Our definition of individuality must now be “finding my place in the

whole”: “my place” gives you the individual, “the whole” gives you

society, but by connecting them, by saying “my place in the whole,” we

get a fruitful synthesis. I have tried hard to get away from any

mechanical system and yet it is difficult to find words which do not

seem to bind. I am now afraid of this expression—my place in the whole.

It has a rigid, unyielding sound, as if I were a cog in a machine. But

my place is not a definite portion of space and time. The people who

believe in their “place” in this sense can always photograph their

“places.” But my place is a matter of infinite relation, and of

infinitely changing relation, so that it can never be captured. It is

neither the anarchy of particularism nor the rigidity of the German

machine. To know my place is not to know my niche, not to know whether I

am cog no. 3 or cog no. 4; it is to be alive at every instant at every

finger tip to every contact and to be conscious of those contacts.

We see now that the individual both seeks the whole and is the whole.

First, the individual, biology tells us, is never complete, completeness

spells death; social psychology is beginning to show us that man

advances towards completeness not by further aggregations to himself,

but by further and further relatings of self to other men. We are always

reaching forth for union; most, perhaps all, our desires have this

motive. The spirit craves totality, this is the motor of social

progress; the process of getting it is not by adding more and more to

ourselves, but by offering more and more of ourselves. Not appropriation

but contribution is the law of growth. What our special contribution is,

it is for us to discover. More and more to release the potentialities of

the individual means the more and more progressive organization of

society if at the same time we are learning how to coördinate all the

variations. The individual in wishing for more wholeness does not ask

for a chaotic mass, but for the orderly wholeness which we call unity.

The test of our vitality is our power of synthesis, of life synthesis.

But although we say that the individual is never complete, it is also

true that the individual is a being who, because his function is

relating and his relatings are infinite, is in himself the whole of

society. It is not that the whole is divided up into pieces; the

individual is the whole at one point. This is the incarnation: it is the

whole flowing into me, transfusing, suffusing me. The fulness, bigness

of my life is not measured by the amount I do, nor the number of people

I meet, but how far the whole is expressed through me. This is the

reason why unifying gives me a sense of life and more unifying gives me

a sense of more life—there is more of the whole and of me. My worth to

society is not how valuable a part I am. I am not unique in the world

because I am different from any one else, but because I am a whole seen

from a special point of view.[22]

That the relation of each to the whole is dynamic and not static is

perhaps the most profound truth which recent years have brought us.[23]

We now see that when I give my share I give always far more than my

share, such are the infinite complexities, the fulness and fruitfulness

of the interrelatings. I contribute to society my mite, and then society

contains not just that much more nourishment, but as much more as the

loaves and fishes which fed the multitude outnumbered the original seven

and two. My contribution meets some particular need not because it can

be measured off against that need, but because my contribution by means

of all the cross currents of life always has so much more than itself to

offer. When I withhold my contribution, therefore, I am withholding far

more than my personal share. When I fail some one or some cause, I have

not failed just that person, just that cause, but the whole world is

thereby crippled. This thought gives an added solemnity to the sense of

personal responsibility.

To sum up: individuality is a matter primarily neither of apartness nor

of difference, but of each finding his own activity in the whole. In the

many times a day that we think of ourselves it is not one time in a

thousand that we think of our eccentricities, we are thinking indirectly

of those qualities which join us to others: we think of the work we are

doing with others and what is expected of us, the people we are going to

play with when work is over and the part we are going to take in that

play, the committee meeting we are going to attend and what we are going

to do there. Every distinct act of the ego is an affirmation of that

amount of separateness which makes for perfect union. Every affirmation

of the ego establishes my relation with all the rest of the universe. It

is one and the same act which establishes my individuality and gives me

my place in society. Thus an individual is one who is being created by

society, whose daily breath is drawn _from_ society, whose life is spent

_for_ society. When we recognize society as self-unfolding,

self-unifying activity, we shall hold ourselves open to its influence,

letting the Light stream into us, not from an outside source, but from

the whole of which we are a living part. It is eternally due us that

that whole should feed and nourish and sustain us at every moment, but

it cannot do this unless at every moment we are creating it. This

perfect interplay is Life. To speak of the “limitations of the

individual” is blasphemy and suicide. The spirit of the whole is

incarnate in every part. “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor

life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,

nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall

be able to separate”—the individual from society.

-----

Footnote 21:

See ch. XV, “From Contract to Community.”

Footnote 22:

This is the principle of the vote in a democracy (see ch. XXI). This

must not, however, be confused with the old Hegelianism (see ch. XXIX

on “Sovereignty”).

Footnote 23:

In art this is what impressionism has meant. In the era before

impressionism art was in a static phase, that is, artists were working

at fixed relations. The “balance” of modern artists does not suggest

fixedness, but relation subject directly to the laws of the whole.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

VIII

WHO IS THE FREE MAN?

--------------

THE idea of liberty long current was that the solitary man was the free

man, that the man outside society possessed freedom but that in society

he had to sacrifice as much of his liberty as interfered with the

liberty of others. Rousseau’s effort was to find a form of society in

which all should be as free as “before.” According to some of our

contemporary thinkers liberty is what belongs to the individual or

variation-giving-one. But this tells only half the tale. Freedom is the

harmonious, unimpeded working of the law of one’s own nature. The true

nature of every man is found only in the whole. A man is ideally free

only so far as he is interpermeated by every other human being; he gains

his freedom through a perfect and complete relationship because thereby

he achieves his whole nature.

Hence free-will is not caprice or whim or a partial wish or a momentary

desire. On the contrary freedom means exactly the liberation from the

tyranny of such particularist impulses. When the whole-will has supreme

dominion in the heart of man, then there is freedom. The mandate of our

real Self is our liberty. The essence of freedom is not irrelevant

spontaneity but the fulness of relation. We do not curtail our liberty

by joining with others; we find it and increase all our capacity for

life through the interweaving of willings. It is only in a complex state

of society that any large degree of freedom is possible, because nothing

else can supply the many opportunities necessary to work out freedom.

The social process is a completely Self-sufficing process. Free-will is

one of its implications. I am free for two reasons: (1) I am not

dominated by the whole because I _am_ the whole; (2) I am not dominated

by “others” because we have the genuine social process only when I do

not control others or they me, but all intermingle to produce the

collective thought and the collective will. I am free when I am

functioning here in time and space as the creative will.

There is no extra-Will: that is the vital lesson for us to learn. There

is no Will except as we act. Let us _be_ the Will. Thereby do we become

the Free-Will.

Perhaps the most superficial of all views is that free-will consists in

choice when an alternative is presented. But freedom by our definition

is obedience to the law of one’s nature. My nature is of the whole: I am

free, therefore, only when I choose that term in the alternative which

the whole commands. I am not free when I am making choices, I am not

free when my acts are not “determined,” for in a sense they always are

determined (freedom and determinism have not this kind of opposition). I

am free when I am creating. I am determined _through_ my will, not in

spite of it.

Freedom then is the identifying of the individual will with the whole

will—the supreme activity of life. Free the spirit of man and then we

can trust the spirit of man, and is not the very essence of this freeing

of the spirit of man the process of taking him from the self-I to the

group-I? That we are free only through the social order, only as fast as

we identify ourselves with the whole, implies practically that to gain

our freedom we must take part in all the life around us: join groups,

enter into many social relations, and begin to win freedom for

ourselves. When we are the group in feeling, thought and will, we are

free: it does what it wishes through us—that is our liberty. In a

democracy the training of every child from the cradle—in nursery,

school, at play—must be a training in group consciousness.

Then we shall have the spontaneous activity of freedom. Let us not be

martyrs. Let us not give up bread and coal that the ends of the Great

War may be won, with the feeling of a restricted life, but with the

feeling that we have gained thereby a fuller life. Let us joyously do

the work of the world because we are the world. Such is the _élan de

vie_, the joy of high activity, which leaps forward with force, in

freedom.

We have to begin to-day to live the life which will give us our freedom.

Savants and plain men have affirmed the freedom of the will, but at the

same time most of us, even while loudly claiming our freedom, have felt

bound. While determinism has many theoretical adherents, it has many

more practical ones; we have considered ourselves bound in thousands of

ways—by tradition, by religion, by natural law, by inertia and

ignorance, etc., etc. We have said God is free but man is not free. That

we are not free has been the most deadening fallacy to which man has

ever submitted. No outside power indeed can make us free. No document of

our forefathers can “declare” us “independent.” No one can ever give us

freedom, but we can win it for ourselves.

It is often thought that when some restraint is taken away from us we

are freer than before, but this is childish. Some women-suffragists talk

of women as “enslaved” and advocate their emancipation by the method of

giving them the vote. But the vote will not make women free. Freedom is

always a thing to be attained. And we must remember too that freedom is

not a static condition. As it is not something possessed “originally,”

and as it is not something which can be given to us, so also it is not

something won once for all. It is in our power to win our freedom, but

it must be won anew at every moment, literally every moment. People

think of themselves as not free because they think of themselves as

obeying some external law, but the truth is _we_ are the law-makers. My

freedom is my share in creating, my part in the creative responsibility.

The heart of our freedom is the impelling power of the will of the

whole.

Who then are free? Those who _win_ their freedom through fellowship.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

IX

THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM

--------------

THE new freedom is to be founded on the new individualism. Many people

in their zeal for a “socialized” life are denouncing “individualism.”

But individualism is the latest social movement. We must guard against

the danger of thinking that the individual is less important because the

collective aspect of life has aroused our ardor and won our devotion.

Collectivism is no short cut to do away with the necessity of individual

achievement; it means the greatest burden possible on every man. The

development of a truly social life takes place at the same time that the

freedom and power and efficiency of its members develop. The individual

on the other hand can never make his individuality effective until he is

given collective scope for his activity. We sometimes hear it said that

the strong man does not like combination, but in fact the stronger the

man the more he sees coöperation with others as the fitting field for

his strength.

But we must learn the method of a real coöperation. We cannot have any

genuine collectivism until we have learned how to evolve the collective

thought and the collective will. This can be done only by every one

taking part. The fact that the state owns the means of production may be

a good or a poor measure, but it is not necessarily collectivism or a

true socialism. The wish for socialism is a longing for the ideal state,

but it is embraced often by impatient people who want to take a short

cut to the ideal state. That state must be grown—its branches will widen

as its roots spread. The socialization of property must not precede the

socialization of the will. If it does, then the only difference between

socialism and our present order will be substituting one machine for

another. We see more and more collectivism coming: so far as it keeps

pace with the socialization of the will, it is good; so far as it does

not, it is purely mechanical. Some people’s idea of socialism is

inventing a machine to grind out your duties for you. But every man must

do his work for himself. Not socialization of property, but

socialization of the will is the true socialism.

The main aim in the reconstruction of society must be to get all that

every man has to give, to bring the submerged millions into light and

activity. Those of us who are basing all our faith on the constructive

vision of a collective society are giving the fullest value to the

individual that has ever been given, are preaching individual value as

the basis of democracy, individual affirmation as its process, and

individual responsibility as its motor force. True individualism has

been the one thing lacking either in motive or actuality in a so-called

individualistic age, but then it has not been an individualistic but a

particularistic age. True individualism is this moment piercing through

the soil of our new understanding of the collective life.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

X

SOCIETY

--------------

WE have seen that the interpenetrating of psychic forces creates at the

same time individuals and society, that, therefore, the individual is

not a unit but a centre of forces (both centripetal and centrifugal),

and consequently society is not a collection of units but a complex of

radiating and converging, crossing and recrossing energies. In other

words we are learning to think of society as a psychic process.

This conception must replace the old and wholly erroneous idea of

society as a collection of units, and the later and only less misleading

theory of society as an organism.[24]

The old individualism with all the political fallacies it

produced—social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

majority rule of the nineteenth, etc.—was based on the idea of developed

individuals first existing and then coming together to form society. But

the basis of society is not numbers: it is psychic power.

The organic theory of society has so much to recommend it to superficial

thinking that we must examine it carefully to find its fatal defects.

But let us first recognize its merits.

Most obviously, an organic whole has a spatial and temporal

individuality of its own, and it is composed of parts each with its

individuality yet which could not exist apart from the whole. An

organism means unity, each one his own place, every one dependent upon

every one else.

Next, this unity, this interrelating of parts, is the essential

characteristic. It is always in unstable equilibrium, always shifting,

varying, and thereby changing the individual at every moment. But it is

always produced and maintained by the individual himself. No external

force brings it forth. The central life, the total life, of this

self-developing, self-perpetuating being is involved in the process.

Hence biologists do not expect to understand the body by a study of the

separate cells as isolated units: it is the organic connection which

unites the separate processes which they recognize as the fundamental

fact.

This interrelating holds good of society when we view it externally.

Society too can be understood only by the study of its flux of

relations, of all the intricate reciprocities which go to make the

unifying. Reciprocal ordering—subordinating, superordinating,

coördinating—purposeful self-unifyings, best describe the social

process. Led by James, who has shown us the individual as a

self-unifying centre, we now find the same kind of activity going on in

society, in the social mind. And this interrelating, this unity as

unity, is what gives to society its authority and power.

Thus the term organism is valuable as a metaphor, but it has not strict

psychological accuracy.

There is this world-wide difference between the self-interrelatings of

society and of the bodily organism: the social bond is a psychic

relation and we cannot express it in biological terms or in any terms of

physical force. If we could, if “functional combination” could mean a

psychological relation as well as a physiological, then the terms

“functional” and “organic” might be accepted. But they denote a

different universe from that of thought. For psychical self-unitings

knit infinitely more closely and in a wholly different way. They are

freed from the limitations of time and space. Minds can blend, yet in

the blending preserve each its own identity. They transfuse one another

while being each its own essential and unique self.

It follows that while the cell of the organism has only one function,

the individual may have manifold and multiform functions: he enters with

one function into a certain group of people this morning and with

another function into another group this afternoon, because his free

soul can freely knit itself with a new group at any moment.[25]

This self-detaching, self-attaching freedom of the individual saves us

from the danger to democracy which lurks in the organic theory. No man

is forced to serve as the running foot or the lifting hand. Each at any

moment can place himself where his nature calls. Certain continental

sociologists are wholly unjustified in building their hierarchy where

one man or group of men is the sensorium, others the hewers and

carriers, etc. It is exactly this despotic and hopeless system of caste

from which the true democracy frees man. He follows the call of his

spirit and relates himself where he belongs to-day, and through this

relating gains the increment of power which knits him anew where he now

belongs and so continually as the wind of spirit blows.

Moreover in society every individual may be a complete expression of the

whole in a way impossible for the parts of a physical organism.[26] When

each part is itself potentially the whole, when the whole can live

completely in every member, then we have a true society, and we must

view it as a rushing of life—onrush, outrush, inrush—as a mobile,

elastic, incalculable, Protean energy seeking fitting form for itself.

This ideal society is the divine goal towards which life is an infinite

progress. Such conception of society must be visibly before us to the

exclusion of all other theories when we ask ourselves later what the

vote means in the true democracy.[27]

-----

Footnote 24:

I speak of it as later because the biological analogy was different

from the organism of mediæval doctrine.

Footnote 25:

See ch. XXX, “Political Pluralism and Functionalism.”

Footnote 26:

See p. 66.

Footnote 27:

See ch. XXI. I have been told that the distinction between the organic

and the psychic theory of society is merely academic. But no one

should frame amendments on the initiative and referendum without this

distinction; no one without it can judge wisely the various schemes

now being proposed for occupational representation—something every one

of us will have soon to do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XI

THE SELF-AND-OTHERS ILLUSION

--------------

IT is now evident that self and others are merely different points of

view of one and the same experience, two aspects of one thought. Neither

of these partial aspects can hold us, we seek always that which includes

self and others. To recognize the community principle in everything we

do should be our aim, never to work with individuals as individuals. If

I go to have a talk with a mother about her daughter, I cannot appeal to

the mother, the daughter, or my own wishes, only to that higher creation

which we three make when we come together. In that way only will

spiritual power be generated. Every decision of the future is to be

based not on my needs or yours, nor on a compromise between them or an

addition of them, but on the recognition of the community between us.

The community may be my household and I, my employees and I, but it is

only the dictate of the whole which can be binding on the whole. This

principle we can take as a searchlight to turn on all our life.

It is the lack of understanding of this principle which works much havoc

among us. When we watch men in the lobbies at Washington working for

their state and their town as against the interests of the United

States, do we sometimes think, “These men have learnt loyalty and

service to a small unit, but not yet to a large one?” If this thought

does come to us, we are probably doing those men more than justice. The

man who tries to get something in the River and Harbor appropriation for

his town, whether or not it needs it as much as other places, is pretty

sure back in his own town to be working not for that but for his own

pocket. It is not because America is too big for him to think of, that

he might perhaps think of Ohio or Millfield, it is just because he

cannot think of Ohio or Millfield. There he thinks of how this or the

other local development, rise in land values etc., is going to benefit

himself; when he is in Washington he thinks of what is going to benefit

Millfield. But the man who works hardest and most truly for Millfield

and Ohio will probably when he comes to Washington work most truly for

the interests, not of Millfield and Ohio, but of the United States,

because he has learned the first lesson of life—to think in wholes.

The expressions social and socially-minded, which should refer to a

consciousness of the whole, are often confused with altruism. We read of

“the socialized character of modern industry.” There is a good deal of

altruism in modern industry, but little that is socialized yet. The men

who provide rest rooms, baths, lectures, and recreation facilities for

their employees, do not by so doing prove themselves to be

socially-minded; they are altruistically-minded, and this is involved in

the old individualism.[28] Moreover, in our attempts at social

legislation we have been appealing chiefly to the altruism of people:

women and children ought not to be overworked, it is cruel not to have

machinery safeguarded, etc. But our growing sense of unity is fast

bringing us to a realization that all these things are for the good of

ourselves too, for the entire community. And the war is rapidly opening

our eyes to this human solidarity: we now see health, for instance, as a

national asset.

All of us are being slowly, very slowly, purged of our particularistic

desires. The egotistic satisfaction of giving things away is going to be

replaced by the joy of owning things together. As our lives become more

and more intricately interwoven, more and more I come to suffer not

merely when I am undergoing personal suffering, more and more I come to

desire not only when I am feeling personal desires. This used to be

considered a fantastic idea not to be grasped by the plain man, but

every day the plain man is coming more and more to feel this, every day

the “claims” of others are becoming My desires. “Justice” is being

replaced by understanding. There are many people to-day who feel as

keenly the fact of child labor as if these children were their own. I

vote for prohibition, even although it does not in the least touch me,

because it does touch very closely the Me of which I am now coming into

realization.

The identification of self and others we see in the fact that we cannot

keep ourselves “good” in an evil world any more than we can keep

ourselves well in a world of disease. The method of moral hygiene as of

physical hygiene is social coöperation. We do not walk into the Kingdom

of Heaven one by one.

The exposition of the self-and-others fallacy has transformed the idea

of self-interest. Our interests are inextricably interwoven. The

question is not what is best for me or for you, but for all of us. My

interests are not less important to the world than yours; your interests

are not less important to the world than mine. If the “altruistic” man

is not a humbug, that is, if he really thinks his affairs of less

importance to the world than those of others, then there is certainly

something the matter with his life. He must raise his life to a point

where it is of as much value to the world as any one’s else.

The self-and-others fallacy has led directly to a conception which has

wrought much harm among us, namely, the identification of “others” with

“society” which leads the self outside society and brings us to one of

the most harmful of dualisms. The reason we are slow to understand the

matter of the subordination of the individual to society is because we

usually think of it as meaning the subordination of the individual to

“others,” whereas it does not at all, it means the subordination of the

individual to the whole of which he himself is a part. Such

subordination is an act of assertion; it is fraught with active power

and force; it affirms and accomplishes. We are often told to “surrender

our individuality.” To _claim_ our individuality is the one essential

claim we have on the universe.

We give up self when we are too sluggish for the heroic life. For our

self is after all the greatest bother we ever know, and the idea of

giving it up is a comfortable thought for sluggish people, a narcotic

for the difficulties of life. But it is a cowardly way out. The strong

attitude is to face that torment, our self, to take it with all its

implications, all its obligations, all its responsibilities, and be

ourselves to the fullest degree possible.

I do not mean to imply, however, that unselfishness has become obsolete.

With our new social ideal there is going to be a far greater demand on

our capacity for sacrifice than ever before, but self-sacrifice now

means for us self-fulfilment. We have now a vision of society where

service is indeed our daily portion, but our conception of service has

entirely changed. The other day it was stated that the old idea of

democracy was a society in which every man had the right to pursue his

own ends, while the new idea was based on the assumption that every man

should serve his fellow-men. But I do not believe that man should “serve

his fellow-men”; if we started on that task what awful prigs we should

become. Moreover, as we see that the only efficient people are the

servers, much of the connotation of humility has gone out of the word

service! Moreover, if service is such a very desirable thing, then every

one must have an equal opportunity for service.

We have had a wrong idea of individualism which has made those who had

more strength, education, time, money, power, feel that they must do for

those who had less. In the individualism we see coming, all our efforts

will be bent to making it possible for every man to depend upon himself

instead of depending upon others. So _noblesse oblige_ is really

egoistic. It is what I owe to myself to do to others. _Noblesse oblige_

has had a splendid use in the world, but it is somewhat worn out now

simply because we are rapidly getting away from the selfish point of

view. I don’t do things now because my position or my standing or my

religion or _my_ anything else demands it, nor because others need it,

but because it is a whole-imperative, that is, a social imperative. We

cannot transcend self by means of others, but only through the synthesis

of self and others. Wholeness is an irresistible force compelling every

member. The consciousness of this is the wellspring of our power.

An English writer says that we get leadership from the fact that men are

capable of being moved to such service by the feeling of altruism; he

attributes public spirit to love, pity, compassion and sensitiveness to

suffering. This is no doubt largely true at the present moment, but

public spirit will sometime mean, as it does to-day in many instances,

the recognition that it is not merely that my city, my nation needs me,

but that I need it as the larger sphere of a larger self-expression.

I remember some years ago a Boston girl just entering social work, fresh

from college, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of youth and having been

taught the ideals of service to others. She was talking to me about her

future and said that she was sorry family circumstances obliged her to

work in Boston instead of New York, there was so much more to reform in

New York! She seemed really afraid that justice and morality had reached

such a point with us that she might not be afforded sufficient scope for

her zeal. It was amusing, but think of the irony of it: that girl had

been taught such a view of life that her happiness, her outlet, her

self-expression, depended actually on there being plenty of misery and

wretchedness for her to change; there would be no scope for her in a

harmonious, well-ordered world.

The self-and-others theory of society is then wrong. We have seen that

the Perfect Society is the complete interrelating of an infinite number

of selves knowing themselves as one Self. We see that we are dependent

on the whole, while seeing that we are one with it in creating it. We

are separate that we may belong, that we may greatly produce. Our

separateness, our individual initiative, are the very factors which

accomplish our true unity with men. We shall see in the chapter on

“Political Pluralism” that “irreducible pluralism” and the self-unifying

principle are not contradictory.

-----

Footnote 28:

It must be remembered, however, that these welfare arrangements are

often accompanied by truly social motives, and experiments looking

towards a more democratic organization of industries.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XII

THE CROWD FALLACY

--------------

MANY people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of

life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a

partial understanding of it, many people to-day are advocating the life

of the crowd. The words society, crowd, and group are often used

interchangeably for a number of people together. One writer says, “The

real things are breathed forth from multitudes ... the real forces of

to-day are group forces.” Or we read of “the gregarious or group life,”

or “man is social because he is suggestible,” or, “man is social because

he likes to be with a crowd.” But we do not find group forces in

multitudes: the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes

of association. Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on

concurrence of emotion rather than of thought, or if on the latter, then

on a concurrence produced by becoming aware of similarities, not by a

slow and gradual creating of unity. It is a crowd emotion if we all

shout “God save the King.” Suggestibility, feeling, impulse—this is

usually the order in the crowd mind.

I know a little boy of five who came home from school one day and said

with much impressiveness, “Do you know whose birthday it is to-morrow?”

“No,” said his mother, “whose?” “Ab’m Lincoln’s,” was the reply. “Who is

he?” said the mother. With a grave face and an awed voice the child

replied, “He freed the slates!” and then added, “I don’t know whether

they were the big kind like mine or the little kind like Nancy’s.” But

his emotion was apparently as great, his sentiment as sincere, as if he

had understood what Lincoln had done for his country. This is a good

example of crowd suggestion because thought was in this case inhibited

by contagious emotion.

Suggestion is the law of the crowd, interpenetration of the group. When

we study a crowd we see how quickly B takes A’s ideas and also C and D

and E; when we study a group we see that the ideas of A often arouse in

B exactly opposite ones. Moreover, the crowd often deadens thought

because it wants immediate action, which means an unthinking unanimity

not a genuine collective thought.[29] The group on the other hand

stimulates thought. There are no “differences” in the crowd mind. Each

person is swept away and does not stop to find out his own difference.

In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony. We want the single voice

but not the single note; that is the secret of the group. The enthusiasm

and unanimity of a mass-meeting may warm an inexperienced heart, but the

experienced know that this unanimity is largely superficial and is based

on the spread of similar ideas, not the unifying of differences. A crowd

does not distinguish between fervor and wisdom; a group usually does. We

do not try to be eloquent when we appear before a board or a commission;

we try merely to be convincing. Before a group it is self-control,

restraint, discipline which we need, we don’t “let ourselves go”; before

a crowd I am sorry to say we usually do. Many of us nowadays resent

being used as part of a crowd; the moment we hear eloquence we are on

the defensive. The essential evil of crowds is that they do not allow

choice, and choice is necessary for progress. A crowd is an

undifferentiated mass; a group is an articulated whole.

It is often difficult to determine whether a number of people met

together are a crowd or a group (that is, a true society), yet it is a

distinction necessary for us to make if we would understand their

action. It is not in the least a question of numbers: it is obvious that

according to our present definition a group is not a small number of

people and a crowd a large number. If someone cries “Fire,” and you and

I run to the window, then you and I are a crowd. The difference between

a group and a crowd is not one of degree but of kind. I have seen it

stated in a sociological treatise that in any deliberative assembly

there is a tendency for the wisest thought to prevail. This assumes that

“any deliberative assembly” is more like a group than a crowd—a very

pleasant thing to assume!

Some writers seem to think that the difference between a crowd and a

not-crowd is the difference between organized and unorganized, and the

example is given of laborers unorganized as a crowd and of a trade-union

as a not-crowd. But a trade-union can be and often is a crowd.

We have distinguished between the crowd and the group; it is also

necessary to distinguish between the crowd and the mob. Often the crowd

or mass is confused with the mob. The examples given of the mass or

crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken audience in

a theatre fire, the mobs of the French Revolution. But all these are

very different from a mass of people merely acting under the same

suggestion, so different that we need different names for them. We might

for the moment call one a crowd and the other a mob.

An unfortunate stigma has often attached itself to the crowd mind

because of this tendency to think of the crowd mind as always exhibiting

itself in inferior ways. Mass enthusiasm, it is true, may lead to riots,

but also it may lead to heroic deeds. People talk much of the panic of a

crowd, but every soldier knows that men are brave, too, in a mass.

Students have often studied what they called the mass mind when it was

under the stress of great nervous strain and at a high pitch of

excitement, and then have said the mass acts thus and so. It has been

thought legitimate to draw conclusions concerning the nature of the mass

mind from an hysterical mob. It has been assumed that a crowd was

necessarily, as a crowd, in a condition of hysteria. It has often been

taken for granted that a crowd _is_ a pathological condition. And color

has been given to this theory by the fact that we owe much of our

knowledge of the laws of suggestion to pathologists.

But the laws of the mass can be studied in ordinary collections of

people who are not abnormally excited, who are not subjects for

pathologists. The laws of the mass as of the mob are, it is true, the

laws of suggestion and imitation, but the mob is such an extreme case of

the mass that it is necessary to make some distinction between them.

Emotion in the crowd as in the mob is intensified by the consciousness

that others are sharing it, but the mob is this crowd emotion carried to

an extreme. As normal suggestibility is the law of the mass, so abnormal

suggestibility is the law of the mob. In abnormal suggestibility the

controlling act of the will is absent, but in normal suggestibility you

have the will in control and using its power of choice over the material

offered by suggestion. Moreover, it must be remembered that emotional

disturbance is not always the cause of the condition of suggestibility:

the will may lose its ascendancy from other causes than excitement;

suggestibility often comes from exhaustion or habit.

The fact is we know little of this subject. Billy Sunday and the

Salvation Army, political bosses and labor agitators, know how to handle

crowds, but the rest of us can deal with individuals better than with

the mass; we have taken courses in first-aid to the injured, but we have

not yet learned what to do in a street riot or a financial panic.

Besides the group and the crowd and the mob, there is also the herd. The

satisfaction of the gregarious instinct must not be confused with the

emotion of the crowd or the true sense of oneness in the group. Some

writers draw analogies from the relation of the individual to the herd

to apply to the relation of man to society; such analogies lead to false

patriotism and wars. The example of the wild ox temporarily separated

from his herd and rushing back to the “comfort of its fellowship” has

adorned many a different tale. The “comfort” of feeling ourselves in the

herd has been given as the counterpart of spiritual communion, but are

we seeking the “comfort” of fellowship or the creative agonies of

fellowship? The latter we find not in herd life, but in group life.

Then besides the group, the crowd, the mob, the herd, there are numbers

as mere numbers. When we are a lot of people with different purposes we

are simply wearied, not stimulated. At a bazaar, for instance, far from

feeling satisfaction in your fellow-creatures, you often loathe them.

Here you are not swayed by one emotion, as in a crowd, nor unified by

some intermingling of thought as in a group.

It must be understood that I do not wish to make any arbitrary dictum in

regard to distinctions between the crowd and the herd, the crowd and

mere numbers, etc. I merely wish to point out that the subject has not

yet received sufficient study. What is it we feel at the midnight mass

of the Madeleine? It is not merely the one thought which animates all;

it is largely the great mass of people who are feeling the one thought.

But many considerations and unanswered questions leap to our mind just

here. All this is an interesting field for the further study and close

analysis of psychologists.

We must not, however, think from these distinctions that man as member

of a group and man as member of a crowd, as one of a herd or of a mob or

of a mere assemblage, is subject to entirely different laws which never

mingle; there are all the various shadings and minglings of these which

we see in such varied associations as business corporation, family,

committee, political meeting, trade-union etc. Our herd traditions show

in our group life; there is something of the crowd in all groups and

there is something of the group in many crowds, as in a legislative

assembly. Only further study will teach us to distinguish how much herd

instinct and how much group conviction contribute to our ideas and

feelings at any one time and what the tendencies are when these clash.

Only further study will show us how to secure the advantages of the

crowd without suffering from its disadvantages. We have all felt that

there was much that was valuable in that emotional thrill which brings

us into a vaster realm although not a coördinated realm; we have all

rejoiced in the quickened heart-beat, the sense of brotherhood, the love

of humanity, the renewed courage which have sometimes come to us when we

were with many people. Perhaps the ideal group will combine the

advantages of the mass and the group proper: will give us collective

thought, the creative will and at the same time the inspiration for

renewed effort and sustained self-discipline.

Crowd association has, however, received more study than group

association because as a matter of fact there is at present so much more

of the former than of the latter. But we need not only a psychology

which looks at us as we are, but a psychology which points the way to

that which we may become. What our advanced thinkers are now doing is to

evolve this new psychology. Conscious evolution means giving less and

less place to herd instinct and more to the group imperative. We are

emerging from our gregarious condition and are now to enter on the

rational way of living by scanning our relations to one another, instead

of bluntly feeling them, and so adjusting them that unimpeded progress

on this higher plane is secured.

And now that association is increasing so rapidly on every hand, it is

necessary that we see to it that this shall be group association, not

crowd association. In the business world our large enterprises are

governed by boards, not by one man: one group (corporation) deals with

another group (corporation). Hospitals, libraries, colleges, are

governed by boards, trustees, faculties. We have committees of

arbitration, boards of partial management (labor agreements) composed of

representatives of employers and employed. Many forms of coöperation are

being tried: some one must analyze the psychological process of the

generation of coöperative activity. All this means a study of group

psychology. In the political world there is a growing tendency to put

the administrative part of government more and more into the hands of

commissions. Moreover, we have not legislatures swayed by oratory and

other forms of mass suggestion, but committee government. Of course

legislative committees do not try to get the group idea, they are

largely controlled by partisan and financial interests, but at any rate

they are not governed wholly by suggestion. In the philanthropic world

we no longer deal with individuals: we form a committee or association

to deal with individuals or with groups of individuals. The number of

associations of every kind for every purpose increases daily. Hence we

must study the group.

-----

Footnote 29:

A good example of the crowd fallacy is the syndicalist theory that the

vote should be taken in a meeting of strikers not by ballot but by

acclamation or show of hands. The idea is that in an open meeting

enthusiasm passes from one to another and that, therefore, you can

thus get the collective will which you could not get by every man

voting one by one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XIII

THE SECRET OF PROGRESS

--------------

I HAVE said that the essence of the social process is the creating of

ever new values through the interplay of all the forces of life. But I

have also tried to show that these forces must be organized; from

confusion nothing is born. The spiritual order grows up within us as

fast as we make new correlations. Chaos, disorder, destruction, come

everywhere from refusing the syntheses of life.

The task of coadaptation is unending, whether it means getting on with a

difficult member of my family, playing the game at school or college,

doing my part in my business, my city, or whether it means Germany and

the Allies living together on the same planet.

Nietzsche thought that the man who showed the most force was the most

virtuous. Now we say that all this brute energy is merely the given,

that the life-process is the unifying of the given—he who shows the

unifying power in greatest degree is the superman. Progress is not

determined then by economic conditions, by physical conditions nor by

biological factors solely, but more especially by our capacity for

genuine coöperation.

This idea of progress clear-cuts some long-established notions. We see

now the truth and the fallacy in the assertions (1) that social

evolution depends upon individual progress with imitation by the crowd,

(2) that evolution means struggle and the survival of the fittest.

For some years the generally accepted theory of the social process was

that the individual invents, society spreads. We have already examined

one half of this theory; let us look at the other half—the idea that the

individual originates.

If a man comes forward with an idea, what do we mean by saying that he

is more “original” than his fellows? So far as the quality of

originality can be described, do we not mean that his capacity for

saturation is greater, his connection with the psychic reservoir more

direct, so that some group finds in him its most complete interpreter?

Or even if it is quite evident that in a particular instance a

particular individual has not derived his idea from the group of which

he is at the moment a member, but has brought it to the group, none of

us believes that that idea arose spontaneously in his mind independent

of all previous association. This individual has belonged to many other

groups, has discussed with many men, or even if he has lived his life

apart he has read newspapers and magazines, books and letters, and has

mingled his ideas with those he has found there. Thus the “individual”

idea he brings to a group is not really an “individual” idea; it is the

result of the process of interpenetration, but by bringing it to a new

group and soaking it in that the interpenetration becomes more complex.

The group idea he takes away is now his individual idea so far as any

new group is concerned, and in fact it becomes an active agent in his

progress and the progress of society only by meeting a new group. Our

life is more and more stagnant in proportion as we refuse the group

life.

According to the old theory, the individual proposes, society accepts or

rejects; the individual is forever walking up to society to be embraced

or rejected—it sounds like some game but is hardly life.

There is an interesting theory current which is the direct outcome of

the fallacy that the individual originates and society imitates, namely,

the great man theory. While it seems absurd in this age to be combating

the idea of special creation, yet it is something very like this that

one comes up against sometimes in the discussion of this theory. The

question is often asked, “Does the great man produce his environment or

is he the product of his environment?” Although for my purpose I may

seem to emphasize the other side of things, not for a moment do I wish

to belittle the inestimable value of genius. But the fact of course is

that great men make their environment and are made by their environment.

There wells up in the individual a fountain of power, but this fountain

has risen underground and is richly fed by all the streams of the common

life.[30]

I have spoken of fallacies in the individual invention theory and in the

struggle theory. But I am using the word struggle as synonymous with

strife, opposition, war; effort, striving, the ceaseless labor of

adjustment will always be ours, but these two ideas represent opposite

poles of existence. In the true theory of evolution struggle has indeed

always been adaptation. For many years the “strongest” man has been to

science the being with the greatest number of points of union, the

“fittest” has been the one with the greatest power of coöperation.

Darwin we all know believed that the cause of the advance of

civilization was in the social habits of man. Our latest biologists tell

us that “mutual aid” has from the first been a strong factor in

evolution, that the animal species in which the practice of “mutual

aid”[31] has attained the greatest development are invariably the most

numerous and the most prosperous. We no longer think of the animal world

as necessarily a world of strife; in many of its forms we find not

strife but coördinated activities.

But to too many people struggle suggests conquest and domination; it

implies necessarily victors and vanquished. Some sociologists call the

dissimilar elements of a group the struggle elements, and the similar

elements the unifying elements. But this is a false distinction which

will, as long as persisted in, continue the war between classes and

between nations. The test of our progress is neither our likenesses nor

our unlikenesses, but what we are going to do with our unlikenesses.

Shall I fight whatever is different from me or find the higher

synthesis? The progress of society is measured by its power to unite

into a living, generating whole its self-yielding differences.

Moreover, we think now of the survival of groups rather than of

individuals. For the survival of the group the stronger members must not

crush the weaker but cherish them, because the spiritual and social

strength which will come from the latter course makes a stronger group

than the mere brute strength of a number of “strong” individuals. That

is, the strength of the group does not depend on the greatest number of

strong men, but on the strength of the bond between them, that is, on

the amount of solidarity, on the best organization.

But it might be said, “You still evidently believe in struggle, only you

make the group instead of the individual the unit.” No, the progress of

man must consist in extending the group, in belonging to many groups, in

the relation of these groups. If we accept life as endless battle, then

we shall always have the strong overcoming the weak, either strong

individuals conquering the weak, or a strong group a weak group, or a

strong nation a weak nation. But synthesis is the principle of life, the

method of social progress. Men have developed not through struggle but

through learning how to live together.

Lately the struggle theory has been transferred from the physical to the

intellectual world. Many writers who see society as a continuous

conflict think its highest form is discussion. One of these says, “Not

for a moment would I deny that fighting is better carried on by the pen

than by the sword, but some sort of fighting will be necessary to the

end of the world.” No, as long as we think of discussion as a struggle,

as an opportunity for “argument,” there will be all the usual evil

consequences of the struggle theory. But all this is superficial. If

struggle is unavailing, it is unavailing all along the line. It is not

intellectual struggle that marks the line of progress, but any signs of

finding another method than struggle. Two neighbors quarrelling in words

are little more developed than two men fighting a duel. We must learn to

think of discussion not as a struggle but as experiment in coöperation.

We must learn coöperative thinking, intellectual team-work. There is a

secret here which is going to revolutionize the world.

Perhaps the most profound reason against struggle is that it always

erects a thing-in-itself. If I “fight” Mr. X, that means that I think of

Mr. X as incapable of change—that either he or I must prevail, must

conquer. When I realize fully that there are no things-in-themselves,

struggle simply fades away; then I know that Mr. X and I are two flowing

streams of activity which must meet for larger ends than either could

pursue alone.

Is Germany the last stronghold of the old theory of evolution, is she

the last being in a modern world to assert herself as a thing-in-itself?

President Wilson’s contribution to this war is that he refuses to look

upon Germany as a thing-in-itself.

The idea of adaptation to environment has been so closely connected with

the “struggle for existence” theory that some people do not seem to

realize that in giving up the latter, the former still has force,

although with a somewhat different connotation. We now feel not only

that adaptation to environment is compatible with coöperation, but that

coöperation is the basis of adaptation to environment. But our true

environment is psychic, and as science teaches adaptation to the

physical, so group psychology will teach the secret of membership in the

psychic environment, will teach the branch to know its vine, where its

own inner sources of life are revealed to it. Then we shall understand

that environment is not a hard and rigid something external to us,

always working upon us, whose influence we cannot escape. Not only have

self and environment acted and reacted upon each other, but the action

and reaction go on every moment; both self and environment are always in

the making. The individual who has been affected by his environment acts

on an environment which has been affected by individuals. We shall need

an understanding of this for all our constructive work: it is not that

formative influences work on a dead mass of inertia, but formative

influences work on an environment which has already responded to

initiatives, and these initiatives have been affected by the responses.

We cannot be practical politicians without fully understanding this.

Progress then must be through the group process. Progress implies

respect for the creative process not the created thing; the created

thing is forever and forever being left behind us. The greatest blow to

a hide-bound conservatism would be the understanding that life is

creative at every moment. What the hard-shelled conservative always

forgets is that what he really admires in the past is those very moments

when men have strongly and rudely broken with tradition, burst bonds,

and created something. True conservatism and true progressivism are not

two opposites: conservatives dislike “change,” yet they as well as

progressives want to grow; progressives dislike to “stand pat,” yet they

as well as conservatives want to preserve what is good in the present.

But conservatives often make the mistake of thinking they can go on

living on their spiritual capital; progressives are often too prone not

to fund their capital at all.

What we must get away from is “the hell of rigid things.” There is a

living life of the people. And it must flow directly through our

government and our institutions, expressing itself anew at every moment.

We are not fossils petrified in our social strata. _We are alive._ This

is the first lesson for us to learn. That very word means change and

change, growth and growth. To live gloriously is to change

undauntedly—our ideals must evolve from day to day, and it is upon those

who can fearlessly embrace the doctrine of “becoming” that the life of

the future waits. All is growing; we must recognize this and free the

way for the growth. We must unclose our spiritual sources, we must allow

no mechanism to come between our spiritual sources and our life. The

_élan vital_ must have free play.

Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal. We do not want

rigid institutions, however good. We need no “body of truth” of any

kind, but the will to will, which means the power to make our own

government, our own institutions, our own expanding truth. _We progress,

not from one institution to another, but from a lesser to a greater will

to will._

We know now that there are no immutable goals—there is only a way, a

process, by which we shall, like gods, create our own ends at any

moment—crystallize just enough to be of use and then flow on again. The

flow of life and we the flow: this is the truth. Life is not a matter of

desirable objects here and there; the stream flows on and he who waits

with his object is left with a corpse. Man is equal to life at every

moment, but he must live for _life_ and not for the _things_ life has

produced.

Yet while it is true that life can never be formalized or formulated,

that life is movement, change, onwardness, this does not mean that we

must give up the abiding. The unchangeable and the unchanging are both

included in the idea of growth.[32] Stability is neither rigidity nor

sterility: it is the perpetual power of bringing forth.

Writers are always fixing dates for the dividing line between the

ancient and the modern world, or between the mediæval and the modern

world. Soon the beginning of modern times, of modern thought, will, I

believe, be dated at the moment when men began to look at a plastic

world, at a life constantly changing, at institutions as only temporary

crystallizations of life forces, of right as evolving, of men as

becoming.

The real work of every man is then to build. The challenge is upon us.

This is the task to which all valiant souls must set themselves. We are

to rise from one mastery to another. We are to be no longer satisfied

with the pace of a merely fortuitous progress. We must know now that we

are coworkers with every process of creation, that our function is as

important as the power which keeps the stars in their orbits. We are

creators here and now. We are not in the anteroom of our real life. This

is real life.

We cannot, however, mould our lives each by himself; but within every

individual is the power of joining himself fundamentally and vitally to

other lives, and out of this vital union comes the creative power.

Revelation, if we want it to be continuous, must be through the

community bond. No _individual_ can change the disorder and iniquity of

this world. No chaotic _mass_ of men and women can do it. Conscious

_group_ creation is to be the social and political force of the future.

Our aim must be to live consciously in more and more group relations and

to make each group a means of creating. It is the group which will teach

us that we are not puppets of fate.

Then will men and women spend their time in trivial or evil ways when

they discover that they can make a world to their liking? We are

sometimes told that young men and women working all day under the

present very trying industrial conditions live in our great cities a

round of gaiety at night. Go and look at them. It is a depressing sight.

A tragedy is a tragedy and has its own nobility, but this farce of a

city population enjoying itself at night is a pitiful spectacle. Go to

clubs, go to dances, go to theatres or moving-pictures, and the mass of

our young people look indifferent and more or less bored—they have _not_

found the joy of life. Play, as useless idling, does not give us joy.

Work, as drudgery, does not give us joy. Only creating gives us joy.

When we see that we are absolute masters of our life, that in every

operation, however humble, we are working out the fundamental laws of

being, then we shall walk to our daily work as the soldiers march to the

Marseillaise.

We know what happened on that lonely island in a distant sea when the

young Prince came to the people of the Kingdom of Cards, who had always

lived by Rules, and taught them to live by their Ichcha, their will.

Images became men and women, rules gave place to wills, the caste of the

Court cards was lost, a mechanism changed into life. The inhabitants of

the Kingdom of Cards, who had never thought, who had never made a

decision, learned the royal power of choosing for themselves.

Regulations were abandoned, and the startling discovery was made that

_they could walk in any direction they chose_. This is what we need to

learn—that we can walk in any direction we choose. We are not a pack of

cards to be put here and there, to go always in rows, to totter and fall

when we are not propped up. We must obey our Ichcha.

Already the change has begun. I have said that we are beginning to

recognize this power—there are many indications that we are beginning to

live this power. We are no longer willing to leave human affairs to

“natural” control: we do not want war because it is “natural” to fight;

we do not want a haphazard population at the dictates of “nature.” We no

longer believe that sickness and poverty are sent by God; people are

being taught that they need not be sick, that it is largely in their own

hands, their own collective hands (social hygiene etc.). Modern charity

is not aimed at relieving individual poverty, but at freeing the

individual from the particular enslavement which has produced his

poverty, in freeing society from the causes which produce poverty at

all.[33]

Our once-honored blind forces are more and more losing their mastery

over us. We are at this moment, however, in a difficult transition

period. We are “freer” than ever before; the trouble is we do not know

what to do with this freedom. It is easy to live the moral, the

“social,” life when it consists in following a path carefully marked out

for us, but the task given us to-day is to revalue all the world values,

to steer straight on and on into the unknown—a gallant forth-faring

indeed. But conscious evolution, the endless process of a perfect

coördinating, demands vital people. War is the easy way: we take to war

because we have not enough vitality for the far more difficult job of

agreeing. So also that kind of religion which consists of contemplation

of other-worldliness is the easy way, and we take to that when we have

not enough vitality deliberately to direct our life and construct our

world. It takes more spiritual energy to express the group spirit than

the particularist spirit. This is its glory as well as its difficulty.

We have to be higher order of beings to do it—we become higher order of

beings by doing it. And so the progress goes on forever: it means life

forever in the making, and the creative responsibility of every man.

Conscious evolution is the key to that larger view of democracy which we

are embracing to-day. The key? Every man sharing in the creative process

_is_ democracy; this is our politics and our religion. People are always

inquiring into their relation to God. God is the moving force of the

world, the ever-continuing creating where men are the co-creators.

“_Chaque homme fait dieu, un peu, avec sa vie_,” as one of the most

illumined of the younger French poets says.[34] Man and God are

correlates of that mighty movement which is Humanity self-creating. God

is the perpetual Call to our self-fulfilling. We, by sharing in the

life-process which binds all together in an active, working unity are

all the time sharing in the making of the Universe. This thought calls

forth everything heroic that is in us; every power of which we are

capable must be gathered to this glorious destiny. This is the True

Democracy.[35]

-----

Footnote 30:

It is unfortunate to be obliged to treat this important point with

such brevity.

Footnote 31:

The expressions “mutual aid” and “animal coöperation” have, however, a

slightly misleading connotation; mutual adaptation, coördinated

activities, come nearer the truth. It is confusing to take the words

and phrases we use of men in the conscious stage and transfer them to

the world of animals in the unconscious stage.

Footnote 32:

It is because of this profound truth that we must always respect

conservatism.

Footnote 33:

The claim of the individual to a larger share in government and to a

share in the control of industry will be taken up in later chapters.

Footnote 34:

“Ce que Nait” is the title of a volume of poems by Arcos, and that

which is being born through all the activity of our common life is

God. It is of the “naissance” and “croissance” of God that Arcos loves

to sing.

Footnote 35:

I have said that we gain creative power through the group. Those who

feel enthralled by material conditions, and to whom it seems an irony

to be told that they are “creators,” will demand something more

specific. Concrete methods of group organization are given in Part

III.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XIV

THE GROUP PRINCIPLE AT WORK

--------------

OUR rate of progress, then, and the degree in which we actualize the

perfect democracy, depend upon our understanding that man has the power

of creating, and that he gets this power through his capacity to join

with others to form a real whole, a living group. Let us see, therefore,

what signs are visible to-day of the group principle at work.

First, our whole idea of education is rapidly changing. The chief aim of

education now is to fit the child into the life of the community; we do

not think of his “individual” development except as contributing to

that. Or it would be nearer the truth to say that we recognize that his

individual development is essentially just that. The method of

accomplishing this is chiefly through (1) the introduction of group

class-room work in the place of individual recitations, (2) the addition

of vocational subjects to the curriculum and the establishment of

vocational schools, and (3) the organizing of vocational guidance

departments and placement bureaus in connection with the public schools.

In many of the large cities of the United States the public schools have

a vocational guidance department, and it is not considered that the

schools have done their duty by the child until they have helped him to

choose his life occupation, have trained him in some degree for it, and

have actually found him a job, that is, fitted him into the community.

It is becoming gradually accepted that this is a function of the state,

and several of our states are considering the appropriation of funds for

the carrying on of such departments.[36]

The further idea of education as a continuous process, that it stops

neither at 14 nor 21 nor 60, that a man should be related to his

community not only through services rendered and benefits received but

by a steady process of preparation for his social and civic life, will

be discussed later.[37]

The chief object of medical social service is to put people into

harmonious and fruitful relation, not only because illness has

temporarily withdrawn certain people from the community, but because it

is often some lack of adaptation which has caused the illness.

Our different immigration theories show clearly the growth of the

community idea. First came the idea of amalgamation: our primary duty to

all people coming to America was to assimilate them as quickly and as

thoroughly as possible. Then people reacted against the melting-pot

theory and said, “No, we want all the Italians have to offer, all the

Syrians can give us; the richness of these different civilizations must

not be engulfed in ours.” So separate colonies were advocated, separate

organizations were encouraged. Many articles were written and speeches

made to spread this thought. But now a third idea is emerging—the

community idea. We do not want Swedes and Poles to be lost in an

undifferentiated whole, but equally we do not want all the evils of the

separatist method; we are trying to get an articulated whole. We want

all these different peoples to be part of a true community—giving all

they have to give and receiving equally. Only by a mutual permeation of

ideals shall we enrich their lives and they ours.

Again our present treatment of crime shows the community principle in

two ways: (1) the idea of community responsibility for crime is

spreading rapidly; (2) we are fast outgrowing the idea of punishing

criminals merely, our object is to fit them into society.

First, the growing idea of community responsibility for crime. We read

in an account of the new penology that “Crime in the last analysis is

not to be overcome after arrest but before,” that crime will be

abolished by a change of environment and that “environment is

transformed by child labor laws and the protection of children, by

housing laws and improved sanitation, by the prevention of tuberculosis

and other diseases, by health-giving recreational facilities, by

security of employment, by insurance against the fatalities of industry

and the financial burdens of death and disease, by suitable vocational

training, by all that adds to the content of human life and gives us

higher and keener motives to self-control, strenuous exertion and

thrift.” We of course do not exonerate the individual from

responsibility, but it must be shared by the whole society in which he

lives.

Secondly, the old idea of justice was punishment, a relic of personal

revenge; this punishment took the form of confinement, of keeping the

man outside society. The new idea is exactly the opposite: it is to join

him to society by finding out just what part he is best fitted to play

in society and training him for it. A former Commissioner of Corrections

in New York told me that a number of people, including several judges,

were looking forward to the time very soon being ripe for making the

“punishment” of a crime the doing some piece of social service in order

to fit the criminal into the social order. One man who had shown in his

crime marked organizing ability had been sent to oversee the reclaiming

of some large tracts of abandoned farm land, and this had worked so well

that a number of judges wished to try similar experiments.

Thus criminals are coming to be shown that their crime has not been

against individuals but against society, that it has divorced them from

their community and that the object of their imprisonment is that they

may learn how to unite themselves to their community. The colony system

means that they must learn to live in a community _by_ living in a

community. This is the object of Mr. William George’s “Social

Sanitarium,” where the men are to live in a graded series of farm

villages, govern themselves, support themselves and also their families

as far as possible, and pass from “village” to “village” on their way

towards the society from which their crime has separated them.

This same principle, to make the life while under punishment a

preparation for community life, underlay the work of Mr. Osborne at Sing

Sing. Through his Mutual Welfare League he tried to develop a feeling of

responsibility to the community, a feeling first of all that there was a

community within the prison. All the men knew gang loyalty; it was Mr.

Osborne’s aim to build upon this. He thought they could not feel

responsibility to a community outside when they left unless they learnt

community consciousness inside. He did not provide recreation for them

solely for the sake of recreation; he did not allow them self-government

because of any abstract idea of the justice of self-government; he tried

to bring the men of Sing Sing to a realization of a community, to a

sense of responsibility to a community. The two men who escaped from

Sing Sing in 1916 and voluntarily returned had learned this lesson.[38]

Both these principles—community responsibility for crime and the

necessity of fitting the offender into the community life—underlie the

work of the juvenile court. The probation officer’s duty is not

exhausted by knitting the child again into worthy relations; he must try

to see that community life shall touch children on all sides in a

helpful not a harmful way.

A future task for the juvenile court is to organize groups back of the

child as part of the system of probation. All our experience is showing

us the value of using the group incentive. The approval or blame of our

fellow-men is an urgent factor in our lives; a man can stand any sort of

condemnation better than that of his club. It was the idea of community

punishment which was such an interesting part of the “Little

Commonwealth” which Mr. Homer Lane established near Detroit for boys and

girls on probation. If a boy did not work he was not punished for it, he

did not even go without food, but the whole commonwealth had to pay for

it out of their earnings. The whole moral pressure of the community was

thus brought to bear upon that boy to do his share of the work—an

incentive which Mr. Lane found more powerful than any punishment.

A colonel of the American army says that fewer offenses are committed in

our army than in the Continental armies, not because human nature is

different in America but because our methods of army discipline are

different: the custom in our army is to punish a company for the offense

of an individual; the company, therefore, looks after its own members.

The procedure of our courts also shows signs of change in the direction

of the recognition of the group principle. Until recently we have had in

our courts two lawyers, each upholding his side: this means a real

struggle, there is no effort at unifying, one or the other must win; the

judge is a sort of umpire. But the Reconciliation Court of Cleveland

(and some other western cities) marks a long step in advance. This does

away with lawyers each arguing one side; the judge deals directly with

the disputants, trying to make them see that a harmonizing of their

differences is possible. In our municipal courts, to be sure, the

principal function of the judge has long been not to punish but to take

those measures which will place the individual again in his group, but

this applies only to criminal cases, whereas the Reconciliation Court of

Cleveland, following the practice of the conciliation courts of certain

continental countries,[39] deals with civil cases. The part of the judge

in our juvenile courts is too well known to need mention.

In a jury I suppose we have always had an example of the group idea in

practical life. Here there is no question of counting up similar

ideas—there must be one idea and the effort is to seek that.

In our legislatures and legislative committees we get little integrated

thought because of their party organization; even among members of the

same party on a committee there are many causes at work to prevent the

genuine interplay we should have. The governors’ commissions, on the

other hand, hear both sides, call in many experts and try to arrive at

some composite judgment.

Nowhere has our social atomism been more apparent than in our lack of

city-planning: (1) we have had many beautiful single buildings, but no

plan for the whole city; (2) and more important, we could not get any

general plan for our cities accepted because the individual property

owner (this was called individualism!) must be protected against the

community. City-planning includes not only plans for a beautiful city

but for all its daily needs—streets, traffic regulations, housing,

schools, industry, transportation, recreational facilities; we cannot

secure these things while property owners are being protected in their

“rights.” The angry protest which goes up from real estate owners when

it is proposed to regulate the height of buildings we have heard in all

our cities. The struggle for enough light and air in tenements has been

fought step by step. The “right” claimed was the right of every man to

do what he liked with his own property. Now we are beginning to

recognize the error of this, and to see that it is not a state of

individualism but of anarchy that our new building laws are trying to do

away with. No real estate owner is to be allowed to do that with his own

property which will not fit into a general plan for the beauty and

efficiency of the city. The key-note of the new city-planning is

adaptation, adaptation of means to end and of part to part. This does

not stifle individual initiative, but directs it.

And the interesting point for us here is that the real estate men

themselves are now beginning to see that particularistic building has

actually hurt real estate interests. The “Report of the Advisory Council

of the Real Estate Interests of New York City” admits that “light, air

and access, the chief factors in fixing rentable values, had been

impaired by high buildings and by the proximity of inappropriate or

nuisance buildings and uses.” It is impossible to talk ten minutes with

real estate men to-day without noticing how entirely changed their

attitude has been in the last ten or twenty years. Moralists used to

tell us that the only path of progress was to make people willing to

give up their own interests for the sake of others. But this is not what

our real estate men are doing. They are coming to see that their

interests are in the long run coincident with the interests of all the

other members of the city.

The growing recognition of the group principle in the business world is

particularly interesting to us. The present development of business

methods shows us that the old argument about coöperation and competition

is not fruitful. Coöperation and competition are being taken up into a

larger synthesis. We are just entering on an era of collective living.

“Cut-throat” competition is beginning to go out of fashion. What the

world needs to-day is a coöperative mind. The business world is never

again to be directed by individual intelligences, but by intelligences

interacting and ceaselessly influencing one another. Every mental act of

the big business man is entirely different from the mental acts of the

man of the last century managing his own competitive business. There is

of course competition between our large firms, but the coöperation

between them is coming to occupy a larger and larger place relatively.

We see this in the arrangement between most of our large printers in

Boston not to outbid one another, in those trades which join to

establish apprentice schools, in the coöperative credit system, worked

out so carefully in some of the western cities as almost to eliminate

bad debts, in the regular conferences between the business managers of

the large department stores, in our new Employment Managers’

associations in Boston and elsewhere, in the whole spirit of our

progressive Chambers of Commerce. When our large stores “compete” to

give the highest class goods and best quality service, and meet in

conference to make this “competition” effective, then competition itself

becomes a kind of coöperation! There are now between thirty and forty

associations in this country organized on the open-price plan. The

Leather Belting Exchange, an excellent example of “coöperative

competition,” was organized in 1915. Some of its avowed objects are:

standardization of grades of leather, promotion of use of leather

belting by scientific investigation of its possible uses, uniform

contract system, uniform system of cost accounting, daily charts of

sales, monthly statistical reports, collection and distribution of

information relative to cost of raw material and to methods and cost of

manufacturing and distribution.[40] How vastly different a spirit from

that which used to animate the business world!

Modern business, therefore, needs above all men who can unite, not

merely men who can unite without friction, but who can turn their union

to account. The successful business man of to-day is the man of trained

coöperative intelligence. The world as well as the psychologist places a

higher value on the man who can take part in collective thinking and

concerted action, and has higher positions to offer him in the business

and political field. The secretary of a Commission investigates a

subject, is clever in mastering details, in drawing conclusions and in

presenting them, perhaps far cleverer in these respects than any member

of the Commission. But the chairman of the Commission must have another

and higher power—the power of uniting these conclusions with the

conclusions of others, the power of using this material to evolve with

others plans for action. This means a more developed individual and

brings a higher price in the open market.

Another illustration of the group principle in the business world is

that a corporation is obliged by law to act in joint meeting, that is,

it cannot get the vote of its members by letter and then act according

to the majority.

But more important than any of the illustrations yet given is the

application of the group principle to the relations of capital and

labor. People are at last beginning to see that industrial organization

must be based on the community idea. If we do not want to be dominated

by the special interests of the capital-power, it is equally evident

that we do not want to be dominated by the special interests of the

labor-power. The interests of capital and labor must be united.[41]

Even collective bargaining is only a milestone on the way to the full

application of the group principle. It recognizes the union, it

recognizes that some adjustment between the interests of capital and

labor is possible, but it is still “bargaining,” still an adjustment

between two warring bodies, it still rests on the two pillars of

concession and compromise. We see now the false psychology underlying

compromise and concession. Their practical futility has long been

evident: whenever any difference is “settled” by concession, that

difference pops up again in some other form. Nothing will ever truly

settle differences but synthesis. No wonder the syndicalists label the

“compromises” made between “antagonistic interests” as insincere. In a

way all compromise is insincere, and real harmony can be obtained only

by an integration of “antagonistic” interests which can take place only

when we understand the method. The error of the syndicalists is in

thinking that compromise is the only method; their fundamental error is

in thinking that different interests are necessarily “antagonistic”

interests.

Compromise is accepted not only as inevitable and as entirely proper,

but as the most significant fact of human association, by those

economists who belong to that school of “group sociologists” which sees

present society as made up of warring groups, ideal society as made up

of groups in equilibrium. Not only, I believe, is conflict and

compromise not the true social process, but also it is not, even at

present, the most significant, although usually the largest, part of the

social process. The integrating of ideas which comes partly from direct

interpenetration, and partly from that indirect interpenetration which

is the consequence of the overlapping membership of groups, I see going

on very largely in the groups to which I belong, and is surely an

interesting sign-post to future methods of association.

The weakness of Arbitration and Conciliation Boards, with their

“impartial” member, is that they tend to mere compromise even when they

are not openly negotiations between two warring parties.[42] It is

probable from what we see on all sides that the more “concessions” we

make, the less “peace” we shall get. Compulsory Arbitration in New

Zealand has not succeeded as well as was hoped just because it has not

found the community between capital and labor.

The latest development of collective bargaining, the Trade

Agreement,[43] with more or less permanent boards of representatives

from employers and workers, brings us nearer true community than we have

yet found in industrial relations. The history of these Agreements in

England and America is fruitful study. One of the best known in America

is Mr. Justice Brandeis’ protocol scheme in 1910 for the garment

industries of New York, which provided for an industrial court composed

of employers and employed to which all disagreements should be brought,

and for six years this prevented strikes in the needle trades of New

York.[44]

One of the most interesting of the Trade Agreements to be found in the

Bulletins of the National Labor Department, and one which can be studied

over a long term of years, is that between the Stove Founders’ National

Defence Association (employers) and the Iron Moulders’ Union of North

America. It is not only that the permanent organ of “conference”

(employers and employees represented) has brought peace to the stove

industry after forty years of disastrous strikes and lockouts, but that

question after question has been decided not by the side which the

market rendered strongest at the moment seizing its advantage, but by a

real harmonizing of interest. A good illustration is the treatment of

the question of who should pay for the bad castings: that was not

decided at once as a matter of superior strength or of compromise, but

after many months a basis of mutual advantage was found.

For some years Trade Agreements have been coming to include more and

more points; not wages and hours alone, but many questions of shop

management, discipline etc. are now included. Moreover it has been seen

over and over again that the knowledge gained through joint conference

is the knowledge needed for joint control: the workmen ought to know the

cost of production and of transportation, the relative value of

different processes of production, the state of the market, the

conditions governing the production and marketing of the competing

product etc.; the employer must know the real conditions of labor and

the laborer’s point of view.

The fundamental weakness of collective bargaining is that while it

provides machinery for adjustment of grievances, while it looks forward

to all the conceivable emergencies which may arise to cause disagreement

between labor and capital, and seeks methods to meet these, it does not

give labor a direct share in industrial control. In the collective

_bargain wages_ and the conditions of employment are usually determined

by the relative _bargaining_ strength of the workers and employers of

the industrial group. Not bargaining in any form, not negotiation, is

the key to industrial peace and prosperity; the collective contract must

in time go the way of the individual contract. Community is the key-word

for all relations of the new state. Labor unions have long been seeking

their “rights,” have looked on the differences between capital and labor

as a fight, and have sought an advantageous position from which to carry

on the fight: this attitude has influenced their whole internal

organization. They quite as much as capital must recognize that this

attitude must be given up. If we want harmony between labor and capital,

we must make labor and capital into one group: we must have an

integration of interests and motives, of standards and ideals of

justice.

It is a mistake to think that social progress is to depend upon anything

happening to the working people: some say that they are to be given more

material goods and all will be well; some think they are to be given

more “education” and the world will be saved. It is equally a mistake to

think that what we need is the conversion to “unselfishness” of the

capitalist class. Those who advocate profit-sharing are not helping us.

The quarrel between capital and labor can never be settled on material

grounds. The crux of that quarrel is not profits and wages—it is the

joint control of industry.

There has been an increasing tendency of recent years for employers to

take their employees into their councils. This ranges from mere

“advisory” boards, which are consulted chiefly concerning grievances,

through the joint committees for safety, health, standardization, wages

etc., to real share in the management.[45] But even in the lowest form

of this new kind of coöperation we may notice two points: the advisory

boards are usually representative bodies elected by the employees, and

they are consulted as a whole, not individually. The flaw in these

advisory boards is not so much, as is often thought, because the

management still keeps all the power in its own hands, as that the

company officials do not sit with these boards in joint consultation.

There is, however, much variety of method. In some shops advisory

committees meet with the company officials. Some companies put many more

important questions concerning conditions of employment before these

bodies than other companies would think practical. A few employers have

even given up the right to discharge—dismissal must be decided by

fellow-employees.

Usually the management keeps the final power in its own hands. This is

not so, however, in the case of Wm. Filene Son’s Co., Boston, which has

gone further than any other plant in co-management. Here the employees

have the right by a two-thirds vote to change, initiate, or amend any

rule that affects the discipline or working conditions of the employees

of the store, and such vote becomes at once operative even against the

veto of the management. Further, out of eleven members of the board of

directors, four are representatives of the employees.[46]

The great advantage of company officials and workers acting together on

boards or committees (workshop committees, discipline boards, advisory

councils, boards of directors, etc.) is the same as that of the regular

joint conferences of the Trade Agreement: employers and employed can

thus learn to function together and prepare the way for joint control.

Workshop committees should be encouraged, not so much because they

remove grievances etc., as because in the joint workshop committee,

managers and workers are learning to act together. Industrial democracy

is a process, a growth. The joint control of industry may be established

by some fiat, but it will not be the genuine thing until the _process_

of joint control is learned. To be sure, the workshop committees which

are independent of the management are often considered the best for the

workers because they can thus keep themselves free to maintain and fight

for their own particular interests, but this is exactly, I think, what

should be avoided.

The labor question is—Is the war between capital and labor to be

terminated by fight and conquest or by learning how to function

together? I face fully the fact that many supporters of labor believe in

what they call the “frank” recognition that the interests of capital and

labor are “antagonistic.” I believe that the end of the wars of nations

and of the war between labor and capital will come in exactly the same

way: by making the nations into one group, by making capital and labor

into one group. Then we shall learn to distinguish between true and

apparent interests, or rather, between long-run and immediate interests;

then we shall give up the notion of “antagonisms,” which belong to a

static world, and see only difference—that is, that which is capable of

integration. This is not an idealistic treatment of the labor problem.

Increase of wages and reduction in cost of production were once

considered an irreconciliable antagonism—now their concurrence is a

matter of common experience. If the hope of that concurrence had been

abandoned as visionary or idealistic, we should be sadly off to-day.

Many people are now making a distinction, however, between production

and distribution in this respect: in the former the interests of capital

and labor are the same, it is said, but not in the latter. When that

reorganization of the business world, which it is no longer utopian to

think of, is further actualized, then in distribution too we shall be

able to see the coincident interests of labor and capital.

As the most hopeful sign in the present treatment of industrial

questions is the recognition that man with his fundamental instincts and

needs is the very centre and heart of the labor problem, so the most

hopeful sign that we shall fully utilize the constructive powers which

will be released by this psychological approach to industrial problems,

is the gradually increasing share of the workman in the actual control

of industry.

The recognition of community rather than of individuals or class, the

very marked getting away from the attitude of pitting labor interests

against the interests of capital, is the most striking thing from our

point of view about the famous report formulated by a sub-committee of

the British Labor Party in the autumn of 1917. In every one of the four

“Pillars” of the new social order this stands out as the most dominant

feature. In explaining the first, The Universal Enforcement of the

National Minimum, it is explicitly stated that this is not to protect

individuals or a class, but to “safeguard” the “community” against the

“insidious degradation of the standard of life.” The second, The

Democratic Control of Industry, proposes national ownership and

administration of the railways, canals and mines and “other main

industries ... as opportunity offers,” with “a steadily increasing

participation of the organized workers in the management,” the extension

of municipal enterprise to housing and town planning, public libraries,

music and recreation, and the fixing of prices. This “Pillar,” too, we

are told, is not a class measure, but is “to safeguard the interests of

the community as a whole.”

Under the heading, “Revolution in National Finance,” the third “Pillar,”

it is again definitely stated and moreover convincingly shown that this

is not “in the interests of wage-earners alone.” Under “The Surplus

Wealth for the Common Good,” the fourth “Pillar,” it is stated that the

surplus wealth shall be used for what “the community day by day needs

for the perpetual improvement and increase of its various enterprises,”

“for scientific investigation and original research in every branch of

knowledge,” and for “the promotion of music, literature and fine arts.”

“It is in the proposal for this appropriation of every surplus for the

common good—in the vision of its resolute use for the building up of the

community as a whole ... that the Labor Party ... most distinctively

marks itself off from the older political parties.”[47]

-----

Footnote 36:

It is interesting to notice that Miss Lathrop’s whole conception of

the Children’s Bureau is that it is to fit children into the life of

the community.

Footnote 37:

See Appendix.

Footnote 38:

The new farm industrial system which is to replace Sing Sing is

founded largely on the community idea.

Footnote 39:

France, Norway, Switzerland. In Norway it is said that more then

three-quarters of the cases which come before the conciliation courts

are settled without law suits.

Footnote 40:

“Experiences in Coöperative Competition,” by W. V. Spaulding.

Footnote 41:

The great value of Robert Valentine’s work consisted in his

recognition of this fact.

Footnote 42:

I am speaking in general. It is true that the history of cases settled

by arbitration reveals many in which the “umpire” has insisted that

negotiations continue until the real coincident interest of both sides

should be discovered.

Footnote 43:

It has long been known in England and America but recently it has been

spreading rapidly.

Footnote 44:

Recently abandoned.

Footnote 45:

The three firms which have carried co-management furthest are the

Printz-Biederman Co. of Cleveland, the Wm. Filene’s Sons Co. of Boston

and the U. S. Cartridge Co. of Lowell. See Report of Committee on

Vocational Guidance, Fourth Annual Convention of National Association

of Corporation Schools, by Henry C. Metcalf.

Footnote 46:

We have a number of minor instances of the recognition of the group

principle in industry. An interesting example is the shop piece-work

in the Cadbury works, where the wages are calculated on the output of

a whole work-room, and thus every one in the room has to suffer for

the laziness of one. (See “Experiments in Industrial Organization,” by

Edward Cadbury.)

Footnote 47:

I have not spoken of the coöperative buying and selling movement

because by the name alone it is obvious how well it illustrates my

point, and also because it is so well known to every one.

Another evidence of the spreading of the community idea is the wide

acceptance of the right of the community to value created by the

community.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XV

FROM CONTRACT TO COMMUNITY

--------------

BUT perhaps nowhere in our national life is the growing recognition of

the group or community principle so fundamental for us as in our modern

theory of law. Mr. Roscoe Pound has opened a new future for America by

his exposition of modern law, an exposition which penetrates and

illumines every department of our thought. Let us speak briefly of this

modern theory of law. It is: (1) that law is the outcome of our

community life, (2) that it must serve, not individuals, but the

community.

Mr. Pound, in a series of articles on “The Scope and Purpose of

Sociological Jurisprudence” in the Harvard Law Review (1910-1912),

points out that it was an epoch-making moment when attention began to be

turned from the nature of law to its purpose. The old conception of law

was that “new situations are to be met always by deductions from old

principles.” The new school (headed by Jhering) believe that “law is a

product of conscious and increasingly determinate human will.” “Legal

doctrines and legal interests do not work themselves out blindly, but

have been fashioned by human wants to meet human needs.” Before Jhering

the theory of law had been individualistic; Jhering’s is a social theory

of law. “The eighteenth century conceived of law as something which the

individual invoked against society; ... Jhering taught that it was

something created by society through which the individual found a means

of securing his interests, so far as society recognized them.” And

Jhering called his a jurisprudence of realities; he wanted legal

precepts worked out and tested by results. For instance, if a rule of

commercial law were in question, the search should be for the rule which

best accords with and gives effect to sound business practice.[48]

So, Mr. Pound tells us, the idea of justice as the maximum of individual

self-assertion, which began to appear at the end of the sixteenth

century and reached its highest development in the nineteenth century,

began to give way towards the end of the nineteenth century to the new

idea of the end of law. Modern jurists have come to consider the working

of law more than its abstract content; they lay stress upon the social

purposes which law subserves rather than upon sanction.[49]

Mr. Pound then shows us that Gierke’s theory of association “became as

strong an attack upon the individualistic jurisprudence of the

nineteenth century upon one side as Jhering’s theory of interests was

upon another.” The “real personality” of the group is plainly expounded

by Gierke, that it is not a legal fiction, that is that the law does not

create it but merely recognizes that which already exists, that this

“real person” is more than an aggregation of individuals, that there is

a group will which is something real apart from the wills of the

associated individuals.

Thus German jurists recognize the principle of “community.” The theory

of Vereinbarung, as expounded by Jellinek,[50] is also a recognition of

the fact that one will can be formed from several. The present tendency

to work out the law of association through the study of the group is

marked and significant.

The chief consequence of this growing tendency in modern juristic

thinking is seen in the change in attitude towards contract. The

fundamental question of relation, of association, is—Can you make one

idea grow where two grew before? _This_ is the law of fruitful increase.

The gradual progress away from contract in legal theory is just the

gradual recognition of this principle. You can have a contractual

relation between two wills or you can have those two wills uniting to

form one will. Contract never creates one will. It is the latter process

which is shown in the development of corporation law.[51] The laws

regulating partnership are based on contractual relations between the

individual members. The laws regulating corporations are based on the

theory that a corporation is something quite different from the

individuals who constitute it or the sum of those individuals, that a

new entity has been created. I am writing at this moment (February,

1918) in a room with the thermometer at 42, but the law would not uphold

me in going and getting my share, as a stock holder, of the coal now in

the New York, New Haven and Hartford sheds! But to many the personality

of the corporation is a fiction: they do not consider the corporation a

self-created entity but a state-created entity. To others, following

Gierke, the corporation is merely a state-_recognized_ entity, it has

the inherent power to create itself. The increasing acceptance of this

latter theory has made it possible to hold liable groups which have not

been legally incorporated but which exercise powers analogous to those

of corporations. This has been the principle of some of the English

decisions making trade-unions responsible, as notably in the Taff-Vale

case.

The paradox of contract is that while it seems to be based on relation,

it is in reality based on the individual. Contract is a particularist

conception. Mr. Pound speaks of the significance of the “parallel

movement away from liberty of contract and yet at the same time towards

the full recognition of association.” It is the legal theory of

association based on our growing understanding of group psychology which

will finally banish contract. When Duguit, the eminent French jurist,

tells us that contract is diminishing, it is because he sees a time when

all juridical manifestations will come from unilateral acts.[52] We see

contract diminishing because we believe in a different mode of

association: as fast as association becomes a “community” relation, as

fast as individuals are recognized as community-units, just so fast does

contract fade away. Jellinek points out that legal theory is coming to

recognize that violation of community is quite different from the

violation of contract.

From status to contract we do not now consider the history of liberty

but of particularism—the development of law through giving a larger and

larger share to the particular will. The present progress of law is from

contract to community. Our particularistic law is giving way to a legal

theory based on a sound theory of interrelationship. Our common law has

considered men as separate individuals, not as members of one another.

These separate individuals were to be “free” to fight out their

differences as best they could, it being overlooked that freedom for one

might not mean freedom for the other, as in the case of employer and

employed. “Individual rights” in practice usually involve some

difference of opinion as to who is the individual! Mr. Olney said of the

Adair case: “It is archaic, it is a long step into the past, to conceive

of and deal with the relations between the employer in such industries

and the employee as if the parties were individuals.”[53]

The principles of individual rights and contract which have long

dominated our courts[54] are giving way now to sounder doctrine. The old

idea was that a man could do what he liked with his own; this is not the

modern notion of law. We find a judge recently saying: “The entire

scheme of prohibition as embodied in the Constitution and laws of Kansas

might fail, if the right of each citizen to manufacture intoxicating

liquors for his own use or as a beverage were recognized. Such a right

does not inhere in citizenship.”[55] Our future law is to serve neither

classes nor individuals, but the community. The lawyer is to bring his

accumulation of knowledge not to his clients merely, but to enrich and

interpret and adjust our whole social life.

We have many signs to-day of the growing recognition of community as the

basis of law. The following are taken from an article by Mr. Pound:[56]

The increasing tendency of law to impose limitations on the use of

property, limitations designed to prevent the anti-social use of

property. This has already been noticed in our new building laws.

The limitations now imposed on freedom of contract. This is shown in the

statutes regulating the hours and conditions of labor, in the law of

insurance,[57] in the judicial decisions which have established that the

duties of public service corporations are not contractual, flowing from

agreement, but quasi-contractual, flowing from the calling in which the

public servant is engaged.

Limitations on the part of creditor or injured party to exact

satisfaction. This is illustrated by the homestead exemptions which

prevail in many states, and such exemptions as tools to artisans,

libraries to professional men, and animals and implements to farmers.

Imposition of liability without fault, as illustrated in workmen’s

compensation and employers’ liability.[58]