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nydus/Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarPublic
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Table of Contents

SPECULATIONS UPON THE HUMAN MIND IN 1915

of being immediately useful in the conduct of affairs.

At the very outset of such researches we are met by an objection which illustrates how different the biological conception of the mind is from that current amongst those whose training has been {93} literary and philosophic. The objection I am thinking of is that of the ordinary intellectualist view of man. According to this we must regard him as essentially a rational creature, subject, it is true, to certain feeble relics of instinctive impulsion, but able to control such without any great expense of will power, irrational at times in an amiable and rather “nice” way, but fundamentally always independent, responsible, and captain of his soul. Most holders of this opinion will of course admit that in a distant and vague enough past man must have been much more definitely an instinctive being, but they regard attempts to trace in modern man any considerable residue of instinctive activities as a tissue of fallacious and superficial analogies, based upon a shallow materialism and an ignorance of the great principles

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