public life with men says that the only difficulty will be that people will think it ridiculous.

Where dissent from prevailing opinion, what Trotter calls the 'opinion of the herd' is more serious, where it might conceivably affect the actions of a large number, it is subjected to more drastic censure. There are instructive instances all through history of the inhospitality with which society, under the sway of an established belief, greeted many political and social ideas now generally regarded as axiomatic. One has but to recall in this connection the passionate opposition of the majority (who were neither more stupid nor malicious than the majority of our own day), to such ideas as religious toleration, Copernican astronomy, the abolition of slavery, universal manhood suffrage, and later, woman suffrage, to see how powerful in controlling opinions regarding human relations is man's instinctive allegiance to the opinions of his group. In Trotter's words:

That a creature of strong appetites and luxurious passions should come to tolerate uncomplainingly his empty belly, his chattering teeth, his naked limbs, is miracle enough. What are we to say of a force, which, when he is told by the full fed and well warmed that his state is the more blessed, can make him answer, "How beautiful, how true." In the face of so effectual a negation not only of experience and common sense, but even of hunger and privation, it is not possible to set any limits to the power of the herd over the individual."

Gregariousness in Habits of Action

But if men tend to think in groups they tend more emphatically still to act in groups, to be acutely uncomfortable when acting in a fashion different from that customary among the majority of their fellows. Habits of action are more deepseated physiologically than habits of thought (which is one reason why our theories are so often in advance of our practise). People will accede intellectually to new ideas which they would not and could not practise, the mind being, as it were, more convertible than the emotions. Even in minor matters, in dress, speech, and manners we like to do the accus

• Trotter: Instincts of the Herd. p. 115.

tomed thing. It is more painful for most people to use the wrong fork at dinner, or to be dressed in a business suit where everyone else is in evening clothes, than to commit a fallacy, or to act upon prejudices rather than upon logical

reasons.

The individual's instinctive desire to be identical in action with other members of his group, from the collars and clothes he wears to the way he brings up his children, is greatly reenforced by the punishment meted out to those who differ from the majority. This may vary from ridicule, as in the case of the laughter that greets the poet's proverbial long hair and flowing tie, the foreigner's accent or a straw hat in April, to the confinement and privation that are the penalties for any marked infringement of the accepted modes of life. Even when the punishments are slight, they are effective. A man who has no moral or religious scruples with reference to gambling on any day of the week will, to avoid the social ostracism of his neighbors, refrain from playing cards on his front porch on Sunday. For no other reason than to avoid being consciously different, many a man will not wear cool white clothes on a hot day in his office who will wear them on a cool evening at the seashore.

Where individuals differ from the group in really or seemingly significant ways they may be severely punished. In primitive societies where every detail of life is charged with some significance to the gods, any slight deviation is punishable by death. Not so many centuries ago, the English penal code provided for the death penalty for the stealing of a sixpence loaf. In our own day we have learnt to make some distinction between actions different from the accustomed that are really socially harmful, and actions that merely offend our instinctive conviction that actions done the way the majority do them must be correct. We have come to tolerate freedom of action, but only grudgingly, and we experience, often despite our better judgment, 'righteous indignation' when intrepid or obstinate individuals insist on having ways different from our own or the majority of our acquaintances. Like the old clerk in Galsworthy's 'Justice', we cannot help

feeling 'it isn't nice', and a dissenter remains like the courageously honest doctor in Ibsen's play, 'An Enemy of the People'.

The Effect of Gregariousness on Innovation

A strong instinctive tendency to community of action and thought is in large part responsible for the comparative absence of innovation in either of these fields. A premium is put upon the conventional, the customary, the common both in the instinctive satisfaction they give the individual, and in the high value set upon them by society. In advanced societies, however, the habit of inquiry and originality may itself come to be endorsed by the majority, as it is among scientists and artists. The herd instinct need not always act on the side of unreason. Among the intellectual classes, it is already enlisted on the side of free inquiry, which among scholars is the fundamental common habit.

If rationality were to become really respectable, if we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned into advantages.7

Sympathy (A Specialization of Gregariousness)

Sympathy, in the strict psychological sense of the term, means a "suffering with, the experiencing of any feeling or emotion when or because we observe in other persons or creatures, the expression of that feeling or emotion." The behavior of animals exhibits the external features of sympathetic action very clearly, "Two dogs begin to growl, and fight, and at once all the dogs within sound and sight stiffen themselves, 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."

7 Trotter, p. 45.

8 McDougall, p. 92.

Ibid., p. 93.

Human beings tend not only sympathetically to reproduce the instinctive actions of others, 10 but they tend, despite themselves, to experience directly and immediately, often involuntarily, the emotions experienced and outwardly manifested by others. Almost everyone has had his mood heightened to at least kindly joy by the presence in a crowded street car of a young child whose inquiring prattle and light-hearted laughter were subdued by the gray restraints and responsibilities of maturity. One melancholy face can crush the joy of a boisterous and cheerful party; " the eagerness and enthusiasm of an orator can, irrespective of the merits of the cause he is defending, provoke eagerness and enthusiasm for the same cause among an audience that does not in the least understand what the orator is talking about.

One brand of cigarettes was recently advertised by the face of a young soldier, roguishly irresponsible, palpably and completely given over to joy. One found one's self transported into something of this same mood before one had a chance to speculate at all as to whether there was any causal relation between the specific quality of tobacco the youngster was smoking, and that contagious undeniable delight. What is called personal magnetism is perhaps more than anything else the ability to provoke in others sympathetic experiences of pleasant and exhilarating emotions.

Sensibility to the emotions of others, though possessed by almost all individuals, varies in degree. The complete absence of it marks a man out as 'stolid', 'cold', 'callous', 'brutal'. Such a type of personality may be efficient and successful in pursuits requiring nothing besides a direct analysis of facts, uncolored by any irrelevant access of feeling, as in the case of

10 In man infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements of a ropewalker, while watching him, feeling a shock in one's legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of physiological sympathy. Ribot: Psychology of the Emotions, p. 232.

Reproduction of the actions of others has by a certain school of philosophers and psychologists, notably Tarde, Le Bon, and Baldwin, been ascribed to imitation. But no experimental researches have revealed any such specific instinct to imitate (see Thorndike, p. 73ff), and 'imitations' of acts can generally be traced to sympathy, or suggestion-which is sympathy on an intellectual plane.

11 Such expressions as 'kill joy', 'wet blanket', 'life of the party' are instances of the popular appreciation of the fact of social contagion.

mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual analysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy of feeling is illustrated in the case of John Stuart Mill who writes in his autobiography:

Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. They are, therefore, I thought, favorable to prudence, and clear-sightedness but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and virtues; and fearfully undermine all desires and . . . all except the purely physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had. All those to whom I looked up were of the opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know a feeling that would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.12

A generous degree of susceptibility to the emotions of others makes a man what is variously called 'mellow', 'humane', 'large-hearted', 'generous-souled'. The possession of such susceptibility is an asset first in that it enriches life for its possessor. It gives him a warm insight into the feelings, emotions, desires, habits of mind and action of other people, and gives to his experiences with them a vivid and personal significance not attainable by any hollow intellectual analysis. It is an asset, moreover, in the purely utilitarian business of dealing with men. The statesman or executive who deals with men as so many animate machines, may achieve certain mechanical and arbitrary successes. But he will be missing half the data on which his decisions must be based if he does not have a live and sensitive appreciation of how men feel when placed in given situations. The placing of women in positions of labor management where women chiefly are to be dealt with is an illustration of the recognition of the impor

12 Mill: Autobiography (Holt Edition), p. 138.