Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/110

 102 BOOK REVIEWS

achieved by Boer armies against the British as well as by the Japanese against the Russians; it is the nation which has its back to the wall without a possibility of retreat that carries the day. It is from energies that have been drawn away from the instinct of self-preservation that the national idea gains additional force.

Chapter IV deals with the group spirit which in the sense the author uses the word is a translation of the French 'esprit de corps'. 'In considering the mental lile of a patriot army as the type of a highly organised group, we saw that group self-consciousness is a factor of very great importance — that it is a principal condition of the elevation of its collective mental life and behaviour above the level of the merely impulsive violence and impulsive fickleness of the mob' (p. 62). Here we seem to be getting near to the pith of the whole argument; we shall get an answer to the question which has been indicated by the author on the principal problem to be solved in his book; that the crowd (group) both elevates and debases the individual. The answer we get is that the 'group spirit plays an important part in raising the intellectual level of the group, for it leads each member deliberately to subordinate his own judgment and opinion to that of the whole, and in any properly organised group this collective opinion will be superior to that of the average individual because in its formation the best minds. . . will be of predominant influence ' (p. 63). We remember that the crowd was said to debase its members because the more archaic impulses which are common to all its members obtain the mastery over the sublimated and individualised products of civilisation, and we also know that the group self-consciousness can only be formed after the pattern of the consciousness of kind, which again goes back to organic sources. The spirit of the crowd and that of the group thus go back to a common origin, and if one of them is said to ' degrade ' the in- dividual while the other 'elevates' him, this answer is only arguing in a vicious circle and at the best serves to show how the introduction of an ' ethical ' point of view is apt to mar all scientific effort. There is a 'higher' and a 'lower' form of nearly all things, for instance, military discipline (p. 65) ; which fatally reminds us of the attitude of tfie Bakairi with whom the word kura means ' we ' and ' good ', while kura-pa means 'not we, they' and 'bad'.

It is rather remarkable to hear that intolerance of the members of other groups is a sign of cultural advance ('to the uncultivated any society is better than none ' p. 6g), for in that case savages and ani- mals are in advance of even the most exclusive of Tories. The idea that the complex structure of Australian society is simply due to the satisfaction and pleasure derived from group consciousness, a sort of playful variation of the group ideal, is a view which is hardly hkely to commend itself to ethnologists (p. 68). McDougall is undoubtedly right

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