Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Part 3: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan



More about "Yahoos" from R.G. Collingwood, taken from his The New Leviathan

30. 62. The Yahoos would not be solitary. They would not, of course, be social, not having free wills; but they would be gregarious. They would find pleasure in each other’s company. They would crowd together with animal delight in propinquity. They would join together gleefully in hymns of corporate self-praise and praise of their adored leader. 
30. 63. They would quarrel, no doubt, and enjoy quarrelling; but only within limits. If their quarrels went so far as to endanger the corporate strength of the herd, which the leader, thinking in terms of enmity towards other such herds, would conceive as his own strength and cherish accordingly, the leader would check it. 
30. 64. Further, the Yahoo is more imitative than Hobbes knew. 
30. 65. There is a kind of imitation quite independent of any intelligent appreciation of the action imitated; and the Yahoo herd would be as imitative as a herd of monkeys. 
30. 66. If the Yahoo herd was surrounded by intelligent human societies it would certainly imitate their ways, though without sharing the intelligence on which these were based. If they cultivated the earth, sailed the sea, and the like, it would do the same; not because its members had the intelligence to invent these and other arts for themselves but because they imitated the actions of those who could. 
Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

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