In

lows this rule. As a corollary to this, selfdeceptions may tend to disappear. The more or less conscious delusions of grandeur which actuate so many people are apt to fail in the emergency of war. Probably the more fundamental of such ideas-the importance of one's individual life-is the one that is most conspicuously shattered. the article by Freud, already quoted, there is considerable discussion of our attitude towards death. He shows that normally we are continually handicapped by our insincerities about death and fears of it in ourselves and others. There is no more beautiful proof that a nation at war acts as a species struggling for existence than the fact that individual deaths do not matter either to the mass or to the individual himself. Trotter's comparison to the multicellular animal is peculiarly apt in this connection. If we find ourselves in a situation of danger we are not conscious of any fear for hand or eye or

body, but for ourselves as a whole. Neither the wolf in the pack nor the bee in the swarm has thought for its own safety. As Trotter points out, mass formation gains psychologically perhaps more than it does tactically. It seems to me not impossible that the success of military training consists essentially in the acquisition of the herd spirit, the gain of a feeling that the herd is always present, even if it be only in imagination. When this is accomplished the prodigies of devotion and self-immolation, which are a commonplace of mass formation, can become possible individually. The essential victory in war rests with that nation which has the largest number of citizens unconsciously and constantly aware of the presence of the herd, fighting or travailling alone, perhaps, but hearing always the voice of their choir invisible.

CHAPTER IV

CORRELATION OF PRIMITIVE INSTINCTS WITH

GREGARIOUSNESS

We are now in a position to recapitulate. In so far as one can generalise about such a protean affair as war, there are two great groups of phenomena. In the first come violence in the form of killing fellow beings, purposeful destruction of property, injury to the rival trade and deception of the enemy. These are all "legitimate" in war. With these there always occur "atrocities" in the form of wanton destruction, loot, and the indulgence of brutal passion on the bodies of the enemy combatant and non-combatant alike, phenomena more apt to preponderate in one country but probably present in all armies. The latter are openly or

tacitly encouraged or, at least, condoned by each belligerent. On the other hand, there is a group of phenomena evidencing a stimulus to the nation at war, causing greater cohesiveness, greater energy, marvellous self-abnegation on the part of individuals, extinction of all that is a sham in life, but with it all a loss of capacity to sympathise with a foreign view-point that amounts to an intellectual stultification.

There are, also, two schools of dynamic psychology that attempt answers to this riddle. One says that primitive, anti-social human instincts still exist unconsciously in the make-up of all "civilised" beings, that they are constantly striving for an outlet which the conditions of war allow. The second school say that man is by instinct a herd animal, and that as such he forms groups to which he owes a blind allegiance, more complete than is generally thought and always including an instinctive hostility to

that which is outside the national group. When the group develops an aggressive type of gregariousness war is imminent. Significantly, each school in its argument leaves one set of phenomena severely alone. As far as each goes, the argument seems sound; can they be reconciled, or are they mutually exclusive?

To answer this we must leave the question of war for a moment and turn to a consideration of the fundamentals of dynamic psychology. Freud and Trotter are probably the only two psychologists who have initiated hypotheses that are not essentially tautological, so only psycho-analysis and herd instinct need be seriously considered. The teaching of Freud is that civilisation has forced upon man a "repression" of primitive instincts whose operation is unconscious but always the dominant, dynamic principle of life. Trotter, on the other hand, insists that man is by nature gregarious,