Besides the reality, without finality, of all things in experience, to
which we gave our first attention in this chapter, and the perfect
sympathy of the spiritual and the material, which we have just seen to
give new dignity to the intellectual life, making thought free, and new
worth to the life and movement of nature, making nature not lifelessly
mechanical, but mechanically productive; besides these two features of
the doubter's world, there still remain two others to be observed by us.
For the first of these there is the fact of a genuine individuality.
Different persons, as well as different things, possess a substantial
worth to the real and the true. No one may be either real or worthy by
himself, but no one is unreal for being dependent on others. The
persons, like the things, that work together for what is real, find the
service its own reward. Reality, having no exclusive resting-place must
itself be dependent. It is dependent on an infinite multiplicity of
differences. Therein lies the person's chance for individuality; nay, it
is his right to it and assurance of it.
Before the days of Descartes, to speak generally, the typical individual
in human society--and let me say also, though at the expense of running
into a rather violent metaphor, the typical individual in any class or
group whatsoever--was the soldier, a creature of another's will, doing
only another's work, and having reality only by virtue of characters so
apart from individual peculiarities as actually to imply existence in
another world. The individual, in other words--if [p.225] at once real
and worthy--was then an unearthly being. For a being so constituted, or
living as if he were so constituted, the creationalistic theology and
the analogous monarchical politics were of course largely responsible,
since in their different ways they took individual independence of
action from the general run of mankind. They imposed on men at large a
certain uniform of life and belief, and then, as it were, appeased them
for this suppression with a doctrine of another life in a world yet to
come. Plainly, then, the time was not one when personal individuality,
except as it was referred to the other world yonder and apart, was
recognized as of much positive worth. Under the regime of prescribed
routine, of life with regard to the hereafter, and of mysterious powers
of all sorts, more or less in good standing in the realm of the
unworldly, personal individuality, though in itself not without some
honour, was valued chiefly and primarily for the different conditions,
the different relations to the things of this world, and the different
views of these things, which men succeeded in overcoming, or rather in
completely denying and eschewing. A worthy individuality was thus
secured rather through self-denial than self-expression; through the
vassal's devotion to his lord, the gallant's submission to his lady, the
courtier's humility before his king, or the saint's self-abasement
before church and heaven. Just think a moment of resting your claim to
distinct personal worth on the mere fact of what you have eschewed or
escaped being in some way different, perhaps more worldly, more
dangerous, and more powerful, from what some others have eschewed or
[p.226] escaped, and you will be able to appreciate the main ground of
the ideally significant distinction between man and man in the days
before Descartes.
But with the advent of the doubter's view of life absolutism and its
appropriate other-worldism melted away like snow beneath a noonday sun,
and upon their going self-denial ceased to be the cardinal virtue and
the chief ground of an approving self-consciousness. Authority came to
be placed not in a visible form, but in an abstract principle. Law
became superior to laws; monarchy to monarchs; divinity to Gods; truth
to truths, and righteousness to rites and habits. The abstract
principle, too, instead of being, as many might imagine, a wholly
shadowy thing, real only to the logician, stood for something vital and
substantial, for something wholly real, for an inner spirit or life or
power in the very things of experience. Authority, henceforth refused to
any specific thing, whether person or manner of life, institution or
formal belief, became a prerogative of all things together, of all
persons or all manners of life or all creeds; and, residing in the
working together of them all, it made personal worth consist no longer
in the denial of individual characters and relations, but in honest
assertion and open use of them. As some have liked to describe the
change, the "universal individual," the individual as an authoritative
and heaven-made type, that dictated a life and a belief to others
generally, passed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself an
individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity as in the relation,
or the activity maintaining the relation, of all individuals. Instead of
a single planet, for [p.227] example, as the controlling centre of the
heavenly bodies, came the unity of the solar system through the force or
the law of gravity. Instead of a monarch or a book or a city the
self-sufficient ruler of human life and human thought, came unity
through the ballot; through freedom of thought--always loyal only to a
real unity and in being thus loyal also always tolerant; and through all
sorts of like means to individuality. The "universal individual" died,
and there arose, as it were, out of his grave the living unity of
manifold individuals, each one different, yet each quite essential.
And the change brought a transfiguration. It was as if the human soul
had entered a new body, or as if the human body had received a new soul.
Not least among the significant evidences of the new life were the rise
of the study of history and the awakening of a keener and more practical
interest in men and things the wide world over. With its valuable
accounts of the manifold experiences of different peoples and different
times, at last seen to be real parts even of the life present and at
hand, the study of history became wonderfully absorbing and inspiring;
and not less valuable than this travel in time was the travel in space,
the real travel or the imaginary, which accompanied it. Furthermore,
such ideas as balance of power and preservation of the worth and
integrity of the individual nation, and division of labour and right of
free speech and of political and religious liberty, developed into most
powerful influences in the life and consciousness of society. And, to
return definitely to the single person, he found himself, not in spite
of, but because of his [p.228] special place and special standpoint, an
active participant in the effective life of his time. Instead of being a
mere soldier as before, he found himself a mechanic; certainly the
proper inhabitant of a mechanically productive nature.
Doubtless the term soldier lends itself more readily to philosophical
generalization than the term mechanic. Perhaps, too, distance in time
lends enchantment to the view, for the day of the soldier was, while the
day of the mechanic is. The day of the soldier has reached the stage of
romance and reflection, while the day of the mechanic suffers from what
is commonplace and prosaic, from the associations of a particular life,
from dust and smoke and factories, from tools and utilities. Yet the
mechanic must be the romantic figure of the future. He is the typical
individual of these modern times, of these times of the free because
practical thinker, and of a nature not lifelessly mechanical but
mechanically productive. Forget the grimy hands and the noisy machinery,
the overshadowing smoke and the apparent absorption in mere utility, and
think only of the man, who in his best moments feels himself
individually responsible and capable, who believes in himself as having
at once a peculiar and a necessary part in the real life of his time,
and who expresses himself through some skilful mastery over the
resources of nature, applying to them the principles his own thinking
has uncovered, and using her machinery to the ends of his own nature,
which, as we have seen, is bounded only by the "unity of experience."
Remember, too, the mechanic of our modern world is [p.229] not the
factory labourer alone. Wherever in social life, whether in political
activity or in industrial management, in educational methods or in
religious effort, there appears a man who appreciates the need first of
observing natural conditions and finding natural laws, and then of
acting only in accord with the suggestions of the laws discovered, just
there is the mechanic, the responsible agent of a law-free but always
lawful nature. The soldier as creature of this world was only a passive,
wholly material part of a mechanism which depended for its movement upon
some outside power or will; but the mechanic, be he humble labourer
skilful in the use of tools, or political leader supporting no law that
is not, so far as can be known, in accord with natural life, or
religious reformer loyal to life as it is, shares positively in the
activity that makes the machinery go and in whatever this activity
produces.
And yet one thing more must be said. Just as before we had to view free
thought in the light of a divided labour, the individual sharing in it
only as he treated his own peculiar experience as hypothetical, as a
means to an end, not merely an end in itself, or as he was subject to
the restraint and correction of the different experiences of others, so
now we must recognize that effective activity, not less than true
thinking or than realistic experience, is also necessarily the labour,
never of one alone, but of many. The successful mechanic--in other
words, the fully responsible agent of a law-free nature--is never an
isolated creature with merely such a sentimental concern for his
neighbours as might spring from the recognized chance [p.230] of meeting
them in that world of the hereafter, where all are to be equal and where
love and peace are to supplant the present hate and rivalry; he is, on
the contrary, one among others, different from him, it is true, and
often very positively at variance with him, but engaged with him in a
single activity and achievement. His difference works not against, but
with their differences for thoroughly controlled, truly effective
activity. As things are real, though never final, so men, at work in the
world, are individual and individually important, but never alone.
The facts in the case, logically and practically, appear to be somewhat
as follows: The individual's view-point, and the special machinery by
which he undertakes to realize it, can be only tentative or provisional;
they have the character, and usually he knows that they have the
character, if I may use a somewhat extravagant term, of makeshifts; and,
such being the fact, he is bound always to be in a state of constraint
or tension, in a relation of suspense towards them and towards the
environment to which they refer or belong. He feels a positive
resistance, a something disposed to counteract what he would do, and of
course the feeling means that he is really party to a growing life, not
established in a completed life. Suppose a view-point, or a machinery
that was perfectly applicable, that worked perfectly, that never did and
never could give out, that might not even very suddenly go all to
pieces, and that therefore put no strain nor uncertainty upon him who
held or employed it; could such a view-point or such machinery be of any
service to a growing life, to productive [p.231] activity? Most
certainly not. Tension, or a strained relationship, is necessary to
every individual's conduct and to every individual's ideas. But this
strain, to be real, just to accomplish its own purposes must be not
merely of a person with his own ideas or with the outer world to which
the ideas refer, but of a person with other persons; not merely of
conscious man with a mechanical nature, but of conscious and
mechanically active man with other conscious and mechanically active
men.
It is now an old story for us, but an important one, that there must be
society. A genuine individuality requires society. Society is a medium
not by which something is added to individual life, but by which
something in individual life is kept real and manifest. By maintaining,
as it were always from without, the natural tension of individual life,
it ensures to the individual the constant growth that is his legitimate
inheritance. The doubter is a social creature. The free thinker
accepting his ideas only tentatively, though at the same time using them
hopefully, sure that they will lead somewhere, is a social creature; and
the mechanic is a social creature, being one with others for whom life
is not routine but growth, and among whom the growth in which each has
his part induces constant tension, the tension of difference, the
tension of opposition and competition, the tension of mutual correction
and compensation, the tension, finally, of reality refusing to be bound.
Not the individual's provisional standpoint, nor yet the machinery that
he employs and that sooner or later must go to pieces, not these alone,
I must therefore reiterate, make the individual effectively [p.232]
active in a growing world, make him a worthy creature doing the work of
nature or of God; these have their place and part; but constant relation
to other individuals, the objects not less of hate than of love, not
less of rivalry than of friendship, is also essential.
In the so-called material world all things, in and by themselves unreal,
get reality, yes, get individual reality, only as through their very
differences they work together for what is real. In the world of mind,
or thought, if this can be imagined apart from the world of things, all
thoughts or ideas, in and by themselves untrue for being subjective,
relative, and partial, get truth only as also through their differences,
so tense and interactive, they work together for what is true. And,
likewise, in the world of persons, if indeed this can be imagined apart
from the world of thought, all individuals, call them now mechanics or
what you will, though in and by themselves without personal worth or
real individuality, without freedom or immortality, get genuine worth
and are assured even immortality only as shoulder against shoulder they
work together for a life that is true and real, worthy and genuine.
But in an earlier chapter, dealing with "The Personal and the Social,
the Vital and the Formal in Experience," a different argument for
individuality was insisted upon. Then the person was individual because
of his independence of particular form; now he is so because a real life
demands the particular and different, with which he is assumed to be
necessarily identified. Then he was the "living, integral exponent of
the unity of experience," free with the [p.233] genius of universality,
now he is one among all the particular conflicting elements of that
unity--or at least of the reality to which that unity refers. So there
appears to be even an inconsistency in my thinking. Yet, I venture still
to think, the inconsistency is only apparent. Certainly it should be
remembered that the person's asserted genius for universality was not
for the universal in an abstract sense, in the sense of the universal as
something by itself and apart from particulars; rather it was for a
constant enriching of the universal through particulars, for the
translation of any one particular relation and experience, which had
reached a higher state of development, to all the other actual or
possible relations of life; and this can mean only that the universal,
in which the personal individual has a place, is not denying or
betraying, but always holding and lifting up to itself all particular
factors or elements in the unity of experience or of reality. Simply,
though perhaps abstrusely too, the universal is just all the
particulars; unity is always in and through difference; and there is,
therefore, without inconsistency, a case for individuality from either
side. Indeed, the life of the individual being, as was said, always in a
tension or strain of difference, of opposition and competition, is bound
to have, it can be real only as it has, both a particular form and a
genius for universality. Not in the sense of that conventional theology,
crudely dualistic and unthinkable, but in a sense that is not to be
gainsaid and that may give some meaning even to the conventional
theology, every individual is real only in having a body and a [p.234]
soul. The soul of a man is only his genius for universality, but for a
universality that works through, not that is independent of, the
particular.
So the difference between this chapter and the former chapter is merely
one of emphasis. The double character of the individual, however, as it
is now before us, starts an inevitable question. Is the individual as
immortal as real? If he is immortal, does the immortality belong to both
sides of his character, to his body and to his soul, or only to one?
And, admittedly, this question offers more serious difficulties than the
suspicion of inconsistency. How can it be met?