Gregariousness

“ Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher apes, is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has passed within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to a nearly cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him. He is not, as Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST gregarious beast. Why should his desire for God be regarded as the overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home, town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at hand to glut it? ”

“ The instincts of pugnacity and gregariousness also have an important social reference; and, different as they seem at first sight, they yet contribute in almost equal measure to the foundation of communities. Man is naturally the most gregarious of animals. "To be alone is one of the greatest of evils for him. ”

“ Not only do men and women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness and monotony of existence; but the gregarious men and women who have no home-life flee to the bright and clattering public house in a vain attempt to express their gregariousness. ”

“ The gregarious individual must obey the master leader on pain of death. In gregarious life the whole pack attacks the disobedient individual for challenging the chief, king, priest, the god-man, the lord of the horde. ”

“ Whilst none of the great anthropoids has advanced socially beyond family life, man is everywhere (with few and doubtful exceptions) gregarious—living at the lowest grade in tribes or bands of about fifty; and the gregarious life is one of the most important conditions of his peculiar development. Possibly, he may originally have been more gregarious than any extant anthropoid, in spite of his not needing society for defence, and of its seeming to be for so large a frugivorous animal inconvenient in relation to nutrition. ”

“ The functions of the gregarious habit in a species may broadly be defined as offensive or defensive, or both. Whichever of these modes it has assumed in the animal under consideration, it will be correlated with effects which will be divisible into two classes—the general char­ac­ter­is­tics of the social animal, and the special char­ac­ter­is­tics of the form of social habit possessed by the given animal. The dog and the sheep illustrate well the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the two simple forms of gre­gar­i­ous­ness—offensive and defensive. ”

“ You have no grudge against your position, nor any dread of it. I doubt if you have ever wittingly set your faces to the mist since you grew greybeards; the desire of knowledge and the fear of the unknown died gradually with that growth. ”

“ Revived by the fire, we were enabled to endure the next bit of martyrdom, an hour upon the low sofa, so many yards from the nursery hearth, our books in our hands, while our cold breakfast was preparing.’ What a changed life have the little folks of to-day! But, ah me! this name of Gregory to childhood. ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones ...’ the son’s mixture made the name of Gregory abhorred in every nursery, and all the father’s good deeds are forgotten. ”

“ Now, we have already seen that a gregarious animal, unless his society is perfectly organized, must be subject to lasting and fierce conflict between experience and herd suggestion.14 It is natural, therefore, to assume that the manifestations of mental instability are not diseases of the individual in the ordinary sense at all, but inevitable consequences of man’s biological history and exact measures of the stage now reached of his assimilation into the gregarious life. ”

“ But if the young inherit a tendency to imitate certain actions of their parents, and if there is among the members of a gregarious species such instinctive imitation as shall tend to keep them [191] gregarious, we have here a social factor in animal life of no slight importance. ”

“ The gregarious tendency in man, according to Mr. Trotter, results in five characteristics which he displays in common with all gregarious animals.
1. “He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental.”21 The same urge which drives the buffalo into the herd and man into the city requires on the part of the latter a sense of spiritual identification with the herd. Man is never so much at home as when on the band wagon. ”

“ The converging currents—decadence and barbarism—meet and join in Gregory's powerful personality. He embodies the intellectual decadence which has lost all independent wish for knowledge and has dropped the whole round of the mind's mortal interests; which has seized upon the near, the tangible, and the ominous in theology till it has rooted religion in the fear of hell. ”

“ In that vast human bulk that sprawls over every continent, the primitive [9] ferocity still exists, veiled perhaps under familiar livery and uniform, but untamed by centuries of training. It is this gloomy mass, saturated with superstitious cowardice, savage with the selfish instinct of greed, or dull with the languor of gorged and exhausted passion, that deliberates not in words or thought, but in some impenetrable free-masonry of instinct like that which beggars illustrate when they silently display their deformities and mutilations as the most eloquent appeals. ”

“ A grim, shuddering waste, made grimmer and more terrible by strange, stray specks of humanity, that, seen in the falling sunlight seemed rather distorted creations of fancy than actual human beings; from stone to stone they pace, stepping with a peculiar, halting, laborious gait, and looking sullenly earthward as if their eyes were chained to the hateful, barren shore and the looking upward were death. ”

“ Avoiding as I scrupulously did the range of apartments inhabited by the unfortunate Lady Greville, several years had passed since I had beheld her; and sometimes when I had been bewildered in the reveries of my own desolate heart, began to doubt her very existence. Yet this unseen being who appeared to occupy no place in the scale of human nature, this unconscious creature who now dwelt in my remembrance like the unreal mockery of a dream, presented an insuperable obstacle to my happiness. ”

“ In appreciating a man's opinions and his mental clarity or murkiness, one should consider his temperament and the temper of his time. Gregory was constrained as well as driven by temperamental yearnings and aversions, aggravated by the humour of the century that produced Benedict of Nursia and was contemplating gloomily the Empire's ruin and decay, now more acutely borne in upon the consciousness of thoughtful people than in the age of Augustine. ”

“ He shouted to her in “English, crying, “Stop; I won’t hurt you!” He shouted in an Indian dialect of which scraps came to him at his need. And then, breathless, he gave over calling.
She had turned her face a little, and he was near enough to hazard the guess that she was frightened, and that at every shout of his the fear of him but leaped the higher in the throbbing breast under the bearskin. ”

“ These wretched beings were described to be in the lowest state of moral and physical degradation, with scarcely rags to cover them, food barely sufficient to keep them alive, and working eighteen or nineteen hours a day, without being permitted any relaxation, or even the privilege of going to church on Sunday. ”

“ Packed about the long tables were young faces flushed with hope or grey with despair; middle-aged faces which expressed excitement or indifference; old, old faces, scarred and lined and seamed, where avarice, selfishness, cruelty, dishonesty crossed and recrossed till human semblance was literally blotted out. ”

“ So with Gregory the patristic limitation of intellectual interest, indifference to physical phenomena, and acceptance of the miraculous are no longer merely thoughts and opinions consciously entertained; they make part of his nature. ”

“ The world is full of pain and terror; the great law of nature is: Eat or be eaten. I realised for the first time that every hedgerow is a horrid den of suffering and fear. Cruelty is Nature's name, Margaret. ”

“ In short, gregarious life depends on stature, strength, means of defence, kind and distribution of food, and mode of propagation. Derived from necessity, this habit of life in common creates a solidarity which is not mechanical and external, but psychological: the sight, the touch, the smell of his companions constitute in each individual a part of his own consciousness, of which he feels the want in its absence ”

“ Not only does he associate the mother with the milk but her very presence brings him comfort, even when he is not hungry. It is within the first few months of life that the child shows that he is a gregarious [1] animal,—gregarious in the sense that he is unhappy away from others. ”

“ A curse falls readily and not without a certain natural grace from Gregory's lips; it is the oiled feather with which he touches every difficult knot encountered in life. From time to time he glances toward the open kitchen door, from which issue the far-flaring light of the fire and familiar voices, with savoury smells of cookery that come to his nostrils like pleasant messengers. ”

“ Greville, with her exquisite good-nature and her innocent fatuity, is embalmed for me; so that she becomes in that light a truly shining specimen, almost the image or compendium of a whole side of a social order. ”

“ They may not see, or know that they see, beauties which amaze the wanderer who visits their wilderness, but they feel them as he never can, and feed on them as he cannot feed. Their senses, not dulled by daily close contact with thousands of indifferent and similar objects, nor by the ceaseless chatter of their fellow-beings, see sights and hear sounds altogether beyond the perceptions of gregarious man. ”

“ They had now reached the house, and did ample justice to the supper awaiting them.
Between meals people can be very sentimental, morbid, and tragical. They can stare at life's deep mysteries and shudder or scoff, sigh or rejoice, according to their moral conditions. They can even grow cold with dread, as did Gregory, realizing that he had "lost his vantage-ground," his good start in the endless career. ”

“ Every sense was outraged by the accumulation of horrors that combined to disgust and horrify. Hunger, nakedness, thirst, heat, damp, and cold, all combined to swell the catalogue of their miseries and their woes. ”

“ Even the so-called gregarious instinct may very probably be the product of the struggle for existence, which, in turn, is the product of scarcity—the advantage of acting in groups being the selective agency in the development of this instinct. ”

“ Gregory, lost in bitter musings, in his careful threadbare clothes, rather unpleasantly hot, hopelessly bewildered as to his place in the universe, conscious of virtue, equipped with information, desiring neither pity nor affection, but only work and due recognition, was a sad blot upon nature. ”

“ Even her daily need of food, which was healthy though not excessive, disgusted him to witness,—he who was out of touch with all wholesome appetites of earth, whose distorted nature sought an alien rest and solace. ”

“ Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of human nature, too often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and crime, occur most commonly at the end of the year, and are frequently associated, as I have had occasion to point out, with one or other of the agricultural seasons, especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. ”

“ Now the blessed Gregory says, that their desolation has some likeness to all perverse men, who exult in evil deeds, and rejoice in the worst things. Such men the merciful Lord bewails daily, who then the perishing townsfolk with tears bemoaned. ”

“ He has displayed a very proper and becoming spirit with great dignity, moderation, and good sense. All the rest is a mass of impotent fury and revolting vulgarity and impertinence, without genius or argument or end and object—mere abuse in the coarsest and stupidest shape. ”

“ Gregory, to rejoice at the sickness or misfortune of an obstinate and scandalous sinner, and even to desire that he may fall into sickness or poverty, in order that he may cease to lead a wicked life, or at least to scandalize others. ”

“ But then, while we are under his spell, it is impossible to consider these graver interests; gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and what he does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious and good-humoured zest that we sympathise and he makes us happy. ”

“ Nothing as he looked with narrowing eye far to east and west, north and south, but a vast, silent monotone of plain that would seem to conceal nothing, as open under the bright rays of the sun as the palm of a man's hand, an unsmiling, grave-faced, hypocritical thing which hid and held from him all that he wanted in the world. ”

“ One could conceive of a man who had never got his full growth physically, who was stunted mentally as well, a half-crazed, half-wild being, who fled here, who subsisted in a state little short of savagery, who crept through the moonlit forests subtly stirred by the weird moon-madness, who hunted like the other wild things. ”

“ The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gre­gar­i­ous­ness is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance, but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activities. We have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as imperative and just as {133} char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly social as those of any other gregarious animal. ”

“ If mistaken sexagenarians could divine the effect that tired eyes smiling from under false hair, aged throats clasped with collars of pearls, and rheumatic old ribs braced into a semblance of girlish grace, produce on the men for whose benefit such adornments have been arranged, reform would quickly follow. There is something absolutely uncanny in the illusion. ”