[1] Indeed, a reformer is to-day called a crusader, though the
knight of the twelfth century armed cap-a-pie for a joust with
the Saracen would hardly recognize as his spiritual descendant a
sedentary person preaching against rum. Yet to the student of
character there is nothing anomalous in the transformation.
How conceptions of right and wrong, of proper and improper
conduct, ideals and thoughts arise, it is not my function to
treat in detail. That intelligence primarily uses the method of
trial and error to learn is as true of groups as of individuals;
and established methods of doing things--customs--are often
enough temporary conclusions, though they last a thousand years.
The feeling that such group customs are right and that to depart
from them is wrong, is perhaps based on a specific instinct, the
moral instinct; but much more likely, in my opinion, is it
obedience to leadership, fear of social disapproval and
punishment, conscience, imitation, suggestibility and sympathy,
all of which are parts of that social cement substance, the
social instinct. No child ever learns "what is right and wrong"
except through teaching, but no child would ever conform, except
through gross fear, unless he found himself urged by deep-seated
instincts to be in conformity, in harmony and in sympathy with
his group,--to be one with that group. Perhaps it is true, as
Bergson suggests, as Galton[1] hints and as Samuel Butler boldly
states, that there are no real individuals in life but we are
merely different aspects of reality or, to phrase it
materialistically, corpuscles in the blood stream of an organism
too vast and complicated to be encompassed by our imagination.
Just as a white blood cell obeys laws of which it can have no
conception, fulfills purposes whose meaning transcends its own
welfare, so we, with all our self-consciousness and all the
paraphernalia of individuality, are perhaps parts of a life we
cannot understand.
[1] For example, read what the hard-headed Galton says
("Hereditary Genius," p. 376):
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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