above the sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, the soul of man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflicting impulses: the desire to assert his individual differences, the desire for distinction, and his terror of isolation. he wants to stand out, but not too far out, and, on the contrary, he wants to merge himself with a group, with some larger body, but not altogether. through all the things of life runs this tortuous compromise, men follow the fashions but resent ready-made uniforms on every plane of their being. the disposition to form aggregations and to imagine aggregations is part of the incurable nature of man; it is one of the great natural forces the statesman must utilise, and against which he must construct effectual defences. the study of the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men’s sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a large proportion of their conduct and personal policy, is the legitimate definition of sociology.

now the sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer themselves is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that chances to be in the air at the time. men and women may vary greatly both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be made. the “natural” social reference of a man is probably to some rather vaguely conceived tribe, as the “natural” social reference of a dog is to a pack. but just as the social reference of a dog may be educated until the reference to a pack is completely replaced by a reference to an owner, so on his higher plane of educability the social reference of the civilised man undergoes the most remarkable transformations. but the power and scope of his imagination and the need he has of response sets limits to this process. a highly intellectualised mature mind may refer for its data very consistently to ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable as god, so comprehensive as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in things. i write “may,” but i doubt if this exaltation of reference is ever permanently sustained. comte, in his positive polity, exposes his soul with great freedom, and the curious may trace how, while he professes and quite honestly intends to refer himself always to his “greater being” humanity, he narrows constantly to his projected “western republic” of civilised men, and quite frequently to the minute indefinite body of positivist subscribers. and the history of the christian church, with its development of orders and cults, sects and dissents, the history of fashionable society with its cliques and sets and every political history with its cabals and inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of men to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves, but which still does not strain and escape their imaginative grasp.

the statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order of the world. he must be a sociologist; he must study the whole science of aggregations in relation to that world state to which his reason and his maturest thought direct him. he must lend himself to the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.

he will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in such matters, that the same man in different moods and on different occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith, not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that the more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the state maker’s point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as what it implicitly repudiates. the natural man does not feel he is aggregating at all, unless he aggregates against something. he refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. the tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. the anti-idea, it would seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of the human mind. when we think of the class a as desirable, we think of not-a as undesirable. the two things are as inevitably connected as the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our little fingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not, comes down halfway. all real working gods, one may remark, all gods that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attempt to universalise the idea of god trails dualism and the devil after it as a moral necessity.

when we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial sociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in the minds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. for example, all sorts of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfaces of my botanist’s mind. he has a strong feeling for systematic botanists as against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewd and evil scoundrels in this relation, but he has a strong feeling for all botanists, and, indeed, all biologists, as against physicists, and those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he regards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all who profess what is called science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoral scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all educated men as against the working man, whom he regards as a cheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel in this relation; but so soon as the working man is comprehended together with those others, as englishmen — which includes, in this case, i may remark, the scottish and welsh — he holds them superior to all other sorts of european, whom he regards, &c. . . .

now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangements of the sympathies one of the chief vices of human thought, due to its obsession by classificatory suggestions. [footnote: see chapter the first, section 5, and the appendix.] the necessity for marking our classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessive contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it with implications beyond its legitimate content. there is no feat of irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way; there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. the seventh sons of seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy persons; all people born in ireland have vivid imaginations and all englishmen are clods; all hindoos are cowardly liars; all curly-haired people are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energetic and wicked, and all frenchmen eat frogs. such stupid generalisations have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by great numbers of sane, respectable people. and when the class is one’s own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which one refers one’s own activities, then the disposition to divide all qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one’s own class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.

it is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such generalisations with suspicion; it is part of the training of the utopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are utopists, to mingle something very like animosity with that suspicion. for crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.