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Sumner also speaks of the extraordinary power of gregariousness, and says that when the movement is upon a vast scale, the numbers engaged being very large, there is always an exhilaration connected with the movement, and that if the causes involved are believed to be deep and holy, the force of this gregarious mood may become demoniacal.
Why should gregariousness drive men out of crowded Egyptian cities into the cells of the Thebaid? The parallel with the dog is not a valid one. Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation?
Some of these social tendencies which are at the root of moral conduct are gregariousness, desire for approval, dislike of scorn, kindliness, attention to human beings, imitation, and others.
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? Why should gregariousness drive a man to God rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house?
The real energy and deliberation, the unswerving purpose in her magnetized the weakness at the roots of his ardent, impulsive, but unstable character. Moreover, in spite of the superlative passion which he had aroused in her, she lacked the animal magnetism which was his in abundance. Her oneness was a magnet for his gregariousness and concentrated it upon herself.
As my Little-Russian deacon said, "Money has come between us and made us work more and love less. We are gathered together, not for love but for mutual profit. It is all the difference between conviviality and gregariousness." The deacon was right, and when one comes upon the Middle Ages, as yet untouched, in Russia, one reflects with a sigh "The whole of Europe, even England, was like this once."
Of course, many other drawbacks must be taken into account also no wide-thrown communications, no analytic language, no writing, no books, and so on; but perhaps being in a crowd all the time is the worst drawback of all. For, as Disraeli says in Sybil, gregariousness is not association. Constant herding and huddling together hinders the development of personality.
That strenuous and struggling childhood of his, whose inner life and aspirations had been so secret and so isolated, had taken the edge off his gregariousness. He did not continuously feel the herd-necessity to rub shoulders with others. The creative mind is essentially isolated.
But in exciting his gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt with which it punished his descent.
To them the garden was work, not play as it should have been; so they failed to gain that contact with mother earth which gives inspiration as well as health; they failed to acquire a love of nature, became infected with the germ of gregariousness, preferred the glare of lights, the rush of hurrying crowds, and lost the relish for fresh air and quiet.
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