10
But to these simple impulses, these life-functions as it were, man has added another,—the gregarious, or, as sociologists pleasantly term it, the "herd" instinct.[1] Why men and some other animals herd together—whether for warmth, for food, for mutual protection, or from some obscurer sympathetic impulse—is not very clearly known. But once the "herd" impulse is established, the "simple life" is, it would seem, at an end. Up to this point though individuality was but little developed, the life-impulses of the unit were paramount; but henceforth, the life-impulses of each unit are controlled by a power from without as well as by instincts from within—controlled by the life-impulses of other units, a power that acts contemporaneously with the inner instincts, and that is bound to control them, to inhibit for its own ends the individualistic impulses of hunger, of reproduction, even of self-preservation. With the "herd" instinct arises the conflict between our life-impulses and the life-impulses of others. Out of that conflict is developed our whole religion and morality, our sociology, our politics.
Between "herd" instinct and the individual impulses, all, happily, is not conflict. The "herd" helps the individual to hunt and to get food, above all helps the weaker individual to survive. But, on the whole, what we notice most is inhibition, what primitive man calls tabu, The history of civilisation is the history of a long conflict between herd-socialism and individualistic im-
- ↑ See Mr. Trotter's very suggestive papers on "Herd Instinct" in the Sociological Review, 1908.
