Power In Civilization Rests On Collective Emotion, Not On Reason

( Originally Published 1918 )

IN setting out to write the chapters in this section and those which follow, I feel that I am engaging in the presentation in brief outline of the system of knowledge which must in the order of nature become the basis of a new type of civilization. The reason for this conviction will appear presently; but it is desirable at this point to endeavour to get as clear and firm a grasp as possible of a few fundamental positions which are involved at the outset.

It will have been noticed in the preceding chapters dealing with the failure of Western knowledge that all the leaders of the great pagan revival in the West have given prominence to one leading idea, namely, that of inborn heredity as the basis of the fabric of civilization. For over half a century this idea has been put forward with great force as the direct opposite of two conceptions previously deeply intrenched in the life of the West and both inherent in the Christian system of ethics. The first was the conception of the equality of all men, fundamental alike in the Christian religion and in all the ideals of the democratic movement in Western history. The second was the conception that the mind of the child in each generation is like a blank page upon which good or evil training produces indelible results, this being also a root conception of Christian ethics.

To both these ideas, basal in Western thought for centuries, the science which Darwin expounded ran directly counter. It was based on struggle resting on inequality. It centred in inborn heredity. If in the struggle for existence A was able to kill B before B killed A, then the race became a race of A's inheriting A's qualities. This was the Darwinian science of evolution in brief. It was based on inborn heredity. There is, accordingly, no idea more in prominence in all those modern phases of Western science in which the endeavour has been to make the Darwinian hypothesis the basis of a science of civilization than the conception of the dominant influence of inborn heredity.

It may be noticed how this idea of a fixed and almost unchangeable heredity for the races and peoples included in civilization has come in our time to colour nearly all political and social theories in the West. Writers in the newspapers and reviews of the day continually give it great prominence. In Great Britain and America, since Herbert Spencer's social theories began to affect opinion, those sharing his views have been strongly under the influence of the idea of inborn heredity as the controlling factor in civilization. On the continent of Europe the conception of Darwinian heredity has formed the basis of nearly all modern theories about the relations of the individual to society. Haeckel made heredity the foundation of his ethics. Lombroso and his school made heredity the basis of their characteristic theories about individual faculties in their relation to society. The group of writers on political science which most profoundly influenced the development of modern Germany in the period before the Great War which opened in 1914 were deeply influenced by the idea of heredity. Bernhardi in his pages continually glorifies in Darwinian terms the characteristic fighting heredity of the West. Even Treitschke's essays are strewn with expressions such as "noble nations, " "brave races, " and with references to the physical and mental inheritance of the Germanic and other peoples, all of which, like most of the Darwinian theories quoted by Bernhardi, imply this conception of the overruling importance of inborn heredity.

The idea that civilization is based on fixed and permanent heredity in the individual has been in recent times in a special sense an overwhelming prepossession with that large group of modern writers in all Western lands who have attempted to apply pure biological conceptions to theories of civilization. The assumption that civilization rests on a great intellectual superiority, imagined as inborn in civilized man as contrasted with the savage, was the fundamental preoccupation of Galton's mind in his discussion of the difference between men of the advanced and the less advanced races. It was the assumption of a corresponding great intellectual inferiority inborn in uncivilized man which led him to his notorious comparison of the mental traits of the Damara race with those of his dog, in which he told us that taking the two, the dog and the Damara, "the comparison reflected no great honour on the man."1 In all his eugenic imaginings Galton remained strongly under the influence of this conception of inborn heredity.

Bateson similarly may be seen to have his mind fixed in the same direction in his dream of civilization relapsing into a kind of caste system, founded upon inborn faculties. Bagehot had a conception of inborn heredity permanently in view in his theories of politics. Karl Pearson, whose horizon is wider than that of Galton, may be distinguished to be always more or less under the influence of the same idea of the slow change and comparative permanence of type in human society. The-man of the study and of the laboratory, whom he considers to be the proper judge in these matters, knows full well, Pearson tells us, that human society cannot be changed in a year, scarcely in a hundred years; for it is controlled, he points out, by laws of psychological influence such as temperament, impulse, and passion relatively so unchangeable in their direction that "no single man, no single group of men, no generation of men, can remodel human society. "

Now one of the first steps necessary for a true conception of the forces controlling civilization and, therefore, to a true conception of the possibility of an entirely new order of civilization, is to understand that most of these assumptions about inborn heredity as the basis of civilization have no foundation in fact. They are, on the contrary, directly in the face of incontrovertible facts of quite a different significance. The increasing interval between civilization and savagery does not depend upon inborn heredity. The science of civilization has almost nothing to do with the facts of inborn heredity. So far from civilization being practically unchangeable or only changeable through influences operating slowly over long periods of time, the world can be changed in a brief space of time. Within the life of a single generation it can be made to undergo changes so profound, so revolutionary, so permanent, that it would almost appear as if human nature itself had been completely altered in the interval.

The mechanism and the forces, moreover, capable of producing changes of this nature already exist in the world. They are to be witnessed at work on every side of us. The science of the organization of this mechanism and of the control of these forces is the real science of civilization. It represents, at present, an almost unexplored world of knowledge. If but one half the intelligence and effort which nations have hitherto directed towards the collective organization of society for war were directed towards the study and collective organization of society in the light of this knowledge, it would result in it becoming visible on all hands that civilization can be altered so radically and so quickly that the outlook of humanity on nearly every fundamental matter can be changed in a single generation.

Let us see if we can grasp the first outlines of a position the complete understanding of which will within a short space in the future be perceived to have become the first necessity of all governments, of all reformers, and of all masters of force in civilization. The mechanism by which limitless and transforming power is capable of being almost suddenly embodied in advancing civilization is absolutely different from that mechanism with which, until quite recently, it was the almost universal custom of the world to believe that human progress was associated.

Germany has been the first country of the West to bring home to the minds of men, though unfortunately only in relation to the atavisms of war, the fact nevertheless indisputable and of the very highest significance to civilization, that an entire nation may be completely altered in character, in outlook, and in motive in a single generation. A great number of recent books deal with the subject from various points of view. But nearly all the writers agree in the absolutely fundamental and universal nature of the change which was accomplished on a whole nation in a brief period. This vast transformation of a people was practically achieved in some twenty years, says a writer of experience.1 It was accomplished so thoroughly, says another well-informed writer, that almost everything previously included in the type of " German" disappeared within a few decades. The alteration which took place in the psychology of the German peoples the writer describes to be a phenomenon so vast and so powerful that it permanently influenced the human mind, while it has been on such a scale that there is nothing to compare with it in history.

The suddenness even more than the completeness of the change is a fact to arrest attention even in the least observant. Most private persons with any considerable experience of Germany and the German people will have been struck with this feature. One of the closest friends of my youth for many years was a retired captain of the German navy, of a type of mind, of ideas, and of motives obvious to me from practical contact with his surroundings in his own country quite usual among the educated classes in Germany in the days when he grew to manhood. In the uprising generation of the German nation of sixty-five millions there is probably not a single individual of this type now in existence. The alteration was not principally a change in individuals in relation to their interests. It was a change so profoundly and dynamically affecting the entire German nation in its attitude to the world that it has already influenced to an incalculable degree the history of civilization.

All this, it must be remembered, was accomplished by a ruling class in Germany almost exclusively in pursuit of those ideals of war described in the previous chapter. But, quite apart from the nature of the ideals involved in the change, it is the fact of the change itself, its thoroughness, its completeness, its universality, and its suddenness, which are to be noted here as a phenomenon of an importance of the very first order.

A revolution of a different character which has taken place under similar circumstances in the psychology of another nation in almost as brief a period is even more remarkable. In the Japanese people the West has beheld an Eastern nation within the space of less than two generations pass through the whole interval which separates feudal-ism from modern conditions. In this space of time a change in general habits, in social and mental outlook, and in national consciousness, was accomplished as by the wand of a conjurer. The new social inheritance thus almost suddenly acquired has been so transforming in its effects and has so powerfully affected the potentiality of Japan in the world that in the brief period mentioned results have been attained absolutely in the face of all that was previously believed to be possible.

Civilization has seen a people formerly negligible and regarded as unfit for association with Western nations attaining almost at a bound an efficiency in the arts of peace and later in the stern stress of war which has given them a place of equality as a great power amongst the leading nations of civilization. By collectively submitting themselves with full intent to a new kind of social inheritance the Japanese people attained in less than two generations to a position which it has taken the principal Occidental nations centuries of stress to reach in the ordinary process of development.

The historian of the future, looking back, will perceive that for three centuries there have been no events in the world to compare in significance and in the lessons which they bear for the future with this sudden transformation of modern Japan and modern Germany. A new science, a new order of ideas, a new kind of knowledge of which the very elements are still almost unknown has come within the vision of civilization.

Some years ago, when I published in Social Evolution a destructive criticism of Galton's examination of the mental faculties of members of what he imagined to be the lower races, it came as a kind of revelation to a large number of minds and even to many minds scientifically trained to learn that there existed no wide inborn interval of superiority, intellectual or mental, between even the foremost races of civilized men and the savage. The efficiency which civilization possessed over savagery rested, I asserted, on a basis quite other than that which had been hitherto almost universally assumed.

It was in this connection that I put on record at the time a prediction which must now be referred to.' I ventured then to assert that sooner or later it would become clear in the actual stress of the world, that the Western peoples in basing a claim to supremacy on the assumption that they possessed any inborn intellectual or other mental superiority over the less advanced races of men, were building on a false hope. All the promise of the intellect in the past in this respect was destined, I foretold, to end in disillusionment. Civilization rested, it was asserted, not on the intellect or on the reasoning processes of mind, but on the psychic inheritance transmitted from generation to generation and entirely independent of inborn heredity in the individual. All that part of the inheritance of civilization which consisted of the conquests of the intellect and of the arts, sciences, and other products of mind would, l asserted, be rapidly acquired by the less advanced peoples and would in the future be utilized with surprising effect against the most developed races by peoples upon whom they had previously looked down.

This prediction has been literally fulfilled in the world since I wrote it. It was made over twenty years ago, not only before the recent Russo-Japanese War, but before the war between Japan and China which preceded it, and at a period when no Western power had yet dreamed of Japan obtaining admission to the circle of the great powers of the world in virtue of her own proved military efficiency displayed through the acquired art and methods of Western war. All the science of expanding civilization in the future is related to the as yet unexplored principles underlying the changes thus almost suddenly effected in the recent history of Japan, and in the surprising history of modern Germany. We have touched therein only the fringe of a vast subject, and this only in one phase of it.

It is necessary to get a grasp of the physical basis of the process in human nature underlying these events before the reach of it in the future of civilization can be fully distinguished. A zoologist in the front rank who has carried the purely biological phase of this subject furthest since I wrote is Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, F.R.S. In the article on Zoology in the current edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica this writer has recently remarked with great emphasis on the significance to civilization of the mechanism of that kind of social inheritance which I described in Social Evolution.

Sir Edwin Ray Lankester describes the main fact with which it is concerned as " a new and unprecedented factor in organic development." All inquiry in the past has been, he asserts, dominated by erroneous ideas. The heredity with which civilization is supremely concerned is not that which is inborn in the individual. It is the social inheritance which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress, this kind of heredity being, to use Sir Edwin Ray Lankester's words, " completely free from the limitations of protoplasmic continuity. . . . It grows and develops, " he continues, "by laws other than those affecting the perishable bodies of successive generations of man-kind, " so that in every generation the child has to begin with, as it were, a clean slate, the inheritance thus conveyed exercising "an incomparable influence on the educable brain."

It must always be remembered there is not in-born in any one of us any part of the effects either of the good or of the evil of this collective heredity, including its psychic elements. If it were interrupted, therefore, in the case of society and the inheritance was not thus conveyed between any two generations either by teaching or by imitation, the result would be extraordinary. There would be a sudden breach in the whole order of civilization. Men would be born mentally and physically the same, but they would inherit in themselves no trace and none of the effects of the past know-ledge or training of society.

This impressive fact is to some extent already dimly apprehended by the general mind through the bearings of it being constantly brought under notice by systems of education. But the contrary fact has never been grasped by the human mind in all its significance. If the incoming generation of men were submitted to a new collective inheritance, including in particular its psychic elements, they would take it up as readily as they did the old. We should then have the surprising spectacle of a great change in the world, appearing to the observer as if a fundamental alteration in human nature had suddenly taken place on a universal scale.

It is to this fact more than to any other in the entire domain of human knowledge that the science of civilization is fundamentally related. All facts and theories concerned with the inborn qualities of individuals have an entirely minor significance in comparison. To obtain control of the mechanism of this collective heredity which, as we shall see presently, is principally psychic in its main elements, is the coming problem of civilization over which the mind of the world will be engaged for long into the future.

Now the immense potentiality of this collective heredity as the cause of efficiency in civilization is due to two things, one of which carries us considerably beyond the extended horizon of Sir Edwin Ray Lankester's striking outlook. It is due, in the first place, to that accumulation of recorded knowledge in the social inheritance which this writer had mainly in view. But it is due, in the second place, and far more distinctly, to the creation and transmission as part of the collective heredity of that psychic element which consists of ideas and idealisms that rest on emotion, and which are conveyed to the young under the influence of psychic emotion. These have a different physical basis in human nature from the laws of the reasoning process of mind with which the textbooks of the West have hitherto been mainly filled. But this psychic inheritance in civilization is the most influential of all elements in the collective heredity. The importance of it is profound, and far exceeds that of inborn heredity in the individual. It is capable of bringing into existence orders of men permanently endowed with characters, feelings, standards of conduct from the influence of which they can never free themselves, and the distinctive mark of which is the power of renunciation and sacrifice which they create in the individual.

In the future it will be seen clearly that all Western knowledge is passing in our time through a profound revolution. In the past the Western intellect has been exclusively concentrated on that phenomenon in time which may be described as the emergence of the efficient individual. The science of this efficient individual is founded on Reason. Reason is essentially the knowledge of material force and not the knowledge of the world as it is. It is the far-flung science, that is to say, of the causes which enabled A to kill B before B was able to kill A in the environment which has prevailed in the past of the world. The higher controversies in Western knowledge for half a century past, in which minds like those of Bergson, Bradley, James, Balfour, Ward, Schiller, Lange, Lodge, McTaggart, Tolstoy, McDougall, and a multitude of others have taken part, have one clue that runs through all the various positions developed therein. They all represent that phase of modern thought in the West in which the effort is being made to separate the psychology of the individual integration from the psychology of the social integration, this last merging in the universal and the infinite. 1 It is with the laws of the integration of the individual efficient in the struggle for his own interests that nearly all the scientific textbooks of the West have hitherto been filled. From physiology to ethics, from economics and political science to psychology, this is so. All this system of knowledge is passing to the rubbish-heap of time as the science of civilization.

It is in the social integration that man must reach his highest efficiency. The laws of the social integration are psychic in character, and they must in the nature of things control the evolution of the human mind and all its contents. The laws of social emotion, as Dr. A. Sutherland 1 was the first clearly to indicate, have a different physical basis in the human organism from the laws of mind which express themselves in Reason. The cause of human progress is psychic emotion. The great secret of the coming age of the world is that civilization rests not on Reason but on Emotion.

One of the most remarkable results of the concentration of the Western mind for ages on the phenomenon of the emergence of the individual efficient in his own interests just referred to is our position in relation to emotion. We know of emotion mainly only as related to the science of this efficient animal. In civilization we are constantly under the necessity of controlling this kind of emotion in the daily conflict of life. But it has followed as one of the consequences resulting from this that a considerable part, even of the educated world, has acquired the habit of conceiving a restricted capacity for emotion to be a feature of advancing civilization. The mistake arises from a fundamental confusion of ideas. It is the control of emotion, not the absence of it, which is the mark of high civilization. Other things being equal, the higher and more complete the individual or the people, the higher and more complete the capacity for emotion.

In civilization as it exists around us at present there is visible on every hand the influence of this element of psychic emotion transmitted in the collective inheritance. We get phases of it in the deep effects of national training and national ethics on different peoples, directed in the past almost solely to the realization of the ideals of war. It is visible in the influence of ideas, and of standards of opinion on classes, groups, and unions of men. But the most striking and permanent results of psychic emotion thus transmitted in civilization are visible in the intensive culture of mind and spirit which forms of belief, and especially the higher types of religion, are capable of producing on men and peoples.

With the single exception of gigantic effort devoted to the national ideal of sacrifice in the cause of successful war, of which the results in recent history have been astounding, the world has witnessed no example in its history of the idealisms of mind universally imposed through intensive culture on the youth of civilization in conditions of emotion and with all the equipment and re-sources of modern civilization in the background. The great systems of religion which have come nearest to realizing such a conception in the past have not so far even remotely approached what is possible under modern conditions of knowledge. We are on the verge of a new era of civilization, and the people or the type of civilization which will first succeed in this experiment will obtain control of all the reservoirs of force in civilization in a manner which has never been thought possible in the past.

There is not an existing institution in the world of civilized humanity which cannot be profoundly modified or altered, or abolished in a generation. There is no form or order of government or of the dominion of force which cannot be removed out of the world within a generation. There is no ideal in conformity with the principles of civilization dreamed of by any dreamer or idealist which can-not be realized within the lifetime of those around him. Treitschke, as a young university lecturer, speaking in 1863, was prophesying further and truer than he knew when he said there was no ideal which a living people chose to put before them-selves that they had not the power of realizing in history.' If only the German people had been free to embody this teaching in an ideal of civilization, what might not modern Germany have accomplished in the world !