y of others passes unnoticed. It is far from
requisite, in pursuing safety, that every strange animal be regarded as
either a friend or an enemy. Wanton hostilities would waste ammunition
and idle attachments would waste time. Yet it often happens that some of
these beings, having something in common with creatures we are wont to
notice, since we stand to them in sexual, parental, or hostile
relations, cannot well go unobserved. Their presence fills us with a
vague general emotion, the arrested possibility at once of sexual, of
parental, and of hostile actions. This emotion is gregarious or
impersonally social. The flock it commonly regards may be described as
an aggregate in which parents and children have been submerged, in which
mates are not yet selected, and enemies not yet descried.

Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful
and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It
renders solitude terrible without making society particularly
delightful. A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can
reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment
from an accustomed society is often unbearable. A creature separated
from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of
possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time
active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with
all its supports. He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and
employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal
existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.
Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe
but insufficient to live on.

Similar beings herding together in the same places are naturally subject
to simultaneous reactions, and the sense of this common reaction makes
possible the conception of many minds having a common experience. The
elements of this experience they express to one another by signs. For
when spontaneous reactions occur together in many animals, each, knowing
well his own emotion, will inevitably take the perceived attitude and
gesture of his fellows for its expression--for his own attitude and
gesture he knows nothing of; and he will thus possess, without further
instruction, the outward sign for his inner experience.

[Sidenote: It gives rise to conscience or sympathy with the public
voice.]

It is see how a mora