John Dewey

Appeal to a gregarious instinct to account for social arrangements is the outstanding example of the lazy fallacy.

Men do not run together and join in a larger mass as do drops of quicksilver, and if they did the result would not be a state nor any mode of human association.

The instincts, whether named gregariousness, or sympathy, or the sense of mutual dependence, or domination on one side and abasement and subjection on the other, at best account for everything in general and nothing in particular.

And at worst, the alleged instinct and natural endowment appealed to as a causal force themselves represent physiological tendencies which have previously been shaped into habits of action and expectation by means of the very social…

Men who have lived in herds develop attachment to the horde to which they have become used; children who have perforce lived in dependence grow into habits of dependence and subjection.

The inferiority complex is socially acquired, and the “instinct” of display and mastery is but its other face.

But the strictly organic conditions which lead men to join, assemble, foregather, combine, are just those which lead other animals to unite in swarms and packs and herds.

In describing what is common in human and other animal junctions and consolidations we fail to touch what is distinctively human in human associations.

We must in any case start from acts which are performed, not from hypothetical causes for those acts, and consider their consequences.

We must also introduce intelligence, or the observation of consequences as consequences, that is, in connection with the acts from which they proceed.

Since we must introduce it, it is better to do so knowingly than it is to smuggle it in in a way which deceives not only the customs officer--the reader--but ourselves as well.

If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.