for the direction of his instinctive bias and a grateful use of the diurnal corrective of events might enable him to reach at any rate some conclusions not altogether without a useful tincture of validity.
It was possible, moreover, to put certain conclusions in a form which the development of the war must confirm or disprove, and it may be interesting as a test of what was put forward as an essay in an essentially practical psychology briefly {224} to review these theoretical anticipations in the light of what actually has happened.
P SYCHOLOGICAL A NTICIPATIONS
The hypothesis was put forward that in the German people the reactions in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western civilizations. The next step was naturally to inquire whether the known characters of what we called aggressive gregariousness were able to account for the observed German peculiarities in reaction, and then to indicate what special features we might expect to appear in Germany under the developing stress of war if our hypothesis was sound.