lecting in buckets and jars. Nay, even more astonishing- is the mental state implied by one of the woodcuts, which tries to aid the devotional reader in conceiving the Trinity, by repr resenting three persons standing in one pair of boots! " Quite in harmony with these astoundingly-gross conceptions are the conceptions implied by the popular literature. The theological ideas that grew up in times when Papal authority was supreme, and before the sale of indulgences had been pro tested against, may be judged from a story contained in the Folk-lore collected by the Brothers Grimm, called " The Tailor in Heaven." Here is an abridged translation that has been made for me: — " God, having one day gone out with the saints and the apostles for a walk, left Peter at the door of heaven with strict orders to admit no one. Soon after a tailor came and pleaded to be let in. But Peter said that God had forbidden any one to be admitted; besides, the tailor was a bad character, and ' cabbaged ' the cloth he used. The tailor said the pieces he had taken were small, and had fallen into his basket; and he was willing to make himself useful— he would carry the babies, and wash or mend the clothes. Peter at last let him in, but made him sit clown in a corner, behind the door. Taking advantage of Peter's going outside for a minute or two. the tailor left his seat and looked about him. He soon came to a place where there were many stools, and a chair of massive gold and a golden footstool, which were God's. Climbing up on the chair, he could see all that was happening on the earth; and he saw an old woman, who was washing clothes in a stream, making away with some of the linen. In his anger, he took up the footstool and threw it at her. As he could not get it back, he thought it best to return to his place behind the door, where he sat down, put ting on an air of innocence. God now re-entered, without observing the tailor. Finding his footstool gone, he asked Peter what had be come of it — had he let anyone in? The apostle at first evaded the question, but confessed that he had let in one — only, however, a poor limping tailor. The tailor was then called, and asked what he had done with the footstool. When he had told, God said to him: — ' O you knave, if I judged like you, how long do you think you would have escaped? For long ago I should not have had a chair or even a poker left in the place, but should have hurled everything at the sin These examples, out of multitudes that might be given, show the wide limits of variation within which social phe- 126 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
nomena range. When we bear in mind that, along1 with the ological ideas that now seem little above those of savages, there went (in England) a political constitution having out lines like the present, an established body of laws, a regular taxation, an emancipated working-class, an industrial system of considerable complexity, with the general intelligence and mutual trust implied by social co-operations so extensive and involved, we see that there are possibilities of combination far more numerous than we are apt to suppose. There is proved to us the need for greatly enlarging those stock-notions which are so firmly established in us by daily observations of sur rounding arrangements and occurrences.
We might, indeed, even if limited to the evidence which our own society at the present time supplies, greatly inci-ease the plasticity of our conceptions, did we contemplate the facts as they really are. Could we nationally, as well as individu ally, " see ourselves as others see us," we might find at home seeming contradictions, sufficient to show us that what we think necessarily-connected traits are by no means necessarily connected. We might learn from our own institutions, and books, and journals, and debates, that while there are certain constant relations among social phenomena, they are not the relations commonly supposed to be constant; and that when, from some conspicuous characteristic we infer certain other characteristics, we may be quite wrong. To aid ourselves in perceiving this, let us, varying a somewhat trite mode of rep resentation, ' consider what might be said of us by an inde pendent observer living in the far future— supposing his state ments translated into our cumbrous language.
" Though the diagrams used for teaching make every child aware that many thousands of years ago the Earth's orbit began to recede from its limit of greatest excentricity; and though all are familiar with the consequent fact that the glacial period, which has so long made a large part of the north ern hemisphere uninhabitable, has passed its climax; yet it is not universally known that in some regions, the retreat of gla ciers has lately made accessible, tracts long covered. Amid moraines and under vast accumulations of detritus, have been found here ruins, there semi-fossilized skeletons, and in some SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 12?
places even records, which, by a marvellous concurrence of favourable conditions, have been so preserved that parts of them remain legible. Just as fossil cephalopods, turned up by our automatic quarry ing-engines, are sometimes so perfect that drawings of them are made with the sepia taken from their own ink-bags; so here, by a happy chance, there have come down to us, from a long-extinct race of men, those actual secretions of their daily life, which furnish colouring matter for a picture of them. By great perseverance our explorers have discovered the key to their imperfectly-developed lan guage; and in course of years have been able to put together facts yielding us faint ideas of the strange peoples who lived in the northern hemisphere during the last pre-glacial period. "A report just issued refers to a time called by these.peo ples the middle of the nineteenth century of their era; and it concerns a nation of considerable interest to us — the English. Though until now no traces of this ancient nation were known to exist, yet there survived the names of certain great men it produced — one a poet whose range of imagination and depth of insight are said to have exceeded those of all who went before him; the other, a man of science, of whom, profound as we may suppose in many ways, we know definitely this, that to all nations then living, and that have since lived, he taught how this Universe is balanced. What kind of people the English were, and what kind of civilization they had, have thus always been questions exciting curiosity. The facts disclosed by this report, are scarcely like those antici pated. Search was first made for traces of these great men, who, it was supposed, would be conspicuously com memorated. Little was found, however. It did, indeed, ap pear that the last of them, who revealed to mankind the constitution of the heavens had received a name of honour like that which they gave to a successful trader who pre sented an address to their monarch; and besides a tree planted in his memory, a small statue to their great poet had been put up in one of their temples, where, however, it was almost lost among the many and large monuments to their fighting chiefs. Not that commemorative structures of magnitude were never erected by the English. Our explorers discovered traces of a gigantic one, in which, apparently, persons of dis- 128 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
tinction and deputies from all nations were made to take part in honouring some being — man he can scarcely have been. For it is difficult to conceive that any man could have had a worth transcendent enough to draw from them such extreme homage, when they thought so little of those by whom their name as a race has been saved from oblivion. Their dis tribution of monumental honours was, indeed, in all respects remarkable. To a physician named Jenner, who, by a mode of mitigating the ravages of a horrible disease, was said to have rescued many thousands from death, they erected a memorial statue in one of their chief public places. After some years, however, repenting them of giving to this statue so conspicuous a position, they banished it to a far corner of one of their suburban gardens, frequented chiefly by children and nursemaids; and in its place, they erected a statue to a great leader of their fighters — one Napier, who had helped them to conquer and keep down certain weaker races. The reporter does not tell us whether this last had been instru mental in destroying as many lives as the first had saved; but he remarks — ' I could not cease wondering at this strange substitution among a people who professed a religion of peace.' This does not seem to have been an act out of har mony with their usual acts: quite the contrary. The records show that to keep up the remembrance of a great victory gained over a neighbouring nation, they held for many years an annual banquet, much in the spirit of the commemorative scalp-dances of still more barbarous peoples; and there was never wanting a priest to ask on the banquet, a blessing from one they named the God of love. In some respects, indeed, their code of conduct seems not to have advanced beyond, but to have gone back from, the code of a still more ancient peo ple from whom their creed was derived. One of the laws of this ancient people was. k an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; ' but sundry laws of the English, especially those con cerning acts that interfei-ed with some so-called sports of their ruling classes, inflicted penalties which imply that their prin ciple had become ' a leg for an eye, and an arm for a tooth.' The relations of their creed to the creed of this ancient people, are, indeed, difficult to understand. They had at one time cruelly persecuted this ancient people — Jews they were called SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 129 — because that particular modification of the Jewish religion which they, the English, nominally adopted, was one which the Jews would not adopt. And yet, marvellous to relate, while they tortured the Jews for not agreeing with them, they substantially agreed with the Jews. Not only, as above instanced, in the law of retaliation did they outdo the Jews, instead of obeying the quite-opposite principle of the teacher they worshipped as divine, but they obeyed the Jewish law, and disobeyed this divine teacher, in other ways — as in the rigid observance of every seventh day, which he had deliber ately discountenanced. Though they were angry with those who did not nominally believe in Christianity (which was the name of their religion), yet they ridiculed those who really believed in it; for some few people among them, nicknamed Quakers, who aimed to carry out Christian precepts instead of Jewish precepts, they made butts for their jokes. Nay, more; their substantial adhesion to the creed they professedly re pudiated, was clearly demonstrated by this, that in each of their temples they fixed up in some conspicuous place, the ten commandments of the Jewish religion, while they rarely, if ever, fixed up the two Christian commandments given instead of them. ' And yet,' says the reporter, after dilating on these strange facts, ' though the English were greatly given to mis sionary enterprises of all kinds, and though I sought diligently among the records of these, I could find no trace of a society for converting the English people from Judaism to Chris tianity.' This mention of their missionary enterprises introduces other remarkable anomalies. Being anxious to get adherents to this creed which they adopted in name but not in fact, they sent out men to various parts of the world to propagate it — one part, among others, being that subjugated territory above named. There the English missionaries taught the gentle precepts of their faith; and there the officers em ployed by their government exemplified these precepts: one of the exemplifications being that, to put down a riotous sect, they took fifty out of sixty-six who had surrendered, and, without any trial, blew them from the guns, as they called it — tied them to the mouths of cannon and shattered their bodies to pieces. And then, curiously enough, having thus taught and thus exemplified their religion, they expressed 10 130 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
great surprise at the fact that the only converts their mis sionaries could obtain among- these people, were hypocrites and men of characters so bad that no one would employ them.
" Nevertheless, these semi-civilized English had their good points. Odd as must have been the delusion which made them send out missionaries to inferior races, who were always ill used by their sailors and settlers, and eventually extirpated, yet on finding that they spent annually a million of their money in missionary and allied enterprises, we cannot but see some generosity of motive in them. Their country was clotted over with hospitals and almshouses, and institutions for taking care of the diseased and indigent; and their towns were overrun with philanthropic societies, which, without saying anything about the wisdom of their policy, clearly implied good feeling. They expended in the legal- relief of their poor as much as, and at one time more than, a tenth of the revenue raised for all national purposes. One of their remarkable deeds was, that to get rid of a barbarous institu tion of those times, called slavery, under which, in their colonies, certain men held complete possession of others, their goods, their bodies, and practically even their lives, they paid down twenty millions of their money. And a not less strik ing proof of sympathy was that, during a war between two neighbouring nations, they contributed large sums, and sent out many men and women, to help in taking care of the wounded and assisting the ruined.
" The facts brought to light by these explorations are thus extremely instructive. Now that, after tens of thousands of years of discipline, the lives of men in society have become harmonious — now that character and conditions have little by little grown into adjustment, we are apt to suppose that con- gruity of institutions, conduct, sentiments, and beliefs, is nec essary. We think it almost impossible that, in the same so ciety, there should be daily practised principles of quite opposite kinds; and it seems to us scarcely credible that men should have, or profess to have, beliefs with which their acts are absolutely irreconcilable. Only that extremely-rare dis order, insanity, could explain the conduct of one who, know ing that fire burns, nevertheless thrusts his hand into the flame; and to insanity also we should ascribe the behaviour SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 131 of one who, professing1 to think a certain course morally right, pursued the opposite course. Yet the revelations yielded by these ancient remains, show us that societies could hold to gether notwithstanding what we should think a chaos of con duct and of opinion. Nay more, they show us that it was pos sible for men to profess one thing1 and do another, without betraying a consciousness of inconsistency. One piece of evi dence is curiously to the point. Among their multitudinous agencies for - beneficent purposes, the English had a 'Naval and Military Bible Society ' — a society for distributing copies of their sacred book among their professional fighters on sea and land; and this society was subscribed to, and chiefly man aged by, leaders among these fighters. It is, indeed, suggested by the reporter, that for these classes of men they had an ex purgated edition of their sacred book, from which the injunc tions to ' return good for evil,' and to ' turn the cheek to the smiter,' were omitted. It may have been so; but, even if so, we have a remarkable instance of the extent to which convic tion and conduct may be diametrically opposed, without any apparent perception that they are opposed. We habitually assume that a distinctive trait of humanity is rational, and that rationality involves consistency; yet here we find an ex tinct race (unquestionably human and regarding itself as ra tional) in which the inconsistency of conduct and professed belief was as great as can well be imagined. Thus we are warned against supposing that what now seems to us natural was always natural. We have our eyes opened to an error which has been getting confirmed among us for these thou sands of years, that social phenomena and the phenomena of human nature necessarily hang- together in the ways we see around us."
Before summing up what has been said under the title of " Subjective difficulties — Intellectual," I may remark that this group of difficulties is separated from the group of " Objective Difficulties," dealt with in the last chapter, rather for the sake of convenience than because the division can be strictly main tained. In contemplating obstacles to interpretation — phe nomena being on the one side and intelligence on the other — we may, as we please, ascribe failure either to the inadequacy 132 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
of the intelligence or to the involved nature of the phenomena. An obstacle is subjective or objective according to our point of view. But the obstacles above set forth arise in so direct a way from conspicuous defects of human intelligence, that they may, more appropriately than the preceding ones, be classed as sub jective.
So regarding them, then, we have to beware, in the first place, of this tendency to automorphic interpretation; or rather, hav ing no alternative but to conceive the natures of other men in terms furnished by our own feelings and ideas, we have to be ware of the mistakes likely hence to arise — discounting our con clusions as well as we can. Further, we must be on our guard against the two opposite prevailing errors respecting Man, and against the sociological errors flowing from them: we have to get rid of the two beliefs that human nature is unchangeable, and that it is easily changed; and we have, instead, to become famil iar with the conception of a human nature that is changed in the slow succession of generations by social discipline. Another ob stacle not to be completely surmounted by any, and to be partial ly surmounted by but few, is that resulting from the want of intellectual faculty complex enough to grasp the extremely- complex phenomena which Sociology deals with. There can be no complete conception of a sociological fact, considered as a component of Social Science, unless there are present to thought all its essential factors; and the power of keeping them in mind with due clearness, as well as in their proper propor tions and combinations, has yet to be reached. Then beyond this difficulty, only to be in a measure overcome, there is the further difficulty, not however by any means so great, of en larging the conceptive capacity; so that it may admit the widely-divergent and extremely-various combinations of social phenomena. That rigidity of conception produced in us by ex periences of our own social life in our own time, has to be ex changed for a plasticity that can receive with ease, and accept as natural, the countless combinations of social phenomena utterly unlike, and sometimes exactly opposite to, those we are familiar with. Without such a plasticity there can be no proper understanding of co-existing social states allied to our own, still less of past social states, or social states of alien civ ilized races and races in early stages of development.
CHAPTER VII.
SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES — EMOTIONAL.
THAT passion perverts judgment, is an observation suffi ciently trite; but the more general observation of which it should form part, that emotion of every kind and degree dis turbs the intellectual balance, is not trite, and even where recognized, is not duly taken into account. Stated in full, the truth is that no propositions, save those which are absolutely indifferent to us, immediately and remotely, can be contem plated without likings and repugnances affecting the opinions we form about them. There are two modes in which pur con clusions are thus falsified. Excited feelings make us wrongly estimate probability; and they also make us wrongly estimate importance. Some cases will show this.
All who are old enough, remember the murder committed by Miiller on the North London Eailway some % years ago. Most persons, too, will remember that for some time after wards there was universally displayed, a dislike to travelling by railway in company with a single other passenger — sup posing him to be unknown. Though, up to the date of the murder in question, countless journeys had been made by two strangers together in the same compartment without evil being suffered by either — though, after the death of Mr. Briggs, the probabilities were immense against the occurrence of a similar fate to another person similarly placed; yet there was habitually aroused a fear that would have been appro priate only had the danger been considerable. The amount of feeling excited was quite incommensurate with the risk. While the chance was a million to one against evil, the antic ipation of evil was as strong as though the chance had been a thousand to one or a hundred to one. The emotion of dread 134 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
destroyed the balance of judgment, and a rational estimate of likelihood became impossible; or rather, a rational estimate of likelihood if formed was wholly inoperative on conduct.
Another instance was thrust on my attention during1 the small-pox epidemic, which a while since so unaccountably spread, after twenty years of compulsory vaccination. A lady living in London, sharing in the general trepidation, was ex pressing her fears to me. I asked her whether, if she lived in a town of twenty thousand inhabitants and heard of one per son dying of small-pox in the course of a week, she would be much alarmed. Naturally she answered, no; and her fears were somewhat calmed when I pointed out that, taking the whole population of London, and the number of deaths per week from small-pox, this was about the rate of mortality at that time caused by it. Yet in other minds, as in her mind, panic had produced an entire incapacity for forming a ra tional estimate of the peril. Nay, indeed, so perturbing was the emotion, that an unusual amount of danger to life was imagined at a time when the danger to life was smaller than usual. For the returns showed that the mortality from all causes was rather below the average than above it. While the evidence proved that the risk of death was less than com mon, this wave of feeling which spread through society pro duced an irresistible conviction that it was uncommonly great.
These examples show in a clear way, what is less clearly shown of examples hourly occurring, that the associated ideas constituting a judgment, are much affected in their relations „ to one another by the co-existing emotion. Two ideas will cohere feebly or strongly, according as the correlative nervous states involve a feeble or a strong discharge along the lines of nervous connexion; and hence a large wave of feeling, imply ing as it does a voluminous discharge in all directions, ren ders such two ideas more coherent. This is so even when the feeling is not relevant to the ideas, as is shown by the vivid recollections of trivialities seen on occasions of great excite ment; and it is still more so when the feeling is relevant — that is, when the proposition formed by the ideas is itself the cause of excitement. Much of the emotion tends, in such case, to discharge itself through the channels connecting the ele ments of the proposition; and predicate follows subject with SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL.. 135 a persistence out of all proportion to that which is justified by experience.
We see this with emotions of all orders. How greatly ma ternal affection falsifies a mother's opinion of her child, every one observes. How those in love fancy superiorities where none are visible to unconcerned spectators, and remain blind to defects that are conspicuous to all others, is matter of com mon remark. Note, too, how, in the holder of a lottery-ticket, hope generates a belief utterly at variance with probability as numerically estimated; or how an excited inventor confi dently expects a success which calm judges see to be impossi ble. That " the wish is father to the thought," here so obvi ously true, is true more or less in nearly all cases where there is a wish. And in other cases, as where horror is aroused by the fancy of something supernatural, we see that in the ab sence of wish to believe, there may yet arise belief if violent emotion goes along with the ideas that are joined together.