LIFE AND MIND.
The outstanding feature of what may be called the natural history of
associated life is the way in which biologic processes are gradually
dominated by psychologic ones. Whatever be the nature of mind, a
question that in no way concerns us here, there is no denying the
importance of the phenomena that come within that category. To speak of
the first beginnings of mind is, in this connection, idle language. In
science there are no real beginnings. Things do not begin to be, they
simply emerge, and their emergence is as imperceptible as the
displacement of night by day, or the development of the chicken from the
egg. But whatever the nature of the beginning of mind, its appearance in
the evolutionary series marked an event of profound and revolutionary
importance. Life received a new impetus, and the struggle for existence
a new significance, the importance of which is not, even to-day,
generally recognized. The old formulae might still be used, but they had
given to them a new significance. The race was still to the swift and
the battle to the strong, but swiftness and strength were manifested in
new ways and by new means. Cunning and intelligence began to do what was
formerly done without their co-operation. A new force had appeared,
arising out of the older forces as chemistry develops from physics and
biology from both. And, as we should expect from analogy, we find the
new force dominating the older ones, and even bending them to its
needs.
Associated life meets us very early in the story of animal existence,
and we may assume that it ranks as a genuine "survival quality." It
enables some animals to survive the attacks of others that are
individually stronger, and it may even be, as has been suggested, that
associated life is the normal form, and that solitary animals represent
a variation from the normal, or perhaps a case of degeneration. But one
result of associated life is that it paves the way for the emergence of
mind as an active force in social evolution. In his suggestive and
important work on _Mutual Aid_, Kropotkin has well shown how in the
animal world the purely biologic form of the struggle for existence is
checked and transformed by the factors of mutual aid, association and
protection. His illustrations cover a very wide field; they include a
great variety of animal forms, and he may fairly claim to have
established the proposition that "an instinct has been slowly developed
among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution ...
which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from
mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life."
But there is, on the whole, a very sharp limit set to the development of
mind in the animal world. One cause of this is the absence of a true
"social medium," to use the admirable phrase of that versatile thinker,
George Henry Lewes. In the case of man, speech and writing enable him to
give to his advances and discoveries a cumulative force such as can
never exist in their absence. On that subject more will be said later.
At present we may note another very important consequence of the
development of mind in evolution. In pre-human, or sub-human society,
perfection in the struggle for existence takes the form of the creation
or the perfecting of an organic tool. Teeth or claws become stronger or
larger, a limb is modified, sight becomes keener, or there is a new
effect in coloration. The changes here, it will be observed, are all of
an organic kind, they are a part of the animal and are inseparable from
it, and they are only transmissible by biologic heredity. And the rate
of development is, of necessity, slow.
When we turn to man and note the way in which he overcomes the
difficulties of his environment, we find them to be mainly of a
different order. His instruments are not personal, in the sense of being
a part of his organic structure. We may say they do not belong to him so
much as they do to the race; while they are certainly transmitted from
generation to generation irrespective of individuals. Instead of
achieving conquest of his environment by developing an organic
structure, man creates an inorganic tool. In a sense he subdues and
moulds the environment to his needs, rather than modifies his structure
in order to cope with the environment. Against extremes of temperature
he fashions clothing and builds habitations. He discovers fire, probably
the most important discovery ever made by mankind. He adds to his
strength in defence and attack by inventing weapons. He guards himself
from starvation by planting seeds, and so harnesses the productive
forces of nature to his needs. He tames animals and so secures living
engines of labour. Later, he compensates for his bodily weaknesses by
inventing instruments which aid sight, hearing, etc. Inventions are
multiplied, methods of locomotion and transportation are discovered, and
the difficulties of space and time are steadily minimized. The net
result of all this is that as a mere biologic phenomenon man's evolution
is checked. The biologic modifications that still go on are of
comparatively small importance, except, probably, in the case of
evolution against disease. The developments that take place are mainly
mental in form and are social in their incidence.
Now if the substantial truth of what has been said be admitted, and I do
not see how it can be successfully challenged, there arise one or two
considerations of supreme importance. The first of these is that social
history becomes more and more a history of social psychology. In social
life we are watching the play of social mind expressed through the
medium of the individual. The story of civilization is the record of the
piling of idea on idea, and the transforming power of the whole on the
environment. For tools, from the flint chip of primitive man, down to
the finished instrument of the modern mechanic, are all so many products
of human mentality. From the primitive dug-out to the Atlantic liner,
from the stone spear-head to the modern rifle, in all the inventions of
civilized life we are observing the application of mind to the conquest
of time, space, and material conditions. Our art, our inventions, our
institutions, are all so many illustrations of the power of mind in
transforming the environment. A history of civilization, as
distinguished from a mere record of biologic growth, is necessarily a
history of the growing power of mind. It is the cumulative ideas of the
past expressed in inventions and institutions that form the driving
power behind the man of to-day. These ideas form the most valuable part
of man's heritage, make him what he is, and contain the promise of all
that he may become.
So long as we confine ourselves to biologic evolution, the way in which
qualities are transmitted is plain. There is no need to go beyond the
organism itself. But this heritage of ideas, peculiarly human as it is,
requires a "carrier" of an equally unique kind. It is at this point that
the significance of what we have called the "social medium" emerges.
The full significance of this was first seen by G. H. Lewes.[1] Writing
so far back as 1879 he said:--
The distinguishing character of human psychology is that to the
three great factors, organism, external medium, and heredity; it
adds a fourth, namely, the relation to a social medium, with its
product, the general mind.... While the mental functions are
products of the individual organism, the product, mind, is more
than an individual product. Like its great instrument language, it
is at once individual and social. Each man speaks in virtue of the
functions of vocal expression, but also in virtue of the social
need of communication. The words spoken are not his creation, yet
he, too, must appropriate them by what may be called a creative
process before he can understand them. What his tribe speaks he
repeats; but he does not simply echo their words, he rethinks them.
In the same way he adopts their experiences when he assimilates
them to his own.... Further, the experiences come and go; they
correct, enlarge, and destroy one another, leaving behind them a
certain residual store, which condensed in intuitions and
formulated in principles, direct and modify all future
experiences.... Men living in groups co-operate like the organs in
an organism. Their actions have a common impulse to a common end.
Their desires and opinions bear the common stamp of an impersonal
direction. Much of their life is common to all. The roads,
market-places and temples are for each and all. Customs arise and
are formulated in laws, the restraint of all.... Each generation is
born in this social medium, and has to adapt itself to the
established forms.... A nation, a tribe, a sect is the medium of
the individual mind, as a sea, a river, or a pond, is the medium of
a fish.[2]
[1] It will ease my feelings if I am permitted to here make a protest
against the shameless way in which this suggestive writer has been
pillaged by others without the slightest acknowledgement. They have
found him, as Lamb said of some other writers, "damned good to steal
from." His series of volumes, _Problems of Life and Mind_, have been
borrowed from wholesale without the slightest thanks or recognition.
[2] _Study of Psychology_, pp. 139, 161-5. So again, a more recent
writer says: "It is not man himself who thinks but his social community;
the source of his thoughts is in the social medium in which he lives,
the social atmosphere which he breathes.... The influence of environment
upon the human mind has always been recognized by psychologists and
philosophers, but it has been considered a secondary factor. On the
contrary, the social medium which the child enters at birth, in which he
lives, moves and has his being, is fundamental. Toward this environment
the individual from childhood to ripest old age is more or less
receptive; rarely can the maturest minds so far succeed in emancipating
themselves from this medium so far as to undertake independent
reflection, while complete emancipation is impossible, for all the
organs and modes of thought, all the organs for constructing thoughts
have been moulded or at least thoroughly imbued by it" (L. Gumplowicz,
_Outlines of Sociology_, p. 157).
Biologically, what man inherits is capacity for acquisition. But what he
shall acquire, the direction in which his native capacity shall express
itself, is a matter over which biologic forces have no control. This is
determined by society and social life. Given quite equal capacity in two
individuals, the output will be very different if one is brought up in a
remote Spanish village and the other in Paris or London. Whether a man
shouts long live King George or long live the Kaiser is mainly a
question of social surroundings, and but very little one of difference
in native capacity. The child of parents living in the highest civilized
society, if taken away while very young and brought up amid a people in
a very primitive state of culture, would, on reaching maturity, differ
but little from the people around him. He would think the thoughts that
were common to the society in which he was living as he would speak
their language and wear their dress. Had Shakespeare been born among
savages he could never have written _Hamlet_. For the work of the
genius, as for that of the average man, society must provide the
materials in the shape of language, ideas, institutions, and the
thousand and one other things that go to make up the life of a group,
and which may be seen reflected in the life of the individual. Suppose,
says Dr. McDougall:--
that throughout the period of half a century every child born to
English parents was at once exchanged (by the power of a magician's
wand) for an infant of the French, or other, European nation. Soon
after the close of this period the English nation would be composed
of individuals of French extraction, and the French of individuals
of English extraction. It is, I think, clear that, in spite of this
complete exchange of innate characters between the two nations,
there would be but little immediate change of national
characteristics. The French people would still speak French, and
the English would speak English, with all the local diversities to
which we are accustomed and without perceptible change of
pronunciation. The religion of the French would still be
predominantly Roman Catholic, and the English people would still
present the same diversity of Protestant creeds. The course of
political institutions would have suffered no profound change, the
customs and habits of the two peoples would exhibit only such
changes as might be attributed to the lapse of time, though an
acute observer might notice an appreciable approximation of the two
peoples towards one another in all these respects. The inhabitant
of France would still be a Frenchman and the inhabitant of England
an Englishman to all outward seeming, save that the physical
appearance of the two peoples would be transposed. And we may go
even further and assert that the same would hold good if a similar
exchange of infants were effected between the English and any other
less closely allied nation, say the Turks or the Japanese.[3]
[3] _Social Psychology_, pp. 330-1.
The products of human capacity are the material of which civilization is
built; these products constitute the inheritance which one generation
receives from another. Whether this inheritance be large or small,
simple or complex, it is the chief determinant which shapes the
personality of each individual. What each has by biological heredity is
a given structure, that is, capacity. But the direction of that
capacity, the command it enables one to acquire over his environment, is
in turn determined by the society into which he happens to be born.
It has already been said that the materials of civilization, whether
they be tools, or institutions, or inventions, or discoveries, or
religious or ethical teachings, are facts that can be directly described
as psychological. An institution--the Church, the Crown, the
Magistracy--is not transmitted as a building or as so many sheets of
paper, but as an idea or as a set of ideas. A piece of machinery is, in
the same way, a mental fact, and is a physical one in only a subordinate
sense. And if this be admitted, we reach the further truth that the
environment to which man has to adapt himself is essentially, so far as
it is a social environment, psychological. Not alone are the outward
marks of social life--the houses in which man lives, the machines he
uses to do his bidding--products of his mental activity, but the more
important features of his environment, to which he must adapt himself,
and which so largely shape his character and determine his conduct, are
of a wholly psychological character. In any society that is at all
distinct from the animal, there exist a number of beliefs, ideas and
institutions, traditions, and, in a later stage, a literature which play
a very important part in determining the direction of man's mind. With
increasing civilization, and the development of better means of
intercourse, any single society finds itself brought into touch and
under the influence of other social groups. The whole of these
influences constitute a force which, surrounding an individual at birth,
inevitably shapes character in this or that direction. They dominate the
physical aspect of life, and represent the determining forces of social
growth. Eliminate the psychological forces of life and you eliminate all
that can be properly called civilization. It is wholly the transforming
power of mind on the environment that creates civilization, and it is
only by a steady grasp of this fact that civilization can be properly
understood.
I have pointed out a distinction between biological and social, or
psychological, heredity. But there is one instance in which the two
agree. This is that we can only understand a thing by its history. We
may catalogue the existing peculiarities of an animal form with no other
material than that of the organism before us, but thoroughly to
understand it we must know its history. Similarly, existing institutions
may have their justification in the present, but the causes of their
existence lie buried in the past. A king may to-day be honoured on
account of his personal worth, but the reason why there is a king to be
honoured carries us back to that state of culture in which the primitive
priest and magic worker inspires fear and awe. When we ring bells to
call people to church we perpetuate the fact that our ancestors rang
them to drive away evil spirits. We wear black at a funeral because our
primitive ancestors wished to hide themselves from the dead man's
ghost. We strew flowers on a grave because food and other things were
once buried with the dead so that their spirits might accompany the dead
to the next world. In short, with all human customs we are forced, if we
wish to know the reason for their present existence, to seek it in the
ideas that have dominated the minds of previous generations.[4]
[4] "The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men's minds is the only real
tyranny, because it cannot be fought against. Tiberius, Ghengis Khan,
and Napoleon were assuredly redoubtable tyrants, but from the depths of
their graves Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Mahomet exerted on the human soul
a far profounder tyranny. A conspiracy may overthrow a tyrant, but what
can it avail against a firmly established belief? In its violent
struggle with Roman Catholicism it is the French Revolution that has
been vanquished, and this in spite of the fact that the sympathy of the
crowd was apparently on its side, and in spite of recourse to
destructive measures as pitiless as those of the Inquisition. The only
real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of
its dead, or the illusions it has forged for itself" (Gustave Le Bon,
_The Crowd_, p. 153).
No one who has studied, in even a cursory manner, the development of our
social institutions can avoid recognition of the profound influence
exerted by the primitive conceptions of life, death, and of the
character of natural forces. Every one of our social institutions was
born in the shadow of superstition, and superstition acts as a powerful
force in determining the form they assume. Sir Henry Maine has shown to
what a large extent the laws of inheritance are bound up with ancestor
worship.[5] Spencer has done the same service for nearly all our
institutions,[6] and Mr. Elton says that "the oldest customs of
inheritance in England and Germany were, in their beginnings, connected
with a domestic religion, and based upon a worship of ancestral spirits
of which the hearthplace was essentially the altar."[7] The same truth
meets us in the study of almost any institution. In fact, it is not long
before one who _thinks_ evolution, instead of merely knowing its
formulae, begins to realize the truth of the saying by a German
sociologist that in dealing with social institutions we are concerned
with the "mental creations of aggregates." They are dependent upon the
persistence of a set of ideas, and so long as these ideas are unshaken
they are substantially indestructible. To remove them the ideas upon
which they rest must be shaken and robbed of their authority. That is
the reason why at all times the fight for reform so largely resolves
itself into a contest of ideas. Motives of self-interest may enter into
the defence of an institution, and in some case may be responsible for
the attempt to plant an institution where it does not already exist, but
in the main institutions persist because of their harmony with a frame
of mind that is favourable to their being.
[5] See _Early History of Institutions_, and _Early Law and Custom_.
[6] _Principles of Sociology_, Vol. I.
[7] _Origins of English History_, p. 261.
A great deal of criticism has been directed against the conclusion of
Buckle that improvement in the state of mankind has chiefly resulted
from an improvement in the intellectual outlook. And yet when stated
with the necessary qualifications the generalization is as sound as it
can well be. Certainly, the belief held in some quarters, and stated
with an air of scientific precision, that the material environment is
the active force which is ever urging to new mental development will not
fit the facts; for, as we have seen, the environment to which human
nature must adapt itself is mainly mental in character, that is, it is
made up in an increasing measure of the products of man's own mental
activity. The theory of the sentimental religionist that the evil in the
world results from the wickedness of man, or, as he is fond of putting
it, from the hardness of man's heart, is grotesque in its
ineffectiveness. Soft heads have far more to do with the evil in the
world than have hard hearts. Indeed, one of the standing difficulties of
the orthodox moralist is, not to explain the deeds of evil men, which
explain themselves, but to account for the harm done by "good" men, and
often as a consequence of their goodness. The moral monster is a rarity,
and evil is rarely the outcome of a clear perception of its nature and a
deliberate resolve to pursue it. Paradoxical as it may sound, it demands
a measure of moral strength to do wrong, consciously and deliberately,
which the average man or woman does not possess. And the world has never
found it a matter of great difficulty to deal with its "bad" characters;
it is the "good" ones that present it with a constant problem.
The point is worth stressing, and we may do it from more than one point
of view. We may take, first of all, the familiar illustration of
religious persecution, as exemplified in the quarrels of Catholics and
Protestants. On the ground of moral distinction no line could be drawn
between the two parties. Each shuddered at the persecution inflicted by
the other, and each regarded the teachings of the other with the same
degree of moral aversion. And it has often been noted that the men who
administered so infamous an institution as the Inquisition were not, in
even the majority of cases, bad men.[8] A few may have had interested
motives, but it would have been impossible to have maintained so brutal
an institution in the absence of a general conviction of its rightness.
In private life those who could deliver men, women, and even children
over to torture were not worse husbands or parents than others. Such
differences as existed cannot be attributed to a lack of moral
endeavour, or to a difference of "moral temperament." It was a
difference of intellectual outlook, and given certain religious
convictions persecution became a religious necessity. The moral output
was poor because the intellectual standpoint was a wrong one.
[8] Speaking of the Inquisition, Mr. H. C. Lea, in his classic _History
of the Inquisition_, says, "There is no doubt that the people were as
eager as their pastors to send the heretic to the stake. There is no
doubt that men of the kindliest tempers, the profoundest aspirations,
the purest zeal for righteousness, professing a religion founded on love
and charity, were ruthless where heresy was concerned, and were ready to
trample it out at any cost. Dominic and Francis, Bonaventure and Thomas
Aquinas, Innocent III. and St. Louis, were types, in their several ways,
of which humanity, in any age, might feel proud, and yet they were as
unsparing of the heretic as Ezzelin di Romano was of his enemies. With
such men it was not hope of gain or lust of blood or pride of opinion or
wanton exercise of power, but sense of duty, and they but represented
what was universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth
century." Vol. I., p. 234.
If we could once get over the delusion of thinking of human nature as
being fundamentally different five hundred years ago from what it is
to-day, we should escape a great many fallacies that are prevalent. The
changes that have taken place in human nature during the historic period
are so slight as to be practically negligible. The motives that animate
men and women to-day are the motives that animated men and women a
thousand or two thousand years ago. The change is in the direction and
form of their manifestation only, and it is in the light of the human
nature around us that we must study and interpret the human nature that
has gone before us. From that point of view we may safely conclude that
bad institutions were kept in being in the past for the same reason
that they are kept alive to-day. The majority must be blind to their
badness; and in any case it is a general perception of their badness
which leads to their destruction.
The subject of crime illustrates the same point. Against crime as such,
society is as set as ever. But our attitude toward the causation and
cure of crime, and, above all, to the treatment of the criminal, has
undergone a profound alteration. And the change that has taken place
here has been away from the Christian conception which brutalized the
world for so long, towards the point of view taken up by the ancient
Greeks, that wrong doing is the outcome of ignorance. Expressed in the
modern manner we should say that crime is the result of an undeveloped
nature, or of a pathological one, or of a reversion to an earlier
predatory type, or the result of any or all of these factors in
combination with defective social conditions. But this is only another
way of saying that we have exchanged the old, brutal, and ineffective
methods for more humane and effective ones because we look at the
problem of crime from a different intellectual angle. A more exact
knowledge of the causation of crime has led us to a more sensible and a
more humane treatment of the criminal. And this, not alone in his own
behalf, but in the interests of the society in which he lives. We may
put it broadly that improvement comes from an enlightened way of looking
at things. Common observation shows that people will go on tolerating
forms of brutality, year after year, without the least sense of their
wrongness. Familiarity, and the absence of any impetus to examine
current practice from a new point of view seem to account for this. In
the seventeenth century the same people who could watch, without any
apparent hostility, the torture of an old woman on the fantastic charge
of intercourse with Satan, had their feelings outraged by hearing a
secular song on Sunday. Imprisonment for "blasphemy," once regarded as a
duty, has now become ridiculous to all reasonable people. At one and the
same time, a little more than a hundred years ago in this country, the
same people who could denounce cock-fighting on account of its
brutality, could watch unmoved the murdering of little children in the
factories of Lancashire. Not so long ago men in this country fought
duels under a sense of moral compulsion, and the practice was only
abandoned when a changed point of view made people realize the absurdity
of trying to settle the justice of a cause by determining which of two
people were the most proficient with sword or pistol. We have a
continuation of the same absurdity in those larger duels fought by
nations where the old verbal absurdities still retain their full force,
and where we actually add another absurdity by retaining a number of
professional duellists who must be ready to embark on a duel whether
they have any personal feeling in the matter or not. And it seems fairly
safe to say that when it is realized that the duel between nations as a
means of settling differences is not a bit more intellectually
respectable than was the ancient duello we shall not be far removed from
seeing the end of one of the greatest dangers to which modern society is
exposed.
Examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but enough has been said to
show what small reason there is for assuming that changes in
institutions are brought about by the operation of some occult moral
sense. It is the enlightenment of the moral sense by the growth of new
ideas, by the impact of new knowledge leading to a revaluation of things
that is mainly responsible for the change. The question of whether a man
should or should not be burned for a difference in religious belief was
never one that could be settled by weighing up the moral qualities of
the two parties in the dispute. All the moral judgment that has ever
existed, even if combined in the person of a single individual could
never decide that issue. It was entirely a question of acquiring a new
point of view from which to examine the subject. Until that was done the
whole force of the moral sense was on the side of the persecutor. To put
the matter paradoxically, the better the man the worse persecutor he
became. It was mental enlightenment that was needed, not moral
enthusiasm.
The question of progress thus becomes, in all directions, one of the
impact of new ideas, in an environment suitable to their reception and
growth. A society shut in on itself is always comparatively
unprogressive, and but for the movement of classes within it would be
completely so. The more closely the history of civilization is studied
the more clearly does that fact emerge. Civilization is a synthetic
movement, and there can be no synthesis in the absence of dissolution
and resolution.
A fight of old ideas against new ones, a contest of clashing culture
levels, a struggle to get old things looked at from a new point of view,
these are the features that characterize all efforts after reform. It
was said by some of the eighteenth century philosophers that society was
held together by agreement in a bond. That is not quite correct. The
truth is that society is held together, as is any phase of social life,
by a bond of agreement. The agreement is not of the conscious,
documentary order, but it is there, and it consists in sharing a common
life created and maintained by having a common tradition, and a common
stock of ideas and ideals. It is this that makes a man a member of one
social group rather than of another--Chinese, American, French, German,
or Choctaw. There is no discriminating feature in what is called the
economic needs of people. The economic needs of human beings--food,
clothing, and shelter, are of the same order the world over. And
certainly the fact of a Chinaman sharing in the economic life of
Britain, or an Englishman sharing in the economic life of China, would
not entitle either to be called genuine members of the group in which he
happened to be living. Membership only begins to be when those belonging
to a group share in a common mental outfit. Even within a society, and
in relation to certain social groups, one can see illustrations of the
same principle. A man is not really a member of a society of artists,
lawyers, or doctors merely by payment of an annual subscription. He is
that only when he becomes a participant in the mental life of the
group.[9] It is this common stock of mental facts which lies at the
root of all collective ideas--an army, a Church, or a nation. And ever
the fight is by way of attack and defence of the psychologic fact.[10]
[9] This seems to me to give the real significance of Nationality. It
has been argued by some that nationality is a pure myth, as unreal as
the divinity of a king. The principal ground for this denial of
nationality appears to be that so-called national characteristics are
seen to undergo drastic transformation when their possessors are subject
to a new set of influences. This may be quite true, but if nationality,
in the sense of being a product of biological heredity, is ruled out, it
does not follow that nationality is thereby destroyed. The fact may
remain but it demands a different interpretation. And if what has been
said above be true, it follows that nationality is not a personal fact,
but an extra or super-personal one. It belongs to the group rather than
to the individual, and is created by the possession of a common speech,
a common literature, and a common group life. And quite naturally, when
the individual is lifted out of this special social influence its power
may well be weakened, and in the case of his children may be
non-existent, or replaced by the special characteristics of the new
group into which he is born. The discussion of nationality ought not,
therefore, to move along the lines of acceptance or rejection of the
conception of nationality, but of how far specific national
characteristics admit of modification under the pressure of new
conditions.
[10] It would take too long to elaborate, but it may be here noted that
in the human group the impelling force is not so much needs as desires,
and that fact raises the whole issue from the level of biology to that
of psychology. So long as life is at a certain level man shares with the
animal the mere need for food. But at another level there arises not
merely the need for food, but a desire for certain kind of food, cooked
in a particular manner, and served in a special style. And provided that
we do not by hunger reduce man to the level of the beast again, the
desire will be paramount and will determine whether food shall be eaten
or not. So, again, with the fact of sex and marriage. At the animal
level we have the crude fact of sex, and this is, indeed, inescapable at
any stage. But the growth of civilization brings about the fact that the
need for the gratification of the sexual appetite is regulated by the
secondary qualities of grace of form, or of disposition, which are the
immediate determinants of whether a particular man shall marry a
particular woman or not. Again, it is the _desire_ for power and
distinction, not the _need_ for money that impels men to spend their
lives in building up huge fortunes. And, finally, we have the fact that
a great many of our present needs are transformed desires. The working
man of to-day counts as needs, as do we all more or less, a number of
things that began as pure desires. We say we need books, pictures,
music, etc. But none of these things can be really brought under the
category of things necessary to life. They are the creation of man's
mental cravings. Without them we say life would not be worth living, and
it is well that we should all feel so. Professor Marshall rightly dwells
upon this point by saying: "Although it is man's wants in the early
stages of development that give rise to his activities, yet afterwards
each new step is to be regarded as the development of new activities
giving rise to new wants, rather than of new wants giving rise to new
activities."--(_Principles of Economics_, Vol. I., p. 164.)
To do the Churches and other vested interests justice, they have never
lost sight of this truth, and it would have been better for the race
had others been equally alive to its importance. The Churches have never
ceased to fight for the control of those public organs that make for the
formation of opinion. Their struggle to control the press, the platform,
and the school means just this. Whatever they may have taught,
self-interest forced upon them recognition of the truth that it was what
men thought about things that mattered. They have always opposed the
introduction of new ideas, and have fought for the retention of old
ones. It was a necessity of their existence. It was also an admission of
the truth that in order for reform to become a fact the power of
traditional ideas must be broken. Man is what he thinks, is far nearer
the truth than the once famous saying, "Man is what he eats." As a
member of a social group man is dominated by his ideas of things, and
any movement of reform must take cognisance of that fact if it is to
cherish reasonable hopes of success.