the stable-minded—a class the members of which are characteristically insensitive to experience, closed to the entry of new ideas, and obsessed with the satisfactoriness of things as they are. At the time when this corollary of gregariousness was first pointed out—some ten years ago—it was noted as a serious flaw in the stability of civilization. The suggestion was made that as long as the great expert tasks of government necessarily gravitated into the hands of a class which characteristically lacked the greater developments of mental capacity and efficiency, the course of {134} civilization must continue to be at the mercy of accident and disaster. The present European war—doubtless in the actual state of affairs a remedy no less necessary because of its dreadfulness—is an example on the greatest possible scale of the kind of price the race has to pay for the way in which minds and temperaments are selected by its society.
When we see the great and serious drawbacks which gregariousness has entailed on man, it cannot but be supposed that that course of evolution has been imposed upon him by a real and deep-seated peculiarity of his nature—a fatal inheritance which it is impossible for him to repudiate.
When we inquire why it is that the manifestations of gregariousness in man are so ambiguous that their biological significance has been to a great extent overlooked, the answer seems to be furnished by that capacity for various reaction which is the result of his general mental development, and which has tended almost equally to obscure his other instinctive activities. It may be repeated once more that in a creature such as the bee the narrow mental capacity of the individual limits reaction to a few and relatively simple courses, so that the dominance of instinct in the species can to the attentive observer never be long in doubt. In man the equal dominance of instinct is obscured by the kaleidoscopic variety of the reactions by which it is more or less effectually satisfied.
While to a superficial examination of society the evidences of man’s gregarious inheritance are ambiguous and trivial, to the closer scrutiny