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nydus/Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarPublic
Page 130 of 306
Table of Contents

SPECULATIONS UPON THE HUMAN MIND IN 1915

the sheep, the ox, and the horse. The tissue of char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly gregarious reactions which his conduct presents furnishes incontestable proof of this thesis, which is thus an indispensable clue to an inquiry into the intricate problems of human society.

It is desirable perhaps to enumerate in a summary {113} way the more obvious gregarious characters which man displays.

  1. He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental. This intolerance is the cause of the mental fixity and intellectual incuriousness which, to a remarkable degree for an animal with so capacious a brain, he constantly displays. As is well known, the resistance to a new idea is always primarily a matter of prejudice, the development of intellectual objections, just or otherwise, being a secondary process in spite of the common delusion to the contrary. This intimate dependence on the herd is traceable not merely in matters physical and intellectual, but also betrays itself in the deepest recesses of personality as a sense of incompleteness which compels the individual to reach out towards some larger existence than his
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