THE ENLARGEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS
NARROWNESS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN TRIBAL SOCIETY—IMPORTANCE OF
FACE-TO-FACE ASSEMBLY—INDIVIDUALITY—SUBCONSCIOUS CHARACTER OF WIDER
RELATIONS—ENLARGEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS—IRREGULARITY IN GROWTH—BREADTH
OF MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS—DEMOCRACY.
In a life like that of the Teutonic tribes before they took on Roman
civilization, the social medium was small, limited for most purposes
to the family, clan or village group. Within this narrow circle there
was a vivid interchange of thought and feeling, a sphere of moral
unity, of sympathy, loyalty, honor and congenial intercourse. Here
precious traditions were cherished, and here also was the field for
an active public opinion, for suggestion and discussion, for leading
and following, for conformity and dissent. “In this kindly soil of the
family,” says Professor Gummere in his Germanic Origins, “flourished
such growth of sentiment as that rough life brought forth. Peace,
good-will, the sense of honor, loyalty to friend and kinsman, brotherly
affection, all were plants that found in the Germanic home that
congenial warmth they needed for their earliest stages of growth....
Originally the family or clan made a definite sphere or system of
life; outside of it the homeless man felt indeed that chaos had come
again.”[45]
When we say that public opinion is modern, we mean, of course, the
wider and more elaborate forms of it. On a smaller scale it has always
existed where people have had a chance to discuss and act upon matters
of common interest. Among our American Indians, for example, “Opinion
was a most potent factor in all tribes, and this would be largely
directed by those having popularity and power. Officers, in fact all
persons, became extremely well known in the small community of an
Amerind tribe. Every peculiarity of temperament was understood, and the
individual was respected or despised according to his predominating
characteristics. Those who were bold and fierce and full of strategy
were made war-chiefs, while those who possessed judgment and decision
were made civil chiefs or governors.”[46] The Germanic tribes were
accustomed to assemble in those village moots to which the historian
recurs with such reverence, where “the men from whom Englishmen were to
spring learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the
worth of the agreement, the ‘common-sense’ to which discussion leads,
as of the laws which derive their force from being expressions of that
general conviction.”[47]
Discussion and public opinion of this simple sort, as every one knows,
takes place also among children wherever they mingle freely. Indeed, it
springs so directly from human nature, and is so difficult to suppress
even by the most inquisitorial methods, that we may assume it to exist
locally in all forms of society and at all periods of history. It grows
by looks and gestures where speech is forbidden, so that even in a
prison there is public opinion among the inmates. But in tribal life
these local groups contained all the vivid and conscious society there
was, the lack of means of record and of quick transmission making a
wider unity impracticable.
In the absence of indirect communication people had to come into
face-to-face contact in order to feel social excitement and rise to
the higher phases of consciousness. Hence games, feasts and public
assemblies of every sort meant more to the general life than they
do in our day. They were the occasions of exaltation, the theatre
for the display of eloquence—either in discussing questions of the
moment or recounting deeds of the past—and for the practice of those
rhythmic exercises that combined dancing, acting, poetry and music in
one comprehensive and communal art. Such assemblies are possibly more
ancient than human nature itself—since human nature implies a preceding
evolution of group life—and in some primitive form of them speech
itself is supposed by some to have been born. Just as children invent
words in the eagerness of play, and slang arises among gangs of boys on
the street, so the earliest men were perhaps incited to the invention
of language by a certain ecstasy and self-forgetting audacity, like
that of the poet, sprung from the excitement of festal meetings.[48]
Something of the spirit of these primitive assemblies is perhaps
reproduced in the social exaltation of those festal evenings around the
camp-fire which many of us can recall, with individual and group songs,
chants, “stunts” and the like; when there were not wanting original,
almost impromptu, compositions—celebrating notable deeds or satirizing
conspicuous individuals—which the common excitement generated in the
minds of one or more ingenious persons.
It is sometimes said that the individual counted for nothing in tribal
life, that the family or the clan was the unit of society, in which
all personalities were merged. From the standpoint of organization
there is much truth in this; that is the group of kindred was for many
purposes (political, economic, religious, etc.) a corporate unit,
acting as a whole and responsible as a whole to the rest of society;
so that punishment of wrong-doing, for example, would be exacted
from the group rather than from the particular offender. But taken
psychologically, to mean that there was a lack of self-assertion, the
idea is without foundation. On the contrary, the barbaric mind exalts
an aggressive and even extravagant individuality. Achilles is a fair
sample of its heroes, mighty in valor and prowess, but vain, arrogant
and resentful—what we should be apt to call an individualist.[49] The
men of the Niebelungenlied, of Beowulf, of Norse and Irish tales and of
our Indian legends are very much like him.
Consider, also, the personal initiative displayed in the formation of a
war-party among the Omahas, as described by Dorsey, and note how little
it differs from the way in which commercial and other enterprises are
started at the present day.
“It is generally a young man who decides to undertake an expedition
against the enemy. Having formed his plan he speaks thus to his friend:
‘My friend, as I wish to go on the war path, let us go. Let us boil
the food as for a feast.’ The friend having consented, the two are
the leaders ... if they can induce others to follow them. So they
find two young men whom they send as messengers to invite those whom
they name.... When all have assembled the planner of the expedition
addresses the company. ‘Ho! my friends, my friend and I have invited
you to a feast, because we wish to go on the war path.’ Then each one
who is willing to go replies thus: ‘Yes, my friend, I am willing.’ But
he who is unwilling replies, ‘My friend, I do not wish to go, I am
unwilling.’ Sometimes the host says, ‘Let us go by such a day. Prepare
yourselves.’”[50]
The whole proceeding reminds one also of the way games are initiated
among boys, the one who “gets it up” having the right to claim the best
position. No doubt the structure of some tribal societies permitted of
less initiative than others; but such differences exist at all stages
of culture.
Self-feeling, self-assertion and the general relation of the individual
to the group are much the same at all epochs, and there was never a
time since man became human when, as we sometimes read, “personality
emerged.” Change has taken place chiefly in the extent and character
of the group to which the individual appeals, and in the ways in which
he tries to distinguish himself. The Germanic tribesman, the mediæval
knight, the Renaissance artist or scholar and the modern captain of
industry are alike ambitious: it is the object that differs. There has,
indeed, been a development of personality in history, but it has been
correlative with that of the general life, and has brought no essential
change in the relation between the two.
In tribal life, then, since the conditions did not admit of wider
unification, public consciousness could be only local in scope.
Beyond its narrow range the cords which held life together were of a
subconscious character—heredity, of course, with its freight of mental
and social tendency; oral tradition, often vague and devious, and a
mass of custom that was revered without being understood. These wider
relations, not being surveyed and discussed, could not be the objects
of deliberate thought and will, but were accepted as part of the
necessary order of things, and usually ascribed to some divine source.
In this way language, laws, religion, forms of government, social
classes, traditional relations to other clans or tribes—all of which
we know to have been built up by the cumulative workings of the human
mind—were thought of as beyond the sphere of man’s control.
The wider unity existed, then as now; human development was continuous
in time and, after a blind fashion, coöperative among contemporaries.
The tools of life were progressively invented and spread by imitation
from tribe to tribe, the fittest always tending to survive; but only
the immediate details of such changes were matters of consciousness:
as processes they were beyond human cognizance. A man might adapt an
ancient custom to a fresh emergency, but he would be unaware that he
was shaping the growth of institutions.
There was even a tribal or national opinion, of a slow, subconscious
sort; a growth and consensus of ideas upon matters of general and
enduring interest, such as religion, marriage and government. And,
under unusual pressure, some more conscious unity of spirit might be
aroused, as among the Germans or Gauls confederated against Rome; but
this was likely to be transient.
The central fact of history, from a psychological point of view, may be
said to be the gradual enlargement of social consciousness and rational
coöperation. The mind constantly, though perhaps not regularly, extends
the sphere within which it makes its higher powers valid. Human nature,
possessed of ideals moulded in the family and the commune, is ever
striving, somewhat blindly for the most part, with those difficulties
of communication and organization which obstruct their realization on
a larger scale. Whether progress is general or not we need not now
inquire; it is certain that great gains have been made by the more
vigorous or fortunate races, and that these are regarded with emulation
and hope by many of the others.
Throughout modern European history, at least, there has been an evident
extension of the local areas within which communication and coöperation
prevail, and, on the whole, an advance in the quality of coöperation as
judged by an ideal moral unity. It has tended to become more free and
human, more adequately expressive of communal feeling.
Perhaps all apparent departures from this tendency may plausibly be
explained as cases of irregular growth. If we find that vast systems
of discipline, like the Roman Empire, have broken down, we find also
that these systems were of a low type, psychologically, that the best
features of them were after all preserved, and that the new systems
that arose, though perhaps less in extent, were on the whole a higher
and fuller expression of human nature.
In the later Empire, for example, it seems plain that social mechanism
(in its proper kind and measure one of the conditions of freedom) had
grown in such a way as to shackle the human mind. In order to achieve
and maintain an imperial reach of control, the state had gradually
been forced to take on a centralized bureaucratic structure, which
left the individual and the local group no sphere of self-reliant
development. Public spirit and political leadership were suppressed,
and the habit of organized self-expression died out, leaving the people
without group vitality and as helpless as children. They were not, in
general, cowards or voluptuaries—it seems that the decline of courage
and domestic morals has been exaggerated—but they had no trained and
effective public capacity. Society, as Professor Dill says, had been
elaborately and deliberately stereotyped.
The decline of vitality and initiative pervaded all spheres of life.
There were no inventions and little industrial or agricultural
progress of any kind. Literature degenerated into rhetoric: “In the
same manner,” says Longinus, “as some children always remain pigmies,
whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender
minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude,
are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned
greatness which we admire in the ancients, who, living under a popular
government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted.”[51]
The growing states of the earlier world were confronted, whether they
knew it or not, with an irreconcilable opposition between freedom and
expansion. They might retain in small areas those simple and popular
institutions which nearly all the great peoples started with, and to
which they owed their vigor; or they could organize on a larger scale
a more mechanical unity. In the first case their careers were brief,
because they lacked the military force to ensure permanence in a
hostile world. In the latter they incurred, by the suppression of human
nature, that degeneracy which sooner or later overtook every great
state of antiquity.
In some such way as this we may, perhaps, dispose of the innumerable
instances which history shows of the failure of free organization—as in
the decay of ancient and mediæval city republics. Not only was their
freedom of an imperfect nature at the best, but they were too small
to hold their own in a world that was necessarily, for the most part,
autocratic or customary. Freedom, though in itself a principle of
strength, was on too little a scale to defend itself. “If a republic be
small,” said Montesquieu, “it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it
be large it is ruined by internal imperfection.”[52]
But how splendid, in literature, in art, and even in arms, were many
of these failures. How well did Athens, Florence and a hundred other
cities illustrate the intrinsic strength and fecundity of that free
principle to which modern conditions permit an indefinite expansion.
The present epoch, then, brings with it a larger and, potentially at
least, a higher and freer consciousness. In the individual aspect of
life this means that each one of us has, as a rule, a wider grasp of
situations, and is thus in a position to give a wider application to
his intelligence, sympathy and conscience. In proportion as he does
this he ceases to be a blind agent and becomes a rational member of the
whole.
Because of this more conscious relation to the larger wholes—nations,
institutions, tendencies—he takes a more vital and personal part in
them. His self-feeling attaches itself, as its nature is, to the object
of his free activity, and he tends to feel that “love of the maker for
his work,” that spiritual identification of the member with the whole,
which is the ideal of organization.
De Tocqueville found that in the United States there was no
proletariat. “That numerous and turbulent multitude does not exist, who
regarding the law as their natural enemy look upon it with fear and
distrust. It is impossible, on the contrary, not to perceive that all
classes ... are attached to it by a kind of parental affection.”[53]
And, notwithstanding a deep and well-grounded “social unrest,” this
remains essentially true at the present day, and should be true of all
real democracy. Where the state is directly and obviously founded upon
the thought of the people it is impossible to get up much fundamental
antagonism to it; the energies of discontent are absorbed by moderate
agitation.
The extension of reach and choice favors, in the long run, not only
political but every kind of opportunity and freedom. It opens to the
individual a more vital, self-determined and energetic part in all
phases of the whole.
At the same time, the limits of human faculty make it impossible that
any one of us should actually occupy all the field of thought thus open
to him. Although stimulated to greater activity than before, one must
constantly select and renounce; and most of his life will still be on
the plane of custom and mechanism. He is freer chiefly in that he can
survey the larger whole and choose in what relations he will express
himself.
Indeed, an ever-present danger of the new order is that one will not
select and renounce enough, that he will swallow more than he can
properly digest, and fail of the benefits of a thorough subconscious
assimilation. The more one studies current life, the more he is
inclined to look upon superficiality as its least tractable defect.
The new conditions demand also a thorough, yet diversified and
adaptable, system of training for the individual who is to share in
this freer and more exigent society. While democracy as a spirit is
spontaneous, only the fullest development of personal faculty can
make this spirit effectual on a great scale. Our confidence in our
instincts need not be shaken, but our application of them must be
enlarged and enlightened. We must be taught to do some one thing well,
and yet never allowed to lose our sense of the relation of that one
thing to the general endeavor.
The general or public phase of larger consciousness is what we call
Democracy. I mean by this primarily the organized sway of public
opinion. It works out also in a tendency to humanize the collective
life, to make institutions express the higher impulses of human nature,
instead of brutal or mechanical conditions. That which most inwardly
distinguishes modern life from ancient or mediæval is the conscious
power of the common people trying to effectuate their instincts. All
systems rest, in a sense, upon public opinion; but the peculiarity
of our time is that this opinion is more and more rational and
self-determining. It is not, as in the past, a mere reflection of
conditions believed to be inevitable, but seeks principles, finds these
principles in human nature, and is determined to conform life to them
or know why not. In this all earnest people, in their diverse ways, are
taking part.
We find, of course, that but little can be carried out on the
highest moral plane; the mind cannot attend to many things with that
concentration which achieves adequate expression, and the principle of
compensation is ever at work. If one thing is well done, others are
overlooked, so that we are constantly being caught and ground in our
own neglected mechanism.
On the whole, however, the larger mind involves a democratic and
humanistic trend in every phase of life. A right democracy is simply
the application on a large scale of principles which are universally
felt to be right as applied to a small group—principles of free
coöperation motived by a common spirit which each serves according
to his capacity. Most of what is characteristic of the time is
evidently of this nature; as, for instance, our sentiment of fair
play, our growing kindliness, our cult of womanhood, our respect for
hand labor, and our endeavor to organize society economically or on
“business principles.” And it is perhaps equally evident that the
ideas which these replace—of caste, of domination, of military glory,
of “conspicuous leisure”[54] and the like—sprang from a secondary
and artificial system, based on conditions which forbade a large
realization of primary ideals.
May we not say, speaking largely, that there has always been a
democratic tendency, whose advance has been conditioned by the
possibility, under actual conditions, of organizing popular thought and
will on a wide scale? Free coöperation is natural and human; it takes
place spontaneously among children on the playground, among settlers in
new countries, and among the most primitive sorts of men—everywhere, in
short, where the secondary and artificial discipline has not supplanted
it. The latter, including every sort of coercive or mechanical control
is, of course, natural in the larger sense, and functional in human
development; but there must ever be some resistance to it, which will
tend to become effective when the control ceases to be maintained
by the pressure of expediency. Accordingly we see that throughout
modern history, and especially during the past century, there has
been a progressive humanism, a striving to clear away lower forms of
coöperation no longer essential, and to substitute something congenial
to natural impulse.
Discussion regarding the comparative merits of monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy has come to be looked upon as scholastic. The world is
clearly democratizing; it is only a question of how fast the movement
can take place, and what, under various conditions, it really involves.
Democracy, instead of being a single and definite political type,
proves to be merely a principle of breadth in organization, naturally
prevalent wherever men have learned how to work it, under which life
will be at least as various in its forms as it was before.
It involves a change in the character of social discipline not
confined to politics, but as much at home in one sphere as another.
With facility of communication as its mechanical basis, it proceeds
inevitably to discuss and experiment with freer modes of action in
religion, industry, education, philanthropy and the family. The law
of the survival of the fittest will prevail in regard to social
institutions, as it has in the past, but the conditions of fitness have
undergone a change the implications of which we can but dimly foresee.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Pages 169, 171.
[46] F. S. Dellenbaugh, The North Americans of Yesterday, 416.
[47] J. R. Green, History of the English People, i, 13.
[48] J. Donovan, The Festal Origin of Human Speech. Mind, October, 1891.
[49] “Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis.”—Horace, Ars
Poet., 122.
[50] J. O. Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, 315, 316. A publication of the U.
S. Bureau of Ethnology.
[51] Quoted by Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, i, 194,
195.
[52] The Spirit of Laws, book ix, chap. 1.
[53] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 24.
[54] One of many illuminating phrases introduced by T. V. Veblen in his
work on The Theory of the Leisure Class.