Part 8

In the first place, the bees of the same swarm do not look alike or act alike except superficially; at least I have not so observed them. Study the heads or the feet of any two bees under a glass, and you shall find as much variety as in the heads or feet of any other two creatures of the same kind, whether brute or human. The lines of difference run smaller, to be sure; but they are always there. In action also the bees are variable; they do marvelously wise things at one moment, or marvelously stupid things at another; but they do not all and always do the same thing under the same circumstances, for when I have experimented with selected bees from the same hive I have noticed very different results; which leads me to suspect that even here I am dealing with individuals rather than with detached fragments of a swarm. It is hard, for example, to make a trap so simple that an imprisoned bee will find his way out of it; but when by great ingenuity you do at last make a trap so very simple that it seems any creature with legs must walk out by the open door, perhaps one bee in five will do the trick; while the other four wait patiently until they die for more simplicity.

Again, while your eye often sees unity of action among the wild creatures, neither your reading nor your own reason will ever reveal a scrap of positive evidence that there is in nature any such convenient thing (humanly convenient, that is, for explanations) as a swarm or flock instinct; though, like the mythical struggle for existence, we are forever hearing about it or building theories upon it. So far as we know anything about instinct, it is neither collective nor incorporeal. It is, to use the definition of Mark Hopkins, which is as good as another and beautifully memorable, “a propensity prior to experience and independent of instruction.” And the only needful addition to this high-sounding definition is, that it is a “propensity” lodged in an individual, every time. It is not and cannot be lodged in a swarm or a hive; you must either put it into each of two bees or else put it between them, leaving them both untouched. In other words, the swarm instinct has logically no abiding-place and no reality; it is a castle in the air with no solid foundation to rest on.

On its practical or pragmatic side also the theory is a failure, since the things bees are said to do in obedience to an incorporeal swarm instinct are more naturally and more reasonably explained by other causes. Bees swarm, apparently, in the lead or under the influence of individuals; and it needs only a pair of eyes to discover that there are plenty of individual laggards and blunderers in the process. They grow angry not all at once, but successively; not because a swarm instinct impels them to anger, but because one irritated bee gives off a pungent odor or raises a militant buzzing, and the others smell the odor or hear the buzzing and are inflamed by it, each through his own senses and by the working of his own motives. On a hot day you will see a few bees fanning air into the hive with their wings, and when these grow weary others take their places; but if it were a swarm instinct that impelled them, you would see all the bees fanning or all sweltering at the same moment. As for the honey-making instinct, on any early-spring day you will find a few bees working in the nearest greenhouse, while the others, which are supposed to be governed by the same collective impulse, are comfortably torpid in the hive or else eating honey faster than these enterprising ones can make it.

I judge, therefore, that the communistic bees have some individual notions, and any show of individuality is so at variance with the common-impulse theory that it seems to illustrate Spencer’s definition of tragedy, which is, “a theory slain by a fact.” In short, bees have our common social instinct highly developed, or overdeveloped, and possibly they have also, like all the higher orders, a stronger or weaker instinct of imitation; but these are very different matters, more natural and more consistent with the facts than is the alleged swarm instinct.

A scientific friend, the most observant ornithologist I have ever met, has just offered an interesting explanation of the flock or herd phenomena we are here considering. He finds little evidence of a swarm instinct, as distinct from our familiar social instinct; but he has often marveled at the wing drill of birds, and has twice witnessed an alarm or warning of danger spread silently among a herd of scattered beasts; and he accounts for the observed facts by the supposition that the minds (or what corresponds to the minds) of the lower orders are often moved not from within, but from without—that is, not by instinct or by sense impressions, not by what they or others of their kind may see or hear, but by some external and unknown influence. My caribou rushed away, he thinks, and my incoming plover turned as one bird from my decoys, because a warning impulse fell upon them at a moment when they were in danger, but knew it not; and they obeyed it, as they obey all their impulses, without conscious thought or knowledge of what they are doing or why they are doing it.

Here is some suggestion of a very modern psychology which is inclined to regard the mind as a thought-receiving rather than as a thought-producing instrument, and with that I have some sympathy; but here is also a rejuvenation of the incorporeal swarm instinct and other fantastic or romantic notions of animals which preclude observation. If the anima of a bird or beast is so constituted that it can receive impulses from a mysterious and unknown source, what is to prevent it from receiving such silent impulses from another anima like itself? And why seek an unseen agent for the warning to my caribou or my plover when one of the creatures saw the danger and was enough moved by it to sound a mental tocsin?

The trouble with my friend’s explanation, and with all others I have thus far heard or read, is twofold. First, like the swarm-impulse theory, it really explains nothing, but avoids one mystery or difficulty by taking refuge in another. There was a Hindu philosopher who used to teach, after the manner of his school, that the earth stood fast because it rested on the back of a great elephant; which was satisfactory till a thoughtful child asked, “But the elephant, what does he stand on?” So when I see intelligent caribou or plover fleeing from an unsensed danger, and am told that they have received an impulse from without, I am bound to ask, “Where did that impulse come from, and who sent it?” For emotional impulses do not drop like rain from the clouds, or fall like apples from unseen trees; they must have their source in a living, intelligent being of some kind, who must feel the impulse before sending it to others. No other explanation is humanly comprehensible.

This leads to the second objection to the theory of external impulse, and to every other notion of a collective or incorporeal swarm instinct—namely, that it contradicts all the previous experience of the wild creature, or at least all educative experience, which lies plain and clear to our observation. To each bird and animal are given individual senses, individual wit and a personal anima; and each begins his mortal experience not in a great flock or herd, but always in solitary fashion, under the care and guidance of a mother animal that has a saving knowledge of a world in which the little one is a stranger. Thus, I watch the innocent fawn when it begins to follow the wary old doe, or the fledgling snipe as it leaves the nest under expert guidance, or the wonder-eyed cub coming forth from its den at the call of the gaunt old she-wolf. In each case I see a mother intelligently caring for her young, leading them to food, warding them from danger, calling them now to assemble or now to scatter; and before my eyes these ignorant youngsters quickly learn to adapt themselves to the mother’s ways and to obey her every signal. Sometimes I see them plainly when some manner of silent communication passes among them (something perhaps akin to that which passes when you catch a friend’s eye and send your thought or order to him across a crowded room), and it has even seemed to me, as recorded elsewhere in our observation of wolf and fox dens, that the young understand this silent communication more readily than they learn the meaning of audible cries expressive of food or danger.

Such is the wild creature’s earliest experience, his training to accommodate himself to the world, and to ways that wiser creatures of his own kind have found good in the world. When his first winter draws near he is led by his mother to join the herd or pack or migrating flock; and he is then ready not for some mysterious new herd or flock instinct, but for the same old signals that have served well to guide or warn him ever since he was born. I conclude, therefore, naturally and reasonably, that my caribou broke away and my incoming plover changed their flight because one of their number detected danger and sent forth a warning impulse, which the others obeyed promptly because they were accustomed to just such communications. There was nothing unnatural or mysterious or even new in the experience. So far as I can see or judge, there is no place or need for a collective herd or flock impulse, and the birds and beasts have no training or experience by which to interpret such an impulse if it fell upon them out of heaven.

Our human experience, moreover, especially that which befalls on the borderland of the subconscious world where the wild creatures mostly live, may give point and meaning to our natural philosophy. There are emotions, desires, impulses which may be conveyed by shouting; and there are others which may well be told without shouting, or even without words. A cheerful man radiates cheerfulness; a strong man, strength; a brave man, courage (we do not know to what extent or with what limitations); and a woman may be more irritated by a man who says nothing than by a man who says too much. These common daily trials may be as side-lights on the tremendous fact that love, fear, hate,—every intense emotion is a force in itself, a force to be reckoned with, apart from the cry or the look by which it is expressed; that all such emotions project themselves outward; and that possibly, or very probably, there is some definite medium to convey them, as an unknown medium which we call “ether” conveys the waves of light.

It is true that we habitually receive such emotional impulses from others by means of our eyes or ears; but sometimes we apparently imbibe them through our skin, as Anthony Trollope said he learned Latin, and once in a way we receive them from another without knowing or thinking of the process at all. It is noteworthy that the most companionable people in the world are silent people, especially a silent friend, and that the silence of any man is invariably more eloquent than his speech. The silence of one man rests you like a melody; the silence of another bores you to yawning, perhaps because it is a “dead” silence; the quietude of a third excites your curiosity to such an extent that, for once in your life, you behave like a perfectly natural animal; that is, you go round the silent one, as it were, view him mentally from all sides, sniff at his opinions from leeward, whir your wings in his face like a sparrow, or stamp your foot at him like a rabbit—all this to stir him up and to uncover what interesting thing lies behind his silence. And why? Simply because every living man is silently, unconsciously projecting his real thought or feeling, and you are unconsciously understanding it or else making a vain conscious effort in that direction.

Such experiences are commonly confined to a room, to the circle of an open fire; but they are not limited by necessity to any narrow reach, since there is nothing in a wall to hinder a man’s love or hate from passing through, or in the air to check its far-going, or in the nature of another man to prevent its reception. The influence of one person’s unvoiced will or purpose or warning or summons upon another person at a distance, should it turn out more common than we now believe possible because of our habit of speech, would be nothing unnatural or mysterious, but rather a true working of the subconscious or animal mind, which had its own way of communication before ever speech was invented.

Whitman, who sometimes got hold of the tail end of philosophy (and who was wont to believe he could drag it out, like a trapped woodchuck, and whirl it around his head with barbaric whoops), was often seen at the burrow of this thought-transference doctrine:

These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they? Why are there men and women that while they are near me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank? Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? What is it that I interchange so suddenly with strangers? What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side? What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by and pause? What gives me to be free to woman’s and man’s good-will? what gives them to be free to mine?

Again, our familiar human experience may throw some clearer light than ever comes from the laboratory of animal psychologists upon the action of gregarious brutes in their so-called blind panics, when they are said to be governed by some extraneous or non-individual herd impulse. How such a theory originated is a puzzle to one who has closely observed animals in the open, since their panics are never “blind,” and their “extraneous” impulse may often be traced to an alarmed animal of their own kind, or even to an excited human being, whose emotions are animal-like both in their manifestation and in their irritating effect. A dog is more easily roused by human than by canine excitement. A frightened rider sends his fear or irresolution in exaggerated form into the horse beneath him. The herd of swine that ran down a steep place into the sea were possessed, I should say, not by exorcised demons, but by the hysteria received directly from some man or woman of the excited crowd in the immediate neighborhood. Panic is more infectious than any fever, and knows no barriers between brute and human. Indeed, in a frightened crowd in the Subway, in a theater where smoke appears, or in any other scene of emotional excitement, you may in a few minutes observe actions more panicky, more suggestive of a herd impulse (if there be such a fantastic thing in orderly nature), than can be seen in a whole lifetime of watching wild animals.

In my head at this moment is the vivid impression of a night when I was caught and carried away by a crowd of Italian socialists, twenty thousand frenzied men and a few ferocious women, that first eddied like a storm-tide about the great square under the cathedral at Milan, howling, shrieking, imprecating, and then poured tumultuously through choked streets to hurl paving-blocks at the innocent roof of the railroad station, as at a symbol of government. The roof was of glass, and the clattering smash of it seemed to get on the nerves of men, like the cry of sick-em! to an excited dog, rousing them to a senseless fury of destruction. Clear and thrilling above the tumult a bugle sang, like a note from heaven, and into the seething mass of humanity charged a squadron of cavalry, striking left or right with the flats of their sabers, raising a new hubbub of shrieks and imprecations as the weaker were trampled down. Fear? That crowd knew no more of fear just then than an upturned hive of bees. They met the charge with a roar, a hoarse, solid shout that seemed to sweep the cavalry away like smoke in the wind. Unarmed men swarmed at the horses like enraged baboons, hurling stones or curses as they went. The rush ended in a triumphant yell, and riderless horses, their eyes and nostrils aflame, went plunging, kicking, squealing through the pandemonium.

There must have been something tremendously animal in the scene, after all; for when I recall it now I see, as if Memory had carved her statue of the event, an upreared horse with a crumpled rider toppling from the saddle; and I hear not the shouts or curses of men, but the horrible scream of a maddened brute.

It was the night, many years ago, when news of disaster to the Italian army at Adowa broke loose, after being long suppressed, and I learned then for the first time what emotional excitement means when the gates are all down. One had to hold himself against it, as against a flood or a mighty wind. To yield, to lose self-control even for an instant, was to find oneself howling, reaching for paving-blocks, seeking an enemy, lifting a bare fist against charging horse or swinging steel, like the other lunatics. I caught a man by the shoulders, held him, and bade him in his own language tell me what the row was about; but he only stared at me wildly, his mouth open. I caught another, and he struck at my face; a third, and he shrieked like a trapped beast. Only one gave me a half-coherent answer, a man whom I dragged from under a saber and pushed into a side-street. His dear Ambrogio had been conscripted by the government, he howled (I suppose they had sent his son or brother with a disaffected Milanese regiment on the African adventure), and they were all robbers, oppressors, murderers—he finished by jerking loose from my grasp and hurling himself, yelling, into the mob again.

Had I been a visiting caribou, watching that amazing scene and knowing nothing of its motive, I might easily have concluded that some mysterious herd impulse was driving all these creatures to they knew not what; but, being human, I knew perfectly well that even this unmanageable crowd had taken its cue from some leader; that the senseless emotion which inflamed them had originated with individuals, who had some ground for their passion; and that from the individual the excitement spread in pestilential fashion until the whole mob caught it and bent to it, as a field of grass bends to the storm.

Therefore (and I hope you keep the thread of logic through a long digression), when I go as a man among caribou or wolves or plover or crows, and see the whole herd or pack or flock acting as one, as if swayed by a single will, I see no reason why I should evoke an incorporeal swarm impulse, or “call a spirit from the vasty deep” of the unknown to explain their similarity of action, since there are natural causes which may account for the matter perfectly—familiar causes, too, which still influence men and women as they influence the remote wood folk.

No, this is not a new animal psychology; it is rather an attempt to banish the delusion that there is any such thing as a distinct animal psychology. Science has many forms, and still plenty of delusions, but there is a basic principle to which she holds steadily—namely, that Nature is of one piece because her laws are constant. It follows that, if you know anything of a surety about your own mind, you may confidently apply the knowledge to any other mind in the universe, whether in the heavens above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth. The only question is, How far may the term “mind” be properly applied to the brute?

That unanswered question does not immediately concern us, for in speaking of mind we commonly mean the conscious or reasoning human article, and we are dealing here with the subconscious mind, which seems to work after the same fashion whether it appears on two legs or four. A dog does not know why he becomes excited in a commotion that does not personally concern him, or why he feels impelled to hasten to an outcry from an unknown source, or why he looks up, contrary to all his habits, when everybody else is looking up; and neither does a man know why he does just such things. Man and brute both act in obedience to something deeper, more primal and more dependable than reason, and in this subconscious field they are akin; otherwise it would be impossible for a man ever to train or to understand a brute, and our companionable dogs would be as distant as the seraphim.

When, therefore, the same unreasoning actions that are attributed to a mysterious collective impulse among birds or animals are found among men to depend on a succession of individual impulses, it is good psychology as well as good natural history to dismiss the whole herd instinct as another thoughtless myth. The familiar social and imitative instincts, the contagion of excitement, the outward projection of emotional impulses, the sensitive bodily nature of an animal which enables him to respond to such impulses even when they are unaccompanied by a voice or cry,—these are comparatively simple and “sensible” matters which explain all the phenomena of flock or herd life more naturally and more reasonably.

VI

WHERE SILENCE IS ELOQUENT

Looking back a moment on our trail of animal “talk” before following it onward, we see, first, that birds and beasts have certain audible cries which convey a more or less definite meaning of food or danger or assembly; and second, that they apparently have also some “telepathic” faculty of sending emotional impulses to others of their kind at a distance. The last has not been proved, to be sure; we have seen little more than enough to establish it as a working hypothesis; but whether we study science or history or an individual bird or beast, it is better to follow some integrating method or principle than to blunder around in a chaos of unrelated details. And the hypothesis of silent communication certainly “works,” since it helps greatly to clarify certain observed phenomena of animal life that are otherwise darkly mysterious.