does not properly express what social
consciousness is or has done. The social life is not a balance in
which primitive instincts are held in leash by other instincts or
feelings, but a new product in which there is a synthesis of impulses
in which the original form of the impulses may be greatly transformed.
We live in composite situations to which there correspond composite
moods. Often motives which clearly reveal to analysis their
instinctive character have no tendency to express themselves in the
definite instinctive movements corresponding to this instinct-feeling,
having permanently become dissociated from the primitive reactions,
either by a process of generalization and fusion of states and
processes in the individual, or by the inheritance of structural
changes. There are, it is true, all degrees of amalgamation of old and
new elements or of transformation of old elements, but to think of
instincts as remaining intact and unchanged in modern life seems
wholly wrong.

After all man is no longer an animal, and even the distance between
man as a member of the present complex organized society and man as
primitive or savage is considerable. The difference is not entirely in
the associations themselves but in all that the associations have
done, or that they represent, in modifying instincts, which no longer
exist in their original form and distinctness. Man is a creature of
feeling, but not of instinct we say, and this distinction is important
in many ways. All analogies between animal and human life have an
element of danger in them. To explain human conduct in terms of herd
instincts--instincts of aggression and the like--is misleading, since
the instincts that are assumed do not exist as such, and perhaps never
did. The psychology of the crowd, and the psychology of war, cannot be
contained in the psychology of the herd, however attractive the
simplicity of these concepts may be. That primitive instincts may
remain as remnants, that the crowd shows some of the characteristics
of the herd and the pack cannot be denied, and that in the spirit of
war these fragments and traits play a certain part may well be
believed. But the synthetic and highly complex mood we call the war
spirit, and the causes of war, however archaic some of their elements
may be, are very different from any mere sum of instincts. There is no
specific craving for combat that we can call a cause of war, or that,
in our view, plays any conside