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.[N] 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. The manifestations of mental instability and disintegration were at first supposed to be of comparatively rare occurrence and limited to certain well-known “diseases,” but they are coming to be recognized over a larger and larger field, and in a great variety of phenomena.
[N] The word “experience” is used here in a special sense that perhaps renders necessary a word or two of definition. The experience meant is everything that comes to the individual, not only his experience of events in the external world, but also his experience of the instinctive and often egoistic impulses at work within his own personality. 1915.
Conditions which at first sight give rise to no suspicion of being acquired injuries to the mind, when they are looked at in the light of the facts we have been considering, reveal themselves as being scars inflicted by conflict as certainly as are some { 58} forms of insanity. Characteristics which pass as vices, eccentricities, defects of temper, peculiarities of disposition, come when critically examined to be explicable as minor grades of defective mental stability, although, on account of their great frequency, they have been looked upon as normal, or at any rate in the natural order of things.
Few examples could be found to illustrate better such conditions than alcoholism. Almost universally regarded as either, on the one hand, a sin or vice, or on the other hand, as a disease, there can be little doubt that in fact it is essentially a response to a psychological necessity. In the tragic conflict between what he has been taught to desire and what he is allowed to get, man has found in alcohol, as he has found in certain other drugs, a sinister but effective peacemaker, a means of securing, for however short a time, some way out of the prison house of reality back to the Golden Age. There can be equally little doubt that it is but a comparatively small proportion of the victims of conflict who find a solace in alcohol, and the prevalence of alcoholism and the punishments entailed by the use of that dreadful remedy cannot fail to impress upon us how great must be the number of those whose need was just as great, but who were too ignorant, too cowardly, or perhaps too brave to find a release there.