Contrasts such as those in the title of the present chapter, the
personal and the social, the vital and the formal, or instrumental, are
always dangerous to clear thinking, and yet in spite of the danger no
thinking can avoid them. They can be only relatively true; the terms in
which they are couched cannot fail, sooner or later, from one standpoint
or another, to make an exchange of the very things to which they apply,
since opposition, as must be remembered, is always a most effective
mixer, and therefore they can only punctuate the naturally chiaroscuro
character that belongs to all articulate thinking. Nevertheless, used
with self-control, they are distinctly serviceable.
In our recent dismission of the value of the essential defects of
experience, and particularly when we came to associate social character
with the habit of contradiction, a contrast of the personal and the
social was very plainly implied, and some special attention to this
contrast, I feel sure, will help us to comprehend more fully what was
said at the time, and will be of great advantage also to our general
purpose. It was [p.155] said that society was nothing alien, or
additional, to the nature of the individual, that a basis for society
lay in the very nature of experience, that so long as man was divided
against himself and the labour of life and reality was necessarily a
divided labour, the case both for society and for personal interest in
society was clear and conclusive; but this was not fully to define the
parts that are played by the individual person and the social group in
the development and maintenance of human life. Some, for example, would
fear more for the safety of the individual or the person than for that
of society; and just in recognition of their fear, we honest doubters,
who are now also at least potential believers, must look to our
defences.
Long ago Plato drew an analogy of the soul or self, of the human
individual, to society, and so, too, Aristotle, though not to society,
but much more broadly to all nature, and the one analogy or the other
has had a good deal of fascination, not to say intellectual inspiration,
for thinking men ever since. Yet, so far as I am aware, at least one of
the implications of the idea has never been fully stated or appraised,
and this is much to be wondered at, since there is involved a strong
case for both the personal and the social in the maintenance of
experience.[1]
Plato found reason, will, and sensuous nature in the individual and
analogously a thinking or law-making class, an official or military
class, and an industrial or [p.156] appetitive class in society; and
Aristotle, in very much the same way, found the parts of the individual
soul analogous to the vegetable, animal, and rational kingdoms of
nature, and either of these analogies is simple enough and reasonable
enough to be formally understood, if not at once wholly appreciated,
with its mere statement. Still, in order to be sure of appreciation, in
order especially to get the reflected light on the relation between
individual and society, we must look to the facts and conditions which
are presented very closely.
To begin with, such an analogy, dealing as it does with the relation of
a part to the whole, has and should have, for a reason not hard to find,
the freedom of the city of logic. Other than logical approval of it
might be cited. Biology and sociology and psychology might be called in
to give testimony. And out of the past, the more recent past at least as
known to the historian of philosophy, Leibnitz with his _lex analogiæ_,
or for that matter with the general import of his monadology, might be
appealed to. But without tarrying for assistance from these quarters,
highly respectable though they are, I make a simple, yet perhaps timely
and--with apologies for so much emotion--soul-satisfying reference to
the logic in the case, for after all biology and sociology and
psychology are always under the restraints of logic, as well as
alliterated with it; nor does the evidence of logic depend on mere
technical acquaintance with given sets of facts. Thus, in these
enlightened days, to say nothing of Plato's time or Aristotle's, how can
the true part of anything ever dare [p.157] not to have an analogy, even
a "part-for-part" or "one-to-one" correspondence to the whole in which
it is comprised? And--this being, as in due time will appear, quite as
important--how can a whole, be it society or nature or anything else,
ever have parts without having also, actually or potentially, parts
within its parts? In fact, given any divided whole, and the division,
however far it may be carried, will always involve at least these three
typical factors: (1) The individual as the part still undivided, though
at the same time necessarily inwardly alive with the self-same
differential operation to which it has owed its origin; (2) the
group-part or class, which for the convenience of the adjective form may
be known also as the faction, and which was so important to Plato in his
analogy of the individual to a class-divided society; and (3) the
all-inclusive whole. And among these factors in all possible ways--that
is, even between individual and individual, or individual and group or
group and group, as well as between either individual or group and
whole--an analogy in terms of all the various elements of the original
differential operation will persist. Such, almost truistically, though
also perhaps somewhat subtly for ordinary purposes, is the logical
condition of division or differentiation. Difference, like its limit
opposition, is thus a great mixer, and division can be no mere
separation or isolation of parts. The saying comes to my mind from
somewhere, that though division may reveal distinct vertebræ, the
vertebra always conceal a spinal cord.
Analogy, however, although thus universal, although [p.158] applicable,
as said, in all of the possible ways, must itself share in, must be
quite under the spell of, the differentiation; it must have as many
various forms as it has expressions. In every expression the relation
must indeed be one of analogy, but it can never be of the same order or
degree. That of the individual to the group or faction must be
qualitatively distinct from all others, say from that of the individual
either to another individual or to the all-inclusive whole. Nor can the
much used and frequently abused distinction between small and large
writings, as when history is taken as a large writing of personal
biography or a social institution of some special phase of personal
character, adequately represent the differentiation here in mind.
Consider how various, internally and externally, are all the terms among
which the analogies obtain. Thus, as of direct interest here, factional
differences are bound to be sharper or wider, they are inevitably more
deeply set and more openly exclusive of each other than individual
differences, and in consequence the faction is, not indeed absolutely,
but characteristically special or particularistic. Perhaps because of
its intermediate position between the individual, which is the whole
implicitly and potentially, and the completely inclusive environment,
which is the whole actually and definitely or explicitly, it is, so to
speak, significantly only one among many, instead of being, as in the
case of each of the extremes, many in one. It conspicuously appropriates
a particular character, and while not excluding any of the other
characters which are incident to its own special production, it includes
these on the whole only in a negative way, in [p.159] the way in which
opposition includes what opposes it or action the reaction it always
implies or in general any different thing the thing or things from which
it is different. The extremes, however, as was said, are each "many in
one," though in different ways. The individual, being still only
potentially divided and being, as it were, the latest residence of the
primary operation, is always in some measure directly and positively
active with all the different factors of the operation, and this in
spite of the restraints of any particular class-affiliation, and the
whole, though macro-cosmic with respect to the microcosmic individual,
is at the same time qualitatively distinct, as distinct at least as the
explicit from the implicit, the actual from the potential. Whatever a
merely formal logic might say, a real logic requires that at most
microcosm and macrocosm are only metaphors of each other. Even their
difference of size would be quite enough to differentiate them at least
as sharply as the difference of size differentiated imperial Rome from
her prototype the Greek City-State. Can the whole and the part be one or
many or many in one, can they be real or alive or conscious, can they be
material, can they be personal, can they be anything whatsoever in
qualitatively the same way? Men have often seemed to think so, but
without any good reason. The faction, then, the individual and the
whole, are qualitatively different expressions of the elements of the
operation that has made them; and their relations, always dependent on
analogy, must be various accordingly.
But now, to leave these questions of logic and to turn directly to the
case for both personality and [p.160] society, no idea can be more
immediately useful to us than that of what is often styled the unity of
experience. Of course this unity, as it is real, must meet just those
tests of reality, or of a real unity, that we have already remarked, but
within the limits of a definition the unity of experience is neither
more nor less than the totality of human relations. It is the
experience-whole comprising all the phases of human nature; in other
words, all the actual or possible relations of man to nature in general,
or all the manifold states and activities, stages and events, however
different, however seemingly contradictory, in human life. A real unity,
as we know, being denied local habitation and a name, is necessarily a
thoroughly differential unity; and human nature is analyzable in an
indefinite number of ways. It is, to illustrate, physical, mental, and
spiritual, or more elaborately, it is athletic, industrial, political,
intellectual, moral, æsthetic, and religious, and in its social life has
developed institutions answering to these different phases of itself. It
is, again, lawful and lawless, old and young, conservative and radical,
sympathetic and selfish. But whatever the mode of analysis or division
or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the elements,
aspects, or relations that are discovered. In a word, even in the
language of the simple logic indicated above, the unity of experience is
only the all-inclusive whole, but here without regard to any distinction
between what is actual or explicit and what is potential or implicit,
out of which has sprung the differential operation that has made human
society and human history, that has given rise to a manifest [p.161]
social life, to the social class or faction and to the individual
person.
And the person as the real individual, as the part that is still
undivided, and that is therefore in itself quick with the differential
operation, is thus the living, integral exponent of the unity of
experience. He is, above all, its unformed or untethered vitality. In
him every phase or part of what is possible in human nature moves with
some power. He is religious, political, industrial; or spiritual,
intellectual, and physical; or good and bad, conservative and radical,
all in one; and characteristically he is each and all of these without
the restraints of such visible forms or rites as now and again may
become instrumental to their expression. Hence the familiar idea of the
universality, which is identical with the indeterminate character, of
any side of human nature; of the political side, for example, or the
religious or the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not any
particular political status, nor any particular religion, nor any
particular body is universal, but the political or the religious or the
physiological is universal--as universal, to repeat, as it is
indeterminate. Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the
lawful or the lawless is universal. Personally, just to sum up what has
been said, all individuals are all things in one, and this idea, as it
is understood, should correct that erroneous treatment of individualism,
whether as a movement in the life of society or even as an incident of
the scientific method of induction, to which reference was made in the
discussion of the rise of science.[2]
[p.162] But the story of personality cannot be told by itself. Whatever
the person may be characteristically, he is never that alone, and before
any estimate of all that he is or of all that enters into his life can
be attained, attention must be turned to society, the other horn of our
present interest, and particularly to the social class or faction. If
the person in his peculiar character is general or all-inclusive with
reference to the unity of experience, the factional life is special,
particular, or partial; it is one-sided and outwardly exclusive.
Sociologically as well as logically factional differences are, as has
been suggested, wider and sharper than individual or personal
differences. Personally all men are free, socially approachable, liberal
in thought and act; not so factionally. Judged from its classes society
is even a hot-bed of specialism, its classes always tending to become
castes, and of hostility, its differences inducing open conflict. An
illustration of this we have already seen in the rise of the profession
of science.
Whence, to emphasize at once a most important conclusion, the typical
relation of the person to the class is not, as so often said or implied,
that of the particular to the general; instead it is that of the general
to the particular, of the whole to the part, and significantly that of
the vital to the instrumental. Yet, to say no more than this would be a
serious mistake, for at least in two ways this statement must be
modified. Doubtless the required modifications are directly consequent
upon the nature and origin of the relation, but nevertheless they need
to be carefully observed. Thus, logically and sociologically [p.163]
factional differences are not merely wider and deeper; just because more
definitely set, they also imply higher development. Factional life may
be special, but through the strength that union gives and the power and
efficiency that spring from repetition and imitation, it attains a high
degree of skill and insight. Again, factional life, like that of
corporations, lacks soul; it tends to become formal and mechanical and
in the sense that this indicates it is static. Hence its instrumental
character. Between individual and class there is a difference very like
that between impulse and habit, or organic life and mere physical
process, or function and structure, or say human nature in terms of its
life-principle, of its distinctly dynamic character, and in terms of its
establishments or institutions. Accordingly the relation of the person
to the class is indeed that of the whole to the part, but of the whole
in a state that is formally undeveloped to the part more or less highly
developed, and of the whole as a living, functional activity, the
differential operation of the unity of experience, to the part as an
institution or instrument.
From all this it appears that the labour involved in the maintenance and
development of human life is divided between the person and the social
classes in some such way as follows. The class life stands for analysis
and special development and establishment; personal life for synthesis
and vitality. The factional life of the class is specialistic, and reaps
for human nature all the familiar advantages of specialism; the personal
life is general or universal, and saves human nature from the disruption
and the stagnation to [p.164] which specialism and its formal
establishment always tend. The factional life is mediative and
instrumental; the personal life is initiative and purposive. And while
so to define the distinction between person and class, or in general to
regard their relation as one of whole to part, even with the
qualifications that were promptly added, may involve some unavoidable
abstraction, and so some limitation of the view; nevertheless the view
is as real and significant at least as the conditions upon which it
rests. Even though persons may be differentiated from each other in an
indefinite number of ways, no two being personal, materially, in the
same way, no two having the same factional restraints, still the
relation of whole to part, subject only to the distinctions of
development and of dynamic or static character, remains significantly
the typical relation of the person to the class. The person may be only
a part of the class, as parts are merely counted, but in interest and
possibility, in the fullest reach of his vitality, the person is larger
than the class. And, if this be the typical relation, then not only is
the story of the person seen to be inseparable from that of the class,
but also there is clearly a real place in social life at once for the
person and for the class. Factional life lacks completeness and
vitality, and personality, the living, integral expression of the unity
of experience, supplies these defects. True, a conflict of classes or
factions may always be counted on, since the unity of the total life,
which of course includes the classes, will prevent their ever being
indifferent to each other, and this conflict will make for both
completeness and vitality, but [p.165] negatively, indirectly, always as
if from outside. Only through the person can vitality and completeness
be secured positively and directly and immediately. Personality, on the
other hand, lacks definiteness and practical efficiency, and only the
special mechanical life of the class can supply these needs. So in the
two together we see a most indispensable co-operation.
The person, furthermore, because of his particular class affiliation,
with the attainment in the way of skill and insight which this imparts,
is always naturally under constraint not merely to overcome the
specialism, but also to apply the special training beyond the immediate
sphere of its development to all sides of the nature that is within him.
Out of the depth and breadth of his personal character, bounded only by
the unity of experience, he must ever react against the narrowness and
the factional ritual, and taking this ritual--or special professional
technique--to be valid mediately rather than immediately, in spirit
rather than merely in letter, must ever seek to translate his factional
experience, its skill and its insight, to all parts of human life. Only
so can he be true both to his special classification and to his personal
wholeness.
But an insistent question: Is such translation possible? On the
possibility the case for either personality or a class-divided society
must finally depend. On the possibility hangs also the worth of this
case to the general argument of this book. Logically, there certainly
can be but one answer, and that an affirmative one, since analogy, the
primal condition of translation, must be universal [p.166] among the
parts of any unity as well as between any part and the whole. No two
parts, it is true, can be literal, prosaic reproductions of each other,
but metaphors of each other all parts are bound to be, and any part and
the whole must also have this relation of the metaphor, so that any
acquired, more or less highly developed power of thought or action,
however special and however technical, may and must have meaning
throughout the whole life of the person or of humanity. Accordingly,
with the acquired freedom of any part, the metaphors, relating part to
part, may, if not must, flash to the remotest regions of the person's
experience-world. The left hand, with its unconsciously developed power,
of course usually unexercised, of mirror-writing, affords only a very
crude illustration of what this implies, and a very imaginative
illustration is in the flashing of the morning light as it reaches
height after height of the beholder's outstretched world.
The conclusions of logic in this matter have sometimes been questioned,
if not defied. Quite properly, it may be, many people, and particularly
many among scientists, have been in the habit of distrusting the leading
of mere logic in the solution of their problems. But in this particular
matter I think that no scientist has ever succeeded in making out a
negative case. A few have tried to do so, have thought themselves for a
time successful, and then in the end, though not without some
reservation, have gone over to the other side. Probably their
undertaking has been inspired by the extravagant views sometimes
entertained, as when money-getting is supposed to educate [p.167] people
to an appreciation of music and art, or a ready memory for one class of
things to imply the same facility in acquiring a memory of another class
of things, or skill in the use of tools to make a good dentist, or
physical self-control or intellectual sincerity to ensure moral
truthfulness. Whereas, if it could be remembered that no special
training could ever be literally applicable beyond the particular sphere
of its attainment, the relation of part and part of human nature being
only analogous and metaphorical, and that in any scientifically observed
case special training, when artificially acquired, or when a result only
of a suggested and merely imitated routine, can hardly count as
conclusive evidence, the problem would lose much of its interest, and
science would be ready even to accept the logical solution. Logically,
then, the translation is possible, and scientifically there is no real
evidence against its possibility.
As to the translation being positively natural or necessary, as well as
possible, the suggestion may not be impertinent that whatever is truly
possible must be also real; that is to say, certain of realization or
rather somehow and somewhere, in some manner and in some degree already
in expression. Even the possible can never have been made out of, or
sprung up out of, nothing. Moreover, the translation here spoken of,
wherein one developed side of life flashes its message, more spiritual
than literal, to another side or the other side of life, plainly can
require nothing unnatural. It exacts only that all the different
elements of our nature and experience, whether as personally or as
factionally manifested, shall be [p.168] forever true to their origin.
The apparent obstacles to translation certainly cannot be obstacles on
the ground of the analogies of the various parts being only metaphorical
instead of literal, for already in the original differentiation that has
made person and faction, that has separated the parts, these have been
overcome. The very nature of the person is their overcoming. The unity
of experience must persist assertive and inviolable, whatever the
divisions of experience. The distinct vertebræ must always contain a
spinal cord that has a common origin with them.
And it remains to be said that since the person is thus at once the
living integral exponent of the unity of experience and the member of
some class or faction, translation is his most characteristic activity.
In this translation, too, we see him a leader, or a party to real
leadership, by nature. In it lies his true genius. Indeed, this
translation is just that which makes the great leader or the great
genius, for through it the person is ever showing himself superior to
his class and training, and to the formal institutions that have brought
him up. Factional life, as we know, develops through imitation and
repetition, but personality through invention under guidance of the
flashing analogies. Invention, too, the application of special
development beyond the sphere of its origin, is only the psychological
term for what sociologically is leadership. In the theory and in the
practice of art, morals, religion, politics, science, and all the other
special sides of experience, the factional and the personal are ever to
be distinguished in this way--the one imitative, the other inventive.
Witness [p.169] the familiar antitheses between the typical and the
vital in art-expression, the formally ideal and the really pleasant in
morality, the legal and the sovereign in politics, the orthodox and the
spiritually alive in religion, technical skill and originality in
science, and so on. These antitheses are all very important to the
understanding of human experience, particularly of its history, but they
are frequently seriously misapplied. More than anything else they show
the personal ever asserting its superiority over the factional; the
living whole, over the developed, established part; and always in order
that the whole, overcoming the exclusiveness of the part, may translate
and appropriate its acquirements.
There is thus a case for personality hidden in that historical analogy
of the individual to its group-divided environment, whether society or
nature, and there is also an equally strong case for society as
something distinct, as something that has its own peculiar work to do.
The rôles, too, that belong to personality and society are as distinct
and as real, besides being as organic to each other, as in general are
whole and part. But the person, at once a corrector of partiality and a
leader, a distributor of special development, holds a conspicuous place
and moreover takes a part that just because of his essential superiority
to the definite and formal is of the greatest moment to our conclusions
as to the nature of all positive experience. All positive, formal
experience we found defective even to the extent of paradox or
contradiction, but personality, characteristically, must be superior to
this defect. Personality must bridge all [p.170] the divisions of
experience, all the gaps in society, all the chasms of history. It must
be, though perhaps one may not safely use the word, the very incarnation
of that spirit of truth, that principle of validity and power for
adequacy, which has already come to our notice more than once.
Factionally experience is relative, phenomenal, divided against itself;
factionally, too, it is at once formal and contradictory; but personally
it reaches beyond the forms and contradictions, and is directly in touch
with what is true and real. So the contrast between the personal and the
social, the vital and the formal, shows itself quite parallel to that
between the real and the phenomenal, the true and the paradoxical.
A business man says to a friend: "Personally, as you know perfectly
well, I should prefer to do what you ask, but professionally I simply
cannot, for you know also that business is business." A preacher
declares: "Personally I should just like to speak out clearly and
without restraint, but my church will not let me." Personally the
soldiers in opposite camps exchange many courtesies, but factionally,
professionally, they meet with rifle and sword on the battlefield. The
father punishing his offending child says: "This hurts me more than
you." And, in general, personally there are no divisions of life--all are
all things together, and restraints that separate man and man are
lacking; but factionally there is always restraint, and open conflict
and inner inconsistency are unavoidable. The person is thus the medium,
not of an abstract universality, but concretely, through his factional
training and his leadership, of the universal life.
[p.171] And, finally, the life of the person is gifted with a great
faith, for it is in touch with an untethered reality; but, factionally,
life is a constant doubting, for it is constantly narrow and it is a
constant contending. So are faith and doubt as close to each other, as
inseparable, as whole and part, as person and class, and with this
conclusion we seem to have won for the doubter the right to say
confidently: "My doubts cannot destroy me; I am; even in me there dwells
the power that makes for reality; even in me, in spite of the very
defects that the conditions of my social life impose, there lives the
spirit of truth. Nay, even the social life itself, when mine as well as
social, is also real and true."
[1] This paragraph, and many of the paragraphs that follow it, except
for considerable revision and adaptation, were published some time ago.
See an article, "The Personal and the Factional in Society," in the
_Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. II,
No. 13, 1906.
[2] Chap. Iv., p. 72.
[p.172]