of immediate satisfaction to the interest.” In maintaining this thesis Dr. Drever seems to be putting forward independently a view which Professor Dewey has long taught. But I have never felt that Dewey’s reasoning carried any conviction to my mind, nor can I see that Drever has added anything to it. If the instinctive disposition is so constituted as to be capable of generating the appropriate emotion when its impulse is denied immedi- ate satisfaction, it is difficult to see any theoretical ground for denying it this capacity when its activity is unobstructed; nor does inspection of the facts seem to me to yield any more evidence in support of this view than the theoretical consideration of the possibilities. Surely, it is merely a matter of degree of intensity of the emotional excitement! Some of Dr. Drever’s criticisms I am happy to be able to accept. Especially I have to admit that he has convicted me of injustice to some of the philosophers of the Scottish school, notably Dugald Stewart and Hutcheson, who had in many respects anticipated me in my view of the place of instinct in human nature. In my defence I can only plead sheer ignorance, and I may attempt to throw off the blame for this by saying that I had fallen a victim to the recent English fashion of over-rating the German schools of philosophy and psychology at the expense of our British predeces- sors. I am grateful to Dr. Drever for having corrected me in this matter. In this part of psychology it is only by the consensus of opinion of competent psychologists that any view or hypothesis can be established or raised to the status of a theory that may confidently be taught or used as a basis for further constructive work. And the only method of verifi- cation open to us is the application of our hypothesis to the control and guidance of human conduct, especially in the two great fields of educa- tion and medicine. I am therefore much encouraged by the fact that in both these fields my sketch of the active side of human nature and its development in the individual has been found useful. Several writers on educational psychology have acknowledged its value, and some of them have incorporated the essence of it in books written for students of edu- cation. I have noticed above that the doctrines of the psycho-analytic school contain much that coincides with my views. This school has re- alized the fundamental importance of instincts in human nature; and though it has devoted an excessive, and in some cases an almost exclu- sive, attention to the sex instinct, it recognises the existence of other human instincts and is realising more fully that they, as well as the sex instinct, may play a part in the genesis of the psycho-neuroses. Other 12/William McDougall workers in this field have applied, and in Various degrees approved, my sketch, notably Dr. Morton Prince, who in his important work, “The Unconscious,” published in 1914, has made large use of it and fur- nished new evidence in support of it. In spite of these encouraging indi- cations that the substance of this book presents an approximation to- wards the truth, it can by no means be claimed that it has secured gen- eral acceptance. The greater number of the more influential of psycholo- gists seem still to give a very small place to instinct in human nature, admitting as instinct at most only some simple and rudimentary tenden- cies to particular forms of movement, such as the crawling, sucking, and lalling of the infant. I may perhaps be allowed to testify that during five years of military service, devoted almost wholly to the care of cases of psycho-neurosis among soldiers and their treatment by the various methods of psycho-therapy, I have found no reason to make any radical alterations in my view of the innate constitution of man. Some critics have complained of this book that it hardly begins to treat of social psychology. One writes: “He seems to do a great deal of packing in preparation for a journey on which he never starts.” I confess that the title of the book lays me open to this charge. It should rather have been called “Propaedeutic to Social Psychology,” for it was de- signed to prepare the way for a treatise on Social Psychology. When I came to attempt the writing of such a treatise, I found that the psychol- ogy of the active and emotional side of our nature was in so backward a condition that it was impossible to go on without first attempting to attain to some clear and generally acceptable account of the innate ten- dencies of human nature and of their organization under the touch of individual experience to form the characters of individual men. I hoped that this book would provide such an agreed basis for Social Psychol- ogy. In that I have been disappointed. Its substance was more remote from contemporary opinion than I had supposed. However, in spite of this, I have decided at last to start on the journey for which I have done my packing as thoroughly as my powers permit, and I am glad to report that I have now in the press a book entitled “The Group Mind,” which does actually make some attempt to deal with a part of the large field of Social Psychology, W. McD. Oxford, September, 1919. An Introduction to Social Psychology/15 of all human activity—of which forces the intellectual processes are but the servants, instruments, or means—that must be clearly defined, and whose history in the race and in the individual must be made clear, before the social sciences can build upon a firm psychological founda- tion. Now, it is with the questions of the former classes that psycholo- gists have chiefly concerned themselves and in regard to which they have made the most progress towards a consistent and generally accept- able body of doctrine: and they have unduly neglected these more so- cially important problems. This has been the result of several condi- tions, a result which we, looking back upon the history of the sciences, can see to have been inevitable. It was inevitable that, when men began to reflect upon the complex phenomena of social life, they should have concentrated their attention upon the problems immediately presented, and should have sought to explain them deductively from more or less vaguely conceived principles that they entertained they knew not why or how, principles that were the formulations of popular conceptions, slowly grown up in the course of countless generations and rendered more ex- plicit, but hardly less obscure, by the labours of theologians and meta- physicians. And when, in the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century, the modern principles of scientific method began to be generally accepted and to be applied to all or most objects of human speculation, and the various social sciences began to be marked off from one another along the modern lines, it was inevitable that the workers in each department of social science should have continued in the same way, attempting to explain social phenomena from proximate principles which they falsely conceived to be fundamental, rather than to obtain a deeper knowledge of the fundamental constitution of the human mind. It was not to be expected that generations of workers, whose primary in- terest it was to lay down general rules for the guidance of human activ- ity in the great fields of legislation, of government, of private and public conduct, should have deliberately put aside the attempt to construct the sciences of these departments of life, leaving them to the efforts of after- coming generations, while they devoted themselves to the preparatory work of investigating the individual mind, in order to secure the basis of psychological truth on which the labours of their successors might rear the social sciences. The problems confronting them were too urgent; customs, laws, and institutions demanded theoretical justification, and those who called out for social reform sought to strengthen their case with theoretical demonstrations of its justice and of its conformity with 16/William McDougall the accepted principles of human nature. And even if these early workers in the social sciences had made this impossible self-denying ordinance, it would not have been possible for them to achieve the psychology that was needed. For a science still more fundamental, one whose connection with the social phenomena they sought to explain or justify was still more remote and obscure, had yet to be created— namely, the science of biology. It is only a comparative and evolutionary psychology that can provide the needed basis; and this could not be created before the work of Darwin had convinced men of the continuity of human with animal evolution as regards all bodily characters, and had prepared the way for the quickly following recogni- tion of the similar continuity of man’s mental evolution with that of the animal world. Hence the workers in each of the social sciences, approaching their social problems in the absence of any established body of psychological truth and being compelled to make certain assumptions about the mind, made them ad hoc; and in this way they provided the indispensable minimum of psychological doctrine required by each of them. Many of these assumptions contained sufficient truth to give them a certain plau- sibility; but they were usually of such a sweeping character as to leave no room for, and to disguise the need for, more accurate and detailed psychological analysis. And not only were these assumptions made by those who had not prepared themselves for the task by long years of study of the mind in all its many aspects and by the many possible avenues of approach, but they were not made with the single- hearted aim of discovering the truth; rather they were commonly made under the bias of an interest in establishing some normative doctrine; the search for what is was clogged and misled at every step by the desire to estab- lish some preconceived view as to what ought to be. When, then, psy- chology began very slowly and gradually to assert its status as an inde- pendent science, it found all that part of its province which has the most immediate and important bearing on the social sciences already occu- pied by the fragmentary and misleading psychological assumptions of the workers in these sciences; and these workers naturally resented all attempts of psychology to encroach upon the territory they had learned to look upon as their own; for such attempts would have endangered their systems. The psychologists, endeavouring to define their science and to mark it off from other sciences, were thus led to accept a too narrow view of An Introduction to Social Psychology/17 its scope and methods and applications. They were content for the most part to define it as the science of consciousness, and to regard introspec- tion as its only method; for the introspective analysis and description of conscious states was a part of the proper work of psychology that had not been undertaken by any other of the sciences. The insistence upon introspection as the one method of the science tended to prolong the predominance of this narrow and paralysing view of the scope of the science; for the life of emotion and the play of motives is the part of our mental life which offers the least advantageous field for introspective observation and description. The cognitive or intellectual processes, on the other hand, present a rich and varied content of consciousness which lends itself well to introspective discrimination, analysis, and descrip- tion; in comparison with it, the emotional and conative consciousness has but little variety of content, and that little is extremely obscure and elusive of introspection. Then, shortly after the Darwinian ideas had revolutionised the bio- logical sciences, and when it might have been hoped that psychologists would have been led to take a wider view of their science and to assert its rights to its whole field, the introduction of the experimental methods of introspection absorbed the energies of a large proportion of the work- ers in the re-survey, by the new and more accurate methods, of the ground already worked by the method of simple introspection. Let us note some instances of the unfortunate results of this prema- ture annexation of the most important and obscure region of psychology by the sciences which should, in the logical order of things, have found the fundamental psychological truths ready to their hands as a firm ba- sis for their constructions. Ethics affords perhaps the most striking example; for any writer on this subject necessarily encounters psychological problems on every hand, and treatises on ethics are apt to consist very largely of amateur psychologising. Among the earlier moralists the lack of psychological insight led to such doctrines as that of certain Stoics, to the effect that the wise and good man should seek to eradicate the emotions from his bosom; or that of Kant, to the effect that the wise and good man should be free from desire. Putting aside, however, these quaint notions of the earlier writers, we may note that in modern times three false and hasty assumptions of the kind stigmatised above have played leading roles and have furnished a large part of the matter with which ethical contro- versy has been busied during the nineteenth century. First in importance 20/William McDougall cal economy was a tissue of false conclusions drawn from false psycho- logical assumptions. And certainly the recent progress in economic doc- trine has largely consisted in, or resulted from, the recognition of the need for a less inadequate psychological basis. An example illustrating these two facts will be not out of place. The great assumption of the classical political economy was that man is a reasonable being who always intelligently seeks his own good or is guided in all his activities by enlightened self-interest; and this was usually combined with the psychological hedonism which played so large a part in degrading utili- tarian ethics; that is to say, good was identified with pleasure. From these assumptions, which contained sufficient truth to be plausible, it was deduced, logically enough, that free competition in an open market will secure a supply of goods at the lowest possible rate. But mankind is only a little bit reasonable and to a great extent very unintelligently moved in quite unreasonable ways. The economists had neglected to take account of the suggestibility of men which renders the arts of the advertiser, of the “pushing” of goods generally, so profitable and effec- tive. Only on taking this character of men into account can we under- stand such facts as that sewing machines, which might be sold at a fair profit for £5, find a large sale at £12, while equally good ones are sold in the same market at less than half the price. The same deduction as to competition and prices has been signally falsified by those cases in which the establishment by trusts or corporations of virtual monopolies in ar- ticles of universal consumption has led to a reduction of the market prices of those commodities; or again, by the fact that so enormous a proportion of the price paid for goods goes into the pockets of small shopkeepers and other economically pernicious middlemen. As an example of the happy effect of the recent introduction of less crude psychology into economic discussions, it will suffice to mention Mrs. Bosanquet’s work on “The Standard of Life.” In political science no less striking illustrations may be found. What other than an error due to false psychological assumptions was the cos- mopolitanism of the Manchester school, with its confident prophecy of the universal brotherhood of man brought about by enlightened self- interest assigning to each region and people the work for which it was best suited? This prophecy has been notoriously falsified by a great outburst of national spirit, which has played the chief part in shaping European history during the last half-century. Again, in the philosophy of history we have the same method of An Introduction to Social Psychology/21 deduction from hasty, incomplete, and misleading, if not absolutely false, assumptions as to the human mind. We may take as a fair example the assumptions that V. Cousin made the foundation of his philosophy of history. Cousin, after insisting strongly upon the fundamental impor- tance of psychological analysis for the interpretation of history, pro- ceeds as follows:2 “The various manifestations and phases of social life are all traced back to tendencies of human nature from which they spring, from five fundamental wants each of which has corresponding to it a general idea. The idea of the useful gives rise to mathematical and physical science, industry, and political economy; the idea of the just to civil society, the State, and jurisprudence; the idea of the beautiful to art; the idea of God to religion and worship; and the idea of truth in itself, in its highest degree and under its purest form, to philosophy. These ideas are argued to be simple and indecomposable, to coexist in every mind, to constitute the whole foundation of humanity, and to follow in the order mentioned.” No better illustration of the truth of the foregoing remarks could be found. We have here the spectacle of a philosopher, who ex- erted a great influence on the thought of his own country, and who rightly conceived the relation of psychology to the social sciences, but who, in the absence of any adequate psychology, contents himself with concoct- ing on the spur of the moment the most flimsy substitute for it in the form of these five assumptions. As for the philosophies of history that make no pretence of a psy- chological foundation, they are sufficiently characterised by M. Fouillée who, when writing of the development of sociology, says: “Elle est née en effet d’une étude en grande partie mythique ou poetique: je veux parler de la philosophie de l’histoire telle que les metaphysiciens ou les théologiens l’ont d’abord conçue, et qui est à la sociologie positive ce que l’alchimie fut à la chimie, l’astrologie a l’astronomie.”3 From the science of jurisprudence we may take, as a last illustra- tion, the retributive doctrine of punishment, which is still held by a con- siderable number of writers. This barbarous conception of the grounds on which punishment is justified arises naturally from the doctrine of free-will; to any one who holds this doctrine in any thorough-going form there can be no other rational view of punishment than the retributive; for since, according to this assumption, where human action la con- cerned, the future course of events is not determined by the present, punishment cannot be administered in the forward-looking attitude with a view to deterrence or to moral improvement, but only in the backward 22/William McDougall looking vengeful attitude of retribution. The fuller becomes our insight into the springs of human conduct, the more impossible does it become to maintain this antiquated doctrine; so that here, too, progress depends upon the improvement of psychology. One might take each of the social sciences in turn and illustrate in each case the great need for a true doctrine of human motives. But, instead of doing that, I will merely sum up on the issue of the work of the nineteenth century as follows:—During the last century most of the workers in the social sciences were of two parties—those on the one hand who with the utilitarians reduced all motives to the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and those on the other hand who, recoiling from this hedonistic doctrine, sought the mainspring of con- duct in some vaguely conceived intuitive faculty variously named the conscience, the moral faculty, instinct, or sense; Before the close of the century the doctrines of both of these parties were generally seen to be fallacious; but no satisfactory substitute for them was generally accepted, and by the majority of psychologists nothing better was offered to fill the gap than a mere word, “the will,” or some such phrase as “the ten- dency of ideas to self-realisation.” On the other hand, Darwin, in the “Descent of Man “ (1871) first enunciated the true doctrine of human motives, and showed how we must proceed, relying chiefly upon the comparative and natural history method, if we would arrive at a fuller understanding of them. But Darwin’s own account suffered from the deference he paid, under protest, to the doctrine of psychological hedo- nism, still dominant at that time; and his lead has been followed by comparatively few psychologists, and but little has yet been done to carry forward the work he began and to refine upon his first rough sketch of the history of human motives. Enough has been said to illustrate the point of view from which this volume has been written, and to enforce the theme of this introductory chapter, namely, that psychologists must cease to be content with the sterile and narrow conception of their science as the science of con- sciousness, and must boldly assert its claim to be the positive science of the mind in all its aspects and modes of functioning, or, as I would prefer to say, the positive science of conduct or behaviour.4 Psychology must not regard the introspective description of the stream of conscious- ness as its whole task, but only as a preliminary part of its work. Such introspective description, such “pure psychology,” can never constitute a science, or at least can never rise to the level of an explanatory sci- An Introduction to Social Psychology/25 ther moral or immoral but simply non-moral.”5 That is to say, the fun- damental problem of social psychology is the moralisation of the indi- vidual by the society into which he is born as a creature in which the non-moral and purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altruistic tendencies. This moralisation or socialisation of the individual is, then, the essential theme of this section. In Section II. I have briefly indicated some of the ways in which the principal instincts and primary tendencies of the human mind play their parts in the lives of human societies; my object being to bring home to the reader the truth that the understanding of the life of society in any or all of its phases presupposes a knowledge of the constitution of the hu- man mind, a truth which, though occasionally acknowledged in prin- ciple, is in practice so frequently ignored. Section I The Mental Characters of Man of Primary Importance for His Life in Society Chapter II The Nature of Instincts and Their Place in the Constitution of the Human Mind The human mind has certain innate or inherited tendencies which are the essential springs or motive powers of all thought and action, whether individual or collective, and are the bases from which the character and will of individuals and of nations are gradually developed under the guidance of the intellectual faculties. These primary innate tendencies have different relative strengths in the native constitutions of the indi- viduals of different races, and they are favoured or checked in very different degrees by the very different social circumstances of men in different stages of culture; but they are probably common to the men of every race and of every age. If this view, that human nature has every- where and at all times this common native foundation, can be estab- lished, it will afford a much-needed basis for speculation on the history of the development of human societies and human institutions. For so long as it is possible to assume, as has often been done, that these innate tendencies of the human mind have varied greatly from age to age and from race to race, all such speculation is founded on quicksand and we cannot hope to reach views of a reasonable degree of certainty. The evidence that the native basis of the human mind, constituted by the sum of these innate tendencies, has this stable unchanging char- acter is afforded by comparative psychology. For we find, not only that these tendencies, in stronger or weaker degree, are present in men of all An Introduction to Social Psychology/27 races now living on the earth, but that we may find all of them, or at least the germs of them, in most of the higher animals. Hence there can be little doubt that they played the same essential part in the minds of the primitive human stock, or stocks, and in the pre-human ancestors that bridged the great gap in the evolutionary series between man and the animal world. These all-important and relatively unchanging tendencies, which form the basis of human character and will, are of two main classes— (1) The specific tendencies or instincts; (2) The general or non-specific tendencies arising out of the consti- tution of mind and the nature of mental process in general, when mind and mental process attain a certain degree of complexity in the course of evolution. In the present and seven following chapters I propose to define the more important of these specific and general tendencies, and to sketch very briefly the way in which they become systematised in the course of character-formation; and in the second section of this volume some at- tempt will be made to illustrate the special importance of each one for the social life of man. Contemporary writers of all classes make frequent use of the words “instinct” and “instinctive,” but, with very few exceptions, they use them so loosely that they have almost spoilt them for scientific purposes. On the one hand, the adjective “instinctive” is commonly applied to every human action that is performed without deliberate reflexion; on the other hand, the actions of animals are popularly attributed to instinct, and in this connexion instinct is vaguely conceived as a mysterious faculty, utterly different in nature from any human faculty, which Providence has given to the brutes because the higher faculty of reason has been denied them. Hundreds of passages might be quoted from contemporary authors, even some of considerable philosophical culture, to illustrate how these two words are used with a minimum of meaning, generally with the effect of disguising from the writer the obscurity and incoher- ence of his thought. The following examples will serve to illustrate at once this abuse and the hopeless laxity with which even cultured au- thors habitually make use of psychological terms. One philosophical writer on social topics tells us that the power of the State “is dependent on the instinct of subordination, which is the outcome of the desire of the people, more or less distinctly conceived, for certain social ends”: another asserts that ancestor-worship has survived amongst the West- 30/William McDougall themselves as parasites to some host in a way that is necessary to their survival. In such cases it is clear that the behaviour of the parent is determined by the impressions made on its senses by the appropriate objects or places: e.g., the smell of decaying flesh leads the carrion-fly to deposit its eggs upon it; the sight or odour of some particular flower leads another to lay its eggs among the ovules of the flower, which serve as food to the grubs. Others go through more elaborate trains of action, as when the mason-wasp lays its eggs in a mud-nest, fills up the space with caterpillars, which it paralyses by means of well-directed stings, and seals it up; so that the caterpillars remain as a supply of fresh ani- mal food for the young which the parent will never see and of whose needs it can have no knowledge or idea. Among the lower vertebrate animals also instinctive actions, hardly at all modified by intelligent control, are common. The young chick runs to his mother in response to a call of peculiar quality and nestles beneath her; the young squirrel brought up in lonely captivity, when nuts are given him for the first time, opens and eats some and buries others with all the movements characteristic of his species; the kitten in the presence of a dog or a mouse assumes the characteristic feline atti- tudes and behaves as all his fellows of countless generations have be- haved. Even so intelligent an animal as the domesticated dog behaves on some occasions in a purely instinctive fashion; when, for example, a terrier comes across the trail of a rabbit, his hunting instinct is immedi- ately aroused by the scent; he becomes blind and deaf to all other im- pressions as he follows the trail, and then, when he sights his quarry, breaks out into the yapping which is peculiar to occasions of this kind. His wild ancestors hunted in packs, and, under those conditions, the characteristic bark emitted on sighting the quarry served to bring his fellows to his aid; but when the domesticated terrier hunts alone, his excited yapping can but facilitate the escape of his quarry; yet the old social instinct operates too powerfully to be controlled by his moderate intelligence. These few instances of purely instinctive behaviour illustrate clearly its nature. In the typical case some sense-impression, or combination of sense-impressions, excites some perfectly definite behaviour, some move- ment or train of movements which is the same in all individuals of the species and on all similar occasions; and in general the behaviour so occasioned is of a kind either to promote the welfare of the individual animal or of the community to which he belongs, or to secure the per- An Introduction to Social Psychology/31 petuation of the species.8 In treating of the instincts of animals, writers have usually described them as innate tendencies to certain kinds of action, and Herbert Spencer’s widely accepted definition of instinctive action as compound reflex ac- tion takes account only of the behaviour or movements to which in- stincts give rise. But instincts are more than innate tendencies or dis- positions to certain kinds of movement. There is every reason to believe that even the most purely instinctive action is the outcome of a distinctly mental process, one which is incapable of being described in purely mechanical terms, because it is a psycho-physical process, involving psychical as well as physical changes, and one which, like every other mental process, has, and can only be fully described in terms of, the three aspects of all mental process—the cognitive, the affective, and the conative aspects; that is to say, every instance of instinctive behaviour involves a knowing of some thing or object, a feeling in regard to it, and a striving towards or away from that object. We cannot, of course, directly observe the threefold psychical as- pect of the psycho-physical process that issues in instinctive behaviour; but we are amply justified in assuming that it invariably accompanies the process in the nervous system of which the instinctive movements are the immediate result, a process which, being initiated on stimulation of some sense organ by the physical impressions received from the ob- ject, travels up the sensory nerves, traverses the brain, and descends as an orderly or co-ordinated stream of nervous impulses along efferent nerves to the appropriate groups of muscles and other executive organs. We are justified in assuming the cognitive aspect of the psychical pro- cess, because the nervous excitation seems to traverse those parts of the brain whose excitement involves the production of sensations or changes in the sensory content of consciousness; we are justified in assuming the affective aspect of the psychical process, because the creature exhibits unmistakable symptoms of feeling and emotional excitement; and, espe- cially, we are justified in assuming the conative aspect of the psychical process, because all instinctive behaviour exhibits that unique mark of mental process, a persistent striving towards the natural end of the pro- cess. That is to say, the process, unlike any merely mechanical process, is not to be arrested by any sufficient mechanical obstacle, but is rather intensified by any such obstacle and only comes to an end either when its appropriate goal is achieved, or when some stronger incompatible tendency is excited, or when the creature is exhausted by its persistent 32/William McDougall efforts. Now, the psycho-physical process that issues in an instinctive ac- tion is initiated by a sense- impression which, usually, is but one of many sense-impressions received at the same time; and the fact that this one impression plays an altogether dominant part in determining the animal’s behaviour shows that its effects are peculiarly favoured, that the nervous system is peculiarly fitted to receive and to respond to just that kind of impression. The impression must be supposed to excite, not merely detailed changes in the animal’s field of sensation, but a sensa- tion or complex of sensations that has significance or meaning for the animal; hence we must regard the instinctive process in its cognitive aspect as distinctly of the nature of perception, however rudimentary. In the animals most nearly allied to ourselves we can, in many instances of instinctive behaviour, clearly recognise the symptoms of some particu- lar kind of emotion such as fear, anger, or tender feeling; and the same symptoms always accompany any one kind of instinctive behaviour, as when the cat assumes the defensive attitude, the dog resents the intru- sion of a strange dog, or the hen tenderly gathers her brood beneath her wings. We seem justified in believing that each kind of instinctive behaviour is always attended by some such emotional excitement, how- ever faint, which in each case is specific or peculiar to that kind of behaviour. Analogy with our own experience justifies us, also, in as- suming that the persistent striving towards its end, which characterises mental process and distinguishes instinctive behaviour most clearly from mere reflex action, implies some such mode of experience as we call conative, the kind of experience which in its more developed forms is properly called desire or aversion, but which, in the blind form in which we sometimes have it and which is its usual form among the animals, is a mere impulse, or craving, or uneasy sense of want Further, we seem justified in believing that the continued obstruction of instinctive striv- ing is always accompanied by painful feeling, its successful progress towards its end by pleasurable feeling, and the achievement of its end by a pleasurable sense of satisfaction. An instinctive action, then, must not be regarded as simple or com- pound reflex action if by reflex action we mean, as is usually meant, a movement caused by a sense-stimulus and resulting from a sequence of merely physical processes in some nervous arc. Nevertheless, just as a reflex action implies the presence in the nervous system of the reflex nervous arc, so the instinctive action also implies some enduring ner- An Introduction to Social Psychology/35 tive action is effected, and its nervous activities are the correlates of the conative element of the psychical process, of the felt impulse to action. Now, the afferent or receptive part and the efferent or motor part are capable of being greatly modified, independently of one another and of the central part, in the course of the life history of the individual; while the central part persists throughout life as the essential unchang- ing nucleus of the disposition. Hence in man, whose intelligence and adaptability are so great, the afferent and efferent parts of each instinc- tive disposition are liable to many modifications, while the central part alone remains unmodified: that is to say, the cognitive processes through which any instinctive process may be initiated exhibit a great complica- tion and variety; and the actual bodily movements by which the instinc- tive process achieves its end may be complicated to an indefinitely great extent; while the emotional excitement, with the accompanying nervous activities of the central part of the disposition, is the only part of the total instinctive process that retains its specific character and remains common to all individuals and all situations in which the instinct is excited. It is for this reason that authors have commonly treated of the instinctive actions of animals on the one hand, and of the emotions of men on the other hand, as distinct types of mental process, failing to see that each kind of emotional excitement is always an indication of, and the most constant feature of, some instinctive process. Let us now consider very briefly the principal ways in which the instinctive disposition may be modified on its afferent or receptive side; and let us take, for the sake of clearness of exposition, the case of a particular instinct, namely the instinct of fear or flight, which is one of the strongest and most widely distributed instincts throughout the ani- mal kingdom. In man and in most animals this instinct is capable of being excited by any sudden loud noise, independently of all experience of danger or harm associated with such noises. We must suppose, then, that the afferent inlet, or one of the afferent inlets, of this innate disposi- tion consists in a system of auditory neurones connected by sensory nerves with the ear This afferent inlet to this innate disposition is but little specialised, since it may be excited by any loud noise. One change it may undergo through experience is specialisation; on repeated experi- ence of noises of certain kinds that are never accompanied or followed by hurtful effects, most creatures will learn to neglect them;11 their in- stinct of flight is no longer excited by them; they learn, that is to say, to discriminate between these and other noises; this implies that the per- 36/William McDougall ceptual disposition, the afferent inlet of the instinct, has become further specialised. More important is the other principal mode in which the instinct may be modified on its afferent or cognitive side. Consider the case of the birds on an uninhabited island, which show no fear of men on their first appearance on the island. The absence of fear at the sight of man implies, not that the birds have no instinct of fear, but that the instinct has no afferent inlet specialised for the reception of the retinal impres- sion made by the human form. But the men employ themselves in shoot- ing, and very soon the sight of a man excites the instinct of fear in the birds, and they take to flight at his approach. How are we to interpret this change of instinctive behaviour brought about by experience? Shall we say that the birds observe on one occasion, or on several or many occasions, that on the approach of a man one of their number falls to the ground, uttering cries of pain; that they infer that the man has wounded it, and that he may wound and hurt them, and that he is therefore to be avoided in the future? No psychologist would now accept this anthropo- morphic interpretation of the facts. If the behaviour we are considering were that of savage men, or even of a community of philosophers and logicians, such an account would err in ascribing the change of behaviour to a purely intellectual process. Shall we, then, say that the sudden loud sound of the gun excites the instinct of fear, and that, because the per- ception of this sound is constantly accompanied by the visual percep- tion of the human form, the idea of the latter becomes associated with the idea of the sound, so that thereafter the sight of a man reproduces the idea of the sound of the gun, and hence leads to the excitement of the instinct by way of its innately organised afferent inlet, the system of auditory neurones? This would be much nearer the truth than the former account; some such interpretation of facts of this order has been offered by many psychologists and very generally accepted.12 Its acceptance involves the attribution of free ideas, of the power of representation of objects independently of sense- presentation, to whatever animals dis- play this kind of modification of instinctive behaviour by experience— that is to say, to all the animals save the lowest; and there are good reasons for believing that only man and the higher animals have this power. We are therefore driven to look for a still simpler interpretation of the facts, and such a one is not far to seek. We may suppose that, since the visual presentation of the human form repeatedly accompanies the excitement of the instinct of fear by the sound of the gun, it acquires An Introduction to Social Psychology/37 the power of exciting directly the reactions characteristic of this in- stinct, rather than indirectly by way of the reproduction of the idea of the sound; i.e., we may suppose that, after repetition of the experience, the sight of a man directly excites the instinctive process in its affective and conative aspects only; or we may say, in physiological terms, that the visual disposition concerned in the elaboration of the retinal impres- sion of the human form becomes directly connected or associated with the central and efferent parts of the instinctive disposition, which thus acquires, through the repetition of this experience, a new afferent inlet through which it may henceforth be excited independently of its innate afferent inlet. There is, I think, good reason to believe that this third interpretation is much nearer the truth than the other two considered above. In the first place, the assumption of such relative independence of the afferent part of an instinctive disposition as is implied by this interpretation is justi- fied by the fact that many instincts may be excited by very different objects affecting different senses, prior to all experience of such objects. The instinct of fear is the most notable in this respect, for in many ani- mals it may be excited by certain special impressions of sight, of smell, and of hearing, as well as by all loud noises (perhaps also by any pain- ful sense-impression), all of which impressions evoke the emotional ex- pressions and the bodily movements characteristic of the instinct. Hence, we may infer that such an instinct has several innately organised affer- ent inlets, through each of which its central and efferent parts may be excited without its other afferent inlets being involved in the excitement. But the best evidence in favour of the third interpretation is that which we may obtain by introspective observation of our own emo- tional states. Through injuries received we may learn to fear, or to be angered by, the presence of a person or animal or thing towards which we were at first indifferent; and we may then experience the emotional excitement and the impulse to the appropriate movements of flight or aggression, without recalling the nature and occasion of the injuries we have formerly suffered; i.e., although the idea of the former injury may be reproduced by the perception, or by the idea, of the person, animal, or thing from which it was received, yet the reproduction of this idea is not an essential step in the process of re-excitement of the instinctive reaction in its affective and conative aspects; for the visual impression made by the person or thing leads directly to the excitement of the cen- tral and efferent parts of the innate disposition. In this way our emo- 40/William McDougall motor tendencies of these instincts are seldom manifested in their purely native forms, but are from the first modified, controlled, and suppressed in various degrees. This is the case more especially with the large move- ments of trunk and limbs; while the subsidiary movements, those which Darwin called serviceable associated movements, such as those due to contractions of the facial muscles, are less habitually controlled, save by men of certain races and countries among whom control of facial movement is prescribed by custom. An illustration may indicate the main principle involved: One may have learnt to suppress more or less completely the bodily movements in which the excitement of the instinct of pugnacity naturally finds vent; or by a study of pugilism one may have learnt to render these movements more finely adapted to secure the end of the instinct; or one may have learnt to replace them by the ha- bitual use of weapons, so that the hand flies to the sword-hilt or to the hip-pocket, instead of being raised to strike, whenever this instinct is excited. But one exercises but little, if any, control over the violent beat- ing of the heart, the flushing of the face, the deepened respiration, and the general redistribution of blood-supply and nervous tension which constitute the visceral expression of the excitement of this instinct and which are determined by the constitution of its central affective part. Hence in the human adult, while this instinct may be excited by objects and situations that are not provided for in the innate disposition, and may express itself in bodily movements which also are not natively de- termined, or may fail to find expression in any such movements owing to strong volitional control, its unmodified central part will produce visceral changes, with the accompanying emotional state of conscious- ness, in accordance with its unmodified native constitution; and these visceral changes will usually be accompanied by the innately determined facial expression in however slight a degree; hence result the character- istic expressions or symptoms of the emotion of anger which, as regards their main features, are common to all men of all times and all races. All the principal instincts of man are liable to similar modifications of their afferent and motor parts, while their central parts remain un- changed and determine the emotional tone of consciousness and the vis- ceral changes characteristic of the excitement of the instinct. It must be added that the conative aspect of the psychical process always retains the unique quality of an impulse to activity, even though the instinctive activity has been modified by habitual control; and this felt impulse, when it becomes conscious of its end, assumes the charac- An Introduction to Social Psychology/41 ter of an explicit desire or aversion. Are, then, these instinctive impulses the only motive powers of the human mind to thought and action? What of pleasure and pain, which by so many of the older psychologists were held to be the only motives of human activity, the only objects or sources of desire and aversion? In answer to the former question, it must be said that in the devel- oped human mind there are springs of action of another class, namely, acquired habits of thought and action. An acquired mode of activity becomes by repetition habitual, and the more frequently it is repeated the more powerful becomes the habit as a source of impulse or motive power. Few habits can equal in this respect the principal instincts; and habits are in a sense derived from, and secondary to, instincts; for, in the absence of instincts, no thought and no action could ever be achieved or repeated, and so no habits of thought or action could be formed. Habits are formed only in the service of the instincts. The answer to the second question is that pleasure and pain are not in themselves springs of action, but at the most of undirected move- ments; they serve rather to modify instinctive processes, pleasure tend- ing to sustain and prolong any mode of action, pain to cut it short; under their prompting and guidance are effected those modifications and ad- aptations of the instinctive bodily movements which we have briefly considered above.15 We may say, then, that directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct), every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along towards its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving power by which all mental activities are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means towards these ends, is but the instrument by which these im- pulses seek their satisfactions, while pleasure and pain do but serve to guide them in their choice of the means. Take away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful im- pulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind; it would lie inert and motionless like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed or a steam-engine whose fires had been drawn. These impulses are the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies, and in them we are confronted with 42/William McDougall the central mystery of life and mind and will. The following chapters, I hope, will render clearer, and will give some support to, the views briefly and somewhat dogmatically stated in the present chapter.16 Chapter III The Principal Instincts and the Primary Emotions of Man Before we can make any solid progress in the understanding of the com- plex emotions and impulses that are the forces underlying the thoughts and actions of men and of societies, we must be able to distinguish and describe each of the principal human instincts and the emotional and conative tendencies characteristic of each one of them. This task will be attempted in the present chapter; in Chapter V. we shall seek to analyse some of the principal complex emotions and impulses, to display them as compounded from the limited number of primary or simple instinc- tive tendencies;17 and in the succeeding chapters of this section we shall consider the way in which these tendencies become organised within the complex dispositions that constitute the sentiments. In the foregoing chapter it was said that the instinctive mental pro- cess that results from the excitement of any instinct has always an affec- tive aspect, the nature of which depends upon the constitution of that most stable and unchanging of the three parts of the instinctive disposi- tion, namely the central part. In the case of the simpler instincts, this affective aspect of the instinctive process is not prominent; and though, no doubt, the quality of it is peculiar in each case, yet we cannot readily distinguish these qualities and we have no special names for them. But, in the case of the principal powerful instincts, the affective quality of each instinctive process and the sum of visceral and bodily changes in which it expresses itself are peculiar and distinct; hence language pro- vides special names for such modes of affective experience, names such as anger, fear, curiosity; and the generic name for them is “emotion.” The word “emotion” is used of course in popular speech loosely and somewhat vaguely, and psychologists are not yet completely consistent in their use of it. But all psychological terms that are taken from com- mon speech have to undergo a certain specialisation and more rigid defi- nition before they are fit for scientific use; and in using the word “emo- An Introduction to Social Psychology/45 to say, the innate disposition has several afferent inlets. In some of the more timid creatures it would seem that every unfamiliar sound or sight is capable of exciting it.20 In civilised man, whose life for so many generations has been more or less sheltered from the dangers peculiar to the natural state, the instinct exhibits (like all complex organs and func- tions that are not kept true to the specific type by rigid selection) consid- erable individual differences, especially on its receptive side. Hence it is difficult to discover what objects and impressions were its natural exci- tants in primitive man. The wail of the very young infant has but little variety; but mothers claim to be able to distinguish the cries of fear, of anger, and of bodily discomfort, at a very early age, and it is probable that these three modes of reaction become gradually differentiated from a single instinctive impulse, that of the cry, whose function is merely to signal to the mother the need for her ministrations. In most young chil- dren unmistakable fear is provoked by any sudden loud noise (some being especially sensitive to harsh deep-pitched noises even though of low intensity), and all through life such noise remains for many of us the surest and most frequent excitant of the instinct. Other children, while still in arms, show fear if held too loosely when carried downstairs, or if the arms that hold them are suddenly lowered. In some, intense fear is excited on their first introduction at close quarters to a dog or cat, no matter how quiet and well- behaved the animal may be; and some of us continue all through life to experience a little thrill of fear whenever a dog runs out and barks at our heels, though we may never have received any hurt from an animal and may have perfect confidence that no hurt is likely to be done us.21 In other persons, again, fear is excited by the noise of a high wind, and though they may be in a solidly built house that has weathered a hundred storms, they will walk restlessly to and fro throughout every stormy night. In most animals instinctive flight is followed by equally instinctive concealment as soon as cover is reached, and there can be little doubt that in primitive man the instinct had this double tendency. As soon as the little child can run, his fear expresses itself in concealment following on flight; and the many adult persons who seek refuge from the strange noises of dark nights, or from a thunderstorm, by covering their heads with the bed-clothes, and who find a quite irrational comfort in so do- ing, illustrate the persistence of this tendency. It is, perhaps, in the op- posed characters of these two tendencies, both of which are bound up 46/William McDougall with the emotion of fear, that we may find an explanation of the great variety of, and variability of, the symptoms of fear. The sudden stop- ping of heart-beat and respiration, and the paralysis of movement in which it sometimes finds expression, are due to the impulse to conceal- ment; the hurried respiration and pulse, and the frantic bodily efforts, by which it is more commonly expressed, are due to the impulse to flight.22 That the excitement of fear is not necessarily, or indeed usually, the effect of an intelligent appreciation or anticipation of danger, is espe- cially well shown by children of four or five years of age, in whom it may be induced by the facial contortions or playful roarings of a famil- iar friend. Under these circumstances, a child may exhibit every symp- tom of fear even while he sits upon his tormentor’s lap and, with arms about his neck, beseeches him to cease or to promise not to do it again. And many a child has been thrown into a paroxysm of terror by the approach of some hideous figure that he knew to be but one of his playfellows in disguise. Of all the excitants of this instinct the most interesting, and the most difficult to understand as regards its mode of operation, is the unfamil- iar or strange as such. Whatever is totally strange, whatever is violently opposed to the accustomed and familiar, is apt to excite fear both in men and animals, if only it is capable of attracting their attention. It is, I think, doubtful whether an eclipse of the moon has ever excited the fear of animals, for the moon is not an object of their attention; but for sav- age men it has always been an occasion of fear. The well-known case of the dog described by Romanes, that was terrified by the movements of an object jerked forward by an invisible thread, illustrates the fear-ex- citing powers of the unfamiliar in the animal world. The following inci- dent is instructive in this respect: A courageous child of five years, sit- ting alone in a sunlit room, suddenly screams in terror, and, on her father hastening to her, can only explain that she saw something move. The discovery of a mouse in the corner of the room at once explains and banishes her fear, for she is on friendly terms with mice. The mouse must have darted across the peripheral part of her field of vision, and this unexpected and unfamiliar appearance of movement sufficed to excite the instinct. This avenue to the instinct, the unfamiliar, becomes in man highly diversified and intellectualised, and it is owing to this that he feels fear before the mysterious, the uncanny, and the supernatural, and that fear, entering as an element into the complex emotions of awe and An Introduction to Social Psychology/47 reverence, plays its part in all religions. Fear, whether its impulse be to flight or to concealment, is characterised by the fact that its excitement, more than that of any other instinct, tends to bring to an end at once all other mental activity, rivet- ing the attention upon its object to the exclusion of all others; owing, probably, to this extreme concentration of attention, as well as to the violence of the emotion, the excitement of this instinct makes a deep and lasting impression on the mind. A gust of anger, a wave of pity or of tender emotion, an impulse of curiosity, may co-operate in supporting and re-enforcing mental activities of the most varied kinds, or may domi- nate the mind for a time and then pass away, leaving but little trace. But fear, once roused, haunts the mind; it comes back alike in dreams and in waking life, bringing with it vivid memories of the terrifying impres- sion. It is thus the great inhibitor of action, both present action and future action, and becomes in primitive human societies the great agent of social discipline through which men are led to the habit of control of the egoistic impulses. The Instinct of Repulsion and the Emotion of Disgust The impulse of this instinct is, like that of fear, one of aversion, and these two instincts together account probably for all aversions, except those acquired under the influence of pain. The impulse differs from that of fear in that, while the latter prompts to bodily retreat from its object, the former prompts to actions that remove or reject the offending object This instinct resembles fear in that under the one name we, per- haps, commonly confuse two very closely allied instincts whose affec- tive aspects are so similar that they are not easily distinguishable, though their impulses are of different tendencies. The one impulse of repulsion is to reject from the mouth substances that excite the instinct in virtue of their odour or taste, substances which in the main are noxious and evil- tasting; its biological utility is obvious. The other impulse of repulsion seems to be excited by the contact of slimy and slippery substances with the skin, and to express itself as a shrinking of the whole body, accom- panied by a throwing forward of the hands. The common shrinking from slimy creatures with a “creepy” shudder seems to be the expression of this impulse. It is difficult to assign any high biological value to it (un- less we connect it with the necessity of avoiding noxious reptiles), but it is clearly displayed by some children before the end of their first year; thus in some infants furry things excite shrinking and tears at their first 50/William McDougall The Instinct of Pugnacity and the Emotion of Anger This instinct, though not so nearly universal as fear, being apparently lacking in the constitution of the females of some species, ranks with fear as regards the great strength of its impulse and the high intensity of the emotion it generates. It occupies a peculiar position in relation to the other instincts, and cannot strictly be brought under the definition of instinct proposed in the first chapter. For it has no specific object or objects the perception of which constitutes the initial stage of the in- stinctive process. The condition of its excitement is rather any opposi- tion to the free exercise of any impulse, any obstruction to the activity to which the creature is impelled by any one of the other instincts.24 And its impulse is to break down any such obstruction and to de- stroy whatever offers this opposition. This instinct thus presupposes the others; its excitement is dependent upon, or secondary to, the excite- ment of the others, and is apt to be intense in proportion to the strength of the obstructed impulse. The most mean-spirited cur will angrily re- sent any attempt to take away its bone, if it is hungry; a healthy infant very early displays anger, if his meal is interrupted; and all through life most men find it difficult to suppress irritation on similar occasions. In the animal world the most furious excitement of this instinct is pro- voked in the male of many species by any interference with the satisfac- tion of the sexual impulse; since such interference is the most frequent occasion of its excitement, and since it commonly comes from other male members of his own species, the actions innately organised for securing the ends of this instinct are such actions as are most effective in combat with his fellows. Hence, also, the defensive apparatus of the male is usually, like the lion’s or the stallion’s mane, especially adapted for defence against the attacks of his fellows. But the obstruction of every other instinctive impulse may in its turn become the occasion of anger. We see how among the animals even the fear- impulse, the most opposed in tendency to the pugnacious, may on obstruction give place to it; for the hunted creature when brought to bay—i.e., when its im- pulse to flight is obstructed—is apt to turn upon its pursuers and to fight furiously, until an opportunity for escape presents itself. Darwin has shown the significance of the facial expression of an- ger, of the contracted brow and raised upper lip; and man shares with many of the animals the tendency to frighten his opponent by loud roars or bellowings. As with most of the other human instincts, the excitement of this one is expressed in its purest form by children. Many a little boy An Introduction to Social Psychology/51 has, without any example or suggestion, suddenly taken to running with open mouth to bite the person who has angered him, much to the distress of his parents. As the child grows up, as self-control becomes stronger, the life of ideas richer, and the means we take to overcome obstructions to our efforts more refined and complex, this instinct ceases to express itself in its crude natural manner, save when most intensely excited, and becomes rather a source of increased energy of action towards the end set by any other instinct; the energy of its impulse adds itself to and reinforces that of other impulses and so helps us to overcome our diffi- culties. In this lies its great value for civilised man. A man devoid of the pugnacious instinct would not only be incapable of anger, but would lack this great source of reserve energy which is called into play in most of us by any difficulty in our path. In this respect also it is the opposite of fear, which tends to inhibit all other impulses than its own. The Instincts of Self-abasement (or Subjection) and of Self-assertion (or Self-display), and the Emotions of Subjection and Elation (or Nega- tive and Positive Self-feeling) These two instincts have attracted little attention, and the two corre- sponding emotions have, so far as I know, been adequately recognised by M. Ribot alone,25 whom I follow in placing them among the primary emotions. Ribot names the two emotions negative and positive self-feel- ing respectively, but since these names are awkward in English, I pro- pose, in the interests of a consistent terminology, to call them the emo- tions of subjection and elation. The clear recognition and understanding of these instincts, more especially of the instinct of self-display, is of the first importance for the psychology of character and volition, as I hope to show in a later chapter. At present I am only concerned to prove that they have a place in the native constitution of the human mind. The instinct of self-display is manifested by many of the higher social or gregarious animals, especially, perhaps, though not only, at the time of mating. Perhaps among mammals the horse displays it most clearly. The muscles of all parts are strongly innervated, the creature holds himself erect, his neck is arched, his tail lifted, his motions be- come superfluously vigorous and extensive, he lifts his hoofs high in air, as he parades before the eyes of his fellows. Many animals, especially the birds, but also some of the monkeys, are provided with organs of display that are specially disposed on these occasions. Such are the tail of the peacock and the beautiful breast of the pigeon. The instinct is 52/William McDougall essentially a social one, and is only brought into play by the presence of spectators. Such self-display is popularly recognised as implying pride; we say “How proud he looks!” and the peacock has become the symbol of pride. By psychologists pride is usually denied the animals, because it is held to imply self-consciousness, and that, save of the most rudi- mentary kind, they probably have not. But this denial arises from the current confusion of the emotions and the sentiments. The word “pride” is no doubt most properly to be used as the name of one form of the self- regarding sentiment, and such sentiment does imply a developed self- consciousness such as no animal can be credited with. Nevertheless, popular opinion is, I think, in the right in attributing to the animals in their moments of self-display the germ of the emotion that is the most essential constituent of pride. It is this primary emotion which may be called positive self-feeling or elation, and which might well be called pride, if that word were not required to denote the sentiment of pride. In the simple form, in which it is expressed by the self-display of animals, it does not necessarily imply self-consciousness. Many children clearly exhibit this instinct of self-display; before they can walk or talk the impulse finds its satisfaction in the admiring gaze and plaudits of the family circle as each new acquirement is prac- tised;26 a little later it is still more clearly expressed by the frequently repeated command, “See me do this,” or “See how well I can do so-and- so”; and for many a child more than half the delight of riding on a pony, or of wearing a new coat, consists in the satisfaction of this instinct, and vanishes if there be no spectators. A little later, with the growth of self- consciousness the instinct may find expression in the boasting and swag- gering of boys, the vanity of girls; while, with almost all of us, it be- comes the most important constituent of the self-regarding sentiment and plays an all-important part in the volitional control of conduct, in the way to be discussed in a later chapter. The situation that more particularly excites this instinct is the pres- ence of spectators to whom one feels oneself for any reason, or in any way, superior, and this is perhaps true in a modified sense of the ani- mals; the “dignified” behaviour of a big dog in the presence of small ones, the stately strutting of a hen among her chicks, seem to be in- stances in point. We have, then, good reason to believe that the germ of this emotion is present in the animal world, and, if we make use of our second criterion of the primary character of an emotion, it answers well to the test For in certain mental diseases, especially in the early stages of An Introduction to Social Psychology/55 more effective guardianship. The highest stage is reached by those spe- cies in which each female produces at a birth but one or two young and protects them so efficiently that most of the young born reach maturity; the maintenance of the. species thus becomes in the main the work of the parental instinct. In such species the protection and cherishing of the young is the constant and all-absorbing occupation of the mother, to which she devotes all her energies, and in the course of which she will at any time undergo privation, pain, and death. The instinct becomes more powerful than any other, and can override any other, even fear itself; for it works directly in the service of the species, while the other instincts work primarily in the service of the individual life, for which Nature cares little. All this has been well set out by Sutherland, with a wealth of illustrative detail, in his work on “The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct.” When we follow up the evolution of this instinct to the highest ani- mal level, we find among the apes the most remarkable examples of its operation. Thus in one species the mother is said to carry her young one clasped in one arm uninterruptedly for several months, never letting go of it in all her wanderings. This instinct is no less strong in many human mothers, in whom, of course, it becomes more or less intellectualised and organised as the most essential constituent of the sentiment of pa- rental love. Like other species, the human species is dependent upon this instinct for its continued existence and welfare. It is true that reason, working in the service of the egoistic impulses and sentiments, often circumvents the ends of this instinct and sets up habits which are incom- patible with it. When that occurs on a large scale in any society, that society is doomed to rapid decay. But the instinct itself can never die out, save with the disappearance of the human species itself; it is kept strong and effective just because those families and races and nations in which it weakens become rapidly supplanted by those in which it is strong. It is impossible to believe that the operation of this, the most power- ful of the instincts, is not accompanied by a strong and definite emotion; one may see the emotion expressed unmistakably by almost any mother among the higher animals, especially the birds and the mammals—by the cat, for example, and by most of the domestic animals; and it is impossible to doubt that this emotion has in all cases the peculiar qual- ity of the tender emotion provoked in the human parent by the spectacle of her helpless offspring. This primary emotion has been very generally 56/William McDougall ignored by the philosophers and psychologists; that is, perhaps, to be explained by the fact that this instinct and its emotion are in the main decidedly weaker in men than in women, and in some men, perhaps, altogether lacking. We may even surmise that the philosophers as a class are men among whom this defect of native endowment is relatively com- mon. It may be asked, ‘How can we account for the fact that men are at all capable of this emotion and of this disinterested protective impulse? For in its racial origin the instinct was undoubtedly primarily maternal. The answer is that it is very common to see a character, acquired by one sex to meet its special needs, transmitted, generally imperfectly and with large individual variations, to the members of the other sex. Familiar examples of such transmission of sexual characters are afforded by the horns and antlers of some species of sheep and deer. That the parental instinct is by no means altogether lacking in men is probably due in the main to such transference of a primarily maternal instinct, though it is probable that in the human species natural selection has confirmed and increased its inheritance by the male sex. To this view, that the parental tenderness of human beings depends upon an instinct phylogenetically continuous with the parental instinct of the higher animals, it might be objected that the very widespread prevalence of infanticide among existing savages implies that primitive man lacked this instinct and its tender emotion. But that would be a most mistaken objection. There is no feature of savage life more nearly universal than the kindness and tenderness of savages, even of savage fathers, for their little children. All observers are agreed upon this point. I have many a time watched with interest a bloodthirsty head-hunter of Borneo spending a day at home tenderly nursing his infant in his arms. And it is a rule, to which there are few exceptions among savage peoples, that an infant is only killed during the first hours of its life. If the child is allowed to survive but a few days, then its life is safe; the tender emo- tion has been called out in fuller strength and has begun to be organised into a sentiment of parental love that is too strong to be overcome by prudential or purely selfish considerations.30 The view of the origin of parental tenderness here adopted com- pares, I think, very favourably with other accounts of its genesis. Bain taught that it is generated in the individual by the frequent repetition of the intense pleasure of contact with the young; though why this contact should be so highly pleasurable he did not explain.31 Others have attrib- An Introduction to Social Psychology/57 uted it to the expectation by the parent of filial care in his or her old age. This is one form of the absurd and constantly renewed attempt to reveal all altruism as arising essentially out of a more or less subtle regard for one’s own welfare or pleasure. If tender emotion and the sentiment of love really arose from a disguised selfishness of this sort, how much stronger should be the love of the child for the parent than that of the parent for the child! For the child is for many years utterly dependent on the parent for his every pleasure and the satisfaction of his every need; whereas the mother’s part—if she were not endowed with this powerful instinct—would be one long succession of sacrifices and painful efforts on behalf of her child. Parental love must always appear an insoluble riddle and paradox if we do not recognise this primary emotion, deeply rooted in an ancient instinct of vital importance to the race. Long ago the Roman moralists were perplexed by it. They noticed that in the Sullan prosecutions, while many sons denounced their fathers, no father was ever known to denounce his son; and they recognised that this fact was inexplicable by their theories of conduct. For their doctrine was like that of Bain, who said explicitly: “Tender feeling is as purely self-seeking as any other pleasure, and makes no inquiry as to the feelings of the be- loved personality. It is by nature pleasurable, but does not necessarily cause us to seek the good of the object farther than is needful to gratify ourselves in the indulgence of the feeling.” And again, in express refer- ence to maternal tenderness, he wrote: “The superficial observer has to be told that the feeling in itself is as purely self-regarding as the pleasure of wine or of music. Under it we are induced to seek the presence of the beloved objects and to make the requisite sacrifices to gain the end, looking all the while at our own pleasure and to nothing beyond.”32 This doctrine is a gross libel on human nature, which is not so far inferior to animal nature in this respect as Bain’s words imply. If Bain, and those who agree with his doctrine, were in the right, everything the cynics have said of human nature would be justified; for from this emotion and its impulse to cherish and protect spring generosity, gratitude, love, pity, true benevolence, and altruistic conduct of every kind; in it they have their main and absolutely essential root, without which they would not be.33 Like the other primary emotions, the tender emotion cannot be de- scribed; a person who had not experienced it could no more be made to understand its quality than a totally colour-blind person can be made to understand the experience of colour-sensation. Its impulse is primarily 60/William McDougall place at once to the anger we call moral indignation against the perpe- trator of the cruelty; and in bad cases we are quite prepared to tear the offender limb from limb, the tardy process of the law with its mild pun- ishments seeming utterly inadequate to afford vicarious satisfaction to our anger.35 How is this great fact of wholly disinterested anger or indignation to be accounted for, if not in the way here suggested? The question is an important one; it supplies a touchstone for all theories of the moral emo- tions and sentiments. For, as was said above, this disinterested indigna- tion is the ultimate root of justice and of public law; without its support law and its machinery would be most inadequate safeguards of personal rights and liberties; and, in opposition to the moral indignation of a majority of members of any society, laws can only be very imperfectly enforced by the strongest despotism, as we see in Russia at the present time. Those who deny any truly altruistic motive to man and seek to reduce apparent altruism to subtle and far-sighted egoism, must simply deny the obvious facts, and must seek some far-fetched unreal explana- tions of such phenomena as the anti-slavery and Congo-reform move- ments, the anti-vivisection crusade, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Let us examine briefly the way in which Bain sought to account for ostensibly disinterested emotion and action. As we have seen above, he regarded tender emotion as wholly self-seeking, and, like many other authors, he attributed such actions as we are con- sidering to sympathy. He wrote: “From a region of the mind quite apart from the tender emotion arises the principle of sympathy, or the prompt- ing to take on the pleasures and pains of other beings, and act on them as if they were our own. Instead of being a source of pleasure to us, the primary operation of sympathy is to make us surrender pleasures and to incur pains. This is a paradox of our constitution to be again more fully considered.”36 Here he has clearly committed himself to a position that needs much explanation. But, when we seek his fuller consideration of this paradox, all we find is a passage of a few lines in his section on moral disappro- bation. This passage tells us that, when another’s conduct inspires a feeling of disapprobation as violating the maxims recognised to be bind- ing. “It is to be supposed that the same sense of duty that operates upon one’s own self, and stings with remorse and fear in case of disobedience, should come into play when some other person is the guilty agent. The feeling that rises up towards that person is a strong feeling of displea- An Introduction to Social Psychology/61 sure or dislike, proportioned to the strength of our regard to the violated duty. There arises a moral resentment, or a disposition to inflict punish- ment upon the offender.”37 That is to say, according to Bain, the source of all disinterested moral indignation is the reflection, “If I had done that, I should have been punished; therefore he must be punished.” Now, this attitude is not uncommon, especially in the nursery, and it plays some small part, no doubt, in securing equal distribution of punish- ments; but it is surely wholly inadequate to account for that paradox of our constitution previously recognised by Bain. In order to realise how far from the truth this doctrine is, we have only to consider what kinds of conduct provoke our moral indignation most strongly. If we hear of a man robbing a bank, holding up a mail train, or killing another in fair fight, we may agree that he should be punished; for we recognise intel- lectually that the interests of society demand that such things shall not be done too frequently, and we ourselves might shrink from similar con- duct; but our feeling towards the criminal may be one of pity, or perhaps merely one of amusement dashed with admiration for his audacity and skill. But let the act be one inflicting pain on a helpless creature—an act of cruelty to a horse, a dog, or, above all, to a child—and our moral indignation blazes out, even though the act be one for which the law prescribes no punishment. Bain’s explanation of his “paradox” of sym- pathy is then utterly inadequate, and a closer examination of his state- ment of the principle of sympathy shows that it is false, and that any plausibility it may seem to possess depends upon the vague and rhetori- cal language in which it is made, His statement is that sympathy is the prompting to take on the pains and pleasures of another being, and to endeavour to abolish that other’s pain and to prolong his pleasure. But, if we use more accurate language, we shall have to say that the sympa- thetic pain or pleasure we experience is immediately evoked in us by the spectacle of pain or of pleasure, and that we then act on it because it is our own pain or pleasure; and the action we take (so long as no other principle is at work) is directed to cut short our own pain and to prolong our own pleasure, quite regardless of the feelings of the other person. Now, the easiest and quickest way of cutting short sympathetically in- duced pain is to turn our eyes and our thoughts away from the suffering creature; and this is the way invariably followed by all sensitive natures in which the tender emotion and its protective impulse are weak. They pass by the sick and suffering with averted gaze, and resolutely banish all thoughts of them, surrounding themselves as far as possible with gay 62/William McDougall and cheerful faces. No doubt the spectacle of the poor man who fell among thieves was just as distressing to the priest and the Levite, who passed by on the other side, as to the good Samaritan who tenderly cared for him. They may well have been exquisitely sensitive souls, who would have fainted away if they had been compelled to gaze upon his wounds. The great difference between them and the Samaritan was that in him the tender emotion and its impulse were evoked, and that this impulse overcame, or prevented, the aversion naturally induced by the painful and, perhaps, disgusting spectacle.38 Our susceptibility to sympathetically induced pain or pleasure, op- erating alone, simply inclines us, then, to avoid the neighbourhood of the distressed and to seek the company of the cheerful; but tender emo- tion draws us near to the suffering and the sad, seeking to alleviate their distress. It is to be noted also that the intensity of the emotion and the strength of its impulse to cherish and protect, and also the violence of the anger we feel against him who inflicts pain on any weak and defenceless creature—all these bear no constant relation to the intensity of our sympathetically induced pain. There are natures so strong and so happily constituted that they hardly know pain; yet they may be very tender- hearted and easily roused to anger by the spectacle of cruelty. Again, the mere threat of injury to a feeble creature may provoke an instantaneous anger; and it would be absurd to suppose that in such a case one first pictures the suffering of the creature that would result if the threat were executed, then sympathetically experiences the pain, and then, putting oneself in the place of the prospectively injured, goes on to feel anger against him who threatens. The response is as direct and instantaneous as the mother’s emotion at the cry of her child or her impulse to fly to its defence; and it is essentially the same process. In no other way than that here proposed is it possible to account for disinterested beneficence and moral indignation. If this view is rejected, they remain a paradox and a miracle—tendencies, mysteriously implanted in the human breast, that have no history in the evolutionary process, no analogy and no intelligible connection with, no resemblance to, any of the other features of our mental constitution. The importance of establishing the place of tender emotion among the primary emotions necessitates in this place a brief criticism of Mr. Shand’s treatment of it, although this criticism may be more easily un- derstood after reading Chapters V and VI, in which the organisation of the sentiments is discussed. An Introduction to Social Psychology/65 of view of this section the chief importance of this instinct is that it illustrates, in a manner that must convince the most obtuse, the continu- ity and the essential similarity of nature and function between the hu- man and the animal instincts. In connection with the instinct of reproduction a few words must be said about sexual jealousy and female coyness. These are regarded by some authors as special instincts, but perhaps without sufficiently good grounds. Jealousy in the full sense of the word is a complex emotion that presupposes an organised sentiment, and there is no reason to re- gard the hostile behaviour of the male animal in the presence of rivals as necessarily implying any such complex emotion or sentiment. The as- sumption of a specially intimate innate connection between the instincts of reproduction and of pugnacity will account for the fact that the anger of the male, both in the human and in most animal species, is so readily aroused in an intense degree by any threat of opposition to the operation of the sexual impulse; and perhaps the great strength of the sexual im- pulse sufficiently accounts for it. The coyness of the female in the presence of the male may be ac- counted for in similar fashion by the assumption that in the female the instinct of reproduction has specially intimate innate relations to the instincts of self-display and self-abasement, so that the presence of the male excites these as well as the former instinct The desire for food that we experience when hungry, with the im- pulse to seize it, to carry it to the mouth, to chew it and swallow it, must, I think, be regarded as rooted in a true instinct. In many of the animals the movements of feeding exhibit all the marks of truly instinctive behaviour. But in ourselves the instinct becomes at an early age so greatly modified through experience, on both its receptive and its executive sides, that little, save the strong impulse, remains to mark the instinctive na- ture of the process of feeding. The gregarious instinct is one of the human instincts of greatest social importance, for it has played a great part in moulding societary forms. The affective aspect of the operation of this instinct is not suffi- ciently intense or specific to have been given a name. The instinct is displayed by many species of animals, even by some very low in the scale of mental capacity. Its operation in its simplest form implies none of the higher qualities of mind, neither sympathy nor capacity for mu- tual aid. Mr. Francis Galton has given the classical description of the operation of the crude instinct. Describing the South African ox in 66/William McDougall Damaraland,43 he says he displays no affection for his fellows, and hardly seems to notice their existence, so long as he is among them; but, if he becomes separated from the herd, he displays an extreme distress that will not let him rest until he succeeds in rejoining it, when he has- tens to bury himself in the midst of it, seeking the closest possible con- tact with the bodies of his fellows. There we see the working of the gregarious instinct in all its simplicity, a mere uneasiness in isolation and satisfaction in being one of a herd. Its utility to animals liable to the attacks of beasts of prey is obvious. The instinct is commonly strongly confirmed by habit; the individual is born into a society of some sort and grows up in it, and the being with others and doing as they do becomes a habit deeply rooted in the instinct It would seem to be a general rule, the explanation of which is to be found in the principle of sympathetic emotion to be considered later, that the more numerous the herd or crowd or society in which the indi- vidual finds himself the more complete is the satisfaction of this im- pulse. It is probably owing to this peculiarity of the instinct that gregari- ous animals of so many species are found at times in aggregations far larger than are necessary for mutual protection or for the securing of any other advantage. Travellers on the prairies of North America in the early days of exploration have told how the bison might sometimes be seen in an immense herd that blackened the surface of the plain for many miles in all directions. In a similar way some kinds of deer and of birds gather together and move from place to place in vast aggregations. Although opinions differ widely as to the form of primitive human society, some inclining to the view that it was a large promiscuous horde, others, with more probability, regarding it as a comparatively small group of near blood relatives, almost all anthropologists agree that primi- tive man was to some extent gregarious in his habits; and the strength of the instinct as it still exists in civilised men lends support to this view. The gregarious instinct is no exception to the rule that the human instincts are liable to a morbid hypertrophy under which their emotions and impulses are revealed with exaggerated intensity. The condition known to alienists as agoraphobia seems to result from the morbidly intense working of this instinct—the patient will not remain alone, will not cross a wide empty space, and seeks alwavs to be surrounded by other human beings. But of the normal man also it is true that, as Pro- fessor James says: “To be alone is one of the greatest of evils for him. Solitary confinement is by many regarded as a mode of torture too cruel An Introduction to Social Psychology/67 and unnatural for civilised countries to adopt. To one long pent up on a desert island the sight of a human footprint or a human form in the distance would be the most tumultuously exciting of experiences.”44 In civilised communities we may see evidence of the operation of this instinct on every hand. For all but a few exceptional, and generally highly cultivated, persons the one essential condition of recreation is the being one of a crowd. The normal daily recreation of the population of our towns is to go out in the evening and to walk up and down the streets in which the throng is densest—the Strand, Oxford Street, or the Old Kent Road; and the smallest occasion—a foreign prince driving to a railway-station or a Lord Mayor’s Show— will line the streets for hours with many thousands whose interest in the prince or the show alone would hardly lead them to take a dozen steps out of their way. On their few short holidays the working classes rush together from town and country alike to those resorts in which they are assured of the presence of a large mass of their fellows. It is the same instinct working on a slightly higher plane that brings tens of thousands to the cricket and football grounds on half-holidays. Crowds of this sort exert a greater fascination and afford a more complete satisfaction to the gregarious instinct than the mere aimless aggregations of the streets, because all their members are simultaneously concerned with the same objects, all are moved by the same emotions, all shout and applaud together. It would be absurd to suppose that it is merely the individuals’ interest in the game that brings these huge crowds together. What proportion of the ten thousand witnesses of a football match would stand for an hour or more in the wind and rain, if each man were isolated from the rest of the crowd and saw only the players? Even cultured minds are not immune to the fascination of the herd. Who has not felt it as he has stood at the Mansion House crossing or walked down Cheapside? How few prefer at nightfall the lonely Thames Embankment, full of mysterious poetry as the barges sweep slowly on- ward with the flood-tide, to the garish crowded Strand a hundred yards away! We cultivated persons usually say to ourselves, when we yield to this fascination, that we are taking an intelligent interest in the life of the people. But such intellectual interest plays but a small part, and beneath works the powerful impulse of this ancient instinct The possession of this instinct, even in great strength, does not necessarily imply sociabil- ity of temperament. Many a man leads in London a most solitary, unso- ciable life, who yet would find it hard to live far away from the thronged 70/William McDougall nucleus; this nucleus is the central part of the innate disposition, the excitement of which determines an affective state or emotion of specific quality and a native impulse towards some specific end. And the tenden- cies to be considered in this chapter have no such specific characters, but are rather of a many-sided and general nature. Consider, for ex- ample, the tendency to imitate—the modes of action in which this ten- dency expresses itself and the accompanying subjective states are as various as the things or actions that can be imitated. Sympathy or the Sympathetic Induction of the Emotions The three most important of these pseudo-instincts, as they might be called, are suggestion, imitation, and sympathy. They are closely allied as regards their effects, for in each case the process in which the ten- dency manifests itself involves an interaction between at least two indi- viduals, one of whom is the agent, while the other is the person acted upon or patient; and in each case the result of the process is some degree of assimilation of the actions and mental state of the patient to those of the agent They are three forms of mental interaction of fundamental importance for all social life, both of men and animals. These processes of mental interaction, of impression and reception, may involve chiefly the cognitive aspect of mental process, or its affective or its conative aspect. In the first case, when some presentation, idea, or belief of the agent directly induces a similar presentation, idea, or belief in the pa- tient, the process is called one of suggestion; when an affective or emo- tional excitement of the agent induces a similar affective excitement in the patient, the process is one of sympathy or sympathetic induction of emotion or feeling; when the most prominent result of the process of interaction is the assimilation of the bodily movements of the patient to those of the agent, we speak of imitation. Now, M. Tarde46 and Professor Baldwin47 have singled out imita- tion as the all-important social process, and Baldwin, like most contem- porary writers, attributes it to an instinct of imitation. But careful con- sideration of the nature of imitative actions shows that they are of many kinds, that they issue from mental processes of a number of different types, and that none are attributable to a specific instinct of imitation, while many are due to sympathy and others to suggestion. We must therefore first consider sympathy and suggestion, and, after defining them as precisely as possible, go on to consider the varieties of imitative action. An Introduction to Social Psychology/71 Sympathy is by some authors ascribed to a special instinct of sym- pathy, and even Professor James has been misled by the confused usage of common speech and has said “sympathy is an emotion.”48 But the principles maintained in the foregoing chapter will not allow us to ac- cept either of these views. The word “sympathy,” as popularly used, generally implies a tender regard for the person with whom we are said to sympathise. But such sympathy is only one special and complex form of sympathetic emotion, in the strict and more general sense of the words. The fundamental and primitive form of sympathy is exactly what the word implies, a suffering with, the experiencing of any feeling or emo- tion when and because we observe in other persons or creatures the expression of that feeling or emotion.49 Sympathetic induction of emotion is displayed in the simplest and most unmistakable fashion by many, probably by all, of the gregarious animals; and it is easy to understand how greatly it aids them in their struggle for existence. One of the clearest and commonest examples is the spread of fear and its flight-impulse among the members of a flock or herd. Many gregarious animals utter when startled a characteristic cry of fear; when this cry is emitted by one member of a flock or herd, it immediately excites the flight-impulse in all of its fellows who are within hearing of it; the whole herd, flock, or covey takes to flight like one individual. Or again, one of a pack of gregarious hunting animals, dogs or wolves, comes upon a fresh trail, sights the prey, and pursues it, uttering a characteristic yelp that excites the instinct of pursuit in all his fellows and brings them yelping behind him. Or two dogs begin to growl or fight, and at once all the dogs within sound and sight stiffen them- selves and show every symptom of anger. Or one beast in a herd stands arrested, gazing in curiosity on some unfamiliar object, and presently his fellows also, to whom the object may be invisible, display curiosity and come up to join in the examination of the object. In all these cases we observe only that the behaviour of one animal, upon the excitement of an instinct, immediately evokes similar behaviour in those of his fel- lows who perceive his expressions of excitement. But we can hardly doubt that in each case the instinctive behaviour is accompanied by the appropriate emotion and felt impulse. Sympathy of this crude kind is the cement that binds animal societ- ies together, renders the actions of all members of a group harmonious, and allows them to reap some of the prime advantages of social life in spite of lack of intelligence. 72/William McDougall How comes it that the instinctive behaviour of one animal directly excites similar behaviour on the part of his fellows? No satisfactory answer to this question seems to have been hitherto proposed, although this kind of behaviour has been described and discussed often enough. Not many years ago it would have seemed sufficient to answer, It is due to instinct. But that answer will hardly satisfy us to-day. I think the facts compel us to assume that in the gregarious animals each of the principal instincts has a special perceptual inlet (or recipient afferent part) that is adapted to receive and to elaborate the sense-impressions made by the expressions of the same instinct in other animals of the same species— that, e.g., the fear-instinct has, besides others, a special perceptual inlet that renders it excitable by the sound of the cry of fear, the instinct of pugnacity a perceptual inlet that renders it excitable by the sound of the roar of anger. Human sympathy has its roots in similar specialisations of the in- stinctive dispositions on their afferent sides. In early childhood sympa- thetic emotion is almost wholly of this simple kind; and all through life most of us continue to respond in this direct fashion to the expressions of the feelings and emotions of our fellow-men. This sympathetic induc- tion of emotion and feeling may be observed in children at an age at which they cannot be credited with understanding of the significance of the expressions that provoke their reactions. Perhaps the expression to which they respond earliest is the sound of the wailing of other children. A little later the sight of a smiling face, the expression of pleasure, provokes a smile. Later still fear, curiosity, and, I think, anger, are com- municated readily in this direct fashion from one child to another. Laugh- ter is notoriously infectious all through life, and this, though not a truly instinctive expression, affords the most familiar example of sympathetic induction of an affective state. This immediate and unrestrained respon- siveness to the emotional expressions of others is one of the great charms of childhood. One may see it particularly well displayed by the children of some savage races (especially perhaps of the negro race), whom it renders wonderfully attractive. Adults vary much in the degree to which they display these sympa- thetic reactions, but in few or none are they wholly lacking. A merry face makes us feel brighter; a melancholy face may cast a gloom over a cheerful company; when we witness the painful emotion of others, we experience sympathetic pain; when we see others terror-stricken or hear their scream of terror, we suffer a pang of fear though we know nothing An Introduction to Social Psychology/75 (3) the impressive character of the source from which the suggested proposition is communicated; (4) peculiarities of the character and na- tive disposition of the subject Of these the first need not engage our attention, as it has but little part in normal social life. The operation of the other three conditions may be illustrated by an example. Suppose a man of wide scientific culture to be confronted with the proposition that the bodies of the dead will one day rise from their graves to live a new life. He does not accept it, because he knows that dead bodies buried in graves undergo a rapid and complete decomposition, and because the acceptance of the propo- sition would involve a shattering of the whole of his strongly and sys- tematically organised knowledge of natural processes. But the same proposition may be readily accepted by a child or a savage for lack of any system of critical belief and knowledge that would conflict with it Such persons may accept almost any extravagant proposition with primi- tive credulity. But, for the great majority of civilised adults of little scientific culture, the acceptance or rejection of the proposition will de- pend upon the third and fourth of the conditions enumerated above. Even a young child or a savage may reject such a proposition with scorn if it is made to him by one of his fellows; but, if the statement is sol- emnly affirmed by a recognised and honoured teacher, supported by all the prestige and authority of an ancient and powerful Church, not only children and savages, but most civilised adults, will accept it, in spite of a certain opposition offered by other beliefs and knowledge that they possess. Suggestion mainly dependent for its success on this condition may be called prestige suggestion. But not all persons of equal knowledge and culture are equally open to prestige suggestion. Here the fourth factor comes into play, namely, character and native disposition. As regards the latter the most impor- tant condition determining individual suggestibility seems to be the rela- tive strengths of the two instincts that were discussed in Chapter III. under the names “instincts of self-assertion” and “subjection.” Personal contact with any of our fellows seems regularly to bring one or other, or both, of these two instincts into play. The presence of persons whom we regard as our inferiors in the particular situation of the moment evokes the impulse of self- assertion; towards such persons we are but little or not at all suggestible. But, in the presence of persons who make upon us an impression of power or of superiority of any kind, whether merely of size or physical strength, or of social standing, or of intellectual reputa- 76/William McDougall tion, or, perhaps, even of tailoring, the impulse of submission is brought into play, and we are thrown into a submissive, receptive attitude to- wards them; or, if the two impulses are simultaneously evoked, there takes place a painful struggle between them and we suffer the complex emotional disturbance known as bashful feeling. In so far as the impulse of submission predominates we are suggestible towards the person whose presence evokes it. Persons in whom this instinct is relatively strong will, other things being the same, be much subject to prestige sugges- tion; while, on the other hand, persons in whom this impulse is weak and the opposed instinct of self-assertion is strong will be apt to be self- confident, “cocksure” persons, and to be but little subject to prestige suggestion. In the course of character-formation by social intercourse, excessive strength of either of these impulses may be rectified or com- pensated to some extent; the able, but innately submissive, man may gain a reasonable confidence; the man of self-assertive disposition may, if not stupid, learn to recognise his own weaknesses; and in so far as these compensations are effected liability to prestige suggestion will be diminished or increased. Children are, then, inevitably suggestible, firstly, because of their lack of knowledge and lack of systematic organisation of such knowl- edge as they have; secondly, because the superior size, strength, knowl- edge, and reputation of their elders tend to evoke the impulse of submis- sion and to throw them into the receptive attitude. And it is in virtue largely of their suggestibility that they so rapidly absorb the knowledge, beliefs, and especially the sentiments, of their social environment. But most adults also remain suggestible, especially towards mass-sugges- tion and towards the propositions which they know to be supported by the whole weight of society or by a long tradition. To the consideration of the social importance of suggestion we must return in a later chapter, This brief discussion may be concluded by the repudiation of a cer- tain peculiar implication attached to the word “suggestion” by some writers. They speak of “suggestive ideas” and of ideas working sugges- tively in the mind, implying that such ideas and such working have some peculiar potency, a potency that would seem to be almost of a magical character; but they do not succeed in making clear in what way these ideas and their operations differ from others. The potency of the idea conveyed by suggestion seems to be nothing but the potency of convic- tion; and convictions produced by logical methods seem to have no less power to determine thought and action, or even to influence the vital An Introduction to Social Psychology/77 processes, than those produced by suggestion; the principal difference is that by suggestion conviction may be produced in regard to proposi- tions that are insusceptible of logical demonstration, or even are op- posed to the evidence of perception and inference. A few words must be said about contra-suggestion. By this word it is usual to denote the mode of action of one individual on another which results in the second accepting, in the absence of adequate logical grounds, the contrary of the proposition asserted or implied by the agent. There are persons with whom this result is very liable to be produced by any attempt to exert suggestive influence, or even by the most ordinary and casual utterance. One remarks to such a person that it is a fine day, and, though, up to that moment, he may have formulated no opinion about the weather, and have been quite indifferent to it, he at once replies, “Well, I don’t agree with you. I think it is perfectly horrid weather.” Or one says to him, “I think you ought to take a holiday,” and, though he had himself contemplated this course, he replies, “No, I don’t need one,” and becomes more immovably fixed in this opinion and the correspond- ing course of action the more he is urged to adopt their opposites. Some children display this contra-suggestibility very strongly for a period and afterwards return to a normal degree of suggestibility But in some per- sons it becomes habitual or chronic; they take a pride in doing and say- ing nothing like other people, in dressing and eating differently, in defy- ing all the minor social conventions. Commonly, I believe, such persons regard themselves as displaying great strength of character and cherish their peculiarity. In such cases the permanence of the attitude may have very complex mental causes; but in its simpler instances, and probably at its inception in all instances, centra-suggestion seems to be deter- mined by the undue dominance of the impulse of self- assertion over that of submission, owing to the formation of some rudimentary senti- ment of dislike for personal influence resulting from an unwise exercise of it—a sentiment which may have for its object the influence of some one person or personal influence in general. Imitation This word has been used by M. Tarde in his well-known sociological treatises to cover processes of sympathy and suggestion as well as the processes to which the name is more usually applied, and, since the verb “to suggest” can be applied only to the part of the agent in the process of suggestion, and since we need some verb to describe the part of the 80/William McDougall finds himself in a situation similar to that of the person he has observed, the idea of the effect observed comes back to mind and perhaps leads directly to action. For example, a child observes an elder person throw a piece of paper on the fire; then, when on a later occasion the child finds himself in the presence of fire and paper, he is very apt to imitate the action; he produces a similar effect, though he may do so by means of a very different combination of movements. This kind of imitation is perhaps in many cases to be regarded as simple ideo-motor action due to the tendency of the idea to realise itself in action; but in other cases various impulses may be operative. For the sake of completeness a fifth kind of imitation may be men- tioned. It is the imitation by very young children of movements that are not expressive of feeling or emotion; it is manifested at an age when the child cannot be credited with ideas of movement or with deliberate self- conscious imitation. A few instances of this sort have been reported by reliable observers; e.g., Preyer55 stated that his child imitated the pro- trusion of his lips when in the fourth month of life. These cases have been regarded, by those who have not themselves witnessed similar ac- tions, as chance coincidences, because it is impossible to bring them under any recognised type of imitation. I have, however, carefully veri- fied the occurrence of this sort of imitation in two of my own children; one of them on several occasions during his fourth month repeatedly put out his tongue when the person whose face he was watching made this movement For the explanation of any such simple imitation of a par- ticular movement at this early age, we have to assume the existence of a very simple perceptual disposition having this specific motor tendency, and, since we cannot suppose such a disposition to have been acquired at this age, we are compelled to suppose it to be innately organised. Such an innate disposition would be an extremely simple rudimentary instinct. It may be that every child inherits a considerable number of such rudimentary instincts, and that they play a considerable part In facilitating the acquisition of new movements, especially perhaps of speech-movements. We shall have to consider in later chapters the ways in which these three forms of mental interaction, sympathy, suggestion, and imitation, play their all-important parts in the moulding of the individual by his social environment, and in the life of societies generally. An Introduction to Social Psychology/81 Play Another tendency, one that the human mind has in common with many of the animals, demands brief notice, namely, the tendency to play. Play also is sometimes ascribed to an instinct; but no one of the many variet- ies of playful activity can properly be ascribed to an instinct of play. Nevertheless play must be reckoned among the native tendencies of the mind of high social value. Children and the young of many species of animal take to play spontaneously without any teaching or example. Several theories of play have been put forward, each claiming to sum up the phenomena in one brief formula. The oldest of the modern theories was proposed by the poet Schiller, and was developed by Herbert Spen- cer. According to this view, play is always the expression of a surplus of nervous energy. The young creature, being tended and fed by its par- ents, does not expend its energy upon the quest of food, in earning its daily bread, and therefore has a surplus store of energy which overflows along the most open nervous channels, producing purposeless move- ments of the kind that are most frequent in real life. There is, no doubt, an element of truth in the theory, but it is clearly inadequate to account for the facts, even in the case of the simple play of animals. It does not sufficiently account for the forms the play activities take; still less is it compatible with the fact that young animals, as well as young children, will often play till they are exhausted. The element of truth is that the creature is most disposed to play when it is so well nourished and rested that it has a surplus of stored energy. But this is true also of work. Others, looking chiefly at the play of children, have regarded their play as a special instance of the operation of the law of recapitulation; and they have sought to show that the child retraverses in his play the successive culture periods of human history, owing to the successive development or ripening of native tendencies to the forms of activity supposed to have been characteristic of these periods. This recapitulatory theory of play and the educational practice based on it are founded on the fallacious belief that, as the human race traversed the various cul- ture periods, its native mental constitution acquired very special tenden- cies, and that each period of culture was, as it were, the expression of a certain well-marked stage in the evolution of the human mind. This view can hardly be accepted, for we have little reason to suppose that human nature has undergone any such profound modifications in the course of the development of civilisation out of barbarism and savagery. Professor Karl Groos56 has recently propounded a new theory of 82/William McDougall play. He sets out from the consideration of the play of young animals, and he points out the obvious utility to them of play as a preparation for the serious business of life, as a perfecting by practice of the more specialised and difficult kinds of activity on the successful exercise of which their survival in the struggle for existence must depend. Consider the case of the kitten playing with a ball on the floor. It is clear that, in the course of such playing, the kitten improves its skill in movements of the kind that will be needed for the catching of its prey when it is thrown upon its own resources. Or take the case of puppies playfully fighting with one another. It seems clear that the practice they get in quick attack and avoidance must make them better fighters than they would become if they never played in this way. Starting out from considerations of this sort, Professor Groos ar- gues that the occurrence of youthful play among almost all animals that in mature life have to rely upon rapid and varied skilled movements justifies us in believing that the period of immaturity, with its tendency to playful activities, is a special adaptation of the course of individual development, an adaptation that enables the creature to become better fitted to cope with its environment than it could be if it enjoyed no such period of play. Groos therefore reverses the Schiller-Spencer dictum, and says—it is not that young animals play because they are young and have surplus nervous energy: we must believe rather that the higher animals have this period of youthful immaturity in order that they may play. The youthful play-tendencies are, then, according to this view, special racial endowments of high biological utility, the products, no doubt, of the operation of natural selection. If we ask—In what does this special adaptation consist? the answer is—it consists in the ten- dency for the various instincts (on the skilled exercise of which adult efficiency depends) to ripen and to come into action in each individual of the species before they are needed for serious use. We have other and better grounds for believing that the time of ripening of any instinct in the individuals of any species is liable to be shifted forwards or back- wards in the age- scale during the course of racial evolution, so that the order of their ripening and of the appearance of the various instinctive activities in the individual does not conform to the law of recapitulation. There is, therefore, nothing improbable in this view that play is deter- mined by the premature ripening of instincts. But it will not fully ac- count for all the facts of animal play, and still less for all forms of children’s play. There remains a difficulty of a very interesting kind. An Introduction to Social Psychology/85 wherever it enters in, it is recognised that it imparts something of a playful character to the activity; a recognition which often finds expres- sion in the phrase “playing the game” applied to activities of the most diverse and serious kinds. Whence comes this strong desire and impulse to surpass our rivals? We saw reason for refusing to accept a specific instinct of rivalry or emulation in the animals, for rivalry and emulation imply self-conscious- ness. It is a defensible view that the impulse of rivalry derives from the instinct of self-assertion; but, though it is probably complicated and reinforced in many cases by the co-operation of this impulse, it can hardly be wholly identified with it. Nor can it be identified with the combative impulse; for this too seems to persist in the most highly civilised peoples with all its fierce strength and its specific brutal tendency to destroy the opponent. The obscurity of the subject and the importance of this impulse of rivalry in the life of societies tempt me to offer a speculation as to its nature and origin that is suggested by the issue of our discussion of the playful fighting of young animals. The impulse of rivalry is to get the better of an opponent in some sort of struggle; but it differs from the combative impulse in that it does not prompt to, and does not find satisfaction in, the destruction of the opponent. Rather, the continued existence of the rival, as such, but as a conquered rival, seems necessary for its full satisfaction; and a benevo- lent condescension towards the conquered rival is not incompatible with the activity of the impulse, as it is with that of the combative impulse. Now, these peculiarities of the impulse of rivalry, when stripped of all intellectual complications, seem to be just those of the modified form of the combative impulse that seems to underlie the playful fighting of young animals. May it not be, then, that the impulse of rivalry is essen- tially this impulse to playful fighting, the impulse of an instinct differen- tiated from the combative instinct in the first instance in the animal world to secure practice in the movements of combat? In favour of this view it may be pointed out that in the human race the native strength of the impulse of rivalry seems on the whole to run parallel with, or to be closely correlated with, the strength of the pugnacious instinct. The im- pulse of rivalry is very strong in the peoples of Europe, especially, per- haps, in the English people; it constitutes the principal motive to almost all our many games, and it lends its strength to the support of almost every form of activity. It cannot be denied that we are a highly pugna- cious people or that our Anglo- Saxon and Danish and Norman ances- 86/William McDougall tors were probably the most terrible fighting-men the world has ever seen. On the other hand, men of the unwarlike races, e.g., the mild Hindoo or the Burman, seem relatively free from the impulse of rivalry. To men of these races such games as football seem utterly absurd and irrational, and, in fact, they are absurd and irrational for all men born without the impulse of rivalry; whereas men of warlike races, e.g., the Maoris, who, like our ancestors, found for many generations their chief occupation and delight in warfare, take up such games keenly and even learn very quickly to beat us at them. I think we may even observe in young boys the recapitulation of the process of differentiation of the impulse of rivalry from the combative instinct The latter usually comes into play at a very early age, but the former does not usually manifest itself until the age of four or five years. Up to this time the more active playing of boys is apt to be formless and vague, a mere running about and shouting, a form of play sufficiently accounted for by the Schiller-Spencer theory. But then the impulse of rivalry begins to work, and from that time it may dominate the boy’s life more and more, in so far as his activities are spontaneous. In this con- nection it is important to note that the growth of self-consciousness must favour and strengthen the operation of this impulse, whereas it is rather adverse to the display of most of the other instinctive activities in their crude forms.58 A universal tendency of the mind, which is so familiar as to run some risk of being neglected, must be briefly mentioned; namely, the tendency for every process to be repeated more readily in virtue of its previous occurrence and in proportion to the frequency of its previous repetitions. The formulation of this tendency may be named the law of habit, if the word “habit” is understood in the widest possible sense. In virtue of this tendency the familiar as such is preferred to the less famil- iar, the habitual and routine mode of action and reaction, in all depart- ments of mental life, to any mode of action necessitating any degree of novel adjustment. And the more familiar and habitual is any mental process or mode of action in a situation of a given type, the more diffi- cult is it to make any change or improvement in it and the more painful is any change of the character of the situation that necessitates an effort of readjustment. This is the great principle by which all acquisitions of the individual mind are preserved and in virtue of which the making of further acquisitions is rendered more difficult, through which the indefi- nite plasticity of the infant’s mind gradually gives place to the elasticity An Introduction to Social Psychology/87 of the mature mind. Temperament In order to complete this brief sketch of the more important features of the native mental constitution, a few words must be said about tempera- ment. This is a very difficult subject which most psychologists are glad to leave alone. Yet temperament is the source of many of the most strik- ing mental differences between individuals and peoples. Under the head of temperamental factors we group a number of natively given constitutional conditions of our mental life that exert a constant influence on our mental processes. This influence may be slight at any one time, but since its effects are cumulative—i.e., since it oper- ates as a constant bias in one direction during mental development and the formation of habits—it is responsible for much in the mental make- up of the adult Temperament is, as the ancients clearly saw, largely a matter of bodily constitution; that is to say that among the temperamen- tal factors the influences on the mental life exerted by the great bodily organs occupy a prominent place. But there are other factors also, and it is impossible to bring them all under one brief formula; and, since tem- perament is the resultant of these many relatively independent factors, it is impossible to distinguish any clearly defined classes of temperaments, as the ancients, as well as many modern authors, have attempted to do. Some of the best modern psychologists have been led into absurdities by attempting this impossible task. The truth is that we are only just begin- ning to gain some slight insight into the conditions of temperament, and progress in this respect must depend chiefly upon the progress of physi- ology. In one respect only can we make a decided advance upon the ancients—we can realise the great complexity of the problem and can frankly admit our ignorance. The temperamental factors may conveniently be grouped in two principal classes—on the one hand, the influences exerted on the ner- vous system and, through it, on mental process by the functioning of the bodily organs; on the other hand, general functional peculiarities of the nervous tissues. We may best grasp something of the nature of the former class by the observation of cases in which their influence is abnormally great. Of recent years some light has been thrown upon temperament by the discovery of the great influence exerted on mental life by certain organs whose functions had been, and in many respects still are, ob- scure. The most notable example is perhaps the thyroid body, a small 90/William McDougall Chapter V The Nature of the Sentiments and the Constitution of Some of the Complex Emotions. We seldom experience the primary emotions discussed in Chapter III in the pure or unmixed forms in which they are commonly manifested by the animals. Our emotional states commonly arise from the simulta- neous excitement of two or more of the instinctive dispositions; and the majority of the names currently used to denote our various emotions are the names of such mixed, secondary, or complex emotions. That the great variety of our emotional states may be properly regarded as the result of the compounding of a relatively small number of primary or simple emotions is no new discovery. Descartes, for example, recognised only six primary emotions, or passions as he termed them, namely— admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness, and he wrote, “All the others are composed of some out of these six and derived from them.” He does not seem to have formulated any principles for the determina- tion of the primaries and the distinction of them from the secondaries. The compounding of the primary emotions is largely, though not wholly, due to the existence of sentiments, and some of the complex emotional processes can only be generated from sentiments. Before go- ing on to discuss the complex emotions, we must therefore try to under- stand as clearly as possible the nature of a sentiment. The word “sentiment” is still used in several different senses. M. Ribot and other French authors use its French equivalent as covering all the feelings and emotions, as the most general name for the affective aspect of mental processes. We owe to Mr. A. F. Shand59 the recogni- tion of features of our mental constitution of a most important kind that have been strangely overlooked by other psychologists, and the applica- tion of the word “sentiments” to denote features of this kind. Mr. Shand points out that our emotions, or, more strictly speaking, our emotional dispositions, tend to become organised in systems about the various objects and classes of objects that excite them. Such an organised sys- tem of emotional tendencies is not a fact or mode of experience, but is a feature of the complexly organised structure of the mind that underlies all our mental activity. To such an organised system of emotional ten- dencies centred about some object Mr. Shand proposes to apply the name “sentiment.” This application of the word is in fair accordance with its usage in popular speech, and there can be little doubt that it will An Introduction to Social Psychology/91 rapidly be adopted by psychologists. The conception of a sentiment, as defined by Mr. Shand, enables us at once to reduce to order many of the facts of the life of impulse and emotion, a province of psychology which hitherto has been chaotic and obscure. That, in spite of the great amount of discussion of the affective life in recent centuries, it should have been reserved for a contemporary writer to make this very important discovery is an astonishing fact, so obvious and so necessary does the conception seem when once it has been grasped. The failure of earlier writers to arrive at the conception must be attributed to the long prevalence of the narrow and paralysing doctrine according to which the task of the psychologist is merely to observe, analyse, and describe the content of his own consciousness. The typical sentiments are love and hate, and it will suffice for our present purpose if we briefly consider the nature and mode of formation of these two. Now, it is a source of great confusion that, sentiments never having been clearly distinguished from the emotions until Mr. Shand performed this great service to psychology, the words love and hate have been used to denote both emotions and sentiments. Thus the disposition of the primary emotion we have discussed under the name of “tender emotion “is an essential constituent of the system of emotional dispositions that constitutes the sentiment of love; and the name “love” is often applied both to this emotion and to the sentiment In a similar way the word “hate” is commonly applied to a complex emotion com- pounded of anger and fear and disgust, as well as to the sentiment which comprises the dispositions to these emotions as its most essential con- stituents. But it is clear that one may properly be said to love or to hate a man at the times when he is not at all present to one’s thought and when one is experiencing no emotion of any kind. What is meant by saying that a man loves or hates another is that he is liable to experience any one of a number of emotions and feelings on contemplating that other, the nature of the emotion depending upon the situation of the other; that is to say, common speech recognises that love and hate are, not merely emotions, but enduring tendencies to experience certain emo- tions whenever the loved or hated object comes to mind; therefore, in refusing to apply the names “love” and “hate” to any of the emotions and in restricting them to these enduring complex dispositions which are the sentiments, no more violence is done to language than is abso- lutely necessary for the avoidance of the confusion that has hitherto prevailed. It must be noted that the sentiments of love and hate comprise 92/William McDougall many of the same emotional dispositions; but the situations of the object of the sentiment that evoke the same emotions are very different and in the main of opposite character in the two cases. Thus, as Shand points out, when a man has acquired the sentiment of love for a person or other object, he is apt to experience tender emotion in its presence, fear or anxiety when it is in danger, anger when it is threatened, sorrow when it is lost, joy when the object prospers or is restored to him, gratitude towards him who does good to it, and so on; and, when he hates a per- son, he experiences fear or anger or both on his approach, joy when that other is injured, anger when he receives favours. It is going too far to say, as Shand does, that with inversion of the circumstances of the object all the emotions called forth by the loved object are repeated in relation to the hated object; for the characteristic and most essential emotion of the sentiment of love is tender emotion, and this is not evoked by any situation of the hated object; its disposi- tion has no place in the sentiment of hate. It is clear, nevertheless, that the objects of these two very different sentiments may arouse many of the same emotions, and that the two sentiments comprise emotional dis- positions that are in part identical, or, in other words, that some of the emotional dispositions, or central nuclei of the instincts, are members of sentiments of both kinds. It is, I think, helpful, at least to those who make use of visual imagery, to attempt to picture a sentiment as a ner- vous disposition and to schematise it crudely by the aid of a diagram. Let us draw a number of circles lying in a row, and let each circle stand for one of the primary emotional dispositions. We are to suppose that the excitement of each one of these is accompanied by the correspond- ing emotion with its specific impulse. These dispositions must be re- garded as natively independent of one another, or unconnected. Let A be the object of a sentiment of hate and B be the object of a sentiment of love; and let a in our diagram stand for the complex neural disposition whose excitement underlies the idea or presentation of A, and let ß be the corresponding disposition concerned in the presentation of B. Then we must suppose that a becomes intimately connected with R, F, and P, the central nuclei of the instincts of repulsion, fear, and pugnacity, and less intimately with C and S, those of curiosity and of submission, but not at all with T, the central nucleus of the tender or parental instinct. Whenever, then, a. comes into play (i.e., whenever the idea of A rises to consciousness) its excitement tends to spread at once to all these dispositions; and we must suppose An Introduction to Social Psychology/95 is it displayed by very young children. It is not merely a pleasurable perception or contemplation. One may get a certain pleasure from the perception or contemplation of an object without feeling any admiration for it; e.g., a popular ditty played on a barrel-organ may give one plea- sure, though one admires neither the ditty nor the mode of its produc- tion, and though one may a little despise oneself on account of the plea- sure one feels. Nor is it merely intellectual and pleasurable appreciation of the greatness or excellence of the object. There seem to be two pri- mary emotions essentially involved in the complex state provoked by the contemplation of the admired object, namely, wonder and negative self-feeling or the emotion of submission. Wonder is revealed by the impulse to approach and to continue to contemplate the admired object, for, as we saw, this is the characteristic impulse of the instinct of curios- ity; and wonder is clearly expressed on the face in intense admiration. In children one may observe the element of wonder very clearly expressed and dominant. “Oh, how wonderful!” or—“Oh, how clever!” or—“How did you do it?” are phrases in which a child naturally expresses its ad- miration and by which the element of wonder and the impulse of curios- ity are clearly revealed. And as soon as we feel that we completely understand the object we have admired, and can wholly account for it, our wonder ceases and the emotion evoked by it is no longer admiration. But admiration is more than wonder.60 We do not simply proceed to examine the admired object as we should one that provokes merely our curiosity or wonder. We approach it slowly, with a certain hesitation; we are humbled by its presence, and, in the case of a person whom we intensely admire, we become shy, like a child in the presence of an adult stranger; we have the impulse to shrink together, to be still, and to avoid attracting his attention; that is to say, the instinct of submission, of self- abasement, is excited, with its corresponding emotion of negative self- feeling, by the perception that we are in the presence of a superior power, something greater than ourselves. Now, this instinct and this emotion are primarily and essentially social. The primary condition of their ex- citement is the presence of a person bigger and more powerful than oneself; and, when we admire such an object as a picture or a machine, or other work of art, the emotion still has this social character and per- sonal reference; the creator of the work of art is more or less clearly present to our minds as the object of our emotion, and often we say, “What a wonderful man he is!” Is, then, the emotion of admiration capable of being evoked in us 96/William McDougall only by other persons and their works? It is obviously true that we ad- mire natural objects, a beautiful flower or landscape, or a shell, or the perfect structure of an animal and its nice adaptation to its mode of life. In these cases no known person is called to mind as the object of our admiration; but, just because admiration implies and refers to another person, is essentially, in so far as it involves negative self-feeling, an attitude towards a person, it leads us to postulate a person or personal power as the creator of the object that calls it forth. Hence in all ages the admiration of men for natural objects has led them to personify the power, or powers, that have brought those objects into being, either as superhuman beings who have created, and who preside over, particular classes of objects, or as a supreme Creator of all things; and, if the intellect rejects all such conceptions as anthropomorphic survivals from a ruder age, the admiration of natural objects still leads men to per- sonify, under the name of Nature, the power that has produced them. It is, I think, true that, if this sense of a personal power is not suggested by any object that we contemplate, the emotion we experience is merely wonder, or at least is not admiration. It is because negative self-feeling is an essential element in admiration that the extremely confident, self- satisfied, and thoroughly conceited person is incapable of admiration, and that genuine admiration implies a certain humility and generosity. It may be added that much admiration—all aesthetic admiration, in fact— includes also an element of pleasure, the conditions of which may be very complex. As an example of the further complication of an emotion, let us consider the nature of our emotion if the object that excites our admira- tion is also of a threatening or mysterious nature and, therefore, capable of exciting fear—a tremendous force in action such as the Victoria Falls, or a display of the aurora borealis, or a magnificent thunderstorm. The impulse of admiration to draw near humbly and to contemplate the ob- ject is more or less neutralised by an impulse to withdraw, to run away, the impulse of fear. We are kept suspended in the middle distance, nei- ther approaching very near nor going quite away; admiration is blended with fear, and we experience the emotion we call awe. Awe is of many shades, ranging from that in which admiration is but slightly tinged with fear to that in which fear is but slightly tinged with admiration. Admiration is, then, a binary compound, awe a ter- tiary compound. And awe may be further blended to form a still more complex emotion. Suppose that the power that excites awe is also one An Introduction to Social Psychology/97 that we have reason to regard as beneficent, one that, while capable of annihilating us in a moment, yet works for our good, sustains and pro- tects us, one that evokes our gratitude. Awe then becomes compounded with gratitude and we experience the highly compound emotion of rev- erence. Reverence is the religious emotion par excellence; few merely human powers are capable of exciting reverence, this blend of wonder, fear, gratitude, and negative self-feeling. Those human beings who in- spire reverence, or who are by custom and convention considered to be entitled to inspire it, usually owe their reverend character to their being regarded as the ministers and dispensers of Divine power. What, then, is gratitude, which enters into the emotion of reverence for the Divine power? Gratitude is itself complex. It is a binary com- pound of tender emotion and negative self-feeling. To this view it may be objected—If tender emotion is the emotion of the parental instinct whose impulse is to protect, how can this emotion be evoked by the Divine power? The answer to this question is—In the same way as the child’s tender emotion towards the parent is evoked, namely, by sympa- thy. Tender emotion occupies a peculiar position among the primary emotions, in that, being directed towards some other person and its im- pulse directly making for the good of that other, it is peculiarly apt to evoke by sympathetic reaction, of the kind we studied in Chapter IV, the same emotion in its object; and this sympathetically evoked tender emo- tion then finds its object most readily in the person to whom it owes its rise. But gratitude is not simply tender emotion sympathetically excited; a child or even an animal may excite our tender emotion in this way; e.g., it may give us something that is utterly useless or embarrassing to us, and by doing so may touch our hearts, as we say; but I do not think that we then feel gratitude, even if the gift involves self-sacrifice on the part of the giver. Mr. Shand maintains that into gratitude there enters some sympathetic sorrow for the person who excites it, on account of the loss or sacrifice sustained by him in giving us that for which we are grateful. It is in this way he would account for the tender element in gratitude; for, according to his view, all tenderness is a blending of joy and sorrow, which are for him primary emotions. But surely we may experience gratitude for a kindness done to us that involves no loss or sacrifice for the giver, but is for him an act of purely pleasurable benefi- cence. I submit, then, that the other element in gratitude, the element that renders it different from, and more complex than, simple tender- ness, is that negative self-feeling which is evoked by the sense of the