48S 



NA TURE 



[October 7, 192: 



Roval Air Force, being attached to the Central Hospital 

 at Hampstead. 



This period marks not merely a new phase in Rivers's 

 work, but is also characterised by a distinct change in 

 his personality and writings. In entering the Army 

 and in investigating the psychoneuroses he was fulfilling 

 the desires of his youth. Whether through the realisa- 

 tion of such long-discarded or suppressed wishes, or 

 through other causes, e.g. the gratified desire of an 

 opportunity for more sympathetic insight into the 

 mental life of his fellows, he became another and a far 

 happier man. Diffidence gave place to confidence, 

 hesitation to certainty, reticence to outspokenness, a 

 somewhat laboured literary style to one remarkable 

 for its ease and charm. More than forty publications 

 can be traced to these years, between 191 6 and the date 

 of his death. It was a period in which his genius was 

 released from its former shackles, in which intuition 

 was less controlled by intellectual doubt, in which in- 

 spiration brought with it the usual accompaniment of 

 emotional conviction — even an occasional impatience 

 with those who failed to accept his point of view. But 

 his honest, generous character remained unchanged to 

 the last. Ever willing to devote himself unsparingly 

 to a cause he believed right, or to give of his best to 

 help a fellow-being in mental distress, he worked with 

 an indomitable self-denying energy, won the gratitude 

 and affection of numberless nerve-shattered soldier- 

 patients, whom he treated with unsurpassed judgment 

 and success, and attracted all kinds of people to this 

 new aspect of psychology. Painters, poets, authors, 

 artisans, all came to recognise the value of his work, to 

 seek, to win, and to appreciate his sympathy and his 

 friendship. It was characteristic of his thoroughness 

 that while attached to the Royal Air Force he took 

 numerous flights, looping the loop and performing 

 other trying evolutions in the air, so that he might gain 

 adequate experience of flying and be able to treat his 

 patients and to test candidates satisfactorily. He had 

 the courage to defend much of Freud's new teaching at 

 a time when it was carelessly condemned in toto by 

 those in authority who were too ignorant or too incom- 

 petent to form any just opinion of its undoubted merits 

 and undoubted defects. He was prepared to admit the 

 importance of the conflict of social factors with the 

 sexual instincts in certain psychoneuroses of civil life, 

 but in the psychoneuroses of warfare and of occupations 

 like mining he believed that the conflicting instincts 

 were not sexual, but were the danger instincts, related 

 to the instinct of self-preservation. 



Thus in the best sense of the term Rivers became a 

 man of the world and no longer a man of the laboratory 

 and of the study. He found time to serve on the 

 Medical Research Council's Air Medical Investigation 

 Committee, on its Mental Disorders Committee, on its 

 -Miners' Nystagmus Committee, and on the Psycho- 

 logical Committee of its Industrial Fatigue Research 

 Board. He served on a committee, of ecclesiastical 

 complexion, appointed to inquire into the new psycho- 

 therapy, and he had many close friends among the 

 missionaries, to whom he gave and from whom he 

 received assistance in the social and ethnological side 

 of their work. 



In 1 91 9, in which year he received honorary degrees 

 from the Universities of St. Andrews and Manchester, 



NO. 2762, VOL. I io] 



he returned to Cambridge as Prelector in Natural 

 Sciences at St. John's College, and began immediately 

 to exercise a wonderful influence over the younger 

 members of the University by his fascinating lectures, 

 his " Sunday evenings," and above all by his ever- 

 ready interest and sympathy. As he himself wrote, 

 after the war work " which brought me into contact 

 with the real problems of life ... I felt that it was im- 

 possible for me to return to my life of detachment.'' 

 And when a few months before his death he was in- 

 vited by the Labour Party to a still more public sphere 

 of work, namely, to become a Parliamentary candidate 

 representing the University of London, once again he 

 gave himself unsparingly. He wrote at the time : 

 " To one whose life has been passed in scientific research 

 and education the prospect of entering practical politics 

 can be no light matter. But the times are so ominous, 

 the outlook both for our own country and the world so 

 black, that if others think I can be of service in political 

 life I cannot refuse." On several occasions subse- 

 quently he addressed interested London audiences, con- 

 sisting largely of his supporters, on the relations be- 

 tween psychology and politics. It was one of these 

 very lectures — on the herd instinct — at which it hap- 

 pened that I took the chair, which was to have formed 

 the basis of his Presidential Address to you here to-day. 

 Rivers's views on the so-called herd instinct were the 

 natural outcome of those which he had put forward 

 during the preceding five years and collected together 

 in his " Instinct and the Unconscious." His aim in 

 writing this book was, as he says, " to provide a 

 biological theory for the psychoneuroses," to view the 

 psychological from the physiological standpoint. He 

 maintained that an exact correspondence holds be- 

 tween the inhibition of the physiologist and the re- 

 pression of the psychologist. He regarded mental 

 disorders as mainly dependent on the coming to the 

 surface of older activities which had been previously 

 controlled or suppressed by the later products of evolu- 

 tion. Here Rivers went beyond adopting Hughlings 

 Jackson's celebrated explanation of the phenomena of 

 nervous diseases as arising largely from the release of 

 lower-level activities from higher-level controls. He 

 further supposed that these lower-level activities repre- 

 sent earlier racial activities held more or less in abey- 

 ance by activities later acquired. This conception he 

 derived from his work with Henry Head on cutaneous 

 sensibility. Rivers could see but " two chief possi- 

 bilities " of interpreting the phenomena disclosed in 

 the study of Head's arm. Either epicritic sensibility 

 is protopathic sensibility in greater perfection, or else 

 protopathic sensibility and epicritic sensibility repre- 

 sent two distinct stages in the development of the 

 nervous system. Failing to see any other explanation, 

 he adopted the second of these alternatives. He sup- 

 posed that at some period of evolution, when epicritic 

 sensibility, with its generally surface distribution, its 

 high degree of discrimination, and its power of accurate 

 localisation, made its appearance, the previously exist- 

 ing protopathic sensibility, with its punctate distribu- 

 tion, its " all-or-nothing " character, and its broad 

 radiating localisation, became in part inhibited or 

 "suppressed," in part blended or "fused" with the 

 newly acquired sensibility so as to form a useful 

 product. He supposed that the suppressed portion 



