SOURCE: “The Philosophy of Wilfred Trotter,” in The Eugenics Review, Vol. XL, No. 3, October, 1948, pp. 149-53.

[Usher discusses Trotter's influence on eugenics, the study of external influences that affect innate societal qualities.]

Some years ago Wilfred Trotter, in his great work The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, drew attention to the vast difference in time scale of history and biology. “It is scarcely to be expected,” he said, “that even a gross movement on the cramped historical scale will be capable of detection in the vast gulf of time the biological series represents.”¹ Nevertheless, he continued, “the infinitely long road still tending upwards comes to where it branches and meets another path, tending perhaps downwards or even upwards at a different slope … a node in the infinite line … a point … capable of recognition by a finite mind and of expression in terms of human affairs.” It was his belief that the human race “stands at such a nodal point to-day.”² Subsequent events—notably the production of atomic weapons—have gone far to confirm the sagacity of that belief.

RACE SURVIVAL

Galton said that eugenics “deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of race”—but unless some vigorous steps are soon taken it may well be that there will be no race left at all, inborn qualities improved or not. It is therefore the purpose of these notes to ask whether there is not some line of research other than positive and negative eugenics, as described in the pamphlet Aims and Objects of the Eugenics Society, which might yield results with greater rapidity.

Is it not possible that attention has been too much focused on “defect” and on the elimination of defective stock? Can it be that, in our concern to bring about improvement of the individuals of our race, we are neglecting alternative lines of research?

One thing is certain. It has not been the “defectives” who have brought about the major calamities to civilization and culture: such disasters are, in fact, the work of extremely able individuals. Thus it might not be too fanciful to suggest that whilst diligent attention is being paid to hygiene and sanitation between the decks of the Ship of State, there is brawling and confusion on the bridge—and the ship itself fast heading for the rocks.

Trotter frequently speculated on this theme; and as so many of his speculations have turned into such very unpleasant realities, it would be less than prudent to ignore the warning.

MAN'S GREGARIOUS INHERITANCE

It was his view that society is not making use of man's gregarious inheritance to “anything approaching” the full possibilities. “To such an extent is this the case,” he said, “that the situation of man as a species even is probably a good deal more precarious than has usually been supposed by those who have come to be in charge of its destinies. The species is irrevocably committed to a certain evolutionary path by the inheritance of instinct it possesses. This course brings with it inevitable and serious disadvantages as well as enormously greater potential advantages. As long as the spirit of the race is content to be submissive to the former and indifferent to the discovery and development of the latter, it can scarcely have a bare certainty of survival and much less of progressive enlargement of its powers.”³

CONSTRUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE FORCES

And again: “Throughout the enormously long period during which modern man has been established on the earth, human society has been left to the uncontrolled contention of constructive and destructive forces, and in the long run the destructive have always proved the stronger. Whether the general level of consciousness will reach the height necessary to give a decisive predominance to constructive tendencies, and whether such a development will occur in time to save Western civilization from the fate of its predecessors, are open questions.”⁴

We may well inquire whether the problems of man's inherited gregarious instinct, a subject which proved so fruitful in Trotter's hands, should not receive close study by eugenists. If this is to be done it will be necessary, for the moment, to leave the questions of physical and mental defects and the prevention of their transmission, and concentrate attention on the fittest of our race and on the ablest brains and endeavour to discover where these “enormously greater potential advantages” spoken of by Trotter are concealed.

COROLLARIES OF GREGARIOUSNESS

They are to be found amongst the corollaries that accompany man's inherited gregarious mental qualities. These are truly instinctive qualities which, so long as man is man, will remain with him. Thus it seems that the most profitable line of approach will be first to endeavour to identify these qualities; it might then be possible to devise some counter influences, and in this manner achieve results in the direction in which all eugenists must wish to see man travel.

It is not possible to adduce in a paper of this nature the evidence and reasons developed by Trotter, but it is necessary to give—however summarily—some of the headings under which the arguments belong, even though they can do little more than refresh the memories of those already familiar with Trotter's views.

TWO SIGNIFICANT EVOLUTIONARY ADVANCES

Taking a comprehensive survey of the whole evolution of life it is impossible not to recognize two advances of a quite dramatic nature, each of which carried with it the most tremendous potentialities for further advancement. The first, of course, was when the single cell had attained the maximum of complexity and two or more fully developed cells remained together, or developed together, and formed the foundation of multicellular organisms. The universality of this step in each kingdom is all the evidence required to show this to be a fundamental and inevitable principle if development is to proceed further.

The next step is when multicellular animal organisms have again reached a maximum of complexity and a number of these organisms remain together and form a superorganism or “major unit.” It is only necessary to mention the words “flock,” “herd,” “pack,” “swarm,” “tribe,” etc., to show that this step is also fundamental and inevitable in the animal kingdom if development is destined to continue.

SOLITARY AND GREGARIOUS SPECIES

But the inherited mental reactions of all individual born into a species which has become gregarious are bound to show certain marked differences from the mental reactions of an individual belonging to a solitary species. The gregarious individual will have all his “normal” or “simple” reactions coloured and modified by the requirements of the “major organism” to which he belongs regardless of the consequences (often fatal) to himself. He must feed when the herd feeds, and flee because the herd is fleeing. To hesitate and investigate the reason would spell swift destruction. He must develop an inner unquestioning sensitiveness to the feeling, or “spirit,” of his fellows; resistance to impulses bearing signs of herd sanction must be suppressed.

Trotter gives a homely but very telling illustration of these qualities in describing the differential reactions of a dog and a cat each caught in the commission of an offence. “… both recognize that punishment is coming: but the dog, moreover, knows that he has done wrong, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him, while the cat's sole impulse is to escape. The rational recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally clear to the gregarious and the solitary animal, but it is the former only who understands that he has committed a crime, who has, in fact, the sense of sin.” … “Conscience … and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal.”⁵

ALTRUISM

We are here on the threshold of a better understanding of the pleasure of service to others, of altruism and self-sacrifice, of the satisfaction enjoyed in performing the unwelcome duty: emotions which have hitherto appeared as anomalies in the mental make-up of a predaceous animal such as man. But Trotter placed upon such qualities a biological significance as great as that of self-esteem, yet with an immensely enhanced potentiality for the further advancement of our species. Indeed, we are here in contact with the foundations of our own interest in eugenics.

It is thus clear that impressions arising in the conscious mind of man must carry with them a formation due to his being a gregarious species. It will be quite futile to endeavour to assess the “truth” of these impressions subjectively, for each will be “an a priori synthesis of the most perfect sort”⁶ and will appear to the reasoning mind as a perfectly self-evident, obvious proposition, needing neither justification nor analysis.

MENTAL NORMALITY

Needless to say, the specious nature of pure reasoning has been realized for a very long time, and psychologists have reaped a rich harvest of results in this field. But the bulk of the work has been centred round abnormality and has been content to accept as a norm the standard set by the majority. To amplify that definition it would be fair to say that an acceptable norm is the beliefs and habits of the majority of individuals of the same nationality, brought up in the same country, at approximately the same time, of the same religion, of the same sex, and of about the same age. It goes without saying that such beliefs and habits bear very little resemblance to an absolute norm, and are not conducive to a really pure reasoning.

To return to the analogy of the Ship of State, it is as though painstaking research has resulted in a perfection of hull contour and propeller efficiency whilst very little is known of the internal electro-magnetic forces which are disturbing the compass.

Again, in speaking of philosophy, Trotter mentions that it has been cultivated by perhaps most of the ablest minds the human race has produced. “It has evolved innumerable systems of doctrine, each rationally proved by its founder to be true, and all inconsistent with one another. No enterprise has ever been longer or better pursued than the effort to find a body of philosophic doctrine which should compel the universal assent of rational minds. An experiment that has gone on failing for two and a half millennia may well make us wonder whether the apparatus is adequate or the method sound.”⁷

Then, in speaking of the intellect, Trotter said: “For a good deal longer than two thousand years the ablest men of every age have been fidgeting with the mechanism of the intellect in the hope of helping mankind to think and therefore behave reasonably. The state of the world to-day (June 1939) cannot but suggest that if practical thought is to become strong enough to help in saving our social systems from their increasing confusions, some more radical corrective is necessary.”⁸

In this connection it is interesting to recall that we are forced to employ identically the same mechanism for the solution of a momentous problem as for a trivial problem. Doubtless a momentous problem receives longer deliberation, but the conclusion in each case is limited by the same defects of mechanism. Thus the longer deliberation is similar to a prolonged microscopical examination under a low-power objective, with no possibility of changing to high-power.

However, since the intellect is the only instrument we possess for thinking, it is to this instrument and its peculiarities that attention must be devoted.

THE CORRECTION OF THOUGHT

“The correction of instrumental errors,” wrote Trotter, “is a familiar idea in practical science. The maker, having turned out as perfect an instrument as he knows how, studies the quality of its performance. Any error now found is to be dealt with not by tinkering with the machine, but by having the constancy and amount of it carefully estimated and stated in a form that can be applied to the results. It is this method that forces itself upon us in determining the function of the intellect, and rendering it fully available. Psychology has told us a great deal about the working of the mind, and in an incidental way about its liabilities to error: but it has not systematically undertaken just this special practical task of, as it were, calibrating the intellect for the contemplation of ordinary experience.”⁹

CALIBRATION OF THE INTELLECT

“The calibration of the intellect” is not a new idea, albeit that it has not before been couched in such apt phraseology. Professor Geoffrey Jefferson has recently drawn attention to some earlier attempts in this direction.¹⁰ But all previous adventures have been fatally handicapped by lack of knowledge of the corollaries of man's gregarious inheritance and of the manner in which these corollaries appear in conscious thought. All such attempts were therefore foredoomed to failure. It might, however, eventually come to be shown, when the underlying influences at work on man's gregarious nature have been identified, that his notorious variety of response to similar stimuli is only masking an almost startling uniformity.

MIND AND REASON

“In the first place,” Trotter reminded us, “we must get rid of the disastrous belief that there is any activity of the mind corresponding with the conception of pure reason. The mind has no such function. All processes of reasoning, however abstract, are participated in and influenced by feeling.”¹¹ Moreover, the only quality that lends itself to accurate abstraction is number (“five digits in the mind are as good as regards number as five fingers of the hand”¹²) and all other abstractions are tainted at their source and cannot lead us of themselves to conclusions of any practical value. “It is necessary here to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the scientific method enlarges the powers of the mind. Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man, distinguished in one or even several departments of science, is more likely to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else.”¹³

However, the gregarious instinct can be shown to be “a definite fact of biology which must have consequences as precise and a significance as ascertainable as the secretion of the gastric juice or the refracting apparatus of the eye”¹⁴; and when it is recalled how accurate the speculations of Trotter have proved to be as the years have passed, there can be little doubt that he bequeathed to us a line of investigation which we ignore at our peril.

The course of events has now been greatly accelerated by the achievement of atomic fission: to doubt whether this knowledge will be put to destructive purposes commits one to the proposition that man's nature has changed since 1945. Unless some steps are taken to counter that nature it may well be that “… civilizations will continue to rise and fall in a dreadful sameness of alternating aspiration and despair until perhaps some lucky accident of confusion finds for humanity in extinction the rest it could never win for itself in life.”¹⁵

These notes are therefore a plea for further research into the gregarious instinct and its corollaries and the consequent “calibration of the intellect” envisaged by Trotter. “Unless such a work can be done,” he said, “it seems probable that the ominous fatuity and confusion that mark our social and political affairs must continue to increase.”¹⁶

SUMMARY

Before, therefore, we can consider ourselves free to devote attention to the “improvement of the inborn qualities of a race,” it is first incumbent upon us to ensure the continuation of the race itself. And secondly it is becoming more and more important that governments should have access to reliable information regarding the qualities and predictable reactions of the material with which they have to deal, i.e. human beings in a specific environment. At present it would appear that this tremendously important field of knowledge is largely guesswork. Commander Stephen King-Hall recently said, “The public would indeed be astonished and even alarmed if it knew how casually and ‘ad hockily’ the affairs of mankind are conducted by its rulers.”¹⁷ Added to which is the fact that the minds of rulers suffer from all the basic defects of the minds of those who are led. To all of these ends it would appear that research on the lines indicated by Wilfred Trotter is fundamental.

In concluding an address to the Institute of Pathology at St. Mary's Hospital, Trotter said a word about our liking to believe that we are receptive of new ideas. “Unfortunately,” he said, “this is the exact opposite of the truth. The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein, and resists it with a similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. I have no doubt that that last sentence has already met with repudiation—and shown how quickly the defence mechanism gets to work.”¹⁸

Notes

1. The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 100.

2. Ibid., p. 101.

3. Ibid., p. 134.

4. Ibid., p. 259.

5. Ibid., p. 40.

6. Principles of Psychology, by William James, quoted in The Instincts of the Herd, p. 15.

7. The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter, F.R.S., p. 177.

8. Ibid., p. 183.

9. Ibid., p. 183.

10. Jefferson, Geoffrey (1948), “Scepsis Scientifica,” Brit. Med. J., 1, 379.

11. The Collected Papers, p. 184.

12. Ibid., p. 175.

13. Ibid., p. 181.

14. The Instincts of the Herd, p. 21.

15. Ibid., p. 247.

16. The Collected Papers, p. 184.

17. National News-Letter, No. 627, July 29th, 1948.

18. The Collected Papers, p. 186.