Part 3 (1/2)
CHAPTER II
POLITICAL ENt.i.tIES
Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the relation between his nature and the environment into which he is born. The last chapter approached that relation (in so far as it affects politics) from the side of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same relation from the side of man's political environment.
The two lines of approach have this important difference, that the nature with which man is born is looked on by the politician as fixed, while the environment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitely changing. It is not to changes in our nature, but to changes in our environment only--using the word to include the traditions and expedients which we acquire after birth as well as our material surroundings--that all our political development from the tribal organisation of the Stone Ages to the modern nation has apparently been due.
The biologist looks on human nature itself as changing, but to him the period of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years which const.i.tute the past of politics is quite insignificant. Important changes in biological types may perhaps have occurred in the history of the world during comparatively short periods, but they must have resulted either from a sudden biological 'sport' or from a process of selection fiercer and more discriminating than we believe to have taken place in the immediate past of our own species. The present descendants of those races which are pictured in early Egyptian tombs show no perceptible change in their bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believe that the mental faculties and tendencies with which they are born have changed to any greater degree.
The numerical proportions of different races in the world have, indeed, altered during that period, as one race proved weaker in war or less able to resist disease than another; and races have been mingled by marriage following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be exchanged at birth with one born of the same breeding-stock even a hundred thousand years ago, one may suppose that neither the ancient nor the modern mother would notice any startling difference. The child from the Stone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than our children if he caught measles, or might show somewhat keener instincts in quarrelling and hunting, or as he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellows of the 'will to live' and 'the joy of life.' Conversely, a transplanted twentieth-century child would resist infectious disease better than the other children in the Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be found to have a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable character. But there apparently the difference would end. In essentials the type of each human stock may be supposed to have remained unchanged throughout the whole period. In the politics of the distant future that science of eugenics, which aims at rapidly improving our type by consciously directed selective breeding, may become a dominant factor, but it has had little influence on the politics of the present or the past.
Those new facts in our environment which have produced the enormous political changes which separate us from our ancestors have been partly new habits of thought and feeling, and partly new ent.i.ties about which we can think and feel.
It is of these new political ent.i.ties that this chapter will treat. They must have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almost entirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, of innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deed or thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How then did the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and become sufficiently significant to produce political results?
The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate us toward impulse or action is that it should be recognisable--that it should be like itself when we met it before, or like something else which we have met before. If the world consisted of things which constantly and arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anything else, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings as at present const.i.tuted would not act at all. They would drift like seaweed among the waves.
The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is like another; and find nuts or gra.s.s for food, because each nut and blade of gra.s.s is like the rest.
But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus to action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be felt in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens, but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a tortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb.
Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature.
The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child in distress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from the stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement or glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at once from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers.
Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip (provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by experience and a.s.sociation.
In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one before were invariably seized with a desire to vote.
The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, ill.u.s.trates the process of creating artificial and easily recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like unto himself.' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If a marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be carried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures. In some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and made recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited a.s.sociations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political ent.i.ties must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to a.s.sociations acquired during life. A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by a.s.sociation.
Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[11] In early political society most recognition is guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek: skeptouchos basileus]). Such a staff is very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a model of a staff stood for a king.
[11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p.
392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them.'
At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leaders.h.i.+p and royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.
When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language, it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional a.s.sociation with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of sensations--one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection of a single quality--kings.h.i.+p, for instance--shared by other such bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for the purpose of stimulating us to action.
Indeed the 'bra.s.s-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of the a.s.sociations which successively enter his consciousness. The first a.s.sociations revealed will be automatic and obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser,' produce at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile,' the marks will first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction may be a.s.sociated. I am a 'visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a blurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me the picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway carriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After the automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional accompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knows about England, which are presented to the memory by a process semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of the experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.
A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language.
If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be subst.i.tuted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go on--the automatic 'image,' automatically accompanied by emotional a.s.sociation, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the succession which I have been discussing:--
'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands.
Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee.'
'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the change from the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective mood in which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised.
But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again, as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarily earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits in one's chair one can feel that that is so.