galton.org 47
Gregarious and Slavish Instincts
47
by festivities in the asylums. On the other hand, the great teachers of all
creeds have made seclusion a prominent religious exercise. In short, by
enforcing celibacy, fasting, and solitude, they have done their best
towards making men mad, and they have always largely succeeded in
inducing morbid mental conditions among their followers.
Floods of light are thrown upon various incidents of devotee life, and
also upon the disgusting and not otherwise intelligible character of the
sanctimonious scoundrel, by the everyday experiences of the madhouse.
No professor of metaphysics, psychology, or religion can claim to know
the elements of what he teaches, unless he is acquainted with the ordinary
phenomena of idiocy, madness, and epilepsy. He must study the
manifestations of disease and congenital folly, as well as those of sanity
and high intellect.
GREGARIOUS
AND
SLAVISH INSTINCTS.
I propose in this chapter to discuss a curious and apparently anomalous
group of base moral instincts and intellectual deficiencies, that are innate
rather than acquired, by tracing their analogies in the world of brutes and
examining the conditions through which they have been evolved. They are
the slavish aptitudes from which the leaders of men are exempt, but which
are characteristic elements in the disposition of ordinary persons. The vast
majority of persons of our race have a natural tendency to shrink from the
responsibility of standing and acting alone they exalt the vox populi even
when they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the vox
Dei, and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority, and custom. The
intellectual deficiencies corresponding to these moral flaws are shown by
the rareness of free and original thought as compared with the frequency
and readiness with which men accept the opinions of those in authority as
binding on their judgment. I shall endeavour to prove that the slavish
aptitudes in man are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature, which
itself is a result of the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of
the forms of his subsequent civilisation. My argument will be, that
gregarious brute
