This is hardly the place to try to elucidate the fundamental principles of the psychology of the social feelings or instincts, but it may be helpful to suggest in outline certain divergences in the theory of the social life that seem to be in point. We see on one side many writers who tend to regard social phenomena as mainly the result of instinct, as the expression either of a single instinct or of a combination of several specific instinctive tendencies. Contrasted with these views are the theories according to which social life is something that is mainly created by reason, based, so to speak, upon the observation that in union there is strength. Neither of these views seems to be satisfactory. That social feeling is based upon instinct is clear, but that it is also something created, synthetic, and subjected to selective processes seems also evident. Precisely what the instinctive basis of the social life is, perhaps one cannot with any certainty determine, nor can we say how many specific instincts enter into it. But that social feeling in its higher levels is a very complex mood, in which, although there are several instinctive reactions or feelings, there is to be discovered no social instinct as such, is the conclusion which we reach.
_Social behavior is a development of all the fundamental tendencies of the organism._ It has its roots both in the reproductive and the nutritional motives. These fundamental tendencies have issued phylogenetically in specific reactions that enter into the social life at all its levels, and in the life of the individual these reactions, expressing needs and desires, issue in highly complex moods, in which fundamental feelings are present but do not constitute the whole of the social moods. The individual does various specific things with reference to his fellows which are of the nature of instinctive reactions, but both in the phyletic development and the development in the individual, elements that enter into the modern social life as instincts have tended to lose their specific character, have become general or merely organic, have been transformed and have to some extent lost their original significance.
The motives of hunger, the reactions of the reproductive mechanisms, reactions to visual impressions and to sounds, warmth reactions, the huddling of fear, the influences of suggestion, susceptibility to all the stimuli of the social object enter into social feelings, and remain to some extent as instinctive reactions in the higher social processes. But we do not seem to find any general social instinct, or any specific herd instinct or any definite and broadly acting protective and aggressive instincts. As compared with some other views of the social feelings ours assumes in one way more and in another less of instinct in the social life. There is more instinct in the sense that more specific instinctive reactions are recognized in it, but less in assuming that these reactions are derivatives of primitive reactions of the organism, and also because they become transformed and fused and lose their original forms. They have come from common sources in organic life, we might say, and they meet again in the general moods which they help to create.